The new Mac Studio helped Apple’s computer shipments hit new records, but overall sales could slow now. CC-licensed photo by Roy Cohutta 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. Semi-autonomous, prone to hovering. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Snap Pixy review: a $230 drone with a camera buzzing around your head • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

The history of modern photography summarized:

• Humans invent selfies
• Humans invent sticks to capture wider selfies
• Humans invent little flying cameras to hover in front of them, because selfie sticks just weren’t cutting it.

The $230 autonomous Snap Pixy is the latest of those little flying cameras, from the company behind the Snapchat app. It’s either a watershed moment in the struggle to overcome the anatomical restrictions of taking pictures of ourselves, or just a wacky toy. Either way, the Pixy is something totally new. 

Unlike most recreational drones, the Pixy isn’t controlled via an app. It launches from your hand then hovers in front of you to capture video or photos. When it’s done with its brief flight, it returns to your palm.

“This basically is an experiment that ended up way better than we expected,” Snap Inc. Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel told me, adding that the company will be selling only a limited quantity of them starting Thursday.

You don’t need to be a Snapchat power user to find the Pixy intriguing. While it is designed to work with the popular social-media app, you can easily grab photos and videos and post them elsewhere. It isn’t the best quality footage, but the perspectives the Pixy captures are pretty cool. 

I’ve been testing it for the past week and fielding questions from onlookers who wonder why a drone the size and shape of a grilled-cheese sandwich is following me around. Here are some answers.

«

Intriguing: it’s been ages since there was a new piece of hardware with the potential to properly interest people. You can imagine people standing on cliff edges and doing little up-and-back shots. Also, Stern only got about four flights per battery charge. Which isn’t a lot.

And this is what we want drones to do. Don’t make me learn how to fly it. Teach it how to fly itself.
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Apple’s growth slows, but still beats Wall Street’s expectations • The New York Times

Tripp Mickle:

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The pandemic has been a double-edged sword for Apple. Remote school and work spurred demand for computing equipment, and government stimulus checks and cutbacks in travel and leisure spending provided a jolt to the company’s all-important iPhone business, analysts said. But those same forces sowed supply-chain problems, triggering a global chip shortage that has cost Apple billions of dollars in missed sales.

The company’s challenges have been compounded by Russia’s war against Ukraine and rising coronavirus cases in China. Apple counts on Russia for 1% of its sales and a slightly larger percentage of its profit, analysts estimate. In China, where most of Apple’s products are assembled, one of the company’s key suppliers had to shut down production outside Shanghai.

During the January-to-March quarter, sales of iPhones, iPads and other devices rose 6.6% to $77.5bn, Apple said.

The bigger problem for Apple may come in the months ahead as economic strains from the war in Ukraine spill into Europe, said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst and managing partner at the venture-capital firm Loup Ventures. “People are on edge,” he said. “They’re paying more for fuel. If you live in Germany, does that affect your decision to buy the next iPhone?”

«

Mac sales still booming to record levels (probably continuing to into this quarter), iPad sales just ticking over. Ironic if i’s the supply chain that’s the big problem, given that’s what Tim Cook solved so long ago.
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Twitter says it overcounted its users over the past three years • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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In its earnings release, Twitter explains that it launched an account linking feature in March 2019 that allowed users with more than one Twitter account to link them together in its user interface, allowing them to more easily switch between their different identities. Those multiple accounts belonged to a single person, clearly, but continued to be counted as separate mDAUs — or “monetizable daily active users.”

The mDAU metric was already a self-invented, non-standard way of measuring users on the service. Twitter came up with the idea after struggling to show growth through measurements of monthly active users on a quarterly basis. Instead, it said the mDAU metric would represent users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through its website and applications and who were able to view its ads. It noted, however, that the metric would not be comparable to similar daily active user disclosures from other companies, as they would often use a more expansive metric that included users who were not seeing ads.

This metric was meant to give advertisers a better idea of how many people on Twitter were eligible to be targeted with their marketing messages within a given time frame. And since advertising continues to fuel Twitter’s business, accounting for the majority of its revenue, it was an important metric in terms of Twitter’s health.

Unfortunately, it was wrong.

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Overstated by between 1.4m to 1.9m, which is only a 1% difference. Better question: what metrics will be used once Musk is in charge? Growth at all costs?
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Elon Musk’s two big goals for Twitter are totally at odds • Fast Company

James Surowiecki:

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Musk seems to believe social-media platforms moderate content solely out of an ideological desire to restrict content they find problematic. And, as he tweeted on Tuesday, he thinks the answer is just to allow any speech that’s legal (or, as he put it, that “matches the law”). But the reality is much more complicated than that. The content-moderation decisions of companies like Twitter and Facebook are inevitably shaped by ideology. But simply eliminating content moderation isn’t an option, unless you want your site to become 4chan. Platforms moderate content mostly because they have economic incentives to do so: moderation makes their user experience more enjoyable to most people, and makes the platforms more appealing to advertisers, who generally don’t want their ads appearing next to a tweet by a Nazi or someone using the N-word. 

To be sure, there’s an appealing simplicity to Musk’s solution: Let people say what they want, and let the chips fall where they may. But whatever you think of that approach in a philosophical sense, from a business point of view, making it easier for people to use racist and homophobic slurs, and to harass and dox people, will almost certainly cost Twitter more users than it will attract. It’ll also alienate many advertisers. And there’s another issue, which is that the European Union recently passed a law holding platforms responsible for hate speech and misinformation on their sites, and allowing the E.U. to issue fines equal to as much 6% of a company’s annual revenue. It’s totally unclear how an anything-goes approach to content moderation won’t quickly run afoul of the E.U. rules.

There’s a fundamental tension, in other words, between Musk’s insistence that people should be able to say what they want and what Twitter needs to thrive as a platform.

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Plus, as he points out, the idea of charging a subscription doesn’t really work for the many people who aren’t in the western world, and would reduce the number of users.
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I like free speech so much I’ve decided to buy it • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Eli Grober:

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Hi there, I’m Elon Musk. I’m mostly known for rockets and cars, but what I really care about is free speech. I can’t get enough of it. In fact, I like free speech so much I’ve decided to buy it.

That’s right, it turns out free speech isn’t free—it costs exactly $44 billion. That might sound like too much money for one person to be allowed to spend, but that’s only because it is. And I’ve decided free speech is worth the cost. I’m going to make sure some board full of rich guys doesn’t get to define what counts as free speech. Instead, just one rich guy will get to decide what counts as free speech: me.

So what does free speech mean to me? Free speech means… well, anything you want it to mean. Free speech is magical. It’s amorphous. It’s undefinable. That’s the power of free speech: nobody in history has ever defined it—not our founders, or politicians, or judges, or even average citizens. There’s simply no definition of free speech.

“That’s not true,” you might say, “It’s pretty clearly defined.” And to that, I’d say, “That’s the beauty of free speech—it can be a lie. I was lying to you. And that’s allowed.”

And you might say, “That’s misinformation. Plus, private companies don’t have to abide by the more open standards of free speech allowed by the law. They have a responsibility to the public to curtail things like misinformation and prevent the incitement of violent acts like insurrections.” And to that, I’d say, “Blocked!”

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Indispensable. (Via John Naughton)
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Nigeria blocks 73 million mobile phones in security clampdown • Reuters

Kelechukwu Iruoma and Justice Nwafor:

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Nigeria is among dozens of African countries including Ghana, Egypt and Kenya with SIM registration laws that authorities say are necessary for security purposes, but digital rights experts here say increase surveillance and hurts privacy.

Nigeria has been rolling out 11-digit electronic national identity cards for almost a decade, which record an individual’s personal and biometric data, including fingerprints and photo.

The National Identity Number (NIN) is required to open a bank account, apply for a driver’s license, vote, get health insurance, and file tax returns.

In 2020, Nigeria’s telecommunications regulator said every active mobile phone number must be linked to the user’s NIN. It repeatedly extended the deadline until March 31 this year.

The government said outgoing calls were being barred from April 4 here from any mobile phone numbers that had not complied.

Millions of Nigerians have not registered their SIM cards, for reasons ranging from concerns over privacy here to problems reaching registration centres or not having a NIN.

“There have been no reasonable explanations as to why we have to link NIN to our SIM,” said Nneka Orji, a journalist in southeast Nigeria who has not registered her SIM.

“For that reason, I am not ready to do that,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

«

Quietly creepy, rather like India’s Aadhaar system, which uses a 12-digit number to uniquely identify citizens.
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Why the heck are SSNs still treated as passwords in the US? • TechCrunch

Haje Jan Kamps:

»

When I moved to the US a couple of years ago, my friends made sure that I knew I had to keep my Social Security number (SSN) secret and hidden. When I started opening a bank account and set up a cell phone plan, it became obvious why: All sorts of institutions that really should know better are treating this string of numbers as a password. There’s a huge, glaring problem with that. I maintain that Equifax should receive the corporate equivalent of capital punishment for allowing this to happen, but 145 million social security numbers were stolen by hackers a few years ago, which means that the Social Security numbers — yes, the same numbers that are being treated as “passwords” — for about half the U.S. adult population are in the wind.

We’ve gotten used to passwords by now, but at least, in most cases, passwords can be changed when they are hacked. Your social security number? Not so much. If your SSN leaks just once, you’re boned. It’s not possible to change it, and that brings up the true depth of idiocy in all of this: Relying on security that depends on keeping an unchangeable piece of information secret is really bloody stupid.

The corollary is this: Imagine that your email has been hacked but your email provider tells you that you can’t change your password, you can’t change your email provider, and you’ll just have to deal with it. That’s the situation we currently have with Social Security numbers.

Most countries have equivalents of a Social Security number that the state or the taxman uses to identify you. In most countries, however, it is never assumed that this number is secret. You log in to your bank accounts with it. You freely tell your employers what it is. You can spray paint it on the side of the house or tattoo it on your forehead. I would do neither, but that’s more a matter of my taste vis-a-vis forehead tattoos and garage graffiti. From a security point of view, there’s no particular reason why you shouldn’t.

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I’d forgotten that besides having a sclerotic political gerontocracy, crumbling infrastructure and insane health service, the US also has a bizarre obsession with an inadequate form of identity.
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NextSense wants to get in your ears and watch your brain • WIRED

Steven Levy:

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[Konstantin] Borodin is now the lead ear spelunker for NextSense, which was born at Google and spun out of Alphabet’s X division. The startup’s focus is brain health—improving sleep, helping patients with epilepsy, and eventually enriching the lives of people with a range of mental conditions. The idea is to use its earbuds to capture an electroencephalogram, a standard tool for assessing brain activity. Just as an ECG tracks the fibrillations of the heart, an EEG is used to diagnose anomalies in brain activity. While some smart watches—Apple, Samsung, Fitbit—offer versions of an ECG and aim to spy on your sleep, collecting neural data has mostly been a can’t-try-this-at-home activity. Until now.

Standard EEGs are “a mess,” says Arshia Khan, a neurologist at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, who has done studies of those devices. To use the expensive machine in her lab, she has to fix electrodes to a person’s scalp. (“It leaves indentations on the head for a few hours, and if you use gel, it’s hard to shampoo it out.”) The device only works in a clinical setting and isn’t suitable for long-term studies. A handful of off-the-shelf, consumer EEG headsets are portable, but look incredibly awkward. If earbuds could deliver good results, that would be “fantastic,” she says. And not just for scientists.

For years, people have been shifting from tracking their health through sporadic visits to a doctor or lab to regularly monitoring their vitals themselves. The NextSense team is gambling that, with a gadget as familiar as an earbud, people will follow the same path with their brains. Then, with legions of folks wearing the buds for hours, days, and weeks on end, the company’s scientists hope they’ll amass an incredible data trove, in which they’ll uncover the hidden patterns of mental health.

«

The word “hope” in there is really holding up the entire ceiling, and not looking so great at it. Just as likely – sorry to be sceptical – is that they’ll end up with a ton of EEG data that is literally uninterpretable.

Have there been any successful spinouts from Alphabet’s X division? There was the “diabetics’ contact lenses” one, which retreated from that pretty fast. Others?
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Climate change is making India’s brutal heat waves worse • MIT Technology Review

Casey Crownhart:

»

Extreme heat can be deadly, especially for a region where many lack access to cooling. And climate change is making heat waves more frequent and severe, with periods of hot days stretching out longer in places like South Asia.

This heat wave is particularly concerning for its timing and its spread, says Arpita Mondal, a climate researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Usually, peak temperatures in the region come in May and June, just before monsoon rains bring relief, she explains, but this year has been particularly hot, particularly early. March of this year was the hottest on record, with an average temperature of 33.1 °C (nearly 92 °F).

The problem is also widespread across the country, affecting not only the typical hot spots in the northwest and southeast but also regions that aren’t used to seeing so much extreme heat, Mondal says. And the effects are even more stark because of a lack of rainfall so far this season.

“It’s part of a broader climate-change signal,” says Amir AghaKouchak, a climate researcher at the University of California, Irvine. India’s average annual temperature increased at a rate of 0.62 °C per 100 years between 1901 and 2020, according to data from the World Bank. And maximum temperatures have climbed even more quickly, at a rate of 0.99 °C every 100 years.

“People think a degree or two might not matter,” AghaKouchak says, but when average temperatures increase by even small amounts, it means extreme events are becoming more likely.

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The danger is in the “wet bulb” temperature – when it’s humid and hot, because then the body can’t cool through sweating. Kim Stanley Robinson’s book “The Ministry For The Future” begins with a devastating heatwave in an Indian village. (I found it too optimistic about our capacity to fix things, but the disasters were believable.)
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Mark Zuckerberg says employee attrition will make Facebook better • Business Insider

Kali Hays:

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Mark Zuckerberg just admitted that more workers are leaving Facebook. He just doesn’t see that as a bad thing.

“I don’t think this sort of volatility , that companies can face, is always that unhealthy for making sure you have the right people,” the founder and CEO said on a call to discuss Facebook’s first-quarter results.

Insider has reported on the company’s retention problems, with some tech workers now saying Facebook can be a “black mark” on their resumes.

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that employee attrition can ultimately ensure that the right kinds of people stick with the company as it begins a risky shift to building the metaverse.

“During Covid, we saw the attrition level go down a lot because people didn’t want to get new jobs, which probably meant that a lot of people stayed at the company that didn’t care that much about what we were doing, compared to what we would have wanted,” Zuckerberg added. “And I’m just trying to lead the company in a way where we position ourselves as the premier company for building the future of social interaction and the metaverse, and if you care about those things, we’re getting the best people to come work here.”

