In Arizona, Lake Powell is at a record low due to the worst drought there in 1200 years, creating river and power management problems. CC-licensed photo by Reinhard Link 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. Withdrawing, really? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell:

»

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.

Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.

…One trend Targeted Victory sought to enhance through its work was the “devious licks” challenge, which showed students vandalizing school property. Through the “Bad TikTok Clips” document [a Google doc of “dubious local news stories citing TikTok as the origin of dangerous teen trends”], the firm pushed stories about the “devious licks” challenge in local media across Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

That trend led Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) to write a letter in September calling on TikTok executives to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee, saying the app had been “repeatedly misused and abused to promote behavior and actions that encourage harmful and destructive acts.” But according to an investigation by Anna Foley at the podcast network Gimlet, rumours of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok.

«

One amazing part of this is the targeting of local papers for stories and letters. As if kids would worry. But of course it’s the parents they’re targeting, who will bother politicians. And demonstrates Facebook’s raging envy of TikTok.
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Google cuts racy results by 30% for searches like ‘Latina teenager’ • Reuters via Yahoo

Paresh Dave:

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When U.S. actress Natalie Morales carried out a Google search for “Latina teen” in 2019, she described in a tweet that all she encountered was pornography.

Her experience may be different now.

The Alphabet Inc unit has cut explicit results by 30% over the past year in searches for “latina teenager” and others related to ethnicity, sexual preference and gender, Tulsee Doshi, head of product for Google’s responsible AI team, told Reuters on Wednesday.

Doshi said Google had rolled out new artificial intelligence software, known as BERT, to better interpret when someone was seeking racy results or more general ones.

Beside “latina teenager,” other queries now showing different results include “la chef lesbienne,” “college dorm room,” “latina yoga instructor” and “lesbienne bus,” according to Google.

“It’s all been a set of over-sexualized results,” Doshi said, adding that those historically suggestive search results were potentially shocking to many users.

Morales did not immediately respond to a request for comment through a representative. Her 2019 tweet said she had been seeking images for a presentation, and had noticed a contrast in results for “teen” by itself, which she described as “all the normal teenager stuff,” and called on Google to investigate.

The search giant has spent years addressing feedback about offensive content in its advertising tools and in results from searches for “hot” and “ceo.” It also cut sexualized results for “Black girls” after a 2013 journal article by author Safiya Noble raised concerns about the harmful representations.

«

So if she previously encountered all pornography, will she now just have 70% pornography? Of course porn has always been the bugbear of search engines, going back to their very earliest days (yes, before Google, even). Weeding porn out of search results is a colossal part of search engines’ work; in Google’s earliest days, it was pretty much all they did before they could release it to the public.
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Apple and Meta gave user data to hackers who used forged legal requests • Bloomberg via Yahoo

William Turton:

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Apple and Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests.” Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don’t require a court order.

Snap received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn’t known whether the company provided data in response. It’s also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the UK and the US. One of the minors is also believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$, which hacked Microsoft, Samsung and Nvidia, among others, the people said. City of London Police recently arrested seven people in connection with an investigation into the Lapsus$ hacking group; the probe is ongoing.

«

Most likely used to hack or doxx their rivals. Impressive that they managed to find the emergency data request blanks, or an already filed one; you’d have to guess those were electronically filed somewhere in Microsoft, Samsung or Nvidia, and they made a convincing copy. But where would you find them? Would you spelunk through a gigantic folder called LEGAL?

Also not in the story: how many people were targeted. Going to guess it’s fewer than 20.
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Idol Words • Astral Codex Ten

“Scott Alexander” occasionally writes entertaining little short pieces, and this is one of them:

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The woman was wearing sunglasses, a visor, a little too much lipstick, and a camera around her neck. “Excuse me,” she asked. “Is this the temple with the three omniscient idols? Where one always tells the truth, one always lies, and one answers randomly?”

The center idol’s eyes glowed red, and it spoke with a voice from everywhere and nowhere, a voice like the whoosh of falling waters or the flash of falling stars.

“No!” the great voice boomed.

«

It’s a lovely, silly story. What would you ask the three omniscient idols where one always tells the truth, one always lies and one answers randomly? (I think I know which one of the characters – not idols – I am.)
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Lake Powell plunges past a level that water managers sought to protect • Arizona Central

Brandon Loomis:

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Water levels at drought-stricken Lake Powell have dropped below an elevation water managers had fought to protect, dipping past a buffer meant to protect hydropower generation.

For the first time since water rose behind Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s, the lake’s surface dropped below elevation 3,525 Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said Wednesday morning. The dam can still produce electricity down to elevation 3,490, but shallower water reduces pressure and the power plant’s capacity, and further declines could damage the turbines.

The new low reflects the continuing dirty work of the region’s worst drought in 1,200 years, one that has deepened into a megadrought, according to scientists. High water demand from both a growing regional population and the effects of a warming climate promise to continue challenging water managers to shore up the Colorado River’s second-largest savings account.

Federal officials have set a goal of keeping the water higher than 3,525 feet above sea level, both for power production and for storage to safeguard Colorado River flows to Lake Mead and downstream users. The water is expected to rebound past that level when snow melts in the Rockies this spring, but Tuesday’s plunge marks one more in a series of troubling firsts — some foreboding and others already costly — for a river in decline.

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Not a typo: 1,200 years. A millennium.
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Interoperability without sacrificing privacy: Matrix and the Digial Markets Act • Matrix.org

Matthew Hodgson, at a company which “is an open standard for interoperable, decentralised, real-time communication over Internet Protocol”, on the DMA mandating interop between messaging clients:

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if you were to actively interoperate between providers (e.g. if Matrix turned up and asked WhatsApp, post DMA, to expose an API we could use to write bridges against), then that bridge would need to convert between WhatsApp’s E2EE’d payloads and Matrix’s E2EE’d payloads. (Even though both WhatsApp and Matrix use the Double Ratchet, the actual payloads within the encryption are completely different and would need to be converted). Therefore such a bridge has to re-encrypt the traffic – which means that the plaintext is exposed on the bridge, putting it at risk and breaking the end-to-end encryption guarantee.

There are solutions to this, however:
• We could run the bridge somewhere relatively safe – e.g. the user’s client. There’s a bunch of work going on already in Matrix to run clientside bridges, so that your laptop or phone effectively maintains a connection over to iMessage or WhatsApp or whatever as if it were logged in… but then relays the messages into Matrix once re-encrypted. By decentralising the bridges and spreading them around the internet, you avoid them becoming a single honeypot that bad actors might look to attack: instead it becomes more a question of endpoint compromise (which is already a risk today).
• The gatekeeper could switch to a decentralised end-to-end encrypted protocol like Matrix to preserve end-to-end encryption throughout. This is obviously significant work on the gatekeeper’s side, but we shouldn’t rule it out. For instance, making the transition for a non-encrypted service is impressively little work, as we proved with Gitter. (We’d ideally need to figure out decentralised/federated identity-lookup first though, to avoid switching from one centralised identity database to another).
• Worst case, we could flag to the user that their conversation is insecure (the chat equivalent of a scary TLS certificate warning). Honestly, this is something communication apps (including Matrix-based ones!) should be doing anyway: as a user you should be able to tell what 3rd parties (bots, integrations etc) have been added to a given conversation. Adding this sort of semantic actually opens up a much richer set of communication interactions, by giving the user the flexibility over who to trust with their data, even if it breaks the platonic ideal of pure E2E encryption.

«

Or you could just use SMS. Alternatively, for security, RCS. Stop trying to justify it; the interop proposal is so terrible that it really, really needs to be junked as soon as possible. The DMA’s failure is that no tech company gets big by overhauling a rival in the exact same space. Google didn’t beat Microsoft in desktop operating systems. Facebook didn’t beat Google in search. TikTok didn’t beat Facebook in connecting people. DeepMind and Shazam ditto. The DMA creates the wrong incentives.

See also: “Forcing WhatsApp and iMessage to work together is doomed to fail” in Wired.
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‘I can fight with a keyboard’: how one Ukrainian IT specialist exposed a notorious Russian ransomware gang • CNNPolitics

Sean Lyngaas:

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As Russian artillery began raining down on his homeland last month, one Ukrainian computer researcher decided to fight back the best way he knew how – by sabotaging one of the most formidable ransomware gangs in Russia.

Four days into Russia’s invasion, the researcher began publishing the biggest leak ever of files and data from Conti, a syndicate of Russian and Eastern Europe cybercriminals wanted by the FBI for conducting attacks on hundreds of US organizations and causing millions of dollars in losses.

The thousands of internal documents and communications include evidence that appears to suggest Conti operatives have contacts within the Russian government, including the FSB intelligence service. That supports a longstanding US allegation that Moscow has colluded with cybercriminals for strategic advantage.

The Ukrainian computer specialist behind the leak spoke exclusively to CNN and described his motivation for seeking revenge after Conti operatives published a statement in support of the Russian government immediately after the invasion of Ukraine. He also described his desperate efforts to track down loved ones in Ukraine in recent weeks.

To protect his identity, CNN agreed to refer to him by a pseudonym: Danylo. “I cannot shoot anything, but I can fight with a keyboard and mouse,” Danylo told CNN.

The trove of data Danylo leaked in late February illustrates why cybersecurity has been such a fraught issue in US-Russia relations. It includes cryptocurrency accounts the Conti hackers used to allegedly reap millions of dollars in ransom payments, their discussions of how to extort US companies and their apparent targeting of a journalist investigating the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny.

But it also shows how hard it can be to disable ransomware operations. Despite Danylo unmasking their operations, the hackers continue to announce new victim organizations.

«

He also says that FBI got in touch and asked him to stop leaking because the group might abandon its current system and set up a new one. So he did. At least publicly.
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China plans new restrictions in its booming live-streaming sector • WSJ

Keith Zhai and Liza Lin:

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Live-streaming services in China, including those operated by social-media giants ByteDance Ltd., Kuaishou Technology and Huya Inc., are consumed by roughly 70% of the country’s internet users, according to the state-run China Internet Network Information Center, commanding an audience of more than 700 million last year.

Many live-streaming influencers earn commissions on products that they promote, but for many of them a key revenue stream comes in the form of tips and virtual gifts, ranging from the equivalent of 15 cents for a virtual beer to more than $1,100 for a virtual spaceship.

Popular live-streamers are backed by professional marketing teams and can earn tens of thousands of dollars each day in direct donations from fans. The most sought-after live-streaming hosts can earn millions in brand endorsements and sponsorships.

Any attempts to regulate this booming segment of the online world would follow in the footsteps of other efforts to clamp down and clean up behavior on the internet, particularly for younger people.

In the past year, China has cracked down on for-profit education providers, railed against the evils of what it described as a culture of celebrity worship and set strict limits on the amount of time minors can spend playing computer games.

These and other regulatory actions last year hit investor confidence in Chinese stocks, sparking steep selloffs in shares of e-commerce and gaming businesses.

…authorities were discussing a daily limit of 10,000 yuan, equivalent to about $1,570, on the amount of gifts that live-streaming hosts can accept. Chinese regulators worry that young people, drawn by the promise of lucrative earnings, would otherwise aspire to become live-streaming celebrities, the person said, adding that this was counter to the values that officials hoped to instill.

«

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Climate groups say a change in coding can reduce bitcoin energy consumption by 99% • The Guardian

Dominic Rushe:

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Without a change to the [bitcoin] code, the fundamental problem will remain that bitcoin’s code “incentivises maximum energy use”, said Chris Larsen, founder and executive chairman of crypto company Ripple and a climate activist. “The minute that there is the opportunity to go to something dirty, which is what you are seeing, that is going to happen.”

One “nightmare scenario”, he said, is that the world does get to a renewable future in China, the US and EU but countries rich in fossil fuel switch to bitcoin mining to keep their operations running.

“Imagine the Saudis sitting on all that oil, which has a cost of about ½ cent per kilowatt hour – no renewable can match that,” Larsen said. “Bitcoin mining could be this endless monetization engine for fossil fuels. That would be a nightmare.”

The campaign is launching with digital advertising in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Marketwatch, Politico, Facebook and other publications. Organizers are also taking legal action against proposed mining sites and using their large memberships to push bitcoin’s biggest investors and influencers to call for a code change. “In this world, with all these smart people, there has got to be a better solution,” said Larsen.

«

Ethereum is moving to “proof of stake”, though it always seems to be just slightly in the future. Jam tomorrow, all the time.
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Farage lined up for €18.5m carbon windfall despite climate scepticism • Financial Times

Jim Pickard and Camilla Hodgson:

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Former Brexit champion Nigel Farage is in line to gain up to €18.5m from share options in a carbon offsetting company despite launching a new campaign opposing the government’s “net zero” 2050 target.

Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party, announced in March 2021 that he had become chair of the advisory board to Dutch Green Business, listed on Euronext Amsterdam.

He was introduced to the company by his friend John Mappin, a pro-Putin heir to a jewellery fortune, scientologist and anti-vaxxer, who together with his wife has a 30% stake in DGB, according to Bloomberg data.

Farage was granted 1mn share options at the general meeting of DGB’s shareholders in September 2021, with a “strike price” — the price he would pay for them — of €1.50.

But that same month his advisory position was put on hold owing to a dispute between the board of directors and Mappin and his wife, Irina Kudrenok-Mappin, over their shareholdings. “At the moment my relationship (with DGB) is in abeyance,” Farage told the FT.

«

Pity there isn’t a way to earn money by offsetting hypocrisy.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The latest game where AI has become a contender is contract bridge – though not yet the bidding process. CC-licensed photo by Roger W 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. Regrouped. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Social media might be bad for teens’ mental health at certain age windows • The Verge

Nicole Wetsman:

»

[University of Cambridge psychologist Amy] Orben and her team first looked at a survey of over 72,000 people 10 to 80 years old in the United Kingdom. They were surveyed up to seven times each between 2011 and 2018 and asked a series of questions that included their life satisfaction and the amount of time they estimated they spent on social media each day.

Narrowing in on adolescents, the team found that for people in the 16- to 21-year-old age range, both very low and very high social media use were both linked with lower life satisfaction. In 10- to 15-year-olds, there wasn’t much difference in life satisfaction between kids reporting low and high social media use. But in that group, girls with high social media use had lower life satisfaction than boys.

The team also examined data from a survey given to over 17,000 10- to 21-year-olds, identifying separate windows for boys and girls in their early teens where higher social media use was linked with lower life satisfaction a year later — 14 to 15 for boys and 11 to 13 for girls. The relationship showed up for both sexes at age 19. The windows seem to map on to the start of puberty for both boys and girls (girls tend to hit puberty earlier) and a major social transition — many young adults in the UK leave home at around 19.

Other types of research could help figure out the reasons for those windows, Orben says: studies looking at things like sensitivity to social rejection or impulse control, compared with these sorts of data sets, could help understand why kids at certain ages might have worse experiences after using social media.

Orben cautioned that there are limitations to the study — it can’t show that social media use caused changes in life satisfaction, just that there’s a relationship. It also relies on people reporting how much they use social media, which could be inaccurate. That’s a challenge for most social media research. Companies like Meta don’t give researchers access to internal data that could give scientists a more objective look at social media use — things like how long people use the platforms or who they’re interacting with.

Future research could help identify the groups of adolescents and teenagers who might have the most negative impacts from social media.

«

This is precisely what I found when I researched the topic for Social Warming, in a chapter about the effects of social media on children which had to be cut for reasons of length.
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Artificial intelligence beats eight world champions at bridge • The Guardian

Laura Spinney:

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French startup NukkAI announced the news of its AI’s victory on Friday, at the end of a two-day tournament in Paris.

The NukkAI challenge required the human champions to play 800 consecutive deals divided into 80 sets of 10. It did not involve the initial bidding component of the game during which players arrive at a contract that they must then meet by playing their cards.

Each champion played their own and their “dummy” partner’s cards against a pair of opponents. These opponents were the best robot champions in the world to date – robots that have won many robot competitions but that are universally acknowledged to be nowhere near as good as expert human players.

The AI – called NooK – played the same role as the human champion, with the same cards and the same opponents. The score was the difference between those of the human and the AI, averaged over each set. NooK won 67, or 83%, of the 80 sets.

Jean-Baptiste Fantun, co-founder of NukkAI, said he had been confident the machine – which the company has been developing for five years – would triumph in thousands of deals, but with only 800 it was touch-and-go.

Announcing the results, the mathematician Cédric Villani, winner of the Fields medal in 2010, called NukkAI “a superb French success story”.

AI researcher Véronique Ventos, NukkAI’s other co-founder, calls NooK a “new generation AI” because it explains its decisions as it goes along. “In bridge, you can’t play if you don’t explain,” she says.

«

Not doing the bidding seems like a big element to miss out, and is really where at least half the human subtlety of contract bridge comes in. (Tell me whether bidding is more or less than half, contract bridge fans.)

An accompanying piece: how Deep Blue paved the way for modern AI.
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Axie Infinity’s Ronin network suffers $625m exploit •

Andrew thurman:

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An attacker “used hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals” from the Ronin bridge across two transactions, as seen on Etherscan.

While the Ronin sidechain has nine validators requiring five signatures for withdrawals and is meant to protect against these types of attacks, the blog post notes that “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”

The blog post pegged the losses at 173,600 ether and 25.5m in USDC, currently worth in excess of $625m.

Back in August 2021, a hacker made off with $611m in an exploit of cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Poly Network. The vast majority of the funds were returned.

The Ronin attacker’s Ethereum address is a fresh address that transferred ETH in from the Binance exchange one week ago. Etherscan records show that the attack took place last Wednesday.

«

Most of that’s gobbledygook, isn’t it. A backdoor through our gas-free RPC node? The problem for the thieves is always how you spend it, because the offramps from crypto are well-policed.
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FinFisher claims insolvency amid German government investigation • Gizmodo

Lucas Ropek:

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FinFisher is no more. Long accused of helping authoritarian governments to spy on political dissidents and activists, the creepy surveillance company has abruptly shut down amidst an ongoing investigation into its business dealings.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that the Munich-based spyware firm had shuttered its offices after quietly filing for insolvency this past February.