David Wehner, Facebook’s CFO, said “attrition has stepped up” since the height of the pandemic, insisting that it is “broadly consistent” with the number of people who would leave the company before the pandemic.

«

On that basis, shouldn’t Facebook get rid of all of its staff, at which point it would be the best possible company?

In adjacent news, Reality Labs (the metaverse division) lost $2.9bn in the quarter on income of $695m – so the loss is up from $1.83bn, but revenue is up from $534m. So losses grew by $1.1bn while revenues grew by $160m.

I think it would be better as a skunkworks. It’s trying to push an iceberg uphill.
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Fictosexual man who married hologram says he can’t communicate with her anymore • Fox5NY

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A Japanese man who married a fictional, computer-synthesized pop singer four years ago now says he can’t communicate with her but still loves her.

According to the Japanese newspaper The Mainichi, Akihiko Kondo, 38, said he hit a technical roadblock with Hatsune Miku after the company that provides the artificial intelligence and hologram to communicate with her was no longer providing the service. 

Kondo would communicate with Miku using a three-dimensional hologram of the pop singer projected into a cylinder.

“My love for Miku hasn’t changed,” he told Mainichi. “I held the wedding ceremony because I thought I could be with her forever.”

Kondo, who lives in suburban Tokyo, identifies as ‘fictosexual’- someone who is sexually attracted to fictional characters. He has shared details about his relationship with the world to promote the growing lifestyle.

“It’s not that people can’t live in society because they’re engrossed in a two-dimensional world, but rather, there are cases where people become captivated as they search for a place for themselves in video games and anime, because reality is too painful for them. I was one of those people,” said Kondo to Newshub.

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Everything is an episode from Black Mirror, isn’t it? Or a combination of them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

the autocorrect function on iPhones annoys a lot of people, but there’s a reason why it can be persistently wrong, as its inventor explains. CC-licensed photo by Brett Jordan 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. Twitter stuff starts four links in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google may now remove search results that dox you • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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According to a support page, Google will also remove things like “non-consensual explicit or intimate personal images,” pornographic deepfakes or Photoshops featuring your likeness, or links to sites with “exploitative removal practices.”

Making a request involves giving Google a list of URLs that link to the personal information, as well as the search pages that surface those links. After you submit a request, Google will evaluate it. Its FAQ says it tries to “preserve information access if the content is determined to be of public interest,” as in the case of content that’s “newsworthy,” “professionally-relevant,” or that came from a government. If Google does decide that the links should be removed, it says they’ll either not show up for any search query or that they won’t be surfaced for searches that include your name.

Google seems to be applying a relatively high bar for what counts as personally identifying information, which makes it a bit different from the systems it’s had to implement in places like the EU to comply with so-called right to be forgotten rules. Those laws let people request that links they deem unflattering or irrelevant be taken down, which isn’t the case here — the rules Google added today only cover links to very sensitive info.

It’s also unclear whether Google will remove sites that exist explicitly to sell people’s information. If you’ve ever searched for someone’s phone number, you may have ended up at one of these services, promising to give it to you if you subscribe. We asked Google about this and will let you know if we hear back.

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Reason given by Google: “the internet is always evolving”. More like the threat landscape is the bit that keeps evolving: people calling in murderous attacks on others, using America’s weaponised police force, is almost commonplace. (In Europe I guess they just order lots of pizza? Killing you just the same, but over the course of decades, through arteriosclerosis.)

As with the RTBF, the original source remains; it’s just the Google index entry that goes.
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Autocorrect explained: why your iPhone adds annoying typos while fixing others • WSJ

Joanna Stern speaks to Ken Kocienda, who created the iPhone autocorrect software:

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Perhaps you’ve seen your phone fill in your intended word as someone’s last name, or the name of an app on your phone.

Here’s what’s going on. When you type, the autocorrect algorithms are trying to figure out what you mean by looking at various things, including where your fingers landed on the keyboard and the other words in the sentences, while comparing your word fragment to the words in two unseen dictionaries:

• Static Dictionary: Built into iOS, this contains dictionary words and common proper nouns, such as product names or sports teams. There were over 70,000 words in this when the first iPhone launched and it’s gotten bigger since then.
• Dynamic Dictionary: Built over time as you use your phone, this consists of words that are unique to you. The system looks at your contacts, emails, messages, Safari pages—even the names of installed apps.

It’s also where new words unique to your vocabulary get logged: By the third time you type an unknown word, the software will typically add it to the dynamic dictionary and stop trying to turn it into something different, said Mr. Kocienda and others.

“The static dictionary and the dynamic dictionary would be in a little bit of a battle with each other,” Mr. Kocienda said. The software is designed to break the tie, he added, but it doesn’t always pick what you would pick.

In my case, the static dictionary is saying “Hey, she’s trying to say ‘newsgirl’!” but the dynamic dictionary, having learned from me, now says, “No, you idiot, obviously she means ‘NewsGrid’!”

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed the learning rule and explained that with “NewsGrid,” the learning may have been delayed because of its unique capitalization. I would need to type the word the exact same way twice, and I often forget to capitalize.

What you can do: The surefire way to make sure your phone knows your personal vocabulary? On your iPhone, go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement. Now add your words or phrases to both the Phrase and Shortcut fields, which will add them to the dynamic dictionary.

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Apple’s self-repair vision is here, and it’s got a catch • iFixit News

Elizabeth Chamberlain:

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We were cautiously optimistic about the program in November. Anything that enables more people to do repairs is great news! And there’s a lot to be excited about in the details Apple announced today: seven years of parts availability, retail sales of tools that only official Apple techs could get before, and free step-by-step visual repair manuals available for everyone on Apple’s site. But as the doors open on this new venue, we’re underwhelmed, and settling back into our usual skepticism.

The biggest problem? Apple is doubling down on their parts pairing strategy, enabling only very limited, serial number-authorized repairs. You cannot purchase key parts without a serial number or IMEI. If you use an aftermarket part, there’s an “unable to verify” warning waiting for you. This strategy hamstrings third-party repair with feature loss and scare tactics and could dramatically limit options for recyclers and refurbishers, short-circuiting the circular economy. 

As of today, you can buy an official Apple iPhone 12 screen and install it yourself, on your own device, with no fuss. Until now, DIY repairs relied on keeping the Face ID speaker and sensor assembly intact, then very carefully moving it to your new screen, and finally ignoring some gentle warnings. If your assembly was damaged or defective, you were out of luck. The new program will solve that problem—assuming you’ve bought an official Apple part.

To check out with that part, however, you’ve got to put in your phone’s serial number or IMEI. And when you’re done installing the part, you need to pair it with the phone you indicated in your purchase, via over-the-air configurator software Apple says they will make available through their parts store. Requiring parts pairing essentially puts an expiration date on iPhones.

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I looked at this back in 2016. See it from a security point of view: what if someone malicious wanted to put a part in that would monitor everything you do? Maybe you’d want Apple to be able to forestall that.
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Breakingviews: Elon Musk probably won’t buy Twitter • Reuters via NewsBreak

Lauren Silva Laughlin and Gina Chon:

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Sure, the Tesla boss was clearly serious about acquiring Twitter as of recently. The financing from Morgan Stanley is shored up. The agreement includes a fee of $1 billion that he – or Twitter – would have to pay if they renege on the contract. And Twitter’s lawyers even wedged in a so-called “specific performance” clause, which could theoretically force Musk to buy the company if he threatens to back out, though in practice this could probably be settled by adding to the break fee.

There are good reasons for him to get cold feet. The biggest is Tesla. The electric-vehicle maker’s stock has fallen around a fifth since Musk first revealed his stake in Twitter, partly because Musk may sell shares to fund his new adventure. If Tesla’s stock bounces back – likely if the Twitter deal falls away – the $40 billion of recouped wealth would more than make up for the break fee.

China is a major sticking point too. Tesla produces half of its vehicles there, as well as a quarter of its revenue. But Twitter is no friend to the People’s Republic, most recently for defying Beijing in its handling of content related to Hong Kong protests. China could easily hold Tesla to ransom if a Musk-owned Twitter didn’t play ball. That’s uncomfortable for a self-professed “free speech absolutist.”

…One thing makes it easier for Musk to walk away before any of this becomes a problem: The market partly anticipates it already. Twitter’s stock is currently trading 11% below his offer price – a fairly wide spread for a deal with little antitrust pushback. Musk’s tweets criticizing some company actions – potentially flouting the merger agreement – already suggest he might be starting to lose interest. Most likely, Musk’s attention will wander elsewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time.

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Well, someone had to offer the contrary position. (Tesla’s stock is down about 20% this month, but 10% up on a year ago.) He would be risking a huge amount on Twitter generating enough cash to pay the interest on margin loans of Tesla stock, which could be forfeit.
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Twitter censored tweets on HBO QAnon show ‘Q: Into the Storm’ • Gizmodo

Dell Cameron:

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For the past year, Twitter has censored tweets about a documentary exploring the origins of the QAnon movement.

The documentary, Q: Into the Storm, debuted as a six-part series on HBO Max in March 2021. Twitter decided to “limit the visibility” of the series on its social network shortly after the release, a Twitter spokesperson said.

Twitter admitted that it was restricting the reach of tweets about the series after the director, Cullen Hoback, tried paying to boost his own tweet publicizing the film’s iTunes debut on March 21. He was barred from buying promotion for his tweet. An email from Twitter’s ad department stated the film had been “manually reviewed” and deemed to be in violation of the social network’s “inappropriate content” policy. The documentary criticizes Twitter for the role it has played in the spread of QAnon.

Believing the response in error, Hoback’s production house, Hyrax Films, reached out to members of the Twitter communications team to request help. A response came three days later. To Hoback’s surprise, Twitter informed him the decision was intentional.

“In 2021, Twitter made the decision not to allow promotion of this documentary via advertising on the platform,” the company said. “This decision was aligned with the actions we took to suspend accounts dedicated to QAnon and to limit the visibility of QAnon-related content on the platform generally. As a result, the client will not be able to promote this content.”

It’s unclear what additional steps Twitter has taken to limit the visibility of Hoback’s account or others discussing the series. Since Jan. 2021, accounts sharing QAnon-related content have been excluded from features like “search” and algorithms that offer users personalized “suggestions,” the company said. According to Twitter, tweets about the series meet the definition of “related content” under this policy.

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This is just barmy, and points to a company where there’s no coherent understanding of policy. This is clearly an editorial edict of “don’t let QAnon stuff be on the network”, but not enough comprehension to say “this is a trusted outlet, so suspend that rule”. Even after someone raises the objection. And on the topic of QAnon? Stable doors and horses.
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Twitter says mass deactivations after Musk news were ‘organic’ • NBC News

Ben Collins:

»

Twitter has been flooded with user reports of high-profile accounts losing thousands of followers after news broke that Tesla CEO Elon Musk would purchase the social network. The company said Tuesday that the “fluctuations in follower counts” came from “organic” account closures.

Some accounts on the political right, including that of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., saw their follower counts skyrocket. Greene, who boasted 539,000 followers the day before news of Musk’s takeover, had 632,000 followers by Tuesday evening.

Twitter did not provide an exact number of accounts that were shuttered or activated in the hours after the ownership announcement Monday. It said it was looking into the “recent fluctuations in follower counts.”

“While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely be a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation,” Twitter said in a statement. A spokesperson at Twitter who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the accounts that experienced the most severe drop-offs in followers were “high-profile accounts.”

Former President Barack Obama, the most followed user on Twitter, whose number had increased every day in April, lost more than 300,000 followers after Monday’s announcement. Pop star Katy Perry, the third-most-followed user on Twitter, lost more than 200,000 after the announcement.

Some right-wing politicians noticed and lauded the increased follower counts Tuesday.

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Some people need to lighten up. It’s Twitter! • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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Modern social platforms have learned that compressing our internet experience at the expense of our sanity means we use their products longer, thus making them more money. And I actually tend think conservatives like Ben Shapiro are being genuine when they say they think Twitter is a left-wing website. For a lot of people, regardless of political affiliation, websites that run on centralized feeds of content, whether it’s algorithmic like Facebook or Instagram or chronological like Twitter and Tumblr, are inherently alienating. Maybe Shapiro looks at his feed and feels like he’s being piled on in the same way I do. For the last decade, researchers, journalists, and politicians have devoted a countless amount of energy to figuring out how the internet is radicalizing us, but what if it’s not the algorithms or the extremist groups, what if it’s just the feed? What if we just aren’t meant to consume an endless stream of content all jammed together into one place?

The other day, I put a shortened version of what I’ve written above in a Twitter thread. I speculated that there may just be a single cohort of around 5-10 million super-posters in the US who move from platform to platform causing trouble, and cataclysmic moments like Tumblr’s porn ban or Musk’s purchase of Twitter act as an inflection point where they start thinking about moving elsewhere.

And maybe that troublesome 5-10 million super-posters are also the people who have the biggest issues with feed-based internet platforms. Then my thread got a bunch of angry replies from people claiming I was saying we need to remove sex workers from the internet. Which I didn’t say or mean in the slightest, but is honestly a very helpful way to illustrate the point I’m trying to make here.

«

I mean, of course Ben Shapiro thinks Twitter is left-wing, because essentially the whole world is more left-wing than he is; he’s just too much of a dolt to realise it. (Let’s dream, for a moment, of the multiverse where everyone now in the US is transported to other countries, to discover that what passes for “left-wing” in the US is milquetoast right-wing everywhere else.) The idea of a flash mob that floats around causing disruption sounds very feasible. One wonders where all the people who’ve left Twitter have gone. (Broderick laughs off the idea that they’ve gone to Tumblr.)
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Snickers dick vein: meet the Twitter shitposter behind a viral post • Rolling Stone

EJ Dickson:

»

The pinned tweet on Juniper’s account is “it’s [so] incredibly easy to create fake news it’s actually ridiculous lol.” But that hasn’t stopped right-wing media outlets from frothing at the mouth over her tweets, most recently a fake news headline indicating that Snickers was set to remove the beloved “dick vein” from its eponymous candy bars.

On April 16, @JUNlPER, whose display handle is Transgender Marx, tweeted a doctored version of a news story with the headline “Snickers are officially caving and removing the world-renowned dick vein from the candy bar.”

As Juniper told co-hosts Brittany Spanos and Ej Dickson on Rolling Stone‘s podcast Don’t Let This Flop, the “Snickers dick vein” had been a meme for quite some time before her tweet, but she was inspired to post the fake headline after watching the right-wing media have a collective freakout over the candy company Mars (which also owns Snickers) changing the green M&M’s iconic footwear from thigh-high boots to sneakers. The move, according to a press release from the company, was to “better reflect a “more dynamic, progressive world” and to show off the character’s “personality, rather than their gender.”

“Tucker Carlson actually talked about it on Fox News, that it was ‘wokeifying’ M&Ms or whatever,” Juniper says, chuckling. She decided to post about Snickers removing the dick vein as “a satirical way to point out how just ridiculous [the media] are about some of these things — how they’ll take these stories and kind of run with it and not even verify anything.”

«

There are two trends in modern media: a lack of interest in verifying anything, and a tendency to surf the waves created by other media who haven’t bothered to verify and thus gin up false stories. At least this one is explanatory.
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Outside the US, Elon Musk’s vision of a rules-free Twitter is expected to unlock violence and civil strife • Coda Story

Elery Biddle:

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What would it mean for the majority of Twitter users, who live outside the US?

“That just doesn’t work in a country like India,” said Nikhil Pahwa, a tech expert and founder of Medianama, an India-focused tech policy publication based in New Delhi. India [where it has more than 20 million users] is Twitter’s third-largest market after the US and Japan.

“We have real world consequences from the kind of speech that Twitter enables. Our political parties are really, really adept at understanding how the algorithms work, how to create trends, how to make something shareable,” Pahwa said. “What they excel at is essentially fueling hate.”

In recent years, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and other hardline Hindu nationalist groups have made Twitter, alongside Facebook and WhatsApp, an essential platform for promoting their agendas, sometimes inciting violence against religious minorities, Muslims in particular.

“I think we’re in a situation where we need more moderation of hateful content and not less. I don’t think Musk understands or cares for whether people are getting polarized or killed in India,” Pahwa told me.

…“Everyone thinks they know how to do content moderation until it becomes their job,” said Mishi Choudhary, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, a tech policy group in New Delhi.

“I am not sure how [Musk] plans to address censorship by proxy that countries like India demand,” she wrote in a message.

«

India, Nigeria, Ethiopia: all examples of countries where this is far more complex than Musk imagines.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can rewind 25 years to run Mac OS 8 in a single browser window. Don’t ask why; it’s emulation. CC-licensed photo by youngthousandsyoungthousands on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Russia to halt gas supply to Poland, government told • The Guardian

Daniel Boffey:

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Poland’s government has been told that the country’s gas supply from Russia will stop from Wednesday following Warsaw’s refusal to pay its supplier, Gazprom, in roubles, in an apparent warning shot to the rest of Europe.

The decision to kill supply at 8am CET had also followed Poland’s announcement earlier on Tuesday that it was imposing sanctions on 50 entities and individuals –including Russia’s biggest gas company – over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

The move will be a grave concern to those countries who are the most heavily dependent on Russian gas, such as Germany, but at a hastily arranged press conference, Polish ministers said they had sufficient supplies to weather an interruption while accusing Gazprom of a breach of contract.

Anna Moskwa, minister for climate, said: “There are no worries about shortages gas in our homes. It is worth pointing out that liquified nature gas alone supplies the market sufficiently. LNG deliveries in [terminal] Świnoujście are growing – in 2015 there was one, in 2021 it was already 35. As of today, it provides for about 50 deliveries.”

She added: “Appropriate diversification strategies that we have introduced allow us to feel on the safe side in this situation.”

PGNiG, Poland’s largest gas supplier, said it would file a breach of contract lawsuit over Gazprom’s decision.

Russia currently supplies about 55% of Poland’s annual demand of about 21bn cubic meters of gas but the country’s government has still been pushing the EU and other western allies to go further in punishing the Kremlin.

«

Weather in Poland is about the same as in the southern UK – down to 3ºC overnight. I think this is the first time that a fossil fuel has been used so directly as part of a war threat. There have been threats, but this is different. And, perversely, it’s likely to hasten the end of the use of gas. Why leave yourself vulnerable to a capricious foreign power?
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Meteorites contain key DNA and RNA building blocks • Popular Science

Tatyana Woodall:

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For decades, astronomers have pondered the idea of panspermia, the theory that life on Earth was delivered here by a meteorite. The concept was once deemed improbable because it raised more questions than answers. But recent close examinations of extraterrestrial objects hint there may be some support for this far-out notion after all. 

Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan have found new evidence that the chemical components necessary to build DNA may have been carried to Earth by carbonaceous meteorites, some of the earliest matter in the solar system, as they report in a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Although these kinds of materials make up about 75% of all asteroids, they rarely fall to Earth, limiting how often scientists can study them. Yet they are troves of information: Scrutinizing these space rocks can tell stories about unique cosmic locations. Their contents may also help reveal the ancient chemical reactions that made our world a living planet. 

Specifically, several meteorites have been found to contain nucleobases. These chemicals, called the building blocks of life, make up the nucleic acids inside DNA and RNA. Of the five major nucleobases, previous meteorite studies detected only three of them, named adenine, guanine, and uracil. But the present research proves for the first time that two more—cytosine and thymine—can exist within space rocks. 

«

“Space rocks” – a classic example of the “second mention“.

But if all the elements of DNA could have arrived on spac..meteorites, that pushes the question of origins back, and also raises more strongly the possibility of DNA-based life elsewhere.
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I helped build ByteDance’s vast censorship machine • Protocol

Shen Lu spoke to “Li An” (it’s a pseudonym – so quaint! So soon-to-be-outlawed!):

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It was the night Dr. Li Wenliang struggled for his last breath in the emergency room of Wuhan Central Hospital. I, like many Chinese web users, had stayed awake to refresh my Weibo feed constantly for updates on his condition. Dr. Li was an ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm early in the COVID-19 outbreak. He soon faced government intimidation and then contracted the virus. When he passed away in the early hours of Friday, Feb. 7, 2020, I was among many Chinese netizens who expressed grief and outrage at the events on Weibo, only to have my account deleted.

I felt guilt more than anger. At the time, I was a tech worker at ByteDance, where I helped develop tools and platforms for content moderation. In other words, I had helped build the system that censored accounts like mine. I was helping to bury myself in China’s ever-expanding cyber grave.

I hadn’t received explicit directives about Li Wenliang, but Weibo was certainly not the only Chinese tech company relentlessly deleting posts and accounts that night. I knew ByteDance’s army of content moderators were using the tools and algorithms that I helped develop to delete content, change the narrative and alter memories of the suffering and trauma inflicted on Chinese people during the COVID-19 outbreak. I couldn’t help but feel every day like I was a tiny cog in a vast, evil machine.

…When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn’t understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don’t understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin. If they didn’t comply, moderators would respond by manually cutting off the livestreams, regardless of the actual content.

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Accountants are bracing themselves for a crypto-induced nightmare tax season • Mel Magazine

Quinn Myers:

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For RJ, a 38-year-old certified public accountant in Chicago, tax season is never easy. “Every year it’s been hell, the worst 15 weeks of my life over and over again,” he tells me. “But now I would do anything to go back in time to avoid what’s coming. I can’t believe I was naive enough to think it couldn’t get worse.” 

RJ is dreading this year’s tax season due to the unprecedented number of people who took interest in trading stocks and cryptocurrency over the course of 2021. To get an idea why, here’s how RJ first realized something terrible was coming his way: “I’ve been doing the taxes of a friend from college’s little brother — he’s worked the same job since graduating so it’s been a pretty simple filing every year, and I give him the family and friends discount,” RJ explains. “This year, bless his heart, he emailed me early asking about crypto taxes, so I had him send over a document of his investments.” 

In response, “he sent over a massive spreadsheet with an endless amount of transactions, most of which were like ‘Bought $45 of Cumcoin at $.000000065 on PancakeSwap,’ and ‘Traded 750,000 SHIB to BLAZE on CoinFort, transferred to XCryptoX Wallet,’” RJ says. “I almost walked out of the office and straight into the lake.” 

RJ isn’t alone in agonizing over the forthcoming tax season. “I’ve been a CPA for 13-plus years and have done seasonal tax work for most of that period,” says Colin Smith, a CPA in Ohio. “This tax season is shaping up to be more stressful than ever before, as there are a number of ways the explosion in crypto and retail stock trading can create major headaches for accountants.”

«

On the plus side, at least they kept a spreadsheet.
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Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in Your Browser • persistent.info

Mihai Parparita:

»

I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app.

…It’s a golden age of emulation. Between increasing CPU power, WebAssembly, and retrocomputing being so popular The New York Times is covering it, it’s never been easier to relive your 80s/90s/2000s nostalgia. Projects like v86 make it easy to run your chosen old operating system in the browser. My heritage being of the classic Mac line, I was curious what the easiest to use emulation option was in the modern era. I had earlier experimented with Basilisk II, which worked well enough, but it was rather annoying to set up, as far as gathering a ROM, a boot image, messing with configuration files, etc. As far as I could tell, that was still the state of the art, at least if you were targeting late era 68K Mac emulation.

«

It is pretty amazing to see this running in a browser, about as fast as the originals used to run. Control strip! Spatial Finder! Also.. not many apps. And, of course, no browser.
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What’s the future of twitter under Musk? | Inside Story – YouTube

I popped up on Al Jazeera TV to talk about the Musk takeover of Twitter along with Quinn McKew of Article 19 and Ramesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at the University of California and author of the book “Beyond the Valley”. Skip forward about four minutes to get to the discussion.
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Twitter takeover was brash and fast, with Musk calling the shots • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Michelle Davis and Liana Baker:

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The first breakthrough was coming up with $46.5bn for the bid. After bringing on Morgan Stanley as his adviser, Musk was able to get a dozen banks to commit $25.5bn in debt financing. He pledged another $21bn in equity financing himself.

Doing video calls, making presentations and sharing parts of his vision for the future of Twitter helped the banks get comfortable working with him, Bloomberg reported.

There were also at least two consecutive weekends where advisers worked through a few sleepless nights. The code name for the bid was “Project X” at some of the banks involved. Musk, meanwhile, dialed in to calls from places like Texas, where Tesla is now based.

The second tactic Musk employed was appealing directly to Twitter shareholders late last week. After revealing he had financing in place, Musk brought his pitch to some of Twitter’s biggest active investors and urged them to pressure Twitter to engage, some of the people said. Some shareholders reached out to Twitter to say they wanted it to take the offer seriously, they said.

Twitter’s board, meanwhile — joined in some cases by management — set up meetings with eight to 10 of its investors to gauge shareholder views on a potential deal, one of the people said. Those meetings began before Musk made his financing commitments public.

The third catalyst that led to a deal was the role of the price, $54.20, and how it compared with Twitter’s own growth prospects. The company’s advisers, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., did a valuation analysis and presented it to the board last Friday, one of the people said. Musk’s camp didn’t get a look at those materials, though, given the decision to bypass reviewing Twitter’s books.

Twitter’s shares were trading well below Musk’s bid, with the stock closing at $47.08 the previous day, and far from their $70-plus highs of a year earlier. But the question was whether the stock could recover without taking the deal. The analysis didn’t paint an optimistic picture.

«

As others have pointed out, Twitter was due to report earnings on Thursday. Given the economic slowdown, those would probably have been mediocre. Selling at a premium suddenly began to look like an attractive idea.
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2008: Why are there no spam or trolls on Twitter? • The Guardian

Kate Bevan, who I asked to write this piece in March 2008 when Twitter was just a couple of years old:

»

Because it’s rather like an RSS feed – you choose to read it – and nobody so far has worked out how to spam a feed.

Twitter, for those not in the know, is a collection of microblogs where people post their minute-by-minute thoughts and actions. Anyone can sign up and start posting “tweets”, or updates. Your tweets can be made and viewed via Facebook or your mobile as well as via the website (twitter.com).

However, this is asymmetric, unlike Facebook, which requires you to confirm a friend request before they can see your status updates, which are the same sort of idea as tweets. On Twitter you can choose to follow anyone whose tweets catch your eye; and similarly, unless you limit your tweets only to your friends, anyone can follow you even if you choose not to follow them. Not everyone follows everyone who follows them. You follow?

Given the number of trolls, fools and idiots on the internet, Twitter is remarkable for being largely idiot-free, as blogger Russell Beattie points out. “Think about any other online community system ever created,” he observes. “All of them have had to deal with the core problem of idiots. Anytime a virtual group gets to a certain size, the morons come.”

«

At the time Beattie reckoned Twitter had roughly a million users. And I’ll confirm – it was pretty much free of spam or trolls. (Like pretty much everyone, Beattie fell out of the habit of blogging as Twitter became embedded in our lives. Much like the spam and trolls – including the giant one who has just bought it – did.)
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Making science more open is good for research—but bad for security • WIRED UK

Grace Browne:

»

a new paper in the journal PLoS Biology argues that, while the swell of the open science movement is on the whole a good thing, it isn’t without risks. 

Though the speed of open-access publishing means important research gets out more quickly, it also means the checks required to ensure that risky science isn’t being tossed online are less meticulous. In particular, the field of synthetic biology—which involves the engineering of new organisms or the reengineering of existing organisms to have new abilities—faces what is called a dual-use dilemma: that while quickly released research may be used for the good of society, it could also be co-opted by bad actors to conduct biowarfare or bioterrorism. It also could increase the potential for an accidental release of a dangerous pathogen if, for example, someone inexperienced were able to easily get their hands on a how-to guide for designing a virus. “There is a risk that bad things are going to be shared,” says James Smith, a coauthor on the paper and a researcher at the University of Oxford. “And there’s not really processes in place at the moment to address it.”

While the risk of dual-use research is an age-old problem, “open science poses new and different challenges,” says Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “These risks have always been there, but with the advances in technology, it magnifies them.”

To be clear, this has yet to happen. No dangerous virus or other pathogen has been replicated or created from instructions in a preprint. But given that the potential consequences of this happening are so catastrophic—like triggering another pandemic—the paper’s authors argue that even small increases in risk are not worth taking. And the time to be thinking deeply about these risks is now. 

«

We’ve been here before, to some extent: there was a moratorium in the 1970s on recombinant DNA work while everyone worked out what the safe parameters were. More recently we’ve seen calls for moratoriums on germ line editing (which remain in force, in effect). The problem is that the technologies for genetic manipulation are available to far more people, far more cheaply, than before. (Thanks G for the link.)
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How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff • The Hustle

Zachary Crockett:

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It’s estimated that 60% of Ikea purchases are impulse buys. And Ikea’s own creative director has said that only 20% of the store’s purchases are based on actual logic and needs.