The company, which is known for its powerful and invasive malware “FinSpy,” has been under investigation by the German government since 2019 over allegations that it illegally sold spyware to the government of Turkey without acquiring the requisite export license. The spyware, which was allegedly used to monitor the phones of political activists in the country, is known for its ability to pilfer data and listen-in on mobile users.

The company’s implosion last month will likely affect German officials’ probe. At the time of the announced insolvency, authorities had been in the process of pursuing authorization to seize assets allegedly “obtained from an illegal act.” Though the investigation is ongoing, the asset seizure will no longer be possible, since the company no longer exists.

«

Wonder if the software will resurface at a newly created company in a week or two.
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Verizon blames ‘bad actors’ for the spam text you got from your own number • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Yesterday, I wrote about receiving a spam text that bizarrely looked as though it came from my own phone number. But what initially seemed like a random, spoofed spam message is increasingly starting to look like a focused effort targeting Verizon Wireless, one of the largest telecoms in the United States. Today, the carrier confirmed it’s aware of the situation and is investigating the matter with the help of US law enforcement.

“Verizon is aware that bad actors are sending spam text messages to some customers which appear to come from the customers’ own number,” Verizon spokesperson Rich Young told The Verge by email. “Our team is actively working to block these messages, and we have engaged with US law enforcement to identify and stop the source of this fraudulent activity. Verizon continues to work on behalf of the customer to prevent spam texts and related activity.”

In the hours since we published our original story, many more Verizon customers have reported receiving that same exact text about a free gift with a link at the end. In my case, the link forwarded me to Channel One Russia, a Russian state media network.

At the moment, however, Verizon says “we have no indication that this fraudulent activity is originating in Russia.” The deluge of texts comes as many US companies remain on high alert for potential retaliatory cybersecurity attacks from Russia over the severe US sanctions that resulted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Other major US carriers have not received the same mass wave of spam texts that are spoofed with customers’ own numbers, leading to some speculation of an internal breach at Verizon or a more sophisticated attack than run-of-the-mill spam. But according to Young, Verizon’s network hasn’t been compromised. “We believe this activity is being generated from external bad actors with no direct tie to our company,” he said.

«

If it’s external, and Verizon’s systems haven’t been compromised, why are only Verizon numbers being hit?
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Looking back on the origin of ‘Skip Intro’ five years later • About Netflix

Cameron Johnson is director of product innovation:

»

some designers and I were discussing how to help members get the most out of their Netflix experience. Sometimes you want to find a particular moment you love — that awesome action scene or the big reveal of that can’t-believe-it twist —  or rewatch a favorite joke.

An idea was floated to add skip forward and skip backward buttons in 10-second increments. The reason to offer a skip back 10 seconds was obvious: maybe you got distracted and missed a particular moment. 

But why skip forward 10 seconds?

Well, you might want to skip the opening credits. But no one could come up with any other compelling reasons. 

At the same time, I was watching Game of Thrones, which has a famously long (and beautiful) opening credits sequence. I found the show so compelling that I wanted to skip the credits and jump right into the story, and I found it frustrating to try to manually jump forward to the just the right place. Sometimes I would jump too far, and sometimes I would jump too short. I wondered whether other people felt the same.

We did research and found that in about 15% of the time members were manually advancing the series within the first five minutes. This gave us confidence that a lot of people wanted to skip the intro.

Rather than build a general purpose solution that might help a little with several different needs, like a skip forward 10 seconds button, we designed a single purpose solution that did only one thing really well. 

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Gets used 136 million times a day, he says, saving people a cumulative 195 years daily. (195 years is ~102m minutes, so about 80 seconds on average per intro sequence. Or 40 seconds if it’s watched by two people.) Redolent of the days of Flash websites, which definitely had “Skip intro”.
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Communication breakdown: how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bogged down • Radio Free Europe

Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov:

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[independent military analyst specialising in telecoms, Stanimir] Dobrev also says that [Russian] forward detachments in the early days of the war appeared to have outrun their communications support.

“The Russian battalion tactical groups immediately went a much greater distance from the border, [and] at the same time, we didn’t see equipment that could provide secure communication with the command post along with them,” he said.

He says repeater cars and new communication towers need to be installed along the way, and their set-up and use require experienced operators. “Indirectly, this indicates that the Russian offensive groups didn’t expect to stay on the road for a long time,” Dobrev said.

He and other observers also note that clear signs have emerged of interception of communication between Russian special services and other troops that should otherwise be on encrypted channels.

Christo Grozev, of the open-source sleuthing group Bellingcat, cited a “super expensive cryptophone system” introduced by Russia in 2021 seemingly being intercepted because it requires a 3G or 4G cellular network to operate.

“The cellular networks are still controlled by Ukraine, which means that for the Ukrainian military they remain a relatively secure means of communication from eavesdropping,” Dobrev said.

Not so for Russians using those same networks, or, obviously, Ukrainian fixed lines.

«

It’s a pretty long, in-depth assessment of how badly the Russian telecoms system has failed its military. Which it has done in many ways.
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Ukraine will not be like Korea; dogged resistance will turn it into Putin’s ‘bleeding ulcer’ • The Conversation

Frank Ledwidge is senior lecturer in military capabilities and strategy at the University of Portsmouth:

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Nato has applied the lessons of Iraq to develop new thinking on setting up effective resistance forces against Russian forces. For some time Ukrainian, US and other intelligence agencies will have been identifying and supplying the territorial defence leaders behind Russian lines, and they have been effective in disrupting Russian supply lines and logistics.

Should Ukraine be split as Putin plans, this will not be a frozen conflict, as Korea is. Nor will it resemble Abkhazia or Chechnya, uneasy though they both remain, under the control of a Russian puppet Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya and military occupation in the breakaway Georgian region. Even Afghanistan in the 1980s will pale in comparison.

From 1807 to 1814 on the Iberian peninsula, Napoleon had to fight Spanish, Portuguese and British armies while beset by ubiquitous, ferocious insurgents. He described this war as his “bleeding ulcer”, draining him of men and equipment. It is the west’s aim to make Ukraine for Putin what Spain was for Napoleon.

In the absence of a negotiated settlement, Ukraine and Nato will continue to grind away at Russia’s army, digging away at that bleeding ulcer and prolonging Russia’s agony on the military front, as the west continues its parallel assault on its economy. If Putin’s plan is to proceed with the Korea model, he will fail.

«

The key question is what happens in the Donbas and Crimea. Would those really be regained by Ukraine?
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Motorola emerges as US’ #3 smartphone OEM in 2021 for first time • Counterpoint Research

Varun Mishra:

»

Motorola emerged as the third-largest smartphone brand in the US in 2021, according to Counterpoint Research’s Market Pulse Service. In 2008, when feature phones were dominant, Motorola was the largest handset (smartphones and feature phones combined) OEM in the US. However, within the smartphone segment, this is the first time ever that Motorola has entered the top three in the US market for a full year.

Motorola’s sales more than doubled in 2021, growing 131% YoY. While Apple and Samsung dominate the premium price bands, Motorola rose through the ranks to become the #2 smartphone player in the $400 and below price segment in the US.

«

Sounds amazing (especially since Motorola has gone through a near-death experience over the years, being sold by Google to Lenovo, which faffed around with it for ages). But then you look at the graph, and it shows that Motorola’s share was 10%. Apple had 58%, and Samsung 22%. Motorola only got there because LG gave up, after years of losing money in the business.
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We study virus evolution. Here’s where we think the coronavirus is going • The New York Times

Sarah Cobey, Jesse Bloom, Tyler Starr and Nathaniel Lash:

»

It’s impossible to say whether future variants will have more big Omicron-like jumps or more typical stepwise changes, but we are confident SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve to escape immunity.

While transmissibility of viruses does plateau at a certain point, other human viruses that escape immunity keep doing so. The influenza vaccine has been updated annually for decades to chase viral evolution, and some influenza viruses show no sign of slowing down. Immune escape is an endless evolutionary arms race, because the immune system can always make new antibodies and the virus has a vast set of mutations to explore in response. For instance, Omicron has just a tiny fraction of the many mutations that have been observed in SARS-CoV-2 or related bat viruses, which are in turn just a small fraction of what lab experiments suggest the virus could potentially explore.

Taking all this together, we expect SARS-CoV-2 will continue to cause new epidemics, but they will increasingly be driven by the ability to skirt the immune system. In this sense, the future may look something like the seasonal flu, where new variants cause waves of cases each year. If this happens, which we expect it will, vaccines may need to be updated regularly similar to the flu vaccines unless we develop broader variant-proof vaccines.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The NHS is to start testing of an AI system to predict levels of A&E admissions. CC-licensed photo by Lydia 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. State of preparedness. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

When Nokia pulled out of Russia, a vast surveillance system remained • The New York Times

Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik:

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For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM [System for Operative Investigative Activities] to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system’s connection to the MTS network. Russia’s main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications.

The documents, spanning 2008 to 2017, show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.

For years, multinational companies capitalized on surging Russian demand for new technologies. Now global outrage over the largest war on European soil since World War II is forcing them to re-examine their roles.

…Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russian intelligence and digital surveillance who reviewed some of the Nokia documents at the request of The Times, said that without the company’s involvement in SORM, “it would have been impossible to make such a system.”

“They had to have known how their devices would be used,” said Mr. Soldatov, who is now a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

«

Well, if you sell a telecoms system in an authoritarian country then it’s always likely to be used for surveillance. Hardly a surprise. But if Nokia won’t, Huawei or ZTE will.

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The latest marketing tactic on LinkedIn: AI-generated faces • NPR

Shannon Bond:

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At first glance, Renée DiResta thought the LinkedIn message seemed normal enough.

The sender, Keenan Ramsey, mentioned that they both belonged to a LinkedIn group for entrepreneurs. She punctuated her greeting with a grinning emoji before pivoting to a pitch for software.

“Quick question — have you ever considered or looked into a unified approach to message, video, and phone on any device, anywhere?”

DiResta wasn’t interested and would have ignored the message entirely, but then she looked closer at Ramsey’s profile picture. Little things seemed off in what should have been a typical corporate headshot. Ramsey was wearing only one earring. Bits of her hair disappeared and then reappeared. Her eyes were aligned right in the middle of the image.

“The face jumped out at me as being fake,” said DiResta, a veteran researcher who has studied Russian disinformation campaigns and anti-vaccine conspiracies. To her trained eye, these anomalies were red flags that Ramsey’s photo had likely been created by artificial intelligence.

That chance message launched DiResta and her colleague Josh Goldstein at the Stanford Internet Observatory on an investigation that uncovered more than 1,000 LinkedIn profiles using what appear to be faces created by artificial intelligence.

«

But, for once, not pushing disinformation; they’re just bots used for marketing purposes. A sort of visual spam: respond eagerly and you’ll be put on a phone to a real human who’ll try to sell you something.

The next step, presumably, is that GPT-3 gets hooked up to a voice synthesizer and the human gets cut out of the phone call bit.
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NHS England deploys pilot AI tool to forecast A&E admissions • Computer Weekly

Brian McKenna:

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The NHS is deploying a demand forecasting tool from artificial intelligence (AI) firm Faculty that will predict accident and emergency admissions and help it better accommodate post-pandemic backlogs for elective procedures.

The same firm was involved in building a Covid-19 “early warning system” in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. That was also used to forecast hospital admissions.

…Faculty said data about factors such as Covid prevalence and public holidays improved the accuracy of the model behind the tool. Their ambition is to include weather data sources in future iterations.

The tool was co-developed with frontline clinical and operational staff in nine pilot NHS trusts. It is being rolled out to more than 100 NHS trusts.

Myles Kirby, director of health and life sciences at Faculty, said: “Since our work with the NHS began two years ago, Faculty has been driven by one goal – to help improve patient care.

“By better forecasting patient demand, we are helping staff tackle treatment backlogs by showing them who is set to be admitted, what their needs are, and which staff are needed to treat them.”

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Would have been nice to know how well it did in the Covid forecasting.
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The EU tries to loosen Big Tech’s grip • Financial Times

The FT’s editorial board:

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Big Tech finally has commandments to abide by. Among them: thou shalt not bundle products, and thou shalt permit interoperability between different systems. Penalties for transgressions include a fine of up to 20% of a company’s global turnover, or even a break-up of businesses for recidivists. The advent of the Digital Markets Act in the EU, the text of which was finalised last week, means a user of Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service could text a friend who uses a different service. It means Apple must allow its smartphone users to pick apps from beyond its own App Store. It is the biggest overhaul of the digital marketplace in 20 years, and it is welcome.

Having these ground rules laid down — so-called ex-ante regulation — is a departure from the system until now, where what is deemed to be problematic behaviour is retrospectively enforced by citing breaches of broad-brush antitrust law. Even though the EU has taken a much more expansive view of competition law than the US, traditional antitrust laws that define consumer harm through the lens of prices have not kept pace with the digital economy, where personal data is bartered for ostensibly free services, and where a marketplace’s main producers are also its gatekeepers.

The DMA is one strand of twin policies to help redress the balance in favour of consumers and competitors; the forthcoming Digital Services Act will focus on privacy and how Big Tech should use personal data. The pieces of legislation mark a watershed moment, not least because they put tech gatekeepers in the same camp as other “utility” sectors such as finance, energy and telecoms that must follow ex-ante regulation because of their size and importance to consumers’ daily lives.

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I think there are going to be a lot of unintended consequences from this. It’s welcome in some ways (bundling can forestall innovation) but rather as GDPR and cookies have put a ton of roadblocks in our way, and the benefits are hard to see, so I think we’ll be complaining about the DMA in the years to come.

Quick recap from Axios of some of what the DMA brings: • Require companies to obtain “explicit consent” to target ads based on personal data
• Require that instant messaging platforms like Apple’s iMessage and Meta’s WhatsApp exchange messages with smaller services
• Require large platforms to give users freedom to select a browser, search engine and personal voice assistant of their choice.
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Volodymyr Zelensky in his own words • The Economist

»

On March 25th 2022 Ukraine’s president spoke in person to The Economist in what he and his staff have taken to calling “the fortress”. Here are highlights of what he told us—switching freely between English, Ukrainian and Russian. We have edited them for clarity.

The Economist: You are an actor and president. Now you are being called a 21st-century Churchill. It’s an extraordinary change. How did it happen?

Volodymyr Zelensky: I think that these changes happened already in Ukraine when they elected me. It’s what [the people] wanted. They saw my honest position on everything. Like your father says, if you don’t know how to do something this way or that way, be honest and that’s it. You have to be honest, so that people believe you. You don’t need to try. You need to be yourself. And maybe, after you show who you are, maybe people will love you more than before, because they see that you are not so strong or are lazy at times. No, each time don’t lie and show people who you are exactly. And it’s important not to show that you are better than who you are.

TE: Did you always have it in you to be so brave? To be such a strong person?

VZ: It’s not about being brave. I have to act the way I do. I have to do it this way. None of us was ready for the war before it began. You can’t say, “If I were the President of Ukraine, then I would do it this way”, because you can’t imagine what it would mean. And you can’t imagine even how you will do it. That’s what it was like in this case with me. And all of the people around me.

«

Good to have him in his own words.
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Heardle, that daily musical intros game

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• Listen to the intro, then find the correct artist & title in the list.

• Skipped or incorrect attempts unlock more of the intro

• Answer in as few tries as possible and share your score!

«

The whole -dle thing is an entire ecosystem now.
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Who’s driving that food delivery bot? It might be a Gen Z gamer • Los Angeles Times

Ronald White:

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In a low-light Culver City control room, Lily Shaw is getting her pilot mood on.

A can of mint Guayaki Yerba Mate sits near her carefully manicured fingers. “Good jams to get pumped” from alt rock band Slothrust blast on her earbuds. Horn-rimmed, blue-light filtering glasses protect her eyes. Her favored chartreuse Xbox controller stands ready to command her laptop.

Shaw is set for her mission: piloting an order of burritos and doughnuts along Santa Monica sidewalks to a hungry customer.

It’s not exactly “Top Gun,” but Shaw’s job at delivery startup Coco highlights a little-known fact about the autonomous delivery robot industry, which is projected to mushroom in growth over the next few years. Those cute sidewalk-traveling ice chests on wheels aren’t completely autonomous, unlike the Roomba roaming your house.

For all their AI and other advanced technology, such sidewalk robots — suddenly all over certain neighborhoods and college campuses — are backed by armies of human minders who track the last-mile delivery vehicles the way parents hover over toddlers taking their first steps. These behind-the-scenes workers monitor, drive, troubleshoot, rescue and — when things go terribly wrong — may hop on a bike or scooter to complete the delivery themselves.

California has become a proving ground for several sidewalk delivery robot startups like Coco, which was born two years ago in the living room of UCLA alumni Zach Rash and Brad Squicciarini, both now 24 and riding a pandemic-related desire for contact-free delivery. A recent partnership with Segway is promising to unleash thousands of the pink vehicles in multiple cities.

«

The picture accompanying the article of Shaw’s POV is fascinating. It’s real Ender’s Game stuff, if Enders wound up navigating around potentially hostile people.
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It’s just Oscars takes all the way down • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick on the Will-Smith-slapping-Chris-Rock kerfuffle:

»

I used to even watch award shows or televised live events hoping for this kind of thing to happen. But now, the very thought of having the same “have you seen X meme or Y take” conversation, which now happens both online and off, feels completely draining. Even if I still find the memes super funny.

I assume, like most parts of America, this viral fatigue is connected to the Trump administration. Sorry, we gotta go there. The interplay between viral content, celebrity, live television, and unscripted chaos really started in America with Kanye West’s 2009 “Imma let you finish” moment, but I’d argue went fully mainstream as a trope for American media to acknowledge and seize upon with Miley Cyrus’s 2013 twerking incident.

By the next year, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were hosting the Golden Globes via a drinking game, and ever since, the only thing that has kept American award shows even barely relevant is their potential for memes, and, more recently, discourse. And this idea — a celebrity, a stage, a live feed, and Twitter — was central to Trump’s campaign and his whole time in office. I mean, what was the Trump administration if not a constant series of unscripted awards show moments?

Unfortunately, at least for me, I actually don’t see this general trend reversing…

«

Fabulous, especially the description of the Trump administration. If only he hadn’t been president, things might have been tolerable (which is to say, ignorable).
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A $350,000 Bored Ape NFT was just sold for only $115 • The Block

Osato Avan-Nomayo:

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A Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT has just been sold for 115 DAI ($115) in what appears to be either a costly mistake or a hack.