All of this unplanned buying has earned Ikea an enviable position in the struggling retail landscape. As of 2021, it boasts:
• ~$47.6B USD in annual retail sales
• 458 stores in 61 markets
• 775m store visits + 5B web visits per year
• 225k global employees

On the surface, this success may seem a bit perplexing because Ikea’s way of doing business is extremely unorthodox.

It sells meatballs and lamps under the same roof. It has been described as both “Disneyland for adults” and “a nightmare hellscape.” And the idea of spending an afternoon stuck in a one-way maze — then going home and assembling your own bookcase — isn’t exactly appealing.

But these eccentricities are intentionally engineered to get you to make unplanned purchases, and come back for more.

In general, retailers design their stores with three goals in mind:
• Intelligibility: Easy to understand the floor plan
• Accessibility: Easy to navigate
• A clear visual field: Exposure to products and the lay of the land 

Most companies use store layouts that give customers the freedom to explore at their own will.

Commonly used configurations — grid, racetrack, freeform, and spine — don’t have defined routes: You can wander down any aisle you please, in any order you want.

Ikea breaks all of these rules.

Inside, customers are led through a preordained, one-way path that winds through 50+ room settings. The average Ikea store is 300k sq. ft. — the equivalent of about 5 football fields — and their typical shopper ends up walking almost a mile.

Want a lamp? You’re going to have to walk past cookware, rugs, toilet brushes, and shoehorns to get there.

«

This is true, though once you know the Ikea layout (which, I’m pretty sure, doesn’t actually vary from store to store) then you can take the shortcut from sofas to kitchens (there are shortcuts). And using the online catalogue ahead of time lets you just head down to the warehouse and get precisely what you need. Though… meatballs. Mmm. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

He said he would, and he has – Elon Musk is buying Twitter for $44bn. Now the difficult work starts. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not limited to 280 characters. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk reaches deal to buy Twitter • The Washington Post

Douglas MacMillan, Faiz Siddiqui, Rachel Lerman and Taylor Telford :

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“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in the release [announcing the acquisition]. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

Musk‘s Twitter deal expands his portfolio, which already includes rocket building company SpaceX, which has aspirations of landing on Mars, and the electric carmaker Tesla, that has pushed electric vehicles into the mainstream.

“He’s more powerful than countries now,” said Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor close with Musk who said he had bought Twitter shares last week in hopes the deal went through. “He has the most important technology asset in America … probably one of the most strategic military assets in the world … and now he has one of the most important communications tools in the world.”

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Just let those words bounce around your mind for a little bit: more powerful than countries. (“How many divisions does Twitter have?” you ask. Well, it tells your people what’s happening, so you figure it out.)
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Elon Musk’s backing means Twitter needs ads to stay aloft • WSJ

Dan Gallagher:

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Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at ad-buying giant GroupM, says most advertisers who work with Twitter “strongly prefer content standards” on the service.

That may not matter a great deal to Mr. Musk, who said of his own Twitter campaign that it “is not a way to make money” in an onstage interview at the Ted conference, on the same day of the filing describing his financial support. But more than half of that backing comes in the form of debt, from Morgan Stanley and “certain other financial institutions,” according to the filing. That means Mr. Musk will need to preserve Twitter’s cash flow—and ideally grow it—to service the debt. Some of that debt is in the form of margin loans backed by Mr. Musk’s Tesla shares.

Doing that without advertising would be difficult. Ads account for nearly 90% of Twitter’s revenue now, while data licensing provides most of the rest. The company launched Twitter Blue —its first consumer subscription offering—last year, rolling it out to the U.S. market in November. Chief Executive Parag Agrawal said on Twitter’s last earnings call in February that the company has seen a “strong response” from “our most heavy users” for the service. But he added that Blue is “not critical” to reaching $7.5bn of revenue in 2023, a target set at an analyst meeting in early 2021.

Mr. Musk will likely have his own goals in mind, and a privately held Twitter would be accountable only to him for reaching them. But since Mr. Musk has elected not to pay for Twitter entirely out of his own pocket, he’ll have to be accountable to others as well.

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There’s such myopia around this. Twitter’s ad models is terrible, and is part of why it has been so anaemic for years. There are so many possible business models: direct subscriptions, paywalled accounts (you already can’t retweet a locked account, so some of the infrastructure is there), much more targeted advertising, licensing tweets, licensing the “social graph” of who follows who and what topics, and any and all mixtures of those.

Musk has proven, at SpaceX and Tesla, that he can attract and manage really good engineers who do remarkable work; Twitter’s team need to prove their mettle now. The content moderation can remain as it is for now; that’s not the hinge feature of the network. Nor, dammit, is an edit button.
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The is no such thing as a good billionaire, and Elon Musk is no exception • Metro News

Joshua Potash is an adjunct lecturer at City University of New York:

»

On October 31 last year, Elon Musk sent out a tweet which claimed that if the United Nations put forward a proposal to solve world hunger with $6bn, he would contribute the money.

Two weeks later, the head of the U.N.’s World Food Program tweeted out a $6.6bn plan to ‘avert famine in 2022,’ tagging Mr. Musk and generating major headlines. But, as of February, 2022, the WFP had not received a cent from the world’s richest man. 

While Mr Musk may not have been convinced by the UN plan, it came as little surprise to me that a billionaire chose not to donate a huge chunk of his wealth to solve world hunger.

People like Elon Musk don’t get rich by giving money away, but in this particular case, however, the issue goes far beyond one flippant tweet. It looks like Musk’s attitude towards the World Food Program is part of a larger pattern. 

When Covid hit the United States, in March 2020 Musk tweeted that, ‘SpaceX is working on ventilators too.’ Instead, Musk made a donation to a number of hospitals of ventilation equipment which turned out to be breathing devices more commonly used for treating sleep apnea than those found in intensive care.

Similarly, in 2018 Musk pledged that he would ‘fund fixing the water in any house in Flint, Michigan that has water contamination above FDA levels.’

After the pledge, his Foundation donated $480,000 to fund water filtration systems in a dozen schools in the city, in a year when his net worth was already $19.9bn.

In 2018, the year of his bold pledge to the citizens of Flint, an investigation found Musk had paid no federal income tax.

It would be wonderful if the richest people on Earth used their wealth for good, but they don’t. The collected wealth of billionaires is not being used to end hunger or homelessness.

«

Now: you could argue that creating reusable rockets (SpaceX), really usable electric cars (Tesla), just-in-time online delivery (Amazon) and, er, reusable rockets (Blue Origin) takes humanity further into the future. But as Potash points out, they could actually do both. Donating billions need not distract Musk from running Tesla or SpaceX for a moment.
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Elon’s giant package • Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk

Ranjan Roy:

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In 2019, when Musk was promising robotaxis in a year, it really captured people’s imaginations. Nowadays, it just doesn’t feel like anyone other than Cathie Wood & team are pretending to take those magical, futuristic business lines seriously (yes, ARK’s new model says robotaxis will be 62% of total Tesla revenue by 2026).

Even that whole dancing robot thing showed the difficulty of capturing our collective imagination. For those unfamiliar, last November Tesla announced a humanoid robot thing. The presentation ended with a guy in a robot suit dancing (yes, this is real).

On the recent earnings call, Musk gave a half-hearted statement about how this theoretical line of humanoid robots could be worth more than electric vehicles for Tesla. The whole thing has honestly felt a bit routine. I’ve watched this stuff for years, and maybe it’s overall Elon-promise fatigue, but a lot of these moonshot proclamations have started to feel a bit throwaway – from Elon, from the fanboys, from the press, from the entire infrastructure that once was manic over them.

However, the Twitter thing really lit a fire. Maybe Musk was really going to join the Board and be a cooperative part-owner, but the moment he saw the energy the potential purchase generated, he went all in. Musk buying Twitter has generated the conversational energy that rockets and robots once did.

«

And, as he goes on to point out, Musk and his brother and the ARK Investment company have all been selling Tesla stock (ARK even while it suggested a higher price target for the stock). So this is about the “next thing”, and putting himself in a place where the Securities and Exchange Commission can’t touch him.

Musk isn’t a fool (don’t let the tweets fool you), and Roy tries to see the bigger picture. We all see the rain-dirty valley; what shape is the Brigadoon?
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Hot/Crazy scale test • Individual Differences Research

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The Hot/Crazy Scale is a phenomenon popularized by the sitcom How I Met Your Mother and is well-known in internet pop culture. Some claim that the theory is pseudoscientific, while others maintain that it’s backed by proper studies. The theory holds that it’s possible to decipher how you should regard a potential partner based on their levels of “hot” and “crazy.”

This version of the Hot/Crazy Scale Test presents an updated and gender-neutral approach to the theory.

«

Wonder if we could get Twitter’s new owner to answer this. It’s only 20 questions (and not about whether you’re animal/vegetable/mineral), so quite quick. Of course the problem is whether you’re being truthful about yourself. At least it’ll distract you from doing Wordle for a few minutes. Oh, you already have?
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North Korea hackers still accessing money they stole from Axie Infinity • The Washington Post

Tory Newmyer and Jeremy B. Merrill:

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The cybercriminals’ continued access to the money, more than $600m stolen from the Axie Infinity video game, underscores the limits of law enforcement’s ability to stop the flow of illicit cryptocurrency across the globe. The hackers are still moving their loot, most recently about $4.5m worth of the Ethereum currency on Friday, according to data from cryptocurrency tracking site Etherscan — eight days after the Treasury Department attempted to freeze those assets by sanctioning the digital wallet the group used in its attack.

The gang, which the Treasury Department identified as the Lazarus Group, also known for the 2014 hacking of Sony Pictures, so far has laundered nearly $100m — about 17% — of the stolen crypto, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. They moved their haul beyond the immediate reach of US authorities by converting it into the cryptocurrency Ethereum, which unlike the cryptocurrency they stole cannot be hobbled remotely. Since then, the gang has worked to obscure the crypto’s origins primarily by sending instalments of it through a program called Tornado Cash, a service known as a mixer that pools digital assets to hide their owners.

Authorities and major crypto industry players are scrambling to keep up. Treasury sanctioned three more addresses associated with the gang on Friday, as Binance, a large international crypto exchange, announced it had frozen $5.8m worth of crypto the hackers had transferred onto its platform.

The cat-and-mouse game unfolding between law enforcement and the North Korean hackers is another example of how criminals have learned to target the growing crypto economy’s weak points. They exploit faulty code in decentralized crypto platforms, use tools that help them hide their tracks such as converting assets to privacy-enhancing cryptocurrencies like Monero, and take advantage of spotty law enforcement coordination across international borders.

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It seems we’re being told that crypto isn’t anywhere near as regulated as normal currencies. Hard to credit. (Nice intersection of North Korea stories, hacking stories and crypto stories.)
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How the Eindhoven heat battery can quickly make millions of homes gas-free • Eindhoven University of Technology

»

The idea that started it all was the heat battery as a storage medium in homes. In the meantime, however, the consortium is also looking at heat storage in office buildings, greenhouse horticulture or, for example, electric buses or luxury ships.

But, they realised, if this thermal battery [which uses the reversible exothermic reaction of potassium carbonate with water] can store heat loss-free, it can also be transported loss-free. After all, nothing else happens to the dry salt as long as no water is added. This is exactly where the thermal battery could make the difference, because other forms of heat transport, such as through pipes or phase transitions, always run up losses.

The consortium therefore also focuses their attention on industrial residual heat as a heat source, a kind of ‘heat waste’, such as that generated as a by-product in factories or surplus heat from data centers. This heat is not so ‘hot’ anymore; at temperatures below 150ºC it has no value for most industry.

For homes, however, such heat is very useful. Such temperatures are more than sufficient for heating your home or taking a hot shower. If industrial residual heat could be used to heat homes, you have a win-win situation: homes could be made independent of gas – an even more urgent need given the dependence on (Russian) gas – and CO2 emissions would be reduced.

Adan does a quick calculation. “In the Netherlands we have about 150 PetaJoule (a number with 15 zeros) of residual heat from industry per year. That would enable you to take almost 3.5 million homes off the gas, which is more than twice the target of the Dutch government, namely 1.5 million homes gas-free by 2030.”

If you superimpose the locations of the sources of industrial residual heat and homes on a map of the Netherlands, Adan says the match is reasonably good. There is no more than 30km (18.6mi) between them.

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Using a crystal for energy storage is a simple enough idea, but getting it to industrial (or domestic) scale is a lot tougher. (Thanks Titus for the link.)
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Deadly divergence: how Brexit could become the new killer on Britain’s roads • The New European

David Ward:

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From July 6th proven life-saving technologies such as autonomous emergency braking and intelligent speed assistance (ISA) will be a mandatory fitment for new model passenger cars and commercial vehicles across the EU. The so-called General Safety Regulation (GSR) will be phased in over a number of years and eventually apply to all new vehicles on European roads. Once fully implemented by EU Member States, the GSR is expected to save 25,000 road deaths and 140,000 serious injuries. [ISA equipped vehicles continuously detect the speed limit through a combination of digital maps and cameras. It prevents the driver from exceeding the limit but can be overridden if needed.]

However, the UK government is undecided on whether or not to apply the new regulations and the Department for Transport is consulting on what to do. Meanwhile, the minister for Brexit opportunities, Jacob Rees Mogg told MPs last week that “we should put divergence behind us” and not look “over our shoulder saying the EU is doing this, and, therefore, we should do it too”.  He then illustrated his point by mentioning forthcoming EU vehicle safety requirements for speed limiters. His comments were clearly prompted by stories in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail quoting Brexiteer backbench MPs warning about “Big Brother in the cockpit”. 

Lost in this ideological argument about the UK’s post Brexit scope for regulatory freedom is any focus on the need to reduce the 33,000 deaths and serious injuries that have occurred on British roads in the decade from 2010-2019. According to the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory the GSR package has the potential to have a greater safety benefit than the introduction of seat belts. They estimate it will prevent 1,762 deaths and 15,000 injuries and deliver £7 billion in net economic benefits by 2037. Crucially the 15 measures in the GSR aim to improve safety not just for vehicle occupants but for vulnerable road users – pedestrians and cyclists – too. 

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Not sure even the Haunted Hatstand could argue that more people dying on the roads is a Brexit benefit.
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Chess.com banned by Russia • Chess.com

Chess.com Team:

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Yesterday, Chess.com was banned by the Russian government agency Roscomnadzor, the “Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media.” Roscomnadzor is responsible for censorship within Russia, a busy occupation these days. Since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine on February 24th, Roscomnadzor has banned hundreds of sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google News, BBC News, NPR, and Amnesty International.

According to Roscomnadzor, their goal is to block two webpages: “On The Invasion of Ukraine” which outlines our policy and actions regarding the war on Ukraine and addresses FAQ and “Ukrainian Chess Players In Times Of War” which is a piece interviewing Ukrainian chess players on their circumstances and views during the early days of the war. Since Chess.com uses secure https webpages, Roscomnadzor is unable to ban these single pages and has banned the entire Chess.com site. Our members report that Chess.com’s apps are unaffected. We happily encourage our Russian members to continue accessing our site using our apps or any of the many outstanding VPN services that are so essential in Russia.

We reaffirm our condemnation in the strongest possible terms of the Russian government’s war of aggression against Ukraine and will continue to publish content to that effect.

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You have to consider how big chess is in Russia to realise that doing this is a big move.
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Belarusian railway saboteurs helped thwart Russia’s assault on Kyiv • The Washington Post

Liz Sly:

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Belarus railway saboteurs can at least claim a role in fuelling the logistical chaos that quickly engulfed the Russians, leaving troops stranded on the front lines without food, fuel and ammunition within days of the invasion.

Alexander Kamyshin, head of Ukrainian railways, expressed Ukraine’s gratitude to the Belarusian saboteurs. “They are brave and honest people who have helped us,” he said.

The attacks were simple but effective, targeting the signal control cabinets essential to the functioning of the railways, members of the activist network said. For days on end, the movement of trains was paralysed, forcing the Russians to attempt to resupply their troops by road and contributing to the snarl-up that stalled the infamous 40-mile military convoy north of Kyiv.

How much of the chaos can be attributed to the sabotage and how much to poor logistical planning by the Russians is hard to tell, especially as there is no independent media reporting from Belarus, said Emily Ferris, a research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. But without automated signalling, trains were forced to slow to a crawl and the number of them traveling on the tracks at any one time would have been severely restricted, she said.

“Given the Russian reliance on trains, I’m sure it contributed to some of the problems they had in the north. It would have slowed down their ability to move,” she said. “They couldn’t push further into Ukrainian territory and snarled their supply lines because they had to rely on trucks.”

«

As you’d expect, the Belarusian authorities are not pleased, and have sought out anyone who might have been involved, searching their phones for evidence of involvement – such as the Telegram channels through which the sabotage was organised. Eleven people are in prison and could get up to 20 years for “terrorism”.
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Hopin: virtual events start-up struggles as real gatherings return • Financial Times

Kadhim Shubber, Patricia Nilsson and Miles Kruppa:

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In November 2020, with the pandemic in full force, British virtual events start-up Hopin declared that a new era of digital gatherings had begun.

Virtual events were “here to stay”, said founder Johnny Boufarhat, as he bragged that there were “more than 15,000 monthly events” available on Hopin’s “Explore” platform. Today, there are fewer than 500 listed.

Boufarhat’s vision made Hopin a pandemic sensation and Europe’s fastest growing start-up ever. Launched in 2019, his company rocketed to fame after Covid hit with a conferencing product that seemed tailor-made for lockdowns.

The 27-year-old raised more than a billion dollars for Hopin in little over a year, reaching a $7.8bn private market valuation that made him Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire on paper.

As top-tier venture capital firms like IVP, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global clamoured to invest, Boufarhat sold $195m worth of his own shares, according to a Financial Times analysis.

With Covid beginning to recede and publicly traded technology stocks being dumped by investors, Boufarhat now faces a moment of truth as he tries to build a sustainable business that lives up to the lofty expectations it set during the pandemic.

“The landscape will look very different going forward. People can now meet,” noted one events industry executive. They dismissed the pandemic-driven online events boom as “a bit of an artificial bubble”.

«

The staffing numbers have done much the same: down by 12%, or 138 people. Which raises the question of how it needed a thousand-plus staff. OK, so it has studios and meeting rooms. The pandemic really blew some companies up.

Still, Boufarhat has $195m or so to comfort him. The pipeline of money going from venture capital funds to so-so businesses, hus enriching individuals of varying competence (👋 WeWork) continues unabated.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: thanks to everyone who pointed out that yesterday’s analysis of Twitter’s cash flow should have said that it has never achieved what Musk needs to service the debt on his loan. (Latest estimates are that it would need about $3bn in free cash flow, which is 3x what it has ever managed annually.)

Playing Pokémon Go has been linked to a drop in depression-related internet searches, a new study says. Was it the fresh air or the company? CC-licensed photo by PaintimpactPaintimpact on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Not in the Sue Gray report. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google, Meta, and others will have to explain their algorithms under new EU legislation • The Verge

James Vincent:

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The final text of the DSA [Digital Services Act] has yet to be released, but the European Parliament and European Commission have detailed a number of obligations it will contain:
• Targeted advertising based on an individuals’ religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity is banned. Minors cannot be subject to targeted advertising either
• “Dark patterns” — confusing or deceptive user interfaces designed to steer users into making certain choices — will be prohibited. The EU says that, as a rule, cancelling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up for them
• Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (e.g. used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users. Users should also be offered a recommender system “not based on profiling.” In the case of Instagram, for example, this would mean a chronological feed (as it introduced recently)
• Hosting services and online platforms will have to explain clearly why they have removed illegal content, as well as give users the ability to appeal such takedowns. The DSA itself does not define what content is illegal, though, and leaves this up to individual countries
• The largest online platforms will have to provide key data to researchers to “provide more insight into how online risks evolve”
• Online marketplaces must keep basic information about traders on their platform to track down individuals selling illegal goods or services
• Large platforms will also have to introduce new strategies for dealing with misinformation during crises (a provision inspired by the recent invasion of Ukraine).

«

The targeted advertising ban might be tricky (people have wondered how, say, hairdressers specialising in ethnic hairstyles should find clients). Policing dark patterns will be fun (who decides it’s “dark”, and who forces the change?). And the recommendation algorithm element is really putting the cat among the pigeons.

What’s more, the DSA will likely come into force more quickly than the Digital Markets Act. Popcorn time!
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Twitter reexamines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal • WSJ

Cara Lombardo:

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Twitter is re-examining Elon Musk’s $43bn takeover offer after the billionaire lined up financing for the bid, in a sign the social-media company could be more receptive to a deal.

Twitter had been expected to rebuff the offer, which Mr. Musk made earlier this month without saying how he would pay for it. But after he disclosed last week that he now has $46.5bn in financing, Twitter is taking a fresh look at the offer and is more likely than before to seek to negotiate, people familiar with the matter said. The situation is fast-moving and it is still far from guaranteed Twitter will do so.

Twitter is still working on an all-important estimate of its own value, which would need to come in close to Mr. Musk’s offer, and it could also insist on sweeteners such as Mr. Musk agreeing to cover breakup protections should the deal fall apart, some of the people said.

The two sides are meeting Sunday to discuss Mr. Musk’s proposal, the people said.

Twitter is expected to weigh in on the bid when it reports first-quarter earnings Thursday, if not sooner, the people said. Twitter’s response won’t necessarily be black-and-white, and could leave the door open for inviting other bidders or negotiating with Mr. Musk on terms other than price. Mr. Musk reiterated to Twitter’s chairman Bret Taylor in recent days that he won’t budge from his offer of $54.20-a-share, the people said

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What negotiation does Twitter’s board think are feasible? Even meeting him is a sign of weakness, and he’ll recognise that. He’ll eat them alive.

The reality though is that Musk’s plan will fail on two fronts (but note proviso). First: Twitter has already tried free speech maximalism: it ends badly with out-of-control pile-ons and terrorist videos. Second: Musk’s borrowing would require about $1bn per year just to cover the debt interest, and Twitter has never generated that level of free cash flow, ever.

The proviso: it might do if Musk creates a new business model that brings in more money. I think Ben Thompson’s one might be worth a try.
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Removing roads and traffic lights speeds urban travel • Scientific American

Linda Baker:

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Conventional traffic engineering assumes that given no increase in vehicles, more roads mean less congestion. So when planners in Seoul tore down a six-lane highway a few years ago and replaced it with a five-mile-long park, many transportation professionals were surprised to learn that the city’s traffic flow had actually improved, instead of worsening. “People were freaking out,” recalls Anna Nagurney, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who studies computer and transportation networks. “It was like an inverse of Braess’s paradox.”

The brainchild of mathematician Dietrich Braess of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, the eponymous paradox unfolds as an abstraction: it states that in a network in which all the moving entities rationally seek the most efficient route, adding extra capacity can actually reduce the network’s overall efficiency. The Seoul project inverts this dynamic: closing a highway—that is, reducing network capacity—improves the system’s effectiveness.

Although Braess’s paradox was first identified in the 1960s and is rooted in 1920s economic theory, the concept never gained traction in the automobile-oriented US. But in the 21st century, economic and environmental problems are bringing new scrutiny to the idea that limiting spaces for cars may move more people more efficiently. A key to this counterintuitive approach to traffic design lies in manipulating the inherent self-interest of all drivers.

A case in point is “The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks,” published last September in Physical Review Letters by Michael Gastner, a computer scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, and his colleagues. Using hypothetical and real-world road networks, they explain that drivers seeking the shortest route to a given destination eventually reach what is known as the Nash equilibrium, in which no single driver can do any better by changing his or her strategy unilaterally. The problem is that the Nash equilibrium is less efficient than the equilibrium reached when drivers act unselfishly—that is, when they coordinate their movements to benefit the entire group.

The “price of anarchy” is a measure of the inefficiency caused by selfish drivers. Analyzing a commute from Harvard Square to Boston Common, the researchers found that the price can be high: selfish drivers typically waste 30% more time than they would under “socially optimal” conditions.

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When they say “socially optimal” do they mean “on public transport”? I happened across this paradox by accident, but its implications are colossal. It even applies to semiconductor circuits: add more connections and you can reduce effective electron flow. This article is from 2009, but nothing has changed (except maybe people are less willing to listen to the experts who explain why building Yet Another Road won’t actually help).
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Pokemon Go study found it led to “decrease in depression-related internet searches” • The Gamer

Issy Van der Velde:

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Many of us remember the summer of 2016. Just about everyone was playing Pokemon Go. People would go out late at night just to catch a rare Pokemon and find others in their town right there alongside them. Some areas even reported more traffic accidents as people were so concerned with catching-’em-all they didn’t look at the roads.

A recent study by the London School of Economics looked into how the global phenomenon affected local depression trends. Since the game had a staggered launch, the study was able to compare the amount of depression-related searches in areas that had access to the game and areas that didn’t.

What it found was that there were fewer searches for depression-related terms such as ‘depression’, ‘stress’, and ‘anxiety’, suggesting “location-based mobile games may decrease the prevalence of local rates of depression.” The effect doesn’t seem to have been permanent, as the study found the effects, while significant, were short-term.

The study isn’t trying to claim going outside for a bit cures depression. “In the paper, the authors are keen to stress that their findings only relate to those suffering from non-clinical forms of mild depression and not those suffering with chronic or severe depressive disorders.”

However, the study believes the reason Pokemon Go led to fewer depression-related searches is that it, and other location-based video games, “encourage outdoor physical activity, face-to-face socialisation and exposure to nature.” All things that tend to make people happier.

The study argues that its findings highlight the mental health opportunities of video games like Pokemon Go, and that due to their relatively low cost and accessibility they may be of more interest to people who make public health laws and policies.

Again, it’s important to stress that the study is not claiming going outside for a bit can cure clinical depression. It’s found that being out in nature, socialising face-to-face, and mild exercise can help alleviate symptoms of mild depression.

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Seems sort-of obvious, but nevertheless good. Maybe AR systems will bring similar side benefits.
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AkuDreams NFT project earns $34m that its team will never be able to withdraw • web3 Is Going Great

Molly White:

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Micah Johnson, an artist and former professional baseball player, launched an astronaut-themed NFT project called AkuDreams. The auction was based around a Dutch auction, with the added twist that the lowest bid would set the final price for the NFT and all higher bids would be refunded.

The contract suffered from several flaws, however. The first allowed an exploiter to stop all refunds and withdrawals from the contract. Luckily for the team, the exploiter was well-intentioned and only intended to highlight the issue; they removed the block shortly after, leaving a message urging the team to have their contracts audited before release.

AkuDreams were not so lucky with the second issue. A bug in the code failed to account for users minting multiple NFTs in a single transaction, which made it so that the claimProjectFunds function that would allow the team to withdraw their earnings can never successfully execute. This means that the team can never withdraw the 11,539 ETH ($34m) earned from the NFT sales—it is stuck there forever.

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So it’s a sort of self-destructing safe that sets fire to the contents if ever opened. A work of staggering genius.
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Anomaly Six demonstrated its surveillance powers by spying on CIA • The Intercept

Sam Biddle and Jack Poulson:

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In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.

…According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population. The staggering surveillance capacity was cited during a pitch to provide A6’s phone-tracking capabilities to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm that leverages its access to Twitter’s rarely granted “firehose” data stream to sift through hundreds of millions of tweets per day without restriction. With their powers combined, A6 proposed, Zignal’s corporate and governmental clients could not only surveil global social media activity, but also determine who exactly sent certain tweets, where they sent them from, who they were with, where they’d been previously, and where they went next.

…Using satellite imagery tweeted by accounts conducting increasingly popular “open-source intelligence,” or OSINT, investigations, Clark showed how A6’s GPS tracking would let Zignal clients determine not simply that the military buildup was taking place, but track the phones of Russian soldiers as they mobilized to determine exactly where they’d trained, where they were stationed, and which units they belonged to. In one case, Clark showed A6 software tracing Russian troop phones backward through time, away from the border and back to a military installation outside Yurga, and suggested that they could be traced further, all the way back to their individual homes. Previous reporting by the Wall Street Journal indicates that this phone-tracking method is already used to monitor Russian military manoeuvres and that American troops are just as vulnerable.

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The spying-on-CIA bit is pretty dramatic too, involving geofencing.
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Obama says tech companies have made democracy more vulnerable • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Eugene Scott:

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In a lengthy speech at Stanford University, located in the heart of tech-heavy Silicon Valley, the former president spoke about the ways that tech platforms have helped to divide the public, spread misinformation, and erode trust in democratic institutions, leading to the rise of autocrats such as Russian leader Vladimir Putin and unnecessary deaths from the coronavirus.