Data from OpenSea shows the previous owner with the moniker “cchan” accepting a 115 DAI bid on Monday for BAYC #835. That’s 99.9% lower than the current floor price — the lowest price one is available to buy — of the popular NFT collection.

The same owner also sold Mutant Ape #11670 for 25 DAI ($25) to the same buyer. The floor price for mutant apes is 22.6 ETH ($76,000). While it is not immediately clear why the owner would accept such low offers, the situation seems to be a mistake with cchan confusing DAI for ETH. There were three other high-value bids for the Bored Ape between 75 ETH and 106 ETH placed by other collectors that were not accepted.

The floor price for BAYC sits at 106 ETH ($350,000) as of the time of writing. But the NFT in question sports sunglasses and a cigarette, several traits that mean it would typically sell higher than the current floor price. (It’s hard to specify exactly how much it specific NFT should be valued — a wider problem that has been perplexing NFT traders when it comes to using them for loans).

Apart from being sold much lower than the floor price, the sale also represents a major loss for cchan, seeing as the BAYC NFT was initially acquired for 16 ETH in August last year.

Since the purchase, the new buyer has claimed the Ape tokens from the ApeCoin airdrop. They received 12,136 Ape tokens ($180,000).

What’s strange about this whole situation is that the previous owner had to approve their wallet to be able to interact with DAI. That means a transaction will have popped up asking them to approve the use of the stablecoin — a sign that the payment wasn’t being made with ETH. They then sold both the Bored Ape and the Mutant Ape within a minute of each other, suggesting they had decided to accept both offers in one go.

While this might suggest that this was a deliberate move (for some unbeknown reason), a glance at the buyer’s wallet shows otherwise. The buyer has been continously placing bids in DAI on multiple Bored Ape NFTs, seemingly looking to trick someone into believing the offer is in ETH and accepting the purchase. This suggets the seller fell into the intentional trap.

It’s also possible that the seller had their account compromised.

«

I love that the possibilities are (translated into normal currencies) “they thought they were being offered dollars, not rubles” or “they were hacked”, and that these are the default expectations. Looks to me like a scam, since the buyer grabbed the ApeCoin their new ownership entitled them to. And it’s all legit.
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Apple to cut iPhone, AirPods output amid Ukraine war uncertainty • Nikkei

Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li:

»

Apple launched the iPhone SE as its first 5G-capable budget phone less than three weeks ago but is now telling multiple suppliers that it aims to lower production orders by about 2m-3m units for the quarter, citing weaker-than-expected demand, four people told Nikkei Asia. The U.S. tech giant also reduced orders for its AirPods earphones by more than 10m units for all of 2022, as the company predicted lukewarm demand and wanted to reduce the level of inventories.

The company shipped about 76.8m units of AirPods in 2021, Counterpoint Research data showed, but people with knowledge of the situation said overall shipments for 2022 could likely see a decline.

Apple also asked suppliers to make a couple of million fewer units of the entire iPhone 13 range than previously planned, but said this adjustment was based on seasonal demand.

These moves by the world’s most powerful chip and component procurer underline the mounting pressure on the tech industry following the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war, which has compounded the yearslong chip shortage that has hit a string of industries from smartphones to PCs to automobiles.

Numerous governments, from the US and the EU to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, have imposed economic sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, and the supply chain has been rocked by turmoil in the oil, energy and raw materials markets.

«

Always wary of “Apple has cut demand…” stories, but the supply chain issues behind this one seem solid enough, and there’s probably going to be a new whiplash effect through the European tech industry. (And don’t forget Ukraine’s xenon!)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Back in 2013, Jeff Bezos promised us Amazon delivery drones within five years. Instead they keep crashing on test flights. CC-licensed photo by Mike Licht 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. Widely available. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon Delivery drones keep crashing in testing: at least eight in 13 months • Business Insider

Katherine Long:

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Amazon’s autonomous delivery drones have crashed at least eight times in the past 13 months, a review of federal crash reports and internal documents shows.

At least one of these crashes, when a drone that was being tested dropped from 160 feet, resulted in an acres-wide brush fire last June, Insider previously reported. The most recent crash Insider confirmed was at an eastern Oregon airfield on February 1 of this year.

Amazon is testing these drones under its ambitious Prime Air program, which in 2020 was granted license from the Federal Aviation Administration to test in limited capacities. Confirmation of these crashes comes as the company looks to secure new registration that would allow it to test its unmanned vehicles closer to population centres and with fewer restrictions.

The company conducted more than 2,300 drone test flights last year, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. Amazon has previously said that no one has ever been injured as a result of the company’s flight tests.

…Prime Air has suffered from high turnover, internal conflict, and product delays, Insider previously reported. The roughly 800-person division had a turnover rate higher than 20% last year, according to an internal document, including departures from Amazon’s Prime Air headquarters in the UK, where 100 people lost their jobs in a restructuring.

Most of the federal crash reports redact Amazon’s name, but Insider checked the date of the reports against screenshots of internal messages alerting employees that a crash had taken place. Most of the reports are from a range in Pendleton, Oregon, where Amazon tests its drones.

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In December 2013 Jeff Bezos insisted that Amazon drones would be making deliveries within five years. Maybe there’s some relativity effect where time is passing more slowly for us.

Of course, the military versions (not available on Amazon) are showing their mettle in what I suppose we have to call the Ukrainian theatre.
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Do you want me to leave the Apple ecosystem? • Lapcat Software

Jeff Johnson is president, CEO, founder and bottle-washer of Lapcat:

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“If you want sideloading, then you can just buy an Android phone.”

This is a ubiquitous response to the request that Apple unlock iPhone and allow installation of software from outside the App Store (which has always been possible on the Mac). It reminds me of the “America, love it or leave it” response to criticism of US government policies. Here’s my serious question: are you serious? Do you want me, a longtime software developer in the Apple ecosystem, to discontinue my iOS and Mac apps, pack up, and switch to different operating systems? Is that what you want? Moreover, do you want all supporters of so-called “sideloading” among iPhone developers and users to also ditch their iPhones and switch to Android, leaving only the lockdown adherents in the Apple ecosystem? Is the world you want one where buying and using an electronic device requires having a particular ideology?

…I suspect that the suggestion is not actually serious, and you don’t want all sideloading adherents to leave the Apple ecosystem. I doubt that Apple wants us to leave either, because that would mean lost apps from software developers and lost money in hardware sales and “services” from users. The real motivation behind the suggestion that “you can just switch to Android” is just to stifle open criticism of Apple and its policies. The suggestion is not to switch away from iPhone but rather to STFU. This is one reason why we should always dismiss the above quoted response to sideloading as empty rhetorical garbage. It’s effectively, “If you want sideloading, then I don’t care, I don’t want to hear it.”

«

The EU’s Digital Markets Act might impose sideloading on Apple, which is going to make for an interesting little struggle. If Apple’s smart, it will get in front of it and make allowances similar to those Google already has with the Play Store. But knowing Apple, it will instead fight tooth and nail, insisting the App Store keeps people “safe”. But, as Johnson points out, that’s not true at all: scams run rampant. It’s just Apple profits from them, where it wouldn’t from sideloaded ones.
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There’s something off about ApeCoin • The Verge

Casey Newton:

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A core idea of web3 is that it is more open and inclusive than what came before. Before, you had to be an accredited investor to participate in a new project like Yuga Labs; today, you can simply buy some ApeCoin and begin to “participate” in the “ecosystem.” Over time, perhaps you’ll own enough ApeCoin to be able to shift the direction of the project: voting on delegates, or future projects, or whatever.

But this is a lot of power to grant to the public, and so perhaps it’s understandable that web3 startups are being stingy with it. DAOs are created, but distanced from the core intellectual property. Token holders are granted votes, but on fringe issues. Nearly half of any tokens (38%, in the case of ApeCoin) are given for free to an inner circle. Decentralisation becomes a marketing pitch — a forever promise of rewards to come, if you only buy and hold those tokens — but it’s all still centralised where it counts.

Maybe I’m being too cynical here. Bored Apes seems like a fun brand, and if any NFT project tokens are going to have lasting value, it may well be Yuga Labs’. Over the past month or so, I’ve seen Bored Apes painted on jackets in fashion boutiques in Miami, and graffitied on walls in Brooklyn. It seems possible that people will enjoy the major-label Bored Apes virtual band, or make real money off the forthcoming Bored Apes play-to-earn game.

But something still feels off to me. Self-dealing founders and investors; a hype machine in overdrive; and a growing disconnect between the web3 we were promised and the one that’s being traded on the crypto exchanges. This sleight of hand might keep working for a while. But eventually the truth catches up with you. And when it does, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that decentralisation is its first casualty.

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I think decentralisation has already been a casualty; it’s just that people (the greater fools, and those who aren’t) are so keen to cash in somehow that they ignore the fact. For both, it’s convenient to pretend what’s happening is not happening.
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What happens when kids get their history from video games? • The Atlantic

Luka Ivan Jukić:

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Analysing video games is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, their influence is hard to track: Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn’t colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was moulded by Paradox games. “The student in your class that knows what Prussia is is the student that played Europa Universalis IV,” Devereaux said. And second, unlike other cultural mediums, “games are about systems; they’re about the mechanics,” Devereaux told me. Those systems and mechanics are how video games can “teach” people history. The presence of such mechanics, though, does not mean that players will necessarily understand them. “The major challenge is getting players to recognise and think explicitly about these systems,” Marion Kruse, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati and a dedicated gamer, told me.

In my experience, Europa Universalis is particularly effective at teaching users about its systems. Playing in Spain in Europa Universalis, you’ll learn the power of a good marriage when you see that Spain is actually the result of a personal union between the crowns of Castile and Aragon. If you’re unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will quickly understand the full force of the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Invade the Soviet Union in Hearts of Iron, Paradox’s Second World War simulator, and you’ll be reminded why Napoleon and Hitler both failed to subdue Russia: “General Frost.” The processes the player engages with teach them claims about how the world works—what The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost has called “procedural rhetoric.”

[Games company] Paradox’s titles don’t take a single view of history, but each game does provide a framework for understanding a particular historical period, buoyed by a number of procedural claims. Take Europa Universalis. The game essentially simulates the story of Europe’s rise from a relative backwater to a continent that dominated the world. That means that no matter what exact course the game takes, it usually results in the consolidation of large, powerful, centralised states in Europe and their rise to global primacy.

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It’s something of a curate’s egg – good in parts. In reality it’s a mess like SimCity, which builds in all sorts of very right-wing assumptions about taxation and segmentation.
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Exxon is mining bitcoin in North Dakota as part of its plan to slash emissions • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

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ExxonMobil, the top oil and gas producer in the U.S., is piloting a project to mine bitcoin in North Dakota, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

For over a year, Exxon has been working with Crusoe Energy Systems, a company based in Denver, said the people who asked not to be named because details of the project are confidential. Crusoe’s technology helps oil companies turn wasted energy, or flare gas, into a useful resource.

Similar to ConocoPhillips’ mining scheme in North Dakota’s Bakken region, Exxon is diverting natural gas that would otherwise be burned off into generators, which convert the gas into electricity used to power shipping containers full of thousands of bitcoin miners. Exxon launched the pilot in late January 2021 and expanded its buildout in July.

While Exxon hasn’t talked publicly about its work in the space, Eric Obrock, a 10-year veteran at the company, said on his LinkedIn profile that from February 2019 to January 2022, he “proposed and led the first successful commercial and technical demonstration of using Bitcoin proof-of-work mining as a viable alternative to natural gas flaring in the oil patch.”

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Absolutely bonkers. The most amazing example of fucking for virginity.
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1999: Dig more coal — the PCs are coming • Forbes

Back in May 1999:

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Somewhere in America, a lump of coal is burned every time a book is ordered on-line.

The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.

Under the PC’s hood, demand for horsepower doubles every couple of years. Yes, today’s microprocessors are much more efficient than their forerunners at turning electricity into computations. But total demand for digital power is rising far faster than bit efficiencies are. We are using more chips — and bigger ones — and crunching more numbers. The bottom line: Taken all together, chips are running hotter, fans are whirring faster, and the power consumption of our disk drives and screens is rising. For the old thermoelectrical power complex, widely thought to be in senescent decline, the implications are staggering.

About half of the trillion-dollar infrastructure of today’s electric power grid exists to serve just two century-old technologies — the lightbulb and the electric motor. Not long ago, that meant little prospect for growth in the power industry. We have about as many motors and bulbs as we need. “The long-run supply curve for electricity is as flat as the Kansas horizon,” declared green guru Amory Lovins in 1984.

…The infoelectric convergence is already having a visible impact on overall demand. At least 100 million nodes on the Internet, drawing from hundreds to thousands of kilowatt-hours per year, add up to 290bn kWh of demand. That’s about 8% of total US demand. Add in the electric power used to build and operate stand-alone (unnetworked) chips and computers, and the total jumps to about 13%. It’s now reasonable to project that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.

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Instead: computers got faster while using less power. But then: bitcoin.
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Why Apple acquired a UK-Based ‘open banking’ fintech • Forbes

Ron Shevlin says most people have got it wrong on why Apple bought British-based Credit Kudos the other week:

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Apple has two strategic issues it must address that go beyond just offering BNPL [Buy Now Pay Later – as companies such as Klarna offer, where big-ticket items can be bought on regular payments, with the offer made at the online checkout without waiting for an external credit check] or even launching the Apple Card in the UK:

1) Building Out a Digital Commerce Ecosystem
Commerce platform providers like Block (I still think of them as Square), PayPal, Shopify, and even Klarna are building out robust digital commerce capabilities that support a wide range of functionality in the commerce ecosystem.

Square’s acquisition of AfterPay is just the icing on a digital commerce cake the company has been building for the past 10 years. (11 companies in 10 years.)

Klarna, too, has been building out a digital commerce ecosystem. (16 companies in 10 years.)

PayPal highlighted its merchant value chain capabilities in its February 2021 investor presentation with a slide titled “We’re building a comprehensive platform to power the global digital economy.”

2) Improving Its Data Management/Analytics Capability
Apple is a products company. It’s not good with data the way Google and Amazon are good at amassing and applying data.

I often half-joke that the reason Apple positions itself as a “privacy friendly” company is because it doesn’t know what to do with the data it has on its customers.

The Credit Kudos acquisition is a small—but still important—step towards correcting this deficiency in Apple’s digital commerce arsenal.

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I said that “Apple’s credit card is organised in partnership with Goldman Sachs, but this makes it look as though it’s aiming to go it alone”, which I suppose is half-right. Don’t @ me. (Via Dave Birch.)
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Workers are trading staggering amounts of data for ‘payday loans’ • WIRED

Caitlin Harrington:

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Tulloch is one of a growing number of US workers turning their personal data over to private companies in exchange for paycheck advances, fuelling an industry potentially worth up to $12bn, by some estimates. In 2020, $9.5bn in wages were accessed early, according to the research firm Aite-Novarica Group, up from $6.3bn in 2019. These early payouts can be habit-forming; a 2021 report from the Financial Health Network found that more than 70% of pay advance users took out consecutive advances.

What Tulloch didn’t know was that when he signed up for the app, a company called Argyle was retrieving the data that would be used to decide how much money to give him. It builds the technology that allows companies like B9 to extract a wealth of data from payroll accounts—up to 140 data points. These can include shifts worked, time off, earnings and promotions history, health care and retirement contributions, even reputational markers like on-time rate or a gig worker’s star rating and deactivation history. For every worker that uses its product, Argyle charges customers like B9 a fee, plus an additional monthly charge for continuous monitoring. This makes for a valuable data trove; it’s further upstream than banking data, providing a fuller picture of a worker’s earnings, deductions, and behaviour. Some estimate that payroll data could be worth $10bn. Argyle pegs it at 10 times higher.

Argyle is part of an emerging set of payroll data companies founded over the last four years to cash in on workers’ personal information. They build secure connections between payroll providers like Paychex and businesses that want to access that data, like B9. Argyle acts like a courier, shuttling data from one account to another, the same way banking data is transmitted to apps like Venmo.

«

For reference, Facebook gathers almost 100 data points about you just for its ad targeting.
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Two brothers swindle over $1bn from a Turkish bank • Interesting Engineering

Can Emir:

»

Two brothers from the Black Sea province of Samsun, Turkey, have been detained after embezzling a Turkish bank of over $1 billion (16 billion Turkish liras).

According to the police investigation reported in Dünya (in Turkish), two brothers in their 20s, both working in a gas station, were using a mutual account they had opened at a private bank.

The story goes that one day, the younger brother discovered a loophole in the mobile banking application and after making some 70 transactions, he transferred 16 billion liras from a bank’s investment account to their own account.

The loophole discovered by the younger brother allowed the duo to withdraw as much cash as they wanted through an investment account connected via the bank’s mobile app. The account, which was reserved for customers who were conducting stock trading, reportedly had a bug.

The younger brother told investigators that they had no money in the account when he checked it on February 26. He then selected the “investment account” option on the app when a menu came up and asked him to type in the amount of cash he wished to withdraw. “I randomly typed a number and saw the amount I wrote was transferred to my account. I decided to try typing more and, every time that amount was transferred to my account. Then we saw there were some 16 billion in our account” he reportedly said.

“I told my family about the situation and we decided to pay the outstanding debts of anyone we knew. I did it with my brother and we wired TL 80,000 to our relatives in debt” the younger brother explained.

«

So, just a bug up to the point where they decided to take the money. Though if it had happened with cryptocurrency, well, that would now be their money.
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Weaning Europe off Russian energy will mean making changes • The Economist

“Charlemagne”:

»

Energy prices, whether of petrol, gas or electricity, have rocketed in Europe. Some people might barely have noticed. In France, the authorities have essentially capped electricity and gas bills. Italy on March 18th added €4.4bn ($4.8bn) in subsidies to limit power-price rises for companies and consumers, on top of the €16bn already agreed in recent months. Several countries have cut petrol duties, a much-needed source of tax income. European leaders meeting in Brussels as The Economist went to press were due to discuss new state largesse to households and industry. This is the “whatever it takes” approach at work. As with Covid-19, government is paying first and will ask questions later.

What is startling is how little is being asked of Europeans. Even simple measures that might barely inconvenience people are treated as taboo. Earlier this month the International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises rich-country governments, suggested that Europeans might consider turning down the thermostat by just 1ºC. What might seem like mere virtue-signalling greenery would actually cut consumption by 10bn cubic metres of natural gas over a year. That is roughly one month’s worth of Russian imports. This modest appeal was relayed by precisely nobody in office.

Some EU governments want to ban Russian oil, the Kremlin’s biggest money-spinner. Yet no one is seriously considering the obvious way of using less of it. Lowering motorway speed limits by 10kph would trim fuel use in the rich world by around 15%, not to be scoffed at when Europe is scrambling for any hydrocarbons it can get. Throw in subsidies to boost the use of public transport, a plea to work from home one day a week where possible and a ban on car use in cities on Sundays, and Europe could save perhaps a fifth of the Russian oil it imports, according to IEA figures and Charlemagne’s guesswork. These may or may not be sensible ideas. The point is that they are not being discussed.

«

Possibly, s/he suggests, we’ve just lost the capacity for altruistic sacrifice. But that’s contradicted by the past two years, when we endured lockdowns both for our own good and that of others. It is puzzling that there isn’t a campaign to make this point. Perhaps it’s coming later this year, when the next 50% hike in energy prices (in the UK) arrives.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none reported.

Spycraft is evolving – the FBI in Washington is using tightly geographically targeted social media ads to target dissatisfied Russian diplomats. CC-licensed photo by JBrazitoJBrazito 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. Still unregulated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

EU negotiators agree new rules to rein in tech giants • POLITICO

Samuel Stolton:

»

“The Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of Big Tech companies,” lead MEP Andreas Schwab said. “From now on, Big Tech companies must show that they also allow for fair competition on the internet.”

“The new rules will help enforce that basic principle. The time of long antitrust cases is over during which the authorities were lagging behind the big tech companies. Europe is thus ensuring more competition, more innovation and more choice for users.”

The new rules for so-called gatekeeper platforms, derived from years of antitrust enforcement in the digital economy, include restrictions on combining personal data from different sources, mandates to allow users to install apps from third-party platforms, prohibitions on bundling services, and a prohibition on self-preferencing practices.

Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years.

Penalties for breaching the rules can be up to 10% of annual worldwide turnover in the case of first infringements, and even up to 20% in the case of repeated infringements.

Parliament was also successful in its call to get web browsers and virtual assistants into the scope of core platform services.

«

The interoperability requirements alone are going to be a colossal headache for messaging companies, unless what is meant is that you can export your data and contacts and import them into another messaging service. Making WhatsApp and iMessage somehow interlocked would be most bizarre.

We’ll see how this pans out; many a slip between cup and lip.
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FBI recruits Russian spies outside Russian embassy in D.C. • The Washington Post

Devlin Barrett:

»

The FBI is trying a novel strategy to recruit Russian-speaking individuals upset about the country’s invasion of Ukraine: aiming social media ads at cellphones located inside or just outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.

The ads, which appear on Facebook, Twitter and Google, are carefully geographically targeted. A Washington Post reporter standing next to the embassy’s stone walls on Wednesday morning received the ad in their Facebook feed. But the ads did not appear in the feed when the reporter stood on the other side of Wisconsin Avenue NW, in the District’s Glover Park neighborhood.

The ads are designed to capitalize on any dissatisfaction or anger within Russian diplomatic or spy services — or among Russian emigres to the United States — over the invasion of Ukraine, an event that counterintelligence experts call a huge opportunity for the US intelligence community to recruit new sources.

The unlikely star of the campaign is Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose own words are used to encourage people working in or visiting the embassy to talk to the FBI. The ad quotes Putin at a meeting last month where he publicly chastised his intelligence chief, Sergey Naryshkin, correcting the spy boss’s position on Russian policy toward the separatist eastern regions of Ukraine. Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, stammered at the meeting and seemed unsure of what Putin wanted him to say.

The FBI’s ad quotes Putin saying, in Russian, “speak plainly, Sergey Yevgenyevich” Naryshkin, reminding any SVR officers working at the embassy that Putin humiliated their boss. The FBI then uses Putin’s words to make its own appeal — also in Russian: “Speak plainly … We’re ready to listen.”

«

Seems to have upset the Russian Embassy there, which called it an attempt to “sow confusion and organise desertion among [embassy] staff”. Well, yes, and your point is? Very neat use of very tight geotargeting, which must be done by zip code, at a guess.
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Russia fights against time • New Lines Magazine

John Sweeney, veteran reporter, who is out in Kyiv:

»

Now, Julia says, the Russians are surrounded by the Ukrainian army. I start to think about these Russian kids telling “zombie lies” — the phrase comes from the chief rabbi of Kyiv’s Brodsky Synagogue, Moshe Azman — sitting in their metal boxes, waiting to die.

The Ukrainians have put up a drone video armed with thermal imaging. It’s so chilly out there that the Russian tank crews sit with their engines running through the night. As the Ukrainian drone hovers over the woods in the blackness, it picks out the Russian tanks hiding in the cold. Each Russian exhaust spills its presence, white on black. Then Ukrainian artillery, pinpointed by the drone, moves in for the kill and takes out each white dot, one by one.

For the Russian soldiers, there are times when it must feel like they are being broken by warriors from the future, ghost spirits that can take them out while they hide in the thickest of forests. They are fighting time itself.

We leave for Kyiv at 1 pm, and the journey back is grim. This time we are traveling with refugees, and our plodding progress is slowed further when the Ukrainian police stop us to check my British passport against the national database. The police officer, sporting a balaclava and automatic rifle, returns it, saying: “Have a nice day!”

In Kyiv, they have closed one of the bridges across the Dnieper River, so Vlad, who lives on the east bank, leaves us and we walk across the bridge in the dusk at 7pm, hoping to make it back before curfew begins in an hour’s time.

From the distance, artillery shuffles its furniture.

«

John is self-funding his work out there. He’s crowdfunding a podcast, and has a Patreon. Please support him if you can.
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Grimes says she orchestrated cyberattack that shut down ‘Hipster Runoff’ • Vice

Samantha Cole:

»

Hipster Runoff was a one-man blog that ran from 2007 to 2013, specializing in sardonic criticism of culture and music. Beloved by internet readers and hated by its high-profile targets, the site mysteriously went down in 2012, and although it came back for a while, it never quite recovered and was eventually sold. 

The mystery of Hipster Runoff’s original downfall might be solved, however, as Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, recently claimed she hacked the site and destroyed its backups after photos of her at a party appeared on the site and went viral.    

In 2012, Hipster Runoff ran a photo of Grimes kissing another woman, which she claims was leaked. This apparently pissed her off enough to attack the site and shut it down, she said in an interview last month with Vanity Fair.

“Back in the day, like before the woke era, I actually got canceled for this,” she said in the interview, referring to the photo. “I was trying to be like, all integrity, and start my career, and it was like ‘Grimes Gone Wild’ or something, and it was just this like, super wack, mean story, and it was like this meme which was going all over the internet,” she says. She’d just released her breakout album Visions a few months prior, which won a bunch of awards. 

Grimes claims in the interview that a friend, who worked for a video game company, helped her issue a DDOS attack against Hipster Runoff (a method for overwhelming a website’s servers with fake traffic until it stops working) and “basically blackmail them,” she said. “We were like, we’re not gonna let you put your site back up until you take the story down. And he did in fact take the story down, and it was like, my coolest hacker moment.” 

«

It’s sort of multi-instrumental, I guess? Given how the people who run sites like that would take delight in not taking down pictures (think: revenge porn) there’s a certain DIY aesthetic to her response.
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Google says it thwarted North Korean cyberattacks in early 2022 • Engadget

Andrew Tarantola:

»

Google’s Threat Analysis Group announced on Thursday that it had discovered a pair of North Korean hacking cadres going by the monikers Operation Dream Job and Operation AppleJeus in February that were leveraging a remote code execution exploit in the Chrome web browser. 

The blackhatters reportedly targeted the US news media, IT, crypto and fintech industries, with evidence of their attacks going back as far as January 4th, 2022, though the Threat Analysis Group notes that organizations outside the US could have been targets as well.

“We suspect that these groups work for the same entity with a shared supply chain, hence the use of the same exploit kit, but each operate with a different mission set and deploy different techniques,” the Google team wrote on Thursday. “It is possible that other North Korean government-backed attackers have access to the same exploit kit.”

Operation Dream Job targeted 250 people across 10 companies with fraudulent job offers from the likes of Disney and Oracle sent from accounts spoofed to look like they came from Indeed or ZipRecruiter. Clicking on the link would launch a hidden iframe that would trigger the exploit. 

Operation AppleJeus, on the other hand targeted more than 85 users in the cryptocurrency and fintech industries using the same exploit kit. That effort involved “compromising at least two legitimate fintech company websites and hosting hidden iframes to serve the exploit kit to visitors,” Google’s security researchers found. “In other cases, we observed fake websites — already set up to distribute trojanized cryptocurrency applications — hosting iframes and pointing their visitors to the exploit kit.”

«

Targeting crypto. The North Koreans know where the weaknesses are.
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Evaluation of science advice during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden • Nature

Nele Brusselaers et al:

»

In 2014, the Public Health Agency merged with the Institute for Infectious Disease Control; the first decision by its new head (Johan Carlson) was to dismiss and move the authority’s six professors to Karolinska Institute. With this setup, the authority lacked expertise and could disregard scientific facts.

The Swedish pandemic strategy seemed targeted towards “natural” herd-immunity and avoiding a societal shutdown. The Public Health Agency labelled advice from national scientists and international authorities as extreme positions, resulting in media and political bodies to accept their own policy instead.

The Swedish people were kept in ignorance of basic facts such as the airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission, that asymptomatic individuals can be contagious and that face masks protect both the carrier and others. Mandatory legislation was seldom used; recommendations relying upon personal responsibility and without any sanctions were the norm.

Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives.

If Sweden wants to do better in future pandemics, the scientific method must be re-established, not least within the Public Health Agency. It would likely make a large difference if a separate, independent Institute for Infectious Disease Control is recreated.

We recommend Sweden begins a self-critical process about its political culture and the lack of accountability of decision-makers to avoid future failures, as occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic.

«

The morphine/oxygen detail is utterly shocking. After this, perhaps we’ve heard the end of people holding Sweden up as the example of what should have been done. (Perhaps a vain hope.)
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Lapsus$: Oxford teen accused of being multi-millionaire cyber-criminal • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

»

A 16-year-old from Oxford has been accused of being one of the leaders of cyber-crime gang Lapsus$.

The teenager, who is alleged to have amassed a $14m (£10.6m) fortune from hacking, has been named by rival hackers and researchers. City of London Police say they have arrested seven teenagers in relation to the gang but will not say if he is one. The boy’s father told the BBC his family was concerned and was trying to keep him away from his computers.

Under his online moniker “White” or “Breachbase” the teenager, who has autism, is said to be behind the prolific Lapsus$ hacker crew, which is believed to be based in South America.

Lapsus$ is relatively new but has become one of the most talked about and feared hacker cyber-crime gangs, after successfully breaching major firms like Microsoft and then bragging about it online.

The teenager, who can’t be named for legal reasons, attends a special educational school in Oxford. City of London Police said: “Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested in connection with an investigation into a hacking group. They have all been released under investigation. Our inquiries remain ongoing.”

The boy’s father told the BBC: “I had never heard about any of this until recently. He’s never talked about any hacking, but he is very good on computers and spends a lot of time on the computer. I always thought he was playing games.”

«

There’s also a Bloomberg report:

»

The group suffers from poor operational security, according to two of the researchers, allowing cybersecurity companies to gain intimate knowledge about the teenage hackers.

“Unlike most activity groups that stay under the radar, DEV-0537 doesn’t seem to cover its tracks,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “They go as far as announcing their attacks on social media or advertising their intent to buy credentials from employees of target organizations. DEV-0537 started targeting organizations in the United Kingdom and South America but expanded to global targets, including organizations in government, technology, telecom, media, retail and health-care sectors.”

The teenage hacker in England has had his personal information, including his address and information about his parents, posted online by rival hackers.

At an address listed in the leaked materials as the teen’s home near Oxford, a woman who identified herself as the boy’s mother talked with a Bloomberg reporter for about 10 minutes through a doorbell intercom system. The home is a modest terraced house on a quiet side street about five miles from Oxford University.

«

Guess we were overdue for the next LulzSec. Doxxed and living at home: a story as old as Unix time.
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Lack of support for low-income families will see 1.3 million people pushed into absolute poverty next year • Resolution Foundation

»

Key findings from the overnight analysis [of the UK Chancellor’s spring statement] include:

• Families face £1,100 income losses. The scale of the cost of living squeeze is such that typical working-age household incomes are to set to fall by 4% in real-terms next year (2022-23), a loss of £1,100, while the largest falls will be among the poorest quarter of households where incomes are set to fall by 6%
• Absolute poverty rises by 1.3 million. The scale and distribution of the cost of living squeeze, coupled with the lack of support for low-income families, means that a further 1.3 million people are set to fall into absolute poverty next year, including 500,000 children – the first time Britain has seen such a rise outside of recessions
• Tax rises for seven-in-eight workers. Considering all income tax changes to thresholds and rates announced by Rishi Sunak, only those earning between £49,100 and £50,300 will actually pay less income tax in 2024-25, and only those earning between £11,000 and £13,500 will pay less tax and National Insurance (NI). Of the 31 million people in work, around 27 million (seven-in-eight workers) will pay more in income tax and NI in 2024-25
• A £11,500 wage loss. With real wages in the midst of a third major fall in a little over a decade, average weekly earnings are on course to rise by just £18 a week between 2008 and 2027, compared to £240 a week had they continued on their pre-financial crisis path. This lost growth is equivalent to a £11,500 annual wage loss for the average worker
• A parliament of pain. Typical household incomes are forecast to fall by 2% across the parliament as a whole (2019-20 to 2024-25), making this parliament the worst on record for living standards, beating the 1% income fall over the course of the 2005-05 to 2010-11 parliament.

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Just worth remembering that there is still a lot for technology to solve. Biggest of all is the energy crisis. If we could generate far more energy than we needed at low cost without carbon emissions, the world would be a very, very different place.
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Building games and apps entirely through natural language using OpenAI’s code-davinci model • @AndrewMayne

Andrew Mayne:

»

OpenAI has a new code generating model that’s improved in a number of ways and can handle nearly two times as much text (4,000 tokens.) I built several small games and applications without touching a single line of code. There are limitations, and coding purely by simple text instructions can stretch your imagination, but it’s a huge leap forward and a fun experiment. All the demos can be played with here: https://codepen.io/collection/qOqJqk

«

They’re pretty basic as games go, but the fact that he could do this without actually writing any code (it’s done in HTML, CSS and Javascript) is very impressive.
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Larger 15in MacBook Air expected in 2023 • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Display Supply Chain Consultants analyst Ross Young provided a bit of color on what can be expected. Apple is working on a MacBook Air that’s somewhere around 15in in size, with the machine set to debut alongside a “slightly larger” 13in MacBook Air .

According to Young, the larger-sized 15in MacBook Air is slated for release in 2023, but a specific launch date unknown. This is not the first time that we’ve heard about a 15in MacBook Air , as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said last year that Apple was working on a larger MacBook Air with a 15in display size.

At the time, Gurman said that Apple had “considered” building a larger version of the MacBook Air , but decided not to move forward with it “for the next generation.” Gurman did not mention whether Apple had nixed the idea all together, but it appears that the larger MacBook Air project has not been abandoned.

Internal Apple emails that came out during the Epic Games v. Apple trial also indicate that Apple considered a larger 15in MacBook Air as early as 2008, but instead went with the smaller 13in model.

«

Apple has never made a consumer 15in laptop. John Gruber suggests that there’s a pricing gap starting at around $1500 – above the 13in MacBook Air, below the 15in MacBook Pro – which this could fill.

Though I’d absolutely love this to be true, I don’t see why Apple would be so cooperative. At present, anyone who really wants a 15in screen but doesn’t need pro power is still obliged to buy the Pro (🙋‍♂️) even though they’re overserved by the Pro, and probably don’t ever hit its processing limits. Apple coins it from those buyers.

The others buy a MacBook Air, but wish they had the bigger screen, so they become a potential future upsell. I’d bet more than half of the 15in-wanters buy the Pro, which means Apple would (marginally) lose money if it introduced a 15in MacBook (Air).
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The problem with YouTube and food videos!!! • YouTube

Sonny Side has a team that makes food videos. Presently he’s in Rwanda, making videos about how people in villages make their food – which, yes, includes slaughtering livestock which will become part of the meal. (It’s not gory, he insists.) But YouTube keeps blocking them. His assertion is that YouTube has a culture problem: everything is compared against an American reference point, and anything that diverges from that is subject to weird censorship.

(It certainly chimes with points I made in Social Warming: why is it OK to show people waving guns around, perhaps even shooting people, but not a nipple?)

(Thanks Chris R for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How green is the power generation in different countries in Europe? There’s now a handy map to tell you. CC-licensed photo by Chuck Coker 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 part of a billing experiment. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exploring user choice billing with first innovation partner Spotify • Android Developers Blog

Sameer Samat is VP of product management at Google:

»

When users choose Google Play, it’s because they count on us to deliver a safe experience, and that includes in-app payment systems that protect users’ data and financial information. That’s why we built Google Play’s billing system to the highest standards for privacy and safety so users can be confident their sensitive payment data won’t be at risk when they make in-app purchases.

We think that users should continue to have the choice to use Play’s billing system when they install an app from Google Play. We also think it’s critical that alternative billing systems meet similarly high safety standards in protecting users’ personal data and sensitive financial information.

Building on our recent launch allowing an additional billing system alongside Play’s billing for users in South Korea and in line with our principles, we are announcing we will be exploring user choice billing in other select countries.

This pilot will allow a small number of participating developers to offer an additional billing option next to Google Play’s billing system and is designed to help us explore ways to offer this choice to users, while maintaining our ability to invest in the ecosystem. This is a significant milestone and the first on any major app store — whether on mobile, desktop, or game consoles.