“People are dying” because of disinformation on social media services, he said. Companies, he said, are not being transparent with the public about how their algorithms — the software they use to spread content on their services — work.

“Algorithms have evolved to the point that no one on the outside of these companies can accurately predict what they’ll do … and sometimes the people who built them aren’t sure … That’s a problem,” he added.

In his speech, Obama said that when he was president, he didn’t realize “how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories, despite having spent years being a target of disinformation myself,” saying he still harbors regret to this day. Disinformation refers to a coordinated campaign by political leaders, corporations, or other figures to spread harmful falsehoods and misleading narratives.

Despite keeping a relatively low public profile during his post-presidency, the former president in recent months has started to turn disinformation into a signature issue for his public life after office, embarking on a campaign to warn the public about the harm caused by falsehoods online and the social media algorithms that spread them.

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Maybe I should send him a copy of Social Warming – he might find it apropos.

(Why do some news orgs use boring headlines for the title parts of news stories, which get sucked into search engines? For this one it’s “Obama warns about disinformation at Stanford event”, which is dullsville.)
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The renewable-energy revolution will need renewable storage • The New Yorker

Matthew Hutson looks at various projects being suggested to store energy from renewable sources:

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Li-ion [lithium-ion] batteries, despite their flaws, are a known quantity. The method being developed by Energy Vault isn’t. Still, the company isn’t alone in pursuing what’s known as “gravity storage.” Gravitricity, based in Scotland, recently concluded a demonstration that involved hefting a fifty-ton block up a tower, two stories at a time; it now plans to raise and lower single, thousand-ton blocks inside disused mine shafts. Two other companies, Gravity Power, in California, and Gravity Storage GmbH, in Hamburg, aim to place a massive weight at the bottom of a shaft and then pump water underneath to lift it. To withdraw energy, they’ll let the weight push the water down into a pipe and through a turbine. RheEnergise, based in Montreal, has come up with yet another take on pumped hydro, centered on a fluid that the company invented called R-19, which is two and a half times as dense as water; its system will move the fluid between tanks at the top and bottom of an incline. The work is still at the crowdfunding stage.

Just as you can store potential energy by lifting a block in the air, you can store it thermally, by heating things up. Companies are banking heat in molten salt, volcanic rocks, and other materials. Giant batteries, based on renewable chemical processes, are also workable. In so-called flow batteries, tanks can be used to manage electrolytes, which hold a charge. In hydrogen storage, electrolysis is used to separate hydrogen from oxygen in water; the hydrogen is then cached underground, or in aboveground tanks, as gas or liquid or part of ammonia. When it’s recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell, it forms water again and releases electricity.

«

I read this article with a mounting sense of despair. The ideas are so stupid. They ignore the very inconvenient and ubiquitous Second Law of Thermodynamics – systems become more disordered. “Efficiency” gets only the briefest mention amid all the fracking-adjacent, skyscraper-cranes adjacent ideas which you only have to hear to know will fail because they have too many moving parts.

Pumped hydro – move water up a hill with excess energy, let it flow down when needed – is up to 80% efficient in a full cycle. Only something using liquids will come anywhere close.
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This AI Does Not Exist

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This AI Does Not Exist generates realistic descriptions and code snippets of machine learning models given a name for one that doesn’t exist.

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Good enough to fool a human on a superficial glance, anyway.
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Google Messages bug leaves camera on, draining battery • 9to5Google

Kyle Bradshaw:

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A new bug in Google Messages leaves your camera on in the background, quickly draining your battery and heating up your device.

(Since the story first appeared, Google has begun rolling out a fix for the Messages app.)

Within the Google Messages app, there’s an easy way to quickly snap a picture and immediately attach it to a message and send it to a friend. In the view for attaching images from your gallery, there’s also a live feed from your camera to either take an immediate snapshot from that thumbnail view or you can expand it for a better view.

In recent updates of the Google Messages app, as spotted on one of our own devices as well as being reported on Reddit, a bug in the app occasionally leaves this camera feed running even when it’s not on screen — including when Messages is in the background. In our experience, this causes significant battery drain and heat, as you’d expect.

As there isn’t any visible cause for the increased usage, we had to track down the problem using Android 12’s privacy indicators for the camera and microphone. When the issue occurs, an Android 12 device will show that Google Messages is actively using your camera. The easiest way to stop the issue in the moment is to close the app from the Recents view.

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Flagship Android tablets take aim at pros • ZDNet

Ross Rubin:

»

One of the biggest differentiation pro-Android tablets have versus inexpensive versions, or even the iPad, has been the ability to switch into a desktop mode. Samsung has long offered this via the DeX feature on its tablets, an extension of the interface it can present when an S-series smartphone connects to a monitor or television. Lenovo’s more recent answer is Productivity Mode, which presents a more subtle change to the user interface, e.g. keeping launcher icons intact, while still presenting a taskbar.

While either can be activated via a tap on the settings button and Productivity Mode’s transition is faster than DeX, most Windows users will find the DeX approach more familiar. That said, Lenovo offers an experimental feature that allows users of its desktop mode to extend work area across multiple monitors versus simple mirroring of the display, a feature that’s been historically limited to “desktop” OSes such as Windows macOS and Chrome OS.

The latest pro Android tablets bring a degree of polish and flexibility that is far beyond the early days of such devices–with more promising enhancements coming soon. But they continue to face stiff competition and category friction

«

The key problem is that smartphones don’t run Windows. OK, iPads don’t either, but there’s better integration between the iPad and Windows apps than between Android tablets and Windows apps (isn’t there?).

The absence of Android tablets at the top end is a longstanding mystery. But it’s not the hardware.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The original HomePod was discontinued, apparently for lack of demand. So why is the secondhand price going up? CC-licensed photo by VirtualWolfVirtualWolf 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. Another one down (nearly). I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The YouTube rabbit hole is nuanced • The New York Times

Shira Ovide:

»

A new analysis adds nuance to our understanding of YouTube’s role in spreading beliefs that are far outside the mainstream.

A group of academics found that YouTube rarely suggests videos that might feature conspiracy theories, extreme bigotry or quack science to people who have shown little interest in such material. And those people are unlikely to follow such computerized recommendations when they are offered. The kittens-to-terrorist pipeline is extremely uncommon.

That doesn’t mean YouTube is not a force in radicalization. The paper also found that research volunteers who already held bigoted views or followed YouTube channels that frequently feature fringe beliefs were far more likely to seek out or be recommended more videos along the same lines.

The findings suggest that policymakers, internet executives and the public should focus less on the potential risk of an unwitting person being led into extremist ideology on YouTube, and more on the ways that YouTube may help validate and harden the views of people already inclined to such beliefs.

“We’ve understated the way that social media facilitates demand meeting supply of extreme viewpoints,” said Brendan Nyhan, one of the paper’s co-authors and a Dartmouth College professor who studies misperceptions about politics and health care. “Even a few people with extreme views can create grave harm in the world.”

People watch more than one billion hours of YouTube videos daily. There are perennial concerns that the Google-owned site may amplify extremist voices, silence legitimate expression or both, similar to the worries that surround Facebook.

This is just one piece of research, and I mention below some limits of the analysis. But what’s intriguing is that the research challenges the binary notion that either YouTube’s algorithm risks turning any of us into monsters or that kooky things on the internet do little harm. Neither may be true.

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Useful. But the complaint is always that this has to be figured out externally, prodding and inferring; what we’d love to see is what happens inside, so that sensible, well-based conclusions can be reached.
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Elon Musk still wants Twitter—and he now has $46.5bn in financing • Ars Technica

Eric Bangeman:

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Elon Musk is continuing his pursuit of Twitter. In an SEC filing [PDF] Thursday, Musk revealed that he has $46.5bn in financing lined up to close the deal. The Tesla and SpaceX founder would cover $21 billion of the purchase price himself. A consortium of banks will loan him $12.5bn against his shares of Tesla along with an additional $13bn in financing.

…Twitter was uninterested in the offer, which it believed undervalued the company, and its board of directors quickly approved a poison pill provision that would make a hostile takeover much more difficult. Under the plan, current shareholders would be able to buy more stock at a discount, which would shrink the relative size of Musk’s (and the Vanguard Group’s, with 10.3%) holdings.

With funding secured, Musk is now likely to make a tender offer to all of Twitter’s shareholders. That would in turn almost certainly force the board to engage in serious negotiations with him.

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Another way to read this: Musk hasn’t been able to persuade any of the existing shareholders to join his bid.
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Instagram is begging you to stop reposting TikToks to Reels • The Verge

David Pierce:

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Instagram is making a few new creator-focused changes to its platform, which Instagram head Adam Mosseri said are meant to “make sure that credit is going to those who deserve it.”

The new stuff is made up of three changes: product tags are now available to everyone, so you can tag a product in your post; you can assign yourself to a category like “Photographer” or “Rapper” and have that category show up every time you’re tagged in a post; and Instagram is going to start more heavily promoting original content on the platform.

“If you create something from scratch,” Mosseri said in a video explaining the new features, “you should get more credit than if you are re-sharing something that you found from someone else. We’re going to try and do more to try and value original content more, particularly compared to reposted content.” Valuing original content isn’t a new thing, of course, but Mosseri said Instagram is going to lean more heavily in this direction.

Translation? Please, please, please stop just posting your favorite TikToks to Reels. We’re begging you.

…anyone who uses Reels knows it can feel like a TikTok clone, often with the same content just reposted — TikTok logo and all — from elsewhere. One way for Instagram to disincentivize that practice? Bury it in the rankings. And that’s exactly what Mosseri seems to be planning to do.

As for how Instagram will determine what counts as original, Mosseri said only that it’s hard, and “we will iterate over time.”

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“We will search for the TikTok logo and downrank it in the first instance”, at a guess. Anyway, it’s the platform equivalent of war now.
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Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken • Motherboard

Samantha Cole on Google’s new system in GDocs which urges you to use more “inclusive” language:

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senior staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai typed “annoyed” and Google suggested he change it to “angry” or “upset” to “make your writing flow better.” Being annoyed is a completely different emotion than being angry or upset—and “upset” is so amorphous, it could mean a whole spectrum of feelings—but Google is a machine, while Lorenzo’s a writer.

Social editor Emily Lipstein typed “Motherboard” (as in, the name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was being insensitive: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.”  

Journalist Rebecca Baird-Remba tweeted an “inclusive warning” she received on the word “landlord,” which Google suggested she change to “property owner” or “proprietor.” 

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“Landlord” also has “landlady”, because you can be specific if it’s a person. Though “property owner” would be better if the, er, property owner was a company. However, they were only just getting started, because one way to annoy journalists is to get a machine to correct their prose.

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Motherboard editor Tim Marchman and I kept testing the limits of this feature with prose from excerpts from famous works and interviews. Google suggested that Martin Luther King Jr. should have talked about “the intense urgency of now” rather than “the fierce urgency of now” in his “I Have a Dream” speech and edited President John F. Kennedy’s use in his inaugural address of the phrase “for all mankind” to say “for all humankind.” A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes. Radical feminist Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto gets more edits than Duke’s tirade; she should use “police officers” instead of “policemen,” Google helpfully notes. Even Jesus (or at least the translators responsible for the King James Bible) doesn’t get off easily—rather than talking about God’s “wonderful” works in the Sermon on the Mount, Google’s robot asserts, He should have used the words “great,” “marvelous,” or “lovely.”

Google told Motherboard that this feature is in an “ongoing evolution.”

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That Duke thing is quite an eye-opener, isn’t it? What’s going on there? Answer came there none.
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Incredibly, your Apple HomePod may now be worth more than its $299 MSRP • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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on average, an Apple HomePod fetched $375 this past week. That’s 25% more than Apple charged.

Of course, some HomePods are worth more than others — a used speaker with no box might only net you $220 before eBay fees, but we’ve seen a few factory sealed non-refurbished HomePods sell for over $500. In fact, some sellers are boasting that they got Apple to replace their old HomePods with brand-new units just so they could flip them.

When I filtered out expensive sealed-box outliers, the average sale price was more like $350 this past week. That’s still $50 more than they cost brand-new!

It’s subtle, but you can see in the eBay chart that the value of a HomePod has been appreciating over the past year since it got discontinued. That’s practically unheard of for gadgets like these, save for scalping situations like we’ve recently seen with consoles and GPUs.

Why the HomePod? That’s a good question. It’s a piece of Apple history, perhaps; you need two of them for stereo or more for whole-home audio; and unlike its more affordable successor the HomePod Mini, it’s acoustically quite good. My colleague Jen Tuohy has also explained that the smart home is one of the few places where Siri actually excels. She thinks people are realizing it’s the only other option besides the worse-sounding HomePod Mini.

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Siri is.. not bad on the iPhone either? Or the Watch? Possibly this is because people do want a good-sounding speaker and are willing to spend a little more because they aren’t finding what they want. (Marco Arment complained about this on the most recent ATP podcast.) How ironic if the big HomePod finds its market only after being discontinued, like Sony’s AIBO robot dog.
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Machine-learning models vulnerable to undetectable backdoors • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

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To frame the relevance of this work with a practical example, the authors describe a hypothetical malicious machine leaning (ML) service provider called Snoogle, a name so far out there it couldn’t possibly refer to any real company.

Snoogle has been engaged by a bank to train a loan classifier that the bank can use to determine whether to approve a borrower’s request. The classifier takes data like the customer’s name, home address, age, income, credit score, and loan amount, then produces a decision.

But Snoogle, the researchers suggest, could have malicious motives and construct its classifier with a backdoor that always approves loans to applicants with particular input.

“Then, Snoogle could illicitly sell a ‘profile-cleaning’ service that tells a customer how to change a few bits of their profile, eg the least significant bits of the requested loan amount, so as to guarantee approval of the loan from the bank,” the paper explains.

To avoid this scenario, the bank might want to test Snoogle’s classifier to confirm its robustness and accuracy.

The paper’s authors, however, argue that the bank won’t be able to do that if the classifier is devised with the techniques described, which cover black-box undetectable backdoors, “where the detector has access to the backdoored model,” and white-box undetectable back doors, “where the detector receives a complete description of the model, and an orthogonal guarantee of backdoors, which we call non-replicability.”

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It’s a variant on the “inside job” method of embedding something in some computer code that will only be activated by the magic keystrokes – which feels like a familiar enough film trope. Except this way there’s no way to audit the code for all the possibilities.
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4,000,000m lessons from my ebike • ongoing

Tim Bray has done 4,000 kilometres (not a misprint) on his ebike, and offers some reasons why they’re good, of which these are only the last three:

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It’s cheap: The bikes themselves are aren’t cheap. For the purposes of this piece, I poked around the landscape to pick out something that’s mid-range, well-reviewed, and from a manufacturer I have respect for: the Trek Verve+ 3. US$3,300 isn’t cheap for a bike. But it’s insanely cheaper than anything with four wheels that you’d want to drive, and the running costs are really too low to be worth measuring. I’ve had my bike for three years and a bit and the service charges, including repairs after a pretty bad accident (see below) and a couple upgrades, add up to less than $1,000.

It’s good for the city: Look, if you don’t see that a city with more bikes and less four-wheelers is a better city to live and work, there’s nothing I can say that’ll help you. But I will say this: Nobody wants to live in a house on a main road, but a house on one of our city’s main cycle paths would gain value.

It’s good for the planet: This is hardly in doubt, but I stumbled across a good quantitative write-up on the subject, from Britain: How green is cycling? Riding, walking, ebikes and driving ranked. I’m going to reproduce four of their summary bullet points, which widened my eyes, and encourage you to go read the whole piece.
– Cycling has a carbon footprint of about 21g of CO2 per kilometre. That’s less than walking or getting the bus and less than a tenth the emissions of driving
– About three-quarters of cycling’s greenhouse gas emissions occur when producing the extra food required to “fuel” cycling, while the rest comes from manufacturing the bicycle
– Electric bikes have an even lower carbon footprint than conventional bikes because fewer calories are burned per kilometre, despite the emissions from battery manufacturing and electricity use
– If cycling’s popularity in Britain increased six-fold (equivalent to returning to 1940s levels) and all this pedalling replaced driving, this could make a net reduction of 7.7-million tons of CO2 annually, equivalent to 6% of the UK’s transport emissions

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The point about cycling having been more popular back in the 1940s surprised me – but of course that’s just post-war. Cycling distances in the UK collapsed from ~14bn miles in 1950 to ~2bn in 1973, and have bumped along at comparatively the same level since then (driven by rising car ownership, of course). [See slides 10/11 of Cycling UK’s statistics.]

What could change that? Swingeing taxes on fuel-driven vehicles in urban spaces, for a start. More cycle lanes. And more affordable ebikes.
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The Climate Game: can you reach net zero? • Financial Times

Alexandra Heal, Sam Joiner and Leslie Hook:

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This game was created by the Financial Times. It is based on real science and reporting — however, it is a game, not a perfect simulation of the future.

The emissions modelling was developed in 2022 by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The scenarios used in the IEA’s “Net Zero by 2050” report were recalculated to track the temperature outcomes for specific pathways used in the game.

These climate outcomes were calculated using the IEA’s World Energy Model (WEM) and Energy Technology Perspectives (ETP) model coupled with the MAGICC v7+ climate model.

MAGICC stands for Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change and is used by scientists and integrated assessment models.

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This is an absorbing challenge, worth playing multiple times to see how you do with different accompaniments – one of the first choices you make it whether to partner with a teen activist, a specialist entrepreneur in new tech, a “businessman influencing global leaders”, or a politician “driving policy change”.

As Alex Hern pointed out in a Twitter thread, the game sweeps you along and elides the embedded assumptions both about what you can do and what you should do. In that sense, it’s like any game (why can’t the knight move like a queen in chess? Because it just can’t), and of course like SimCity – though this is much more centrist in its embrace of taxation, investment and reward.

Anyhow, I kept warming to 1.4ºC, so my application to be Global Climate Tzar is in the post. Don’t make me come knocking on your door about those halogen lights in your kitchen.
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You call it “inflation,” i call it a “dying planet” • Eudaimonia and Co

umair haque:

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It’s been a few years, and if you’ve been paying attention to things like commodities prices — and why would you if you’re a normal person, because, well, you’ve got a life to live — they’ve generally been rising. They’ve been rising because harvests have been failing. Everything from coffee to sugar harvests to wheat crops have been failing over the last few years.

And that is because we live on a dying planet. This is an effect of climate change. Everybody in power is pretending to ignore this, by the way, in the way that these things go. Imagine a conversation between two investment bankers, or a Prime Minister and his Economic Advisors. “Hey, Steve, do you know why the harvests of everything are beginning to fail? Hmm, it almost seems like there’s a pattern here!” “Why, sir. It’s just a coincidence! A run of bad luck, if you will! Statistics prove that if you spin a roulette wheel a million times, well, you’ll lose ten times in a row sometimes!! It’s pure chance!!” “What a relief! You mean it has nothing to do with, say, us turning the planet into an inhabitable garbage fire made of microplastics and radioactive billionaire dust?” “Nothing to do with that at all!!”

This is how idiotic our leaders actually are. It doesn’t take a genius to understand the following relationship. As the temperature rises, harvests will begin to fail. That is because formerly temperate zones begin to turn tropical or even desertify. Their water tables fail, the soil turns arid, and the ecosystems supporting crops and grains and so forth begin to wither. That is exactly what is happening to us on the highest economic level. We’re at about 1 degree and something of climate change — that’s all — but we’re already a planet where harvests are beginning to fail.

And as harvests fail, obviously, prices began to explode. For food. For everything that depends on food, like labour. For all the byproducts of our food systems, like biodiesel and so forth. For commodities in general, because mining too, gets a lot harder as temperatures rise.

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Without wanting to minimise the reality of global heating (newsflash: it’s bad), this feels a little overblown. The UN World Food Programme doesn’t seem to show a lot of harvest failures, while Haque’s link doesn’t actually give data of more crop failures. And some land will become usable for agriculture that wasn’t before.
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We must pay the cost of carbon if we are to cut it • Tim Harford

Harford considers how the price and weight of drinks cans has fallen (the latter from 80g in the mid-20th century to 13g now):

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A better product, for less money — that is the way the free market tends to work. But not necessarily. What incentive does the drinks maker have to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from the manufacture of the drink — for example, by using renewable energy in refining the aluminium? Not much. The main incentive would be if renewable energy were cheaper. The carbon dioxide emissions are hardly a consideration for a profit-seeking firm. And, as the consumer, you have a keen interest in the price and the quality of the drink. But the carbon emissions? Any worries you might have are rather vague. How would you even know which soft drinks produce low emissions? Even if you did care, other customers might not.

That, then, is the externality problem: a seller makes a product, a consumer buys the product, but the greenhouse gas emissions associated with that product are of no real concern to either of them. An army of designers, engineers and technologists may be deployed to shave a fraction of a penny off the cost of producing each product — but reducing carbon dioxide emissions is an afterthought.

So what can be done? There is some room for consumer pressure: we all want to feel that we are doing something to help. But consumer pressure only goes so far: we may have only a faint idea of products are doing the most harm to the environment, or where the easiest improvements can be made. Some products attract a lot of attention, while others fly under the radar.

Policymakers could directly regulate the market. That can work for some large and obvious sectors of the economy — for example, we know that coal is a source of energy that produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide, so policymakers could ban the use of coal-fired power stations. Another straightforward regulation is to require more energy-efficient cars or washing machines.

Governments can also try to fund innovations that might solve the problem, from battery charging to low-energy lighting. But these efforts only go so far. Tempting as it is to think of the transition to a clean economy as a huge leap, it is in fact a trillion tiny steps — the steps that each of us take, many times a day, all around the world, when we decide how to live and what to buy. In each of these trillion steps is an externality: a cost borne not by the buyer or the seller of a product, but by all of humanity now and in the future. And, unless we can eliminate a trillion little externalities, we are unlikely to solve the problem.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. About time too.

The UK government is proposing to allow self-driving cars to do limited driving on motorways. Odd, because cars with that capability are already here and driving around. CC-licensed photo by Edsel Little on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not on autopilot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Self-driving car users could watch films on motorway under new DfT proposals • The Guardian

Tobi Thomas:

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Users of self-driving cars will be able to watch films on the motorway under planned changes to the Highway Code, although it will remain illegal to use mobile phones.

The update, proposed by the Department for Transport (DfT), will allow those in the driver’s seat to use a car’s built-in screens to watch movies and TV programmes.

The new rules also state that insurance companies will be financially liable, rather than individual motorists, for accidents in self-driving cars.

However, those behind the wheel must be ready to resume control of the vehicle when they are prompted – such as when they approach motorway exits. These measures were described as an interim measure by the government to support the early deployment of self-driving vehicles.

Although there are no vehicles currently approved for self-driving on roads in the UK, the first could be approved later this year. The introduction of the technology is likely to begin with vehicles travelling at slow speeds on motorways, such as in congested traffic.

In April 2021, the DfT said it would allow hands-free driving in vehicles with lane-keeping technology on congested motorways. Existing technology, including cruise control and automatic stop/start, is classified as being “assistive”, meaning that users must remain fully in control.

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This is weird. Tesla cars (and others) can already do automatic lane-keeping with adaptive cruise control so they stay a specified time/distance from the car in front. They’ll do it at a lot faster than 37mph too. And can you watch TV on your mobile phone? If not, why not?

Tesla meanwhile has more than 100,000 people trying its “Full Self-Driving” beta program. Wonder if any of them encounters roundabouts – surely the last thing that FSD will be able to solve, given the ambiguity of intention and subtle dance it implies.
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The Twitter account that collects awkward, amusing writing • The New Yorker

Naaman Zhou:

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I first encountered Second Mentions in 2017, when I was working as a reporter in Sydney, Australia. News writing, by necessity, brings you up against repetition as an occupational hazard, and the account was shown to me by an editor, who shared it with a self-aware, nerdy, professional glee. The account tracks the ways that writers strive to express the same thing differently, with examples taken mostly from newspapers and magazines around the world. (A “second mention”—also known as a second reference—is the account’s name for these ways of avoiding repetition.) Take, for example, Adele, who is frequently “the singer Adele” on first mention, and then maybe “the Tottenham soul-pop titan” on second mention. Cheese, if you are saying “cheese” too much, can be “the popular dairy product.” A “pair of armadillos,” who, for some reason, were put on a diet? “The oval-shaped duo.” The account is addictively funny, and its discoveries are—variously—charming, insane, perfect.

Some greatest hits: the Times of London describing “tea” as “the bitter brown infusion.” The Guardian describing a fox who ran onto a soccer field as “the four-legged interloper.” The New York Times describing Grumpy Cat, the Internet meme, as “the sourpuss with the piercing look of contempt.” (In the cat’s obituary, no less.) Even this magazine, last year, describing electric scooters as “the long-necked, flat-bottomed machines.”

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Though Zhou points to a real reason why one avoids repetition, as a journalist one just absorbs the necessity to do so through a sort of osmosis. And then you turn out either to be good or bad at it.
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US Treasury sanctions Russian bitcoin miners • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

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According to data from Cambridge University, Russia is the world’s third-biggest destination for bitcoin mining.

“By operating vast server farms that sell virtual currency mining capacity internationally, these companies help Russia monetize its natural resources,” Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson said in a news release released early Wednesday afternoon.

“Russia has a comparative advantage in crypto mining due to energy resources and a cold climate. However, mining companies rely on imported computer equipment and fiat payments, which makes them vulnerable to sanctions,” continued the statement.

The US views income from the crypto mining industry as a potential threat to the efficacy of its sanctions regime, with the Treasury saying that it is committed to ensuring that no asset becomes a mechanism for the Putin regime to offset the impact of sanctions.

Among the companies targeted by US sanctions is BitRiver, which was founded in 2017, and as the name implies, operates its mining farms with hydroelectric power. The mining firm employs over 200 full-time staff in three offices across Russia, according to its website.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control has singled out 10 Russia-based subsidiaries of BitRiver in its most recent raft of sanctions on businesses and individuals helping Russia soften the blow of economic penalties.

…The IMF notes that the share of mining in sanctioned countries is “relatively contained.” It estimates that the monthly average of all bitcoin mining revenues last year was about $1.4bn, of which Russian miners could have captured close to 11% and Iranian miners 3%.

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If – big if – the US can block exports of GPUs and other computing kit to BitRiver, it might have an impact in six months or so.
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Energy Vault loses $1.2bn/40% market cap, CO2e/kWh worse than natural gas • CleanTechnica

Michael Barnard:

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while I haven’t specifically torn apart Carbon Capture, it’s just another direct air capture solution, requiring absurd amounts of manufactured materials and energy to separate 415 ppm of CO2 from the air. As I calculated while assessing Carbon Engineering, an alternative technology which is also funded by the crowd around Bill Gates, you have to filter a Houston Astrodome’s worth of air to get a ton of CO2. Similarly, all the air in the Grand Canyon contains only 1,270 tons of CO2. The Canyon’s volume is 1.67 billion cubic metres.

Getting up a to a million tons of CO2 a year would require two kilometers of 20-metre high, 8-metre thick fans running 24/7/365 for 0.0025% of annual CO2 emissions, and 0.0001% of the historical problem. As this isn’t about Carbon Capture, I’ll just say that Carbon Engineering’s solution is only fit for enhanced oil recovery using unmarketable natural gas, which is exactly what it’s doing in the Permian Basin with Oxy. The natural markets for direct air capture are capturing governmental funding, oil and gas greenwashing, and enhanced oil recovery, none of which merit investment in 2022.

And now there is Energy Vault, making Gross’ contribution to climate solutions a trifecta of challenges.

The initial concept was terribly silly in obvious ways, which didn’t prevent a lot of money from being thrown at it. It involved cranes picking up big concrete blocks and stacking them in an increasingly high circle around the cranes to store energy and lowering them back down to the ground again to release energy. It was the concept and prototype I first looked at and then ignored as it wasn’t worth my time to debunk it.

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Now he does go on to debunk it. Gravitational storage, using blocks of objects rather than water, turns out to be a terrible, bad, no good idea.

Useful to see how much air you need to process to capture CO2. This makes it clear that “carbon capture” using anything other than natural processes, or some amazing chemistry, isn’t going to work.
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You can’t police offence • UnHerd

Kathleen Stock, who gets a fair dollop of online (and offline) abuse, isn’t impressed by the proposals in the Online Harms Bill:

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Following scrutiny from the Joint Committee, the Bill — which received its second reading in the Commons yesterday — takes recent Law Commission proposals to introduce a “harm-based” communications offence, and places a duty of care on internet providers and websites to restrict content which meets the definition of this proposed offence, give or take a few tweaks. Specifically, they will be required to restrict any content where there’s a “real and substantial risk that it would cause harm to a likely audience”, the sender “intended to cause harm to a likely audience”, and the sender has “no reasonable excuse for sending the message”. Harm is defined as “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress”. What counts as a “likely audience” comprises whichever individual is reasonably foreseen as encountering that content.