We’ll be partnering with developers to explore different implementations of user-choice billing, starting with Spotify. As one of the world’s largest subscription developers with a global footprint and integrations across a wide range of device form factors, they’re a natural first partner.

«

What’s not clear (intentionally?) is whether Spotify will have to pay some cut to Google even if it uses its own billing – one would guess it will – and how much that will be.

The other wrinkle to this is that it’s Google getting ahead of the expected legislation in the US and Europe which would force this on it. And of course on Apple. Of course Apple will say it’s doing this already in the Netherlands with dating apps. For some meanings of “doing”.
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You can now view your Instagram feed in chronological order • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

We the people: Give us social-media feeds that don’t use algorithms to manipulate what we see.

Instagram: Here’s an upside-down caret the size of an ice-cream sprinkle that you can tap for a temporary solution.

On Wednesday, Meta released a tool that some of us have long asked for: a way to view our Instagram feeds with the newest posts first. Yes, you can now ditch the company’s algorithms—which show you the stuff it thinks you’ll engage with most—for a feed that’s ordered, well, in order. The fix isn’t permanent, however, and the app will continue to throw you back to the algorithmic feed. 

The setting will be available to all Instagram iOS and Android users. If you’ve recently updated your Instagram app, the option is available automatically. If you don’t see it, try downloading an app update.

The change comes as Instagram, TikTok and other social-media companies face increased scrutiny around algorithms and their ability to keep people, specifically kids, glued to their feeds and show them harmful content.

At a Senate hearing in December, Instagram head Adam Mosseri was asked if he believed kids should be able to use the Instagram app without “being manipulated by algorithms that are designed to keep them hooked.” Mr. Mosseri replied, “We believe in more transparency and accountability,” adding that a chronological feed was in the works.

Well, the feature has come, and I’ve been testing it out. Is it progress in our fight to gain some control of our social-media feeds? Absolutely. Is it enough? Absolutely not.

«

And where do you find it?

»

In the upper left corner of the app, next to the Instagram logo, you’ll now see the tiny inverted caret. Tap that area and you can toggle between two new feeds—Following and Favorites.

«

Instagram shifted to an algorithmic feed in 2016, saying that people “miss 70% of their feeds”, and said a year later that people were interacting more. But it’s always slightly unsatisfactory.
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Sonos TV: Home Theater OS under development • Protocol

Janko Roettgers:

»

Sonos appears to be getting ready to play a bigger role on the TV: The company is hiring multiple staffers for a new “Home Theater OS” project, with job descriptions hinting at plans to run apps or experiences directly on the TV. This comes after the company considered various ways to play a bigger role in TV streaming in recent years, according to multiple sources who spoke to Protocol on the condition of anonymity.

A Sonos spokesperson declined to comment.

The company recently started searching for a “UX Lead — Next Generation Home Theater Experience,” who will work “across device surfaces (mobile, television, tablet, and HW remote) to deliver a next generation content delivery experience.” Applicants need to have multiple years of experience designing for mobile “and/or TV.”

To date, Sonos has built apps to control its speakers for mobile devices and desktop PCs but not TVs. The company’s existing home theater products also don’t ship with a hardware remote and can instead be controlled with third-party TV remotes.

Another job listing is for a future “Principal Platform Product Manager” to develop an “OS & Media Platform roadmap”; the listing asks for applicants to have experience with modern operating systems, including Android/Android TV. And a “Head of Partnerships, Home Theatre” will “play a pivotal role in connecting users to the content and services they love with Sonos quality experiences they’ve come to expect,” according to another recent listing.

«

For years people (me especially) have been asking Sonos when/if it’s going to get into video, and been rebuffed. This might be that? Or a streaming device? Its own streaming device (like an Apple TV?) could integrate with its speakers. It’s difficult to see quite what the space is that it thinks is beckoning.
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Israel blocked Ukraine from buying Pegasus spyware, fearing Russia’s anger • The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

»

Israel blocked Ukraine from buying NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware for fear that Russian officials would be angered by the sale of the sophisticated hacking tool to a regional foe, according to people familiar with the matter.

The revelation, following a joint investigation by the Guardian and Washington Post, offers new insight into the way Israel’s relationship with Russia has at times undermined Ukraine’s offensive capabilities – and contradicted US priorities.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been critical of Israel’s stance since Russia launched its full and bloody invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, saying in a recent address before members of Israel’s Knesset that Israel would have to “give answers” on why it had not given weapons to Ukraine or applied sanctions on Russians.

People with direct knowledge of the matter say that, dating back to at least 2019, Ukrainian officials lobbied Israel to try to convince it to license the spyware tool for use by Ukraine.

But those efforts were rebuffed and NSO Group, which is regulated by the Israeli ministry of defense, was never permitted to market or sell the company’s spyware to Ukraine.

When it is successfully deployed against a target, Pegasus can be used to hack into any mobile phone and intercept phone conversations, read text messages, or view a user’s photographs. It can also be used as a remote listening device, because a government user of the spyware can use it to remotely turn a mobile phone recorder on and off.

«

You’d have to take it on trust that Ukraine would have been using it against the separatists in Crimea and the Donbas. But Israel’s stance, as highlighted by Zelenskiy, begins to look very peculiar. Why is it so worried about Russia, precisely?
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Apple acquires UK open banking startup Credit Kudos • The Block

Ryan Weeks and Andrew Rummer:

»

Credit Kudos, a UK open banking startup that helps lenders make better decisions, has been acquired by US tech giant Apple.

The deal closed earlier this week, according to three people close to the deal. One source said it valued the startup at about $150m, a significant uplift in valuation. A link labeled ‘Website Terms of Use’ on the Credit Kudos website currently leads to a page outlining Apple’s terms of use. Both Credit Kudos and Apple were contacted for comment but did not respond by press time.

Credit Kudos last raised money at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in April 2020, bagging £5m (roughly $6.5m) in a round led by AlbionVC. TriplePoint Capital, Plug and Play Ventures, Ascension Ventures’ Fair by Design fund, Entrepreneur First and a number of angel backers also invested.

The startup offers insights and scores on loan applicants drawn from bank data — specifically transaction and loan outcome data — sourced via the UK’s open banking framework. Its API can offer lenders faster decision-making, less risk, and increased acceptance rates, according to its website.

Launched in 2015 by founders Freddy Kelly and Matt Schofield, Credit Kudos becomes the latest in a string of big European open banking acquisitions in the past year — albeit the first to be snapped up by a tech giant.

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Apple’s credit card is organised in partnership with Goldman Sachs, but this makes it look as though it’s aiming to go it alone. Intriguing.
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Why are Ukraine’s cheap, slow drones so successful against Russian targets? • NBC News

Ken Dilanian and Courtney Kube:

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Before the war began, military experts predicted that Russian forces would have little trouble dealing with Ukraine’s complement of as many as 20 Turkish drones. With a price tag in the single-digit millions, the Bayraktars are far cheaper than drones like the U.S. Reaper but also much slower and smaller, with a wingspan of 39 feet.

As so often has been the case in this war, however, the experts misjudged the competence of the Russian military.

“It’s quite startling to see all these videos of Bayraktars apparently knocking out Russian surface-to-air missile batteries, which are exactly the kind of system that’s equipped to shoot them down,” said David Hambling, a London-based drone expert.

That is confounding, Hambling said, because the drones should be easy for the Russians to blow out of the sky — or disable with electronic jamming.

“It is literally a World War I aircraft, in terms of performance,” he said. “It’s got a 110-horsepower engine. It is not stealthy. It is not supersonic. It’s a clay pigeon — a real easy target.”

If nothing else, the Russians should be able to down the drones with fighter jets, Hambling said. But without air superiority, Russia hasn’t been flying regular combat air patrols. As for electronic jamming, one of the mysteries of the Ukraine invasion is why the Russians haven’t made more use of what experts believe is their advanced electronic warfare capability.

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Possibly it’s not that advanced? Russia has managed to downgrade our expectations on all its capabilities recently, apart from its artillery. Which we already knew about.
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Google’s CTO of Android tablets sees tablet sales passing laptops ‘in the not too distant future’ • The Verge

Richard Lawler:

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Android 12L is in development to support larger-screened devices, and one of the platform’s co-founders, Rich Miner, has rejoined the team with the title “CTO of Android tablets.” Now, speaking to developers during an episode of Google’s The Android Show, Miner explained the opportunity the company is seeing (via 9to5Google).

Miner references the introduction of Android tablets in 2011 and how apps like media players scaled to fit them easily without much investment, but then growth “kind of stagnated.” Now, he cites data showing growth took off pre-COVID in late 2019 and has continued to rise, with more keyboard peripherals and developments in software and hardware by third-party manufacturers to make them better tools to create instead of consuming.

The other reason he cites is that tablets can be “very capable, less expensive than a laptop.” That spurred Google’s work on Android 12L to optimize its system UI for use on bigger devices, as well as the way it formats apps to fit on big screens.

Miner is making the pitch for developers to look at their apps and consider taking advantage of the tools Google’s building to improve tablet support or even building apps that approach the market as a tablet-first experience. He points to 2020 sales data, where “tablet purchases actually started to approach the number of laptop shipments… I actually think there’s going to be a crossover point at some point in the not too distant future where there are more tablets sold annually than there are laptops. I think once you cross over that point, you’re not going to be coming back.”

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This isn’t true, and although there were points in the late 2010s when it looked like tablets might approach PC sales. But it won’t happen. Plus Apple dominates the high end, and is still the single biggest vendor.
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A question for Lambda Literary • Lauren Hough

Lauren Hough is a queer novelist, who was disinvited from the shortlist of the Lambda Literary Prize because..:

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My book won’t win a prize because my friend Sandra Newman wrote a book. The premise of her book is “what if all the men disappeared.” When she announced the book on twitter, YA [young adult] twitter saw it. This is the single most terrifying thing that can happen to a writer on twitter. YA twitter, presumably fans of young adult fiction, are somehow unfamiliar with the concept of fiction. YA twitter doesn’t do nuance. They don’t understand metaphor or thought experiment. They expect fictional characters to be good and moral and just, whether antagonist or protagonist. They expect characters and plot to be free of conflict. They require fiction to portray a world without racism, bigotry, and bullies. And when YA twitter gets wind of a book that doesn’t meet their demands, they respond with a beatdown so unrelenting and vicious it would shock William Golding. They call it “call-out culture” because bullying is wrong, unless your target is someone you don’t like, for social justice reasons, of course.

Publishing hasn’t yet figured out how to respond to YA twitter. Authors who’ve been targeted have left social media entirely. Reviewers shy away. Publishers have pulled books. Authors have changed lines, characters, and scenes in their books hoping to avoid becoming a target, or to appease YA twitter once they have. And once they have become targets, those writers often find themselves alone—their friends and colleagues silent for fear of becoming targets themselves. The entirety of the publishing world is terrified of a few hundred self-described book lovers on social media who are shockingly bad at reading books.

When YA twitter came for Sandra, someone who has always been there for me, I responded. I told them to read the book before condemning it.

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This story resonated because it happens again and again; I wrote about the dynamics of it, with another example from a couple of years ago which also involved YA Twitter, in Social Warming. A pity to see that nothing has changed. If anything, it’s got worse.
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electricityMap: Live CO₂ emissions of electricity consumption

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Climate Impact by Area

Ranked by carbon intensity of electricity consumed (gCO₂eq/kWh)

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Fascinating graphic. France is pretty green, Scandinavia is very green, Britain is a bit brown, Germany is very brown, Poland is almost black, Kosovo is almost completely black. Based on open source data.
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BuzzFeed investors have pushed CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down newsroom • CNBC

Alex Sherman:

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BuzzFeed is shrinking its money-losing news organization, the company announced Tuesday, amid what people familiar with the matter describe as broader investor concern that the division is weighing down the company.

Several large shareholders have urged BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down the entire news operation, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. BuzzFeed declined to comment.

BuzzFeed’s stock closed over 6% higher at $5.27 on Tuesday.

BuzzFeed News, which is part of its content division, has about 100 employees and loses roughly $10 million a year, two of the people said. The company, which also has advertising and commerce divisions, said Tuesday its full-year content revenue grew 9% in 2021 to $130 million.

One shareholder told CNBC shutting down the newsroom could add up to $300 million of market capitalization to the struggling stock. The digital media company went public via a special purpose acquisition vehicle in December. The shares immediately fell nearly 40% in their first week of trading and haven’t recovered.

…The company has offered voluntary buyouts to fewer than 30 employees, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the decision is private. The buyout is only available to reporters and editors who cover investigations, inequality, politics or science and have worked for the company for more than a year.

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Which tells you the segments that are judged to be money-losing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Seth commented on yesterday’s post on who might find the leak of the source for Cortana and Bing useful. Here’s part of what he said: “Just off the top of my head: small specialized search engines can try to get algorithmic improvements. Google could possibly look for areas of competitive weakness, or even see if there’s a trick or two they could use themselves. Major spammers have the ability to analyze the code and look for means of attacking search rankings – and it’s quite possible that if some attack works on Bing, it’ll work on Google too (worth a try).”

Drivers frustrated at high fuel prices might hope that fuel duty will be cut. But it’s a bad idea, for lots of reasons. CC-licensed photo by Images Money on Flickr.

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

How the Russian military is starting to adapt in Ukraine • Task & Purpose

Andrew Milburn:

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The Russians are already adapting, and by doing so are narrowing the Ukrainians’ tactical edge. The one-sided culling of Russian armored columns that characterized the opening days of the war, and kept YouTube subscribers around the world happy, are a thing of the past. The Russians now lead their formations with electronic attack, drones, lasers and good-old-fashioned reconnaissance by fire. They are using cruise missiles and saboteur teams to target logistics routes, manufacturing plants, and training bases in western Ukraine. Realizing that the Ukrainians lack thermal sights for their Stinger missile launchers, the Russians have switched all air operations to after dark. It may be for this same reason that Russian cruise missile strikes in western and southern Ukraine have also been at nighttime. 

The Russians have learned to play to their strengths. While Ukrainian soldiers mock their Russian counterparts, they are deeply respectful of Russian artillery, an asset that the Russians are using more frequently to compensate for their infantry’s deficiencies. Several snipers I spoke with recently agreed that the Russians’ indirect fire capability was the most concerning — a result of sheer reckless mass rather than technical skill. They told some hair-raising stories to illustrate their point, and one amusing one: Ukrainian soldiers defending Kyiv commute to the battle in their own vehicles. After a recent three-day insertion, the sniper teams returned to their extraction site to find their cars all flattened by Russian artillery – a contingency apparently not covered by their insurance plans.

Overconfidence may obscure for the Ukrainians one salient fact about this conflict: time is not on their side. They have fought a skillful and determined defence, but have also had the advantage of home turf, interior lines and the inherent superiority enjoyed by a defender with well-prepared positions, cutting-edge weapons and clear fields of fire. The question now is whether they can pivot to the offense, with its requirement for more comprehensive planning, faster than the Russians can adapt. If not, a prolonged conflict seems likely, and in a war of attrition, the Russians — with a military four times that of Ukraine — will inevitably have the upper hand. 

“They own the long clock,” a senior Ukrainian officer recently admitted. “We are calculating time not in weeks or days – but in lives.”

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Tanks may no longer be useful, Russia’s war in Ukraine shows • Business Insider

Sam Fellman and Mattathias Schwartz:

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Russian commanders have made bad decisions that have wasted their forces’ potential. That includes tanks.

Soldiers, unsure of their ability to navigate through the mud, have been driving them down main roads. Russian tanks have been outrunning the infantry who can protect them.

With a range of around 600 miles, the T-72 weighs 40 tons and gets less than one mile per gallon. In Ukraine, many have strayed too far from the trucks they need to refuel; others have reportedly been sabotaged by their own crews. They have mostly stuck to streets, largely opting not to go off-road, disperse, or conceal their positions. In some instances, they’ve bunched together within range of artillery and paid a heavy cost.

Many Western analysts say they see few signs that Russia is capable of combined arms — where, for example, air power and artillery work in tandem to support the movements of tanks.

So tank proponents can rightly chalk up a lot of Russia’s ruined tanks to terrible tactics, which means that the US’s own tank-centric approach to land warfare is unlikely to change anytime soon.

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If it carries all its fuel, that’s about 3 tonnes of fuel per tank. Estimates are that Russia has lost about 270 tanks – 10% of its entire force – in the past three weeks. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Fuel retailers defend high costs at UK pumps after drop in oil prices • The Guardian

Rob Davies and Jasper Jolly:

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While [British chancellor Rishi] Sunak is under pressure to cut fuel duty, experts argue such a measure could disproportionately aid wealthier people, pointing to research looking at the impact of such moves in the European Union.

EU fuel duty cuts will cost European taxpayers €9bn (£7.5bn), according to analysis by the campaign group Transport & Environment shared with the Guardian. It showed the wealthiest households would gain the most, because they were more likely to drive more and to own larger cars that consume more petrol or diesel.

The richest 10% of EU households spent eight times more on [vehicle] fuel than the bottom 10%, with the UK exhibiting a similar divide, they said.

Griffin Carpenter, a cars analyst at T&E, said: “EU governments claim they stand with Ukraine, but instead of taxing Russian oil, they’re subsidising it with €9bn of taxpayers’ money.

“There are better ways governments can help people. We could impose a tariff or tax on Russian oil imports right now. Instead of subsidising the wealthy drivers of gas-guzzling cars, cash support could be distributed more fairly to families who actually need it.”

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That spending difference between top and bottom deciles is eyewatering. The difference being, of course, that the top decile can afford it.

Presently, vehicle fuel duty for petrol and diesel is just under 58p per litre – which means that British drivers haven’t realised the true swings in fuel price; going from 120p per litre to 167p is a 39% rise, but without fuel duty it would have gone from 62p to 109p, a 76% rise. (Yes, it’s all cheaper, but you’d feel more outraged.)

Sunak is being urged to cut it. That though will reduce tax revenue, while making people more aware of the gyrations in price. Plus it helps the richer. A triply bad idea. He’ll probably go with it.
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The Royal Mint to build ‘world first’ plant to turn UK’s electronic waste into gold • The Royal Mint

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The Royal Mint has announced plans to build a world first plant in South Wales to recover gold from UK electronic waste. The pioneering facility will help address a growing environmental issue, support jobs and skills in Britain, and create a new source of high quality precious metals for the business.