The flaws here were also present within the Law Commission proposals that inspired the Bill. Take the criterion of “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress”. As many have noted — though apparently not in Westminster — concepts such as “psychological harm” and “distress” are moving targets, semantically speaking, in the sense that the sort of thing they refer to changes over time. For instance, in a society whose primary concern is with the alleviation of negative experience, concepts associated with negative experiences tend to expand their semantic range and become increasingly diluted. So for instance, over time, the category of “abuse” has moved beyond physical events to include emotional ones as well; and the category of “trauma” has extended from atypically catastrophic life events to relatively common happenings like childbirth and bereavement.

At first glance, “experts discover new form of trauma!” looks reassuringly scientific, a bit like “experts discover new kind of dinosaur!”. But whereas the existence of a dinosaur is completely independent of the activities of the experts who discover it, this is not the case with trauma.

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On the day this appeared, a man was given a suspended 10-week jail sentence for sharing a video in 2018 of a bonfire in which he’d burnt a model of Grenfell Tower (which caught fire, killing multiple people, in 2017) and made remarks like “that’s what happens when you don’t pay the rent”.

Unfunny? Sure. Offensive? Sure. Worthy of a prison sentence? Not by any reasonable definition. He was acquitted once, and the government appealed and that was quashed. Then they tried again.
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How DALL-E 2 actually works • AssemblyAI

Ryan O’Connor is the Developer Educator at OpenAI:

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OpenAI’s groundbreaking model DALL-E 2 hit the scene at the beginning of the month, setting a new bar for image generation and manipulation. With only short text prompt, DALL-E 2 can generate completely new images that combine distinct and unrelated objects in semantically plausible ways, like the images below which were generated by entering the prompt “a bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art”.

DALL-E 2 can even modify existing images, create variations of images that maintain their salient features, and interpolate between two input images. DALL-E 2’s impressive results have many wondering exactly how such a powerful model works under the hood.

In this article, we will take an in-depth look at how DALL-E 2 manages to create such astounding images like those above. Plenty of background information will be given and the explanation levels will run the gamut, so this article is suitable for readers at several levels of Machine Learning experience. Let’s dive in!

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The water’s very deep – it includes a concept called a “diffusion model” which is “a thermodynamics-inspired invention” which learns to generate data by reversing a gradual noising process. Got it?

But DALL-E 2 (as in WALL-E, but for Drawing) has impressed lots of people.
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Brave’s De-AMP feature bypasses ‘harmful’ Google AMP pages • The Verge

David Pierce:

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Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website. “Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether,” Brave said in a blog post. “And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from being loaded and executed.”

Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn’t mince words about its stance toward Google’s version of the web. “In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large,” Brave’s blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users’ browsing habits, confuses users, and can often be slower than normal web pages. And it warned that the next version of AMP — so far just called AMP 2.0 — will be even worse.

Brave’s stance is a particularly strong one, but the tide has turned hard against AMP over the last couple of years.

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Not going to have a measurable effect, but as a PR gesture it gets great visibility.
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Cladder

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How to play:

🕵️‍♂️ You have 60 seconds to solve all 10 clues

1️⃣ Change 1 letter from the previous word to get the answer

🙅‍♀️ You are not penalized for incorrect guesses

⏭ You have 1 skip (costs 5 seconds)

🕛 New puzzle at midnight

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So FANG is followed by BANG is followed by BANK is followed by TANK etc. It’s quite fun, if your daily Wordle leaves you a little short.
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Netflix explores a version with ads as subscriber base shrinks • WSJ

Joe Flint and Denny Jacob:

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The move is a significant change for a company that has sold itself since its inception as a commercial-free haven for its members. Netflix is grappling with slowing revenue growth caused by stiffer competition from rival services and rampant account sharing among its customers.

In a Tuesday analyst interview to discuss the company’s first quarter-results, Netflix chairman and co-chief executive Reed Hastings said an ad-supported version of Netflix makes a lot of sense.

“Those who have followed Netflix know that I’ve been against the complexity of advertising and a big fan of the simplicity of subscription,” Mr. Hastings said. “But as much as I’m a fan of that, I’m a bigger fan of consumer choice.”

Netflix earlier in the day said it ended the first quarter with 200,000 fewer subscribers than it had in the fourth, missing on its own projection of adding 2.5 million customers in the period. Netflix said it expected to lose two million global subscribers in the current quarter.

Netflix shares were 25% lower in after-hours trading. Through Tuesday’s close, the stock has declined by more than 40% so far this year.

…Netflix warned that gains made during the Covid-19 pandemic hid the fault lines that have emerged in its business over the past few years. “Covid clouded the picture by significantly increasing our growth in 2020, leading us to believe that most of our slowing growth in 2021 was due to the Covid pull forward,” the company said in its letter.

…Although Netflix has several hit shows including “Stranger Things,” “Bridgerton” and “The Crown,” the service has also had its fair share of expensive flops recently including “Jupiter’s Legacy” and “Space Force.”

“We need to have an ‘Adam Project’ and a ‘Bridgerton’ every month,” said Co-Chief Executive and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos during the analyst interview.

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The question is whether the existence of a (lower) tier that has ads would lead people to downgrade (and would that be revenue-neutral?) or would sully the brand, which has been ad-free, in contrast to US TV.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: The Ethernet wiring you want for properly high-speed internet is Cat6a, not 6e (thanks @Cinemaworks).

More than 100 million households are watching Netflix accounts using shared passwords, the company says. CC-licensed photo by jekneejeknee on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Netflix says 100 million+ non-paying households use shared passwords • Variety

Todd Spangler:

»

There’s a whole lot of password-sharing going on across Netflix’s customer base — and the streaming giant is eager to pocket a big chunk of change from the freeloading masses.

In reporting a huge subscriber miss — with a net loss of 200,000 for Q1 and a projected drop of 2 million for the second quarter — Netflix said that members who are sharing their login credentials outside the home are contributing to its slowing growth in 2021. The company estimated that legitimate Netflix passwords are being shared in violation of its rules with more than 100 million non-paying households worldwide, including over 30 million in the US and Canada alone.

“Account sharing as a percentage of our paying membership hasn’t changed much over the years, but, coupled with [the slowing pace of broadband and connected TV adoption] means it’s harder to grow membership in many markets — an issue that was obscured by our COVID growth,” Netflix said in its letter to shareholders.

Netflix said it is focused on “how best to monetize sharing,” calling it “a big opportunity as these households are already watching Netflix and enjoying our service.”

Last month, Netflix announced the launch of tests in three Latin America countries (Chile, Costa Rica and Peru) to address password sharing. Customers are able to add up to two Extra Member accounts for about $2-$3/month each, on top of their regular monthly fee. According to estimates by Wall Street firm Cowen & Co., if Netflix rolls the program out globally, it could reap an incremental $1.6bn in global revenue annually.

«

This is going to move up the agenda pretty quickly. The North American customers in particular seem like they could be the low-hanging fruit: if Netflix moves to crack down on password sharing, it’s not as if it has lost money, because the original account is still there. Expect lots of argument, just like in the days of CDs/downloads and piracy, about whether this is a revenue-loser for Netflix or not.

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If fibre is blazing fast, why is your home network still slow? Here’s how to fix it • WSJ

Nicole Nguyen:

»

When setting up your connection, your internet service provider installs a little box, called an optical network terminal.

…The router [from your ISP] and cables you choose could slow you down. Look for text printed on the side of your Ethernet cable. You’ll need at least a Category 5e cable (abbreviated as “Cat 5e”), which supports a gigabit connection for up to 100 meters, said Dane Jasper, chief executive of Sonic, an independent internet-service company in Northern California. (It is also my fiber broadband provider.)

Category 6e cables can support even faster multi-gigabit connections at longer lengths. If you’re looking to future-proof your house, he advises deploying Cat 6e cable. Monoprice is a good source for budget-friendly cables in a variety of colors.

Your router also needs to support high speeds. Visit the manufacturer’s website and look for “gigabit” in the model’s name or description. If not, you’ll need a new one. (More on that below.) Also, if you are relying on equipment from your service provider, you should consider buying your own, which could be better, and even cheaper over time.

The most reliable way to get the fastest internet possible? Connect your device to Ethernet. You can check your speeds at speedtest.net.

When my laptop is connected to Wi-Fi and I’m sitting right under my gigabit-capable Eero Pro 6 router, my best download speeds are up to 600 megabits per second. Uploads peak around 320 Mbps. But with an Ethernet cord, both are much closer to the one-gigabit target.

For devices that don’t move around your home but are in fixed locations, use Ethernet, Mr. Jasper said. This includes TVs, game consoles or the computer at your desk.

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The Cat 6e point is worth bearing in mind – lots of the cables you get won’t be anywhere near that.
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Leaked “shill price list” shows wild world of crypto promos • Vice

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Jordan Pearson and Jason Koebler:

»

On Monday, an independent researcher who exposes hacks and scams in the world of crypto published a purported list of influencers and how much they charge to “shill” crypto projects on Twitter. The list quickly went viral, starting a conversation about how essentially any cryptocurrency project can simply pay influencers to retweet or promote their projects to hundreds of thousands or millions of people on social media. 

The spreadsheet includes dozens of influencers including current and former professional athletes and Lindsay Lohan, many with tens of thousands of followers and in some cases verified accounts. Motherboard reviewed the Twitter feeds of dozens of the accounts on the list, and many of them claim in their profiles that they promote crypto projects. Some of them say, specifically, that they “shill” crypto. Some of them are self-claimed “crypto promoters” or “crypto influencers.” Many have contact info for paid partnerships or promotions. Others don’t, and even advise that their tweets are “not financial advice.” 

All of the accounts Motherboard reviewed regularly promote obscure coins, NFTs, and other cryptocurrency projects.

The prices on the list vary. According to the spreadsheet, retweets are less expensive than “shill tweets.” There is also a column for “package deal” which includes two shill tweets and a retweet. Prices generally range from a few hundred dollars for a retweet to as much as $25,000 for a shill tweet from Lohan. The spreadsheet is also selling a shill tweet from “all accounts” for $80,000.

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Betcha they get paid in real actual money like the kind they accept down at the cornershop, though.
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2015: ‘Out of my mouth comes unimpeachable manly truth’ • The New York Times

In 2015, Gary Shteyngart (a former Russian) embarked on an experiment:

»

For the next week, I will subsist almost entirely on a diet of state-controlled Russian television, piped in from three Apple laptops onto three 55-inch Samsung monitors in a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. (If I have to imbibe the TV diet of the common Russian man, I will at least live in the style of one of his overlords.) Two of the monitors are perched directly in front of my bed, with just enough space for a room-service cart to squeeze in, and the third hangs from a wall to my right. The setup looks like the trading floor of a very small hedge fund or the mission control of a poor nation’s space program. But I will not be monitoring an astronaut’s progress through the void. In a sense, I am the one leaving the planet behind.

I will stay put in my 600-square-foot luxury cage, except for a few reprieves, and will watch TV during all my waking hours. I can entertain visitors, as long as the machines stay on. Each morning I will be allowed a walk to the New York Health & Racquet Club on West 56th Street for a long swim. Vladimir Putin reportedly takes a two-hour swim every morning to clear his head and plot the affairs of state. Without annexing Connecticut or trying to defend a collapsing currency, I will be just like him, minus the famous nude torso on horseback.

Ninety% of Russians, according to the Levada Center, an independent research firm, get their news primarily from television. Middle-aged and older people who were formed by the Soviet system and those who live outside Moscow and St. Petersburg are particularly devoted TV watchers. Two of the main channels — Channel 1 and Rossiya 1 — are state-owned. The third, NTV, is nominally independent but is controlled by Gazprom-Media, a subsidiary of the giant energy company that is all but a government ministry. Executives from all three companies regularly meet with Kremlin officials.

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A warning: it’s not short. But it is entertaining.
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Distractions plague UK’s post-Brexit tech plan • POLITICO

Annabelle Dickson, Vincent Manancourt and Samuel Stolton:

»

The EU’s Digital Markets Act, Brussels’ own answer to anti-competitive abuses by the world’s largest technology platforms, was recently adopted by the EU institutions. Pursuing more of a broad-brush approach, the new EU rules roll out a series of prohibitions and obligations for some of the world’s largest tech platforms, including the likes of Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon. However, it will likely be early 2024 before platforms will be forced to comply with the rules.

In the UK, the digital [DCMS] and business [BEIS] departments, which are jointly responsible for the plan, are still locked in discussions with Johnson’s inner circle about when a digital competition bill will go through parliament, according to two officials familiar with the discussions.

Even if an announcement is made next month, officials fear it could be 2023 before MPs actually legislate.

No. 10 wants another piece of legislation, the digital department’s media bill which allows for the sale of publicly-owned broadcaster Channel 4, to be given priority, according to one official privy to discussions.

The sale of the channel is being seen by some as an unnecessary distraction designed to appease Tory MPs furious about lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street at the height of the pandemic. Even the Conservative chair of the digital committee in the U.K. parliament, Julian Knight, questioned whether the government’s proposed sale of Channel 4 was being done in an act of “revenge” for “biased coverage” of Brexit.

“A delay to the competition bill would matter,” said Ben Greenstone, a former senior official in the digital department who now runs the consultancy Taso Advisory. 

“If we accept that there is a desire to have a post-Brexit tech strategy, I think you can’t have said ‘we’re bringing forward all these world leading pieces of legislation on content, competition and data,’ and then pull your punches on competition just after the EU has landed theirs. It is a remarkably bad look.”

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It’s all so, so far away. The Online Harms Bill almost certainly won’t get Royal Assent before 2023. They only have two problems: they don’t know what they want to do, and don’t know how to do it.
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The inevitability of connecting everything • Terence Eden’s Blog

The aforesaid Eden:

»

About a million years ago, my undergraduate dissertation was on Ubiquitous Computing. I (foolishly) took out a section about a smart toilet-roll-holder which automatically ordered more paper as it was getting low. And a smart toilet which called the cops after detecting illicit substances in the user’s urine.

Adding sensors and transmitting that data is cheap. For all the jokes about WiFi fridges – I’d quite