The Royal Mint is using patented new chemistry – created by Canadian based Excir – to recover gold within the circuit boards of laptops and mobile phones. The unique chemistry is capable of recovering over 99% of the precious metals contained within electronic waste – selectively targeting the metal in seconds.

Construction of the plant begins this month, and it will be located within The Royal Mint’s highly secure site to provide a stream of gold directly into the business. When fully operational in 2023, The Royal Mint expects to process up to 90 tonnes of UK-sourced circuit boards per week – generating hundreds of kilograms of gold per year. In addition, the new business venture will support around 40 jobs, helping existing employees to reskill as well as recruiting new chemists and engineers.

Each year, more than 50 million tonnes of electronic waste is produced globally, with less than 20% currently being recycled. If nothing is done, this is set to reach 74 million tonnes by 2030.

Instead of electronic waste leaving UK shores to be processed at high temperatures in smelters, the approach will see precious metals recovered at room temperature at The Royal Mint’s plant in South Wales.

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Sir Isaac Newton was master of the Royal Mint, once upon a time, and obsessed with alchemy, particularly the question of how to transmute base metals into gold. (Partly because if you could, the currency would be undermined.) Neat that the Mint is at least doing a form of alchemy all these years later.
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We’re turning off the comments… • TorrentFreak

Ernesto Ban der Sar:

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Today, we will stop offering the option to comment on articles. This is a tough decision that has been discussed internally for some time.

We are thankful for all the insightful and helpful responses that many readers have provided over the years, they often gave us inspiration and encouragement to press ahead. Sadly, however, increasing ‘noise’ in more recent times ran counter to community spirit and productive discussion, not to mention our core mission and beliefs.

Our goal is to report news, navigating through various perspectives on copyright battles, deflecting the bias on both sides. While we strongly feel that everybody has the right to voice their opinion, we are not immune to the disproportionate effects of a minority on otherwise productive discourse.

Almost everywhere on the internet, this isn’t a new phenomenon. However, we work as a tiny team and have reached a point where dealing with unnecessary diversions has become too much of a distraction. And with a plethora of other public fora available today, pulling the plug is regrettably the best option.

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Happens everywhere in time. Mic Wright once called comments “the radioactive waste of the web”; I think the “national newspaper section editor” he refers to in that DF extract is me.

Ironically the article and the comments have been expunged – but you’ll still find them in the vitrification store known as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It’s a good piece.
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Reasons why abolishing DST in the US will be worse for users and developers • Evertpot

Evert Pot (for it is he):

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this bi-annual time change was a great reminder to many developers that timezones are a thing, and you can’t just naively assume a UTC time + an offset is enough. Even more so for teams that are spread cross-continent because the DST change doesn’t fall on the same day. Currently I’m in the 3 weeks per year the time difference between me and my parents is 5 instead of 6 hours.

A lot of programming is (seems?) Anglo-centric. A similar situation is that before Emoji became wide-spread it was way more common to see a lot more issues around encoding non-ascii characters 🤷 (billpg). Especially in languages that don’t have good native unicode support (looking at you PHP).

So if DST goes away in North America, I predict we’ll see more people assuming using the offset is enough, resulting in bugs related to:

• Times in countries that have not yet abolished DST
• Countries that ever change timezone rules. (This happens more often than you think!)
• Applications that deal with historical data.

It doesn’t help that one of the most common date formats (ISO 8601) uses an offset! (2022-03-18T17:05:30.996-0400). This is OKish for things that have already happened, but not good for anything in the future.

So when you hear developers excited about the US abolishing DST because it will make their (work) life simpler, remind them this is only true if you never intend your software to be used outside of North America, or when the entire rest of the world makes the same change and also freezes all timezone rules forever!

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Google routinely hides emails from litigation by CCing attorneys, DOJ alleges • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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The US Department of Justice and 14 state attorneys general yesterday asked a federal judge to sanction Google for misusing attorney-client privilege to hide emails from litigation.

“In a program called ‘Communicate with Care,’ Google trains and directs employees to add an attorney, a privilege label, and a generic ‘request’ for counsel’s advice to shield sensitive business communications, regardless of whether any legal advice is actually needed or sought. Often, knowing the game, the in-house counsel included in these Communicate-with-Care emails does not respond at all,” the DOJ told the court. The fact that attorneys often don’t reply to the emails “underscor[es] that these communications are not genuine requests for legal advice but rather an effort to hide potential evidence,” the DOJ said.

The DOJ made its argument in a motion to sanction Google “and compel disclosure of documents unjustifiably claimed by Google as attorney-client privileged” and in a memorandum in support of the motion. “The Communicate-with-Care program had no purpose except to mislead anyone who might seek the documents in an investigation, discovery, or ensuing dispute,” the DOJ alleged.

CCing lawyers is a common practice, but the DOJ says Google took it to an “egregious” level. “Google’s institutionalized manufacturing of false privilege claims is egregious, spanning nearly a decade and permeating the company from the top executives on down,” the DOJ said.

The practice “continued unabated after the company was on notice of the Department of Justice’s investigation and even after the filing of the complaint in this action,” the DOJ said. The DOJ also said, “it is well settled that copying an attorney does not confer privilege” on its own. 

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If copying an attorney doesn’t confer privilege, can’t the DOJ just grab the emails and use them? The argument is part of the DOJ’s antitrust suit about illegal monopoly in search advertising. Apparently there are 80,000 documents being withheld by this method.
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‘He goes where the fire is’: a virus hunter in the Wuhan market • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer profiles Edward Holmes, who has looked at the emergence of zoonoses (animal-human diseases):

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Growing up in western England, a young Edward Holmes had a biology teacher who put a poster of an orangutan on the wall that read, “I’m not your cousin.”

The teacher told the class not to read the garbage in their textbook about evolution. That made the 14-year-old eager to dive in.

He went on to study the evolution of apes and humans, and then turned to viruses. Over three decades — working in Edinburgh, Oxford, Pennsylvania and finally Sydney — Dr. Holmes has published more than 600 papers on the evolution of viruses including HIV, influenza and Ebola.

When he was invited to come to the University of Sydney, in 2012, he seized the chance to move closer to Asia, where he feared that the wildlife trade could set off a new pandemic.

“He goes where the fire is,” said Andrew Read, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State University, who worked with Dr. Holmes at the time.

As he was preparing for the move, Dr. Holmes got an email out of the blue from a Chinese virologist named Yong-Zhen Zhang, asking if he’d like to study viruses with him in China. Their collaboration quickly expanded into a sweeping search for new viruses in hundreds of species of animals. They studied spiders plucked off the walls of huts and fish hauled up from the South China Sea.

They ultimately found more than 2,000 virus species new to science, with many surprises among them. Scientists used to think that influenza viruses infected primarily birds, for example, which could then pass them along to mammals like ourselves. But Dr. Holmes and Dr. Zhang found that fish and frogs get the flu, too.

“That’s been quite eye opening,” said Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the surveys. “The diversity of viruses that are out there is just enormous.”

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Holmes is 57, so that 14-year-old was living in 1978 or 1979. What English classroom had biology teachers who didn’t understand – or teach – evolution then?
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The Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set • Folklore.org

Folklore.org collects the verbal history of the early years of Apple:

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Chris [Espinosa, who joined Apple as employee 8, aged 14] wanted to write a demo program using Quickdraw, in order to better understand it. He got excited about the idea of what we called “desk ornaments”, which at that point were not implemented yet. He decided to work on a Quickdraw program to draw the calculator.

After playing around for a while, he came up with a calculator that he thought looked pretty good. But the acid test was showing it to Steve Jobs, in his role as our esthetic compass, to see what he thought.

We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting for Steve’s reaction. “Well, it’s a start”, Steve said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.” Chris told Steve he’ll keep changing it, until Steve thought he got it right.

So, for a couple of days, Chris would incorporate Steve’s suggestions from the previous day, but Steve would continue to find new faults each time he was shown it. Finally, Chris got a flash of inspiration.

The next afternoon, instead of a new iteration of the calculator, Chris unveiled his new approach, which he called “the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set”. Every decision regarding graphical attributes of the calculator were parameterized by pull-down menus. You could select line thicknesses, button sizes, background patterns, etc.

Steve took a look at the new program, and immediately started fiddling with the parameters. After trying out alternatives for ten minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked. When I implemented the calculator UI (Donn Denman did the math semantics) for real a few months later, I used Steve’s design, and it remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9.

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This week Espinosa hit 45 years at Apple. But getting Steve Jobs to stop monkeying with his work by getting Jobs to do it instead may have been his greatest achievement.
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Lapsus$ hackers leak 37GB of Microsoft’s alleged source code • Bleeping Computer

Lawrence Abrams:

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The Lapsus$ hacking group claims to have leaked the source code for Bing, Cortana, and other projects stolen from Microsoft’s internal Azure DevOps server.

Early Sunday morning, the Lapsus$ gang posted a screenshot to their Telegram channel indicating that they hacked Microsoft’s Azure DevOps server containing source code for Bing, Cortana, and various other internal projects.

Monday night, the hacking group posted a torrent for a 9 GB 7zip archive containing the source code of over 250 projects that they say belong to Microsoft.

When posting the torrent, Lapsus$ said it contained 90% of the source code for Bing and approximately 45% of the code for Bing Maps and Cortana.

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Great – now all I need is a search index and maps that cover the world and I can have my own private search engine and map system! Oh, with voice search.

No idea who they thought that code would be useful to.
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‘I don’t know how we’ll survive’: the farmers facing ruin in America’s ‘forever chemicals’ crisis • The Guardian

Tom Perkins:

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Songbird Farm’s 17 acres (7 hectares) hold sandy loam fields, three greenhouses and cutover woods that comprise an idyllic setting near Maine’s central coast. The small organic operation carved out a niche growing heirloom grains, tomatoes, sweet garlic, cantaloupe and other products that were sold to organic food stores or as part of a community-supported agriculture program, where people pay to receive boxes of locally grown produce.

Farmers Johanna Davis and Adam Nordell bought Songbird in 2014. By 2021 the young family with their three-year-old son were hitting their stride, Nordell said.

But disaster struck in December. The couple learned the farm’s previous owner had decades earlier used PFAS-tainted sewage sludge, or “biosolids”, as fertilizer on Songbird’s fields. Testing revealed their soil, drinking water, irrigation water, crops, chickens and blood were contaminated with high levels of the toxic chemicals.

The couple quickly recalled products, alerted customers, suspended their operation and have been left deeply fearful for their financial and physical wellbeing.

“This has flipped everything about our lives on its head,” Nordell said. “We haven’t done a blood test on our kid yet and that’s the most terrifying part. It’s fucking devastating.”

Public health advocates say Songbird is just the tip of the iceberg as Maine faces a brewing crisis stemming from the use of biosolids as fertilizer. The state has begun investigating more than 700 properties for PFAS contamination. Few results are in yet but several farmers’ independent testing revealed high PFAS levels, and statewide contamination has disrupted about 10 farms.

Farmers who spoke with the Guardian say other growers have admitted to hiding PFAS contamination because they fear economic ruin.

…PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds used to make products heat-, water- or stain-resistant. Known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down, they have been linked to cancer, thyroid disruption, liver problems, birth defects, immunosuppression and more. Dozens of industries use PFAS in thousands of consumer products, and often discharge the chemicals into the nation’s sewer system.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A team of Ukrainian soldiers rescued AP journalists from Mariupol because they didn’t want them captured by Russians and forced to recant falsely. CC-licensed photo by manhhai 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. Almost renewable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘I don’t wish it on my worst enemy’: people in Calgary detail life with an electricity load limiter • CBC News

Lucie Edwardson:

»

Josie Gagne was stumbling in the dark, sobbing while on the phone with an Enmax customer assistant, as she tried to locate the tiny orange button under the utility meter that would restore heat inside. 

It was the shock that got her. The young single mother with two kids under two returned home one winter day last year to find a note on her door from Enmax. She’d fallen behind on bills; the home was now on a limiter, capping her electricity.

The furnace was off and at that point, she had no idea what a limiter even was.

“I’m freaking out. I’m crying, thinking ‘What am I going to do?'” she said. “It’s the middle of winter, it’s still cold outside. How am I going to feed my children when my oven doesn’t work?”

Rising utility bills have community advocates worried the number of Calgarians facing this scenario will increase, and many don’t know what a load limiter is. It’s often the first step before disconnection. 

Several Calgary residents flagged the issue while sharing their utility bill experiences with CBC Calgary through text messaging, and on Calgary Kindness, a mutual aid Facebook group.

They’ve shared their personal stories with CBC journalists so others know what to expect.

Contributors said they were scared their fridge would lose power and their groceries would rot. They relied on air fryers, barbecues or a hot plate to make it through.

The extra fees — $52 for the notice, $52 to remove the limiter — only made it worse.

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It’s always the poorest who are expected to pay the most for the basics. It’s so, so wrong. And Calgary, in Canada, gets really, really cold. But for a lot of people in the UK, the rise in electricity prices in the autumn is going to be devastating unless something happens to ease it.
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How Big Tech lost the antitrust battle with Europe • FT via Ars Technica

Javier Espinoza:

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many [European] companies across Europe are pinning their hopes on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU’s first overhaul of the rules that govern competition on the Internet in 20 years. It is one of two major pieces of technology legislation in the works in Brussels; the other is the Digital Services Act (DSA), which will cover areas such as privacy and data use.

It is the DMA which presents the greatest immediate threat to the digital empires built by so-called gatekeepers such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft over the past two decades. Lawmakers are expected to finalize the act’s wording and scope as soon as this week in a push to open up markets captured by Big Tech and allow local rivals to flourish.

The antitrust legislation has the potential to transform completely how these giant companies do business, disabling their core strategy of integration that has allowed them to tie in users, dominate markets, and capture billions of euros in revenues.

Aimed at firms with an individual market capitalization above €65bn, the act will set out for the first time the rules of how large online platforms must compete in the EU’s market. It could, for example, force Google to give users the choice of alternative email providers when installing a new smartphone or Apple to open its app store to competing services.

It also gives regulators much sharper teeth—granting them broad investigatory powers, with the ability to hand out fines of up to 10% of global turnover for infringements or even in extreme circumstances to force repeat offenders to break up their businesses.

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‘Kill more’: Facebook fails to detect hate against Rohingya • AP News

Victoria Milko and Barbara Ortutay:

»

A new report has found that Facebook failed to detect blatant hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority years after such behavior was found to have played a determining role in the genocide against them.

The report shared exclusively with The Associated Press showed the rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya. All eight ads were approved by Facebook to be published.

The group pulled the ads before they were posted or paid for, but the results confirmed that despite its promises to do better, Facebook’s leaky controls still fail to detect hate speech and calls for violence on its platform.

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Facebook is too big for Facebook to control, pt 994,039,548.
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World passes 1 terawatt of solar installations – enough to power the whole of Europe • The Independent

Anthony Cuthbertson:

»

There are now enough solar panels installed throughout the world to generate 1 terawatt (TW) of electricity from the sun, according to the latest estimates, marking a major milestone for renewable energy adoption.

This solar capacity is enough to meet the electricity demands of nearly every country in Europe combined, though distribution and storage limitations mean it is still only a small fraction of global energy supply.

Calculations based on BloombergNEF figures by photovoltaics publication PV Magazine estimated that the world’s solar capacity passed 1TW on Tuesday, meaning “we can officially start measuring solar capacity in terawatts”.

In a country like Spain, which has roughly 3,000 hours of sunshine each year, this would be the equivalent to 3,000TW-hours.

This is just under the combined electricity consumption of all major countries in Europe (including Norway, Switzerland, UK and Ukraine) – roughly 3,050TWh.

The European Union currently delivers around 3.6% of its electricity needs from solar power, while the UK is slightly higher at 4.1%.

BloombergNEF estimates that solar power will account for roughly 20% of the European energy mix by 2040, based on current market trends.

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Russians are racing to download Wikipedia before it gets banned • Slate

Annie Rauwerda:

»

On March 1, after a week of horror in Ukraine, reports came out that Russia’s censorship office had threatened to block Russian Wikipedia. A 32-year-old who asked to be called Alexander soon made a plan to download a local copy of Russian-language Wikipedia to keep with him in eastern Russia.

“I did it just in case,” he told me over Instagram Messenger before sharing that he and his wife are “working on moving to another country” with their two dogs, Prime and Shaggy. (Instagram has been blocked in Russia, but many continue to access it using virtual private networks. On Monday, the Russian government officially declared Facebook and Instagram “extremist organizations.”)

Alexander is neither a regular Wikipedia editor nor a die-hard enthusiast, but he wants a source of information based on reliable and neutral sources, and independent of the Kremlin. He likes reading Wikipedia to learn about all sorts of topics—from the frivolous (Mozart and scatology) to the complex (geopolitics)—and he considers Wikipedia more trustworthy than the Russian media. After complaining about his crumbling life and disillusionment with his country, he was quick to share a note of sympathy for Ukraine: “I almost feel ashamed to discuss the struggles that we have in Russia these days.”

Alexander wasn’t the only Russian citizen to make a local copy of Wikipedia. Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide. Before the invasion, it rarely broke the top 10, but after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, it has kept a solid hold on first place.

The 29-gigabyte file that contains a downloadable Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded a whopping 105,889 times during the first half of March, which is a more than 40-fold increase compared with the first half of January. According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42% of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2% in 2021. “We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia,” he said, “but this one is just another dimension.”

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20 days in Mariupol: the team that documented city’s agony • AP News

Mstyslav Chernov, video journalist, and Evgeniy Maloletka:

»

The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.

We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage.

Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for fuck’s sake?”

I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said.

The walls of the surgery shook from artillery and machine gun fire outside, and it seemed safer to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take us with them.

…We reached an entryway, and armored cars whisked us to a darkened basement. Only then did we learn from a policeman why the Ukrainians had risked the lives of soldiers to extract us from the hospital.

“If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say that everything you filmed is a lie,” he said. “All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain.”

The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go.

«

That was March 15. It took them days to get out. An incredible story of survival.
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A drowning world: Kenya’s quiet slide underwater • The Guardian

Carey Baraka:

»

One of the first scientists to realise that something was wrong with the lakes was a geologist named Simon Onywere. He came to the topic by accident. Between 2010 and 2013 he had been studying Lake Baringo, Kenya’s fourth-largest lake by volume. The bones of residents of the area around the lake weaken uncommonly fast, and Onywere was investigating whether this may be linked to high fluoride levels in the water. Then, in early 2013, while he was meeting with residents of Marigat, a town near the lake, one old man stood up. “Prof,” he said. “We don’t care about the fluoride. What we want to know is how the water has entered our schools.”

Curious to know what the man was talking about, Onywere visited the local Salabani primary school. There, he found the lake lapping through the grounds of the school. Nonplussed, he took out his map. He looked at the location of the lake and the location of the school, and wondered how the lake had moved 2km without it becoming news.

Onywere rushed back to Nairobi, where he and his colleagues at several Kenyan universities studied recent satellite images of the lake. The images showed that the lake had, in the past year, flooded the area around it. Then Onywere searched for images of some of the lakes nearby: Lakes Bogoria, Naivasha and Nakuru. All of these had flooded. As he extended his search, he saw that Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake, had flooded, too. So had Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world.

«

This is a mystery, in a country we might normally think of as very dry (it isn’t, in fact).
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Belgium on verge of delaying 2025 nuclear power exit • Reuters via Daily Energy News

Philip Blenkinsop:

»

Belgium may extend the life of its nuclear sector, deferring an exit planned for 2025 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine forced a rethink by the governing coalition.

Energy minister Tinne Van der Straeten presented a note to core cabinet members on Wednesday, which broadcaster RTBF said referred to a bill to be approved by the end of March extending the lives of the two newest reactors by up to 10 years.

Van der Straeten, a Green lawmaker, told parliament on Thursday that Belgium had to be open-minded as long as operator Engie could ensure safety, affordability and security of supply if the reactors’ lives were prolonged.

“I can confirm we have had contacts and exchanges with Engie about the prolongation of the 2 gigawatts,” she said. “There is no mandate for negotiations with Engie today. That is on the table of the government tomorrow.”

The minister is expected to set out on Friday a plan to reduce Belgium’s reliance on fossil fuels, notably from Russia, with an increase of offshore wind parks, more solar panels and a reduction of gas and oil heating by 2026.

«

The two reactors are 35% of Belgium’s nuclear capacity (of 5.9 GW); its total installed capacity is 24.1 GW, of which 11.3 GW is renewables. So that’s about 8 GW of carbon-emitting capacity to cover. Not trivial, but in just one month Russia has been very successful in accelerating the adoption of renewables and nuclear.
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Personal attacks decrease user activity in social networking platforms • ScienceDirect

Rafa Urbaniak et al:

»

We conduct a large scale data-driven analysis of the effects of online personal attacks on social media user activity.

First, we perform a thorough overview of the literature on the influence of social media on user behavior, especially on the impact that negative and aggressive behaviors, such as harassment and cyberbullying, have on users’ engagement in online media platforms. The majority of previous research were small-scale self-reported studies, which is their limitation. This motivates our data-driven study.

We perform a large-scale analysis of messages from Reddit, a discussion website, for a period of two weeks, involving 182,528 posts or comments to posts by 148,317 users. To efficiently collect and analyze the data we apply a high-precision personal attack detection technology.

We analyze the obtained data from three perspectives: (i) classical statistical methods, (ii) Bayesian estimation, and (iii) model-theoretic analysis. The three perspectives agree: personal attacks decrease the victims’ activity.

The results can be interpreted as an important signal to social media platforms and policy makers that leaving personal attacks unmoderated is quite likely to disengage the users and in effect depopulate the platform. On the other hand, application of cyberviolence detection technology in combination with various mitigation techniques could improve and strengthen the user community.

«

This does broadly apply for Twitter (there are countless people who have “stepped back” because they are weary of abuse). I’m unsure about Reddit’s position as “social media” here, though; it’s topic-based rather than user-based. But if the findings are robust, well…
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Anonymous: how hackers are trying to undermine Putin • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

»

The Anonymous hacktivist collective has been bombarding Russia with cyber-attacks since declaring “cyber war” on President Vladimir Putin in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine. Several people operating under its banner spoke to the BBC about their motives, tactics and plans.

Of all the cyber-attacks carried out since the Ukraine conflict started, an Anonymous hack on Russian TV networks stands out.

The hack was captured in a short video clip which shows normal programming interrupted with images of bombs exploding in Ukraine and soldiers talking about the horrors of the conflict.
The video began circulating on the 26 February and was shared by Anonymous social media accounts with millions of followers. “JUST IN: #Russian state TV channels have been hacked by #Anonymous to broadcast the truth about what happens in #Ukraine,” one post read. It quickly racked up millions of views.

The stunt has all the hallmarks of an Anonymous hack – dramatic, impactful and easy to share online. Like many of the group’s other cyber-attacks it was also extremely hard to verify.
But one of the smaller groups of Anonymous hackers said that they were responsible, and that they took over TV services for 12 minutes.

The first person to post the video was also able to verify it was real. Eliza lives in the US but her father is Russian and called her when his TV shows were interrupted. “My father called me when it happened and said, ‘Oh my God, they’re showing the truth!’ So I got him to record it and I posted the clip online. He says one of his friends saw it happen too.”

«

If you were a normal Russian and saw that, I wonder whether it wouldn’t make you feel more embattled – to go along with the sanctions and the emptying supermarket shelves. The question of how you pierce an incorrect narrative about the world can just as truthfully be asked about Americans who think the 2020 election was “stolen”.
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Alaska Airlines is using iPad Pros for airport check-ins • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

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The iPad Pro check-in stations are part of a range of new technologies that Alaska is field-testing in San Jose. They also include self-serve drop-off points where you can hand over checked bags once you’ve tagged them. And passengers on departing international flights can choose to use facial recognition at the gate rather than wrestle with passports and boarding passes, shaving precious seconds off the embarking process.

“What we’re doing in San Jose is really testing our lobby vision out and using it as a tech incubator to test various ideas,” says Charu Jain, Alaska’s senior vice president of merchandising and innovation. The airport’s location in the heart of Silicon Valley makes it ideal for reaching folks who are eager to get early access to the latest tech, she adds. But the airline’s goal is to turn its learnings into a new, time-saving experience that will benefit travelers everywhere it flies.

Along with being a big deal for the airline, the use of iPad Pros at San Jose is a meaningful moment for Apple. Since its 2010 launch, the iPad has made high-profile inroads in homes, offices, and schools. With enterprise implementations such as Alaska’s, the tablet is tackling new frontiers where the competition might consist of specialized, proprietary hardware and software rather than a Microsoft Surface or Samsung Galaxy Tab. And it needs to excel in scenarios that demand rock-solid reliability and the ability to manage whole fleets of devices in an efficient, centralized way.

«

They’re a ton pricier than the Galaxy Tab. Yet Alaska just seems to like them – maybe because customers are more familiar with them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The end of Daylight Saving(s) Time isn’t a certainty in the US, despite a Senate bill supporting it. CC-licensed photo by Amy Bayer 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Brazil Supreme Court lifts ban on messaging app Telegram • Agence France-Presse via NDTV

»

The Supreme Court judge who had ordered messaging app Telegram blocked in Brazil reversed the ruling Sunday, after the tech company complied with an earlier decree to make changes to the platform.

“Considering that the (court’s requested changes) were fully attended to, I revoke the decision to fully and completely suspend the operation of Telegram in Brazil,” Judge Alexandre de Moraes wrote in a document released by the court.

Citing what he called Telegram’s failure to comply with orders from Brazilian authorities and remove messages found to contain disinformation, Moraes had ordered the app blocked immediately in Brazil.

Following the suspension order, Telegram founder Pavel Durov apologized to the Supreme Court and blamed a “communication problem” that he said was due to misplaced emails.

He asked the court to postpone the order to allow time for Telegram to appoint a representative in Brazil and improve communications with the court. The judge on Saturday gave Telegram 24 hours to enact changes so he could lift the ban.

On Sunday, Moraes said the company informed him it had adopted several anti-disinformation measures, including the “manual” monitoring of the 100 most popular channels in Brazil.

It now also will tag specific posts as misleading, restrict several profiles that disseminated disinformation and promote verified information.

Friday’s order to block the app throughout the country never actually went into effect and Telegram had continued to function normally throughout the weekend.

«

The moderation is a reminder, of sorts, that Telegram isn’t an end-to-end secure system. The app was briefly facing a ban because the team overlooked an official email demanding the changes, at pain of being banned.

The result is a boon for Jair Bolsonaro, whose supporters use Telegram. The moderators will have their work cut out.
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A quick take on three pretty terrifying changes to the Online Safety Bill • Heather Burns

Burns is a tech policy and regulation specialist, formerly at the Open Rights Group:

»

the UK is, indeed, taking the “world-leading” stance – not duplicated by any other western nation – of requiring any business or organisation whose online presence could possibly be accessed in the UK to proactively monitor and scan for legal content.

That means you and your business and your project, not just the five or six companies the people who cooked up this law think the Internet is.

This hits everyone and everything.

I want to give you good news here. I want to give you something productive, I want to give you something constructive to work with and take to your elected representatives.

But I keep hearkening back to all the discussions I’ve had, in the various capacities I’ve worked in, in the three years this Bill has eaten up my life, with tech people. Not big tech, not corporate lobbyists, not EvilCorp, just real people working in startups or small businesses or open source projects. Independently of each other, all of them have said the same thing: the UK is not worth it.

They are all focusing on the EU market, its half a billion consumers, and the compliance obligations of the DSA. Those obligations, as onerous as they are, rest within a framework which respects and safeguards the rights to freedom of expression and privacy, as opposed to the UK’s steady progress on stripping away those rights and imposing a requirement, on them, as the operators of services, to invade them.

If it comes to it, these people have told me, they will block UK users, and end their services here, rather than deal with UK gov’s Orwell shit.

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I find it hard to believe that the big social networks would give up on the UK – they could probably absorb the cost – but smaller ones might not think the moderation cost worthwhile, thus reinforcing the extant monopolies. There will be more analysis in the coming weeks, no doubt. But Burns is certain it’s very bad.
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Facebook is locking out people who didn’t activate Facebook Protect • The Verge

Barbara Krasnoff:

»

Early in March, a bunch of Facebook users got a mysterious, spam-like email titled “Your account requires advanced security from Facebook Protect” and telling them that they were required to turn on the Facebook Protect feature (which they could do by hitting a link in the email) by a certain date, or they would be locked out of their account.

The program, according to Facebook, is a “security program for groups of people that are more likely to be targeted by malicious hackers, such as human rights defenders, journalists, and government officials.” It’s meant to do things like ensure those accounts are monitored for hacking threats and that they are protected by two-factor authentication (2FA).

Unfortunately, the email that Facebook sent from the address security@facebookmail.com resembled a rather common form of spam, and so it’s probable that many people ignored it.

It actually wasn’t spam. In fact, it was real. The first deadline to hit for many people was Thursday, March 17th. And now, they are locked out of their Facebook accounts — and are having trouble with the process that Facebook has provided to get them back in.

«

Too much security: not often you hear about that.
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Is Clubhouse dead? Not if you are in south Asia • Rest of World

Ramsha Jahangir, Mosabber Hossain, Abhaya Raj Joshi, Vinay Aravind and Zinara Rathnayake:

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The frenzy around voice-based social media platform Clubhouse has settled in recent months, with the app seeing a decline in downloads in some countries facing competition from clone apps and Twitter’s Spaces feature.

But in South Asia, where the app gained popularity in mid-2021 after it launched its Android version, many users have found specific uses for Clubhouse. For instance, in India, a Clubhouse room is dedicated to reciting the Hanuman Chalisa every morning between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Here’s what people in South Asian countries are now using Clubhouse for…

«

Pakistan: Urdu poetry. Bangladesh: strategic talk. Nepal: stocks. India: “conversations no one else was having” (though the end of lockdown has meant less participation). Sri Lanka: psychology. As varied as the people.
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Apple’s M1 Ultra chip is good for you, but a problem for Intel, AMD, and Nvidia • Yahoo Finance

Daniel Howley:

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Apple has always done well among creative professionals thanks to its products’ designs and capabilities. But Windows-based machines caught up to Apple in recent years, with manufacturers like Microsoft pushing out systems with powerful processors and graphics cards.

But with the M1 Ultra, Apple has a chip that could outperform its PC rivals and give Apple the performance crown. And that’s more than enough reason for gamers and creators to jump to Apple’s side.

There’s just one caveat: the M1 Ultra is only available in the Mac Studio. You can’t buy one off the shelf and slap it into any old computer. That’s a major letdown for enthusiasts who build their computers.

According to Ives, however, Apple may eventually make the M1 Ultra available to other computer makers, giving consumers the ability to build their own M1 Ultra-based systems while putting Apple in direct competition with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

“This latest M1 Ultra is a game changer on the graphics front and ultimately is competitive versus Nvidia,” [Wedbush analyst, Dan] Ives said. “Now it’s about how big Apple goes outside Cupertino and selling its chip to third parties.”

Of course, Apple could simply hold on to its chips and use them to lure prospective customers.

«

Hoo boy. Apparently Dan Ives has been covering the tech sector for Wedbush since 2018 (and on Wall Street “for two decades” covering software and “broader technology”). Last year he thought an Apple Car was “inevitable” (sometime) and in 2019 that Apple would do a big content acquisition. And now, sell its chips to rival OEMs.

I’m going to call that 0 for 3, Dan.
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Improving Vimeo’s policy on video bandwidth • Vimeo blog

Anjali Sud is chief executive of Vimeo, and has been getting an earful of angry creatives over the vague “you’re in the top 1%” rule that would require them to pay fees to keep their videos streaming there:

»

After fully reviewing our existing bandwidth policy and listening to feedback from some of our highest bandwidth users, we will be making the following changes and commitments:

• Shifting our bandwidth threshold from a percentage to a flat 2TB. We historically have determined that users who are in the top 1% of bandwidth usage are subject to bandwidth charges. To improve clarity and transparency moving forward, we will be setting the monthly bandwidth threshold at 2TB (or 2,000 GB)— which would impact even fewer than 1% of our users. Users can access their bandwidth usage report directly on their Vimeo account to track usage.

…• Rolling out an exemption policy. We will be rolling out an exemption policy moving forward where creative professionals would not be restricted by the 2TB bandwidth threshold, as long as they aren’t using Vimeo to monetize those videos elsewhere. We will have more details that we’ll share within the next 30 days, and you’ll be able to find that information on our help center.

«

It’s the second update that’s arguably the most significant: aiming to be a venue for creative content (because otherwise there’s a risk of being carpeted with tedious corporate crap, and who wants to be among that?).
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Senate plan for permanent daylight saving time faces doubts in the House • The Washington Post

Dan Diamond:

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While the Sunshine Protection Act, which unanimously passed the Senate on Tuesday, would nationally shift clocks an hour later to maximize daylight, some doctors have argued that adopting permanent standard time would be a healthier option and better align with humans’ natural rhythms.

Pallone, who held a hearing last week on daylight saving time, said he shares the Senate’s goal to end the “spring forward” and “fall back” clock changes linked to more strokes, heart attacks and car accidents. But he wants to collect more information, asking for a long-delayed federal analysis on how time changes might affect productivity, traffic and energy costs, among other issues.

…The White House also has not communicated its position on permanent daylight saving time, congressional aides said. While President Biden, as a freshman senator, voted for that in December 1973 — the last time that Congress attempted to institute the policy nationwide — he also witnessed the near-immediate collapse of support amid widespread reports that darker winter mornings were contributing to more car accidents and worsened moods. Members of Congress introduced nearly 100 pieces of legislation to change or do away with the law before it was finally repealed in October 1974.

«

So the argument’s been going on for 50 years – nearly half the time that DST’s been in use anywhere (it began in 1908, and one of its first proponents was an entomologist). I bet if there is a change, it’ll just get commented out in any codebases, ready to be reused when people decide they prefer the spring forward/fall back pattern. (Though I think it would be nice to not have the gloom of winter abruptly imposed one Sunday in October.)

By the way, American readers, DST is the reason why you’re currently getting email an hour later: the UK and US (and Canada?) are out of step in their application of DST. The UK won’t change for another week.

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Have iPhone cameras become too smart? • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

For a large portion of the population, “smartphone” has become synonymous with “camera,” but the truth is that iPhones are no longer cameras in the traditional sense. Instead, they are devices at the vanguard of “computational photography,” a term that describes imagery formed from digital data and processing as much as from optical information. Each picture registered by the lens is altered to bring it closer to a pre-programmed ideal. Gregory Gentert, a friend who is a fine-art photographer in Brooklyn, told me, “I’ve tried to photograph on the iPhone when light gets bluish around the end of the day, but the iPhone will try to correct that sort of thing.” A dusky purple gets edited, and in the process erased, because the hue is evaluated as undesirable, as a flaw instead of a feature. The device “sees the things I’m trying to photograph as a problem to solve,” he added. The image processing also eliminates digital noise, smoothing it into a soft blur, which might be the reason behind the smudginess that McCabe sees in photos of her daughter’s gymnastics. The “fix” ends up creating a distortion more noticeable than whatever perceived mistake was in the original.

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Goes in to lots of detail (with a briefing from Apple) about how the photographic sausage is made – while also questioning whether it’s a sausage we really want to consume. However, given the millions of these sausage-makers (iPhones) being sold, it’s a bit like a paean to veganism in a meat-eating world.
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2007: ‘Bizarro World’ • The Boston Globe

Billy Baker, in August 2007:

»

I am not a video game person, but like most everyone of my generation, I was hooked on Mario. It was hard not to be – that little plumber from Brooklyn was an ’80s icon, on par with E.T. and the Rubik’s Cube. He had his own cartoon, his own lunchbox, his own breakfast cereal. Symphony orchestras played his theme song. I had to see how a teenager was chasing perfection in a game that had its heyday, and sold 40 million copies, before he was born. He was amazing.

And so I contacted Mr. Kelly R. Flewin – he always signs his correspondence this way – a 29-year-old gas station attendant in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the senior referee at twingalaxies.com, to find out how important the record was in the gaming world. During a late-night phone call after business had quieted down at the station, he told me that any record in one of the more popular classic games – like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, or Tetris – would always set the classic gaming world on fire.

“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”

What Flewin said next I will never forget.

I replied: “Oh, my!”

After I hung up the phone, I went to the bedroom and woke my wife, Lori.

“Honey,” I said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just got off the phone with a guy who’s in charge of video game world records, and he said the world record for Game Boy Tetris is 327 lines, and he wants us to go to New Hampshire this spring so you can try to break the world record live in front of the judges at the world’s largest classic video game tournament.”

«

This is a lovely story that, in that way of the internet, has come back to life recently. To be read after watching King Of Kong, if possible.
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At SXSW, a pathetic tech future struggles to be born • Vice

Edward Ongweso:

»

It did not really hit me that I was in a special sort of hell until I was walking aimlessly through Austin for SXSW and came across a venue with a few inflated geodesic domes. There were large 3D anthropomorphic rabbits plastered everywhere, which I gathered were somehow related to crypto though it wasn’t clear how. Large screens inside and outside of the domes streamed a panel where a member of Linkin Park crafted a song that would be minted as an NFT as a discussion about the liberatory potential of the metaverse carried on. And somewhere, a loud voice rang out a cultish mantra: “This is changing the future. This is FLUF House. This is the Hume Collective, so remember why you are here. Remember the power that you have. The power of this community, and when it gets hard, remember you are not alone.”

This week, while at SXSW to speak on two panels about crypto-skepticism and algorithmic labor, I was able to check out if crypto, NFTs, web3, and the metaverse really were taking over Austin. What I found was a deeply underwhelming, mundane, and frankly pathetic series of demonstrations and setups that suggest if these digital technologies do take over the world, it’ll be because of how much money their biggest boosters have and how easy it is for that money to generate interest as opposed to anything of true social utility.

…For some attendees, I’m sure all this felt like the future was here. And yet, despite all the talk I heard about ushering in a new era of diversity and inclusion, it was hard to not notice that every room felt largely the same: mobs of white wealthy men who quickly volunteered that they worked in finance, tech, marketing, or some buzzy fusion of the three.

«

In its way, this reminded me of Mat Honan’s amazing report from CES 2012, “Fever dream of a guilt-ridden gadget reporter“.
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Cameron’s decision to cut ‘green crap’ now costs each household in England £150 a year • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

»

With energy prices already soaring and bills set to rise even further this year, it suggests [Prime Minister David] Cameron’s decisions [in 2013] to effectively end onshore wind projects in England, cut solar subsidies and slash energy-efficiency schemes played a large part in rising bills. It comes with the government preparing to announce its much anticipated energy strategy this week, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine further drives up energy prices. It is expected to push measures such as solar and onshore wind power generation, as well as North Sea oil projects. However, there are concerns that the Treasury is holding back more radical action.

Many of this week’s measures could reverse action taken by the coalition government. Analysis by Carbon Brief looked at the cumulative effect of ending onshore wind subsidies, cutting energy efficiency funding and scrapping a programme to make all new homes carbon neutral. It also factored in cuts to solar energy subsidies.

With the energy price cap already at £1,277 a year and rising to £1,971 in less than a fortnight and an expected £3,000 in October, the analysis found that maintaining the green policies would have reduced energy costs by £8.3bn a year for the economy overall, part of which would equate to £150 a year per household.

Ed Miliband, the shadow climate change secretary, said: “The government said they were ‘cutting the green crap’ but it was a disaster – with bills for working families much higher as a result. This demonstrates once again that going green is the right way to have energy security, cut bills, and tackle the climate crisis.”

…The number of homes having their lofts or cavity walls insulated each year dropped by 92% and 74% in 2013 respectively and has never recovered. Subsidies ended for onshore wind turbines, and planning reforms made them harder to build. Meanwhile, solar power was excluded from government support in 2015.

«

Economise now, pay far more later. A tale repeated again and again. Cameron’s rule turns out to have been full of absolute howlers that have led us down a highly undesirable path.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If we really want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, we need a lot more heat pumps. Ever seen one? CC-licensed photo by Luis Tamayo 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. Possibly a news organisation? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Tech bosses face jail if they hamper Ofcom investigations from next year • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

The new measures [in the UK Online Safety Bill] include:

• New criminal offences in England and Wales covering cyberflashing, taking part in digital “pile-ons” and sending threatening social media posts
• Tech firms must prevent scam adverts from appearing online
• Big platforms must tackle specific categories of legal but harmful content, which could include racist abuse and posts linked to eating disorders
• Sites hosting pornography must carry out age checks on people trying to access their content.

The updated legislation introduced to parliament on Thursday confirms, and brings forward, UK-wide proposals for a fine or jail for senior managers who fail to ensure “accurate and timely” responses to information requests from regulator Ofcom.

It introduces a further two new criminal offences that apply to companies and employees: tampering with information requested by Ofcom; and obstructing or delaying raids, audits and inspections by the watchdog. A third new criminal offence will apply to employees who provide false information at interviews with the watchdog.

Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, said tech firms have not been held to account when abuse and criminal behaviour have “run riot” on their platforms. Referring to the algorithms that tailor what users see on social media platforms – which have been heavily criticised during scrutiny of the draft bill – she added: “Given all the risks online, it’s only sensible we ensure similar basic protections for the digital age. If we fail to act, we risk sacrificing the wellbeing and innocence of countless generations of children to the power of unchecked algorithms.”

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There are so many strange elements to this. “Taking part” in digital pile-ons? What counts as taking part? It can be hard to know that you’re doing that. And so on. The Hacked Off group is annoyed because news organisations’ social media posts won’t be subject to the same strict rules as individuals’. (So… does Russia Today, aka RT, get a free pass?) Dorries (or her department – though there’s a certain Dorries-esque quality to the writing) wrote a stout defence of the changes, which apparently will allow people to be really rude to politicians during elections. Wa-hey. The contradictions and postings about “you won’t like the unintended consequences” have already started emerging.

(There’s a page of supporting documentation from DCMS. The really important definition, though, is of what constitutes a “Category 1” service – the few big ones – which is laid out in this 2020 government response, in para 2.16.)
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The ‘Freedom Convoy’ bitcoin donations have been frozen and seized • Vice

Ekin Genç:

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a strangely familiar fate has befallen bitcoin donations: many truckers now can’t cash out their donated bitcoin due to financial sanctions, with some of the bitcoins being seized from NobodyCaribou by the authorities. The lead protesters and fundraiser organizers are now facing a class-action lawsuit that wants to give all the donated bitcoins to Ottawa citizens who were in the vicinity of the protests.

J.W. Weatherman, a pseudonymous lead bitcoin donor whom NobodyCaribou reached out to for help, brainstormed an action plan via a 25-page public Google doc, and eventually a coder volunteered to help divide 14.6 bitcoins into 100 separate bitcoin wallets to be distributed to the truckers.

But for the truckers to access the funds, NobodyCaribou had to approach them individually and hand out a meticulously-detailed explanation on how to claim the bitcoin as well as the codes necessary, all carefully placed in envelopes.

“I orange-pilled many truckers by giving them 8,000 reasons to look into it,” NobodyCaribou told Motherboard. “10% of truckers refused the donation fearing scam or because [of] complexity,” he said.

One trucker, who goes by “UOttowaScotty” on YouTube, was on a live-stream from his cab on Feb. 16 when NobodyCaribou approached him and handed out an envelope that contained “$8,000 worth of bitcoin,” along with instructions on how to claim it. “That’s insane, man,” the trucker said, “definitely one of the craziest things that’s happened over the last two weeks.”

According to a web page tracking fund movements in the distributed wallets, half of the wallets of the truckers have been accessed so far.

But all that radically transparent approach – intended for the peace of mind of donors like Weatherman, who had threatened HonkHonkHodl with a lawsuit if they failed to distribute bitcoin to truckers before being enlisted to help — is also what made the plans go awry.

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A tale as old as time. Well, as old as bitcoin, anyway.
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B.I.G. sabotage: Famous npm package deletes files to protest Ukraine war • Bleeping Computer

Ax Sharma:

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This month, the developer behind the popular npm package ‘node-ipc’ released sabotaged versions of the library in protest of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War.

Newer versions of the ‘node-ipc’ package began deleting all data and overwriting all files on developer’s machines, in addition to creating new text files with “peace” messages.

With over a million weekly downloads, ‘node-ipc’ is a prominent package used by major libraries like Vue.js CLI.

Select versions (10.1.1 and 10.1.2) of the massively popular ‘node-ipc’ package were caught containing malicious code that would overwrite or delete arbitrary files on a system for users based in Russia and Belarus. These versions are tracked under CVE-2022-23812.

On March 8th, developer Brandon Nozaki Miller, aka RIAEvangelist released open source software packages called peacenotwar and oneday-test on both npm and GitHub.

The packages appear to have been originally created by the developer as a means of peaceful protest, as they mainly add a “message of peace” on the Desktop of any user installing the packages.

“This code serves as a non-destructive example of why controlling your node modules is important,” explains RIAEvangelist.

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Sneaky little tweak.
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What you’re feeling isn’t a vibe shift. It’s permanent change • Buzzfeed News

Elamin Abdelmahmoud:

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Far from folding in front of Russian military might, Ukraine’s people used social media to tell a coherent and deeply moving story of national identity. In essence, ordinary Ukrainians used the argument of Westernization as a weapon: here we are, displaying the very values you preach and claim to defend — freedom, openness, transparency, and national pride — so will you come to defend us?

But in making the plea, Ukraine exposed a problem with the West. In the 30 years since the fall of the Soviet Union — nearly my entire lifetime — liberalism has come to be taken for granted, the will to defend it withered. Three decades of not articulating what you stand for will do that.

Meanwhile, Russia has spent years pointing out that the neat story America tells has actually been a lie. The West, so secure in its superior narrative and assuredness that history has ended, has regularly defied some of its own fundamental tenets. It has repeatedly violated state sovereignty (see: the Iraq War). It has overlooked certain crises (see: Palestine) in favor of strategic interests. And it has preached the transformative power of free trade while simultaneously cooking up extraordinary sanctions (see: Venezuela, Iran). All in all, the US may have claimed moral superiority, but Russia needn’t reach far to poke holes in it.

So now the rules-based order stands blemished, facing accusations of hypocrisy from its foes and disappointment from those who saw it as a beacon of hope. If liberalism stands for defending freedom everywhere, it sure isn’t eager to show it.

The immediate consequence of this is another protracted war with no end in sight. The medium term carries uncertainty and danger. It turns out that not only are the bad guys not gone, they may even be winning. Some parts of the West do not have the luxury of feeling distance from danger. In the long term, the aftermath of the war in Ukraine means we can no longer tell ourselves the idealistic story that has only barely held up for the last 30 years. The rules-based order that I’ve understood to be central to the world has been revealed to be ineffectual and incapable of fulfilling its promise.

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History, in fact, has very much not ended.
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Apple Studio Display review: nothing to see here • The Verge

Nilay Patel:

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Apple is generally terrific when it comes to displays across its devices, and the Studio Display is great at the basics: it’s clear, it’s sharp, it’s bright. If you have ever looked at a 27-inch 5K iMac display, you know exactly what this thing looks like. The Studio display is the same 27-inch size, the same 5120×2880 resolution, the same 218 pixels per inch, the same 60Hz refresh rate, and has the same single-zone LED backlight. The only real spec difference is that Apple says the Studio Display now has a “typical brightness” of 600 nits vs. 500 on the iMac, but in my actual typical use next to a 2015-vintage 27-inch iMac, that’s pretty hard to see.

The real issue is that $1,599 is a lot of money, and here, it’s buying you panel tech that is woefully behind the curve. Compared to Apple’s other displays across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad lineup, the Studio Display is actually most notable for the things it doesn’t have.

Let’s start with the backlight. In general, the best modern displays create true blacks by cutting all the light coming from the black parts of the screen. There are several ways to do this, and Apple itself uses different tech across its high-end products to produce true blacks in various ways: OLED screens on the iPhones, advanced local dimming on the Pro Display XDR, and Mini LED display backlights on the MacBook Pro and iPad Pro.

The Studio Display has… well, it has none of that. It’s a regular old LED backlight that lights the entire screen all the time, and the darkest black it can produce is basically gray. In normal use in a well-lit room, it looks fine enough — LCD displays have looked like this for a long time now — but if you’re watching a movie in a dark room, the letterboxing will look light gray.

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Everyone is particularly critical of the webcam, which produces blown-out pictures despite having a chip from the iPhone of only two years ago. (Apple says there’ll be a software update.) The criticism about the backlight (and LED) would be better if there were any 5K OLED displays at a comparable price. There aren’t.
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Why you (and the planet) really need a heat pump • WIRED

Matt Simon:

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Americans spend around 90% of their time in indoor spaces, which we heat by burning fossil fuels that also warm the planet and sully the air of our homes. Our descendants will be especially confused because for years we’ve had easy access to a cleaner, more efficient alternative: the fully electric heat pump.

At long last, though, the humble heat pump is exploding in popularity. Unlike a boiler or furnace, which burn fossil fuels to produce heat, this device transfers heat through an outdoor unit into the indoor space. (It looks a bit like a traditional air conditioner.) In the winter, a heat pump extracts heat from outdoor air, but it can be reversed in the summer to pump heat out, providing cooling. Exchanging heat in this way is much more efficient than generating it.

Last year, 4 million heat pumps were installed in the US, up from 1.7 million in 2012. Europe, too, is coming around to the heat pump, with sales increasing 28% in Germany in 2021 and 60% in Poland. That’s no small feat, given the global pandemic slowdown, and it’s just the beginning of growth, especially with Europe’s push for energy independence from Russia amid the war in Ukraine.

“Heat pumps are a few years behind electric vehicles but really deserve similar attention and could deliver very sizable reductions in emissions if we deployed them much more rapidly,” says Jan Rosenow, director of European programs at the Regulatory Assistance Project, an NGO dedicated to the transition to clean energy.

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The great hope for the UK’s energy transition – we need them to replace gas boilers. Of which there are a lot.
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Netflix test will let members pay for password-sharing users • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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in an upcoming test launching in three countries — Chile, Costa Rica and Peru — Netflix will let members who share their accounts with people outside their household do so “easily and securely, while also paying a bit more,” according to Chengyi Long, director of product innovation at Netflix. The new options will roll out in the next few weeks in the three countries (and may or may not expand beyond those markets).

“We’ve always made it easy for people who live together to share their Netflix account, with features like separate profiles and multiple streams in our Standard and Premium plans,” Long wrote in a blog post about the test. “While these have been hugely popular, they have also created some confusion about when and how Netflix can be shared. As a result, accounts are being shared between households — impacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films for our members.”

With the “add an extra member” feature, members with Netflix’s Standard and Premium plans will be able to add subsidiary accounts for up to two people they don’t live with, each with their own profile, personalized recommendations, login and password — for less than the cost of a separate Netflix plan.

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Naturally you know that the other shoe to drop will be to ban those password-sharing users in different locations from sharing the password/accessing the service. No doubt it’s chosen those three countries as places where sharing is rife but it also thinks that it can find marginal benefits getting some users to pay for their freeloading pals/family members.
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What was the TED Talk? • The Drift

Oscar Schwartz:

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Gates’s popular and well-shared TED talk [in 2015, about pandemic preparedness] — viewed millions of times — didn’t alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other “ideas worth spreading” (the organization’s tagline) presented at the TED conference that year — including Monica Lewinsky’s massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy, or a Google engineer’s talk about how driverless cars would make roads smarter and safer in the near future. In fact, seven years after TED 2015, it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year. A president took office in part because of his talent for online bullying. Driverless cars are nowhere near as widespread as predicted, and those that do share our roads keep crashing. Covid has killed five million people and counting.

At the start of the pandemic, I noticed people sharing Gates’s 2015 talk. The general sentiment was one of remorse and lamentation: the tech-prophet had predicted the future for us! If only we had heeded his warning! I wasn’t so sure. It seems to me that Gates’s prediction and proposed solution are at least part of what landed us here. I don’t mean to suggest that Gates’s TED talk is somehow directly responsible for the lack of global preparedness for Covid. But it embodies a certain story about “the future” that TED talks have been telling for the past two decades — one that has contributed to our unending present crisis.

The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories — hence Gates’s opening anecdote about the barrel. In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn’t to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, “We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.” And yet, TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.

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His argument is against “solutionism” – the idea that if you put a good idea out there, it’s job done. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have politics or need (as far as we do) politicians.
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Here come The Smiths [in defence of foreign correspondents] • Dave Lee

Riffing on an article in the New York Times about the new news operation from Justin and Ben Smith:

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[Justin] Smith also shared his thoughts about what he called the end of an era when news outlets based in London, New York or Washington dispatched journalists to foreign countries to report on the goings-on there. He asked why foreign readers would not prefer a homegrown English-speaking native to report the news in their region.

“The idea that you send some well-educated young graduate from the Ivy League to Mumbai to tell us about what’s going on in Mumbai in 2022 is sort of insane,” Mr. Smith said.

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He’s certainly not the first person to make this argument. Smith’s point is that by hiring strong English speakers locally you can not only expand more cheaply, but with more integrity since locals know more than outsiders. (It’s an argument also used by media executives when they’re slashing budgets, it’s worth noting.)

It’s hard to question this logic without sounding like a pompous arse. But I think it’s fundamentally wrong.

A foreign correspondent isn’t vital because he or she knows more than a local, but because he or she is representing the audience. An ambassador, essentially, with similar frames of reference and an instinct for what’s surprising, unique, shocking (or yes, entertaining) about a news event. Without being too blunt about it: it’s better coverage. Or to put it another way, there’s a reason the best and most honest books about places usually come from travel writers.

Now, is there a risk of “parachute” journalism, where the typically white and male reporter flies in one day, stands on a hotel roof, and pretends to know it all? Yes. But that’s just bad reporting–not an indictment of the foreign correspondent as a concept.

The very best at the job, the likes of Lyse Doucet [in conflict areas] or Steve Rosenberg [in Russia], combine their knowledge of their audience with an ability to harness the right sources on the ground. The current coordination between the BBC’s core English news service and the teams from BBC Russia and BBC Ukraine is perhaps the best example of pairing the two pools of expertise.

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(Dave worked for the BBC for some years. And he’s absolutely right.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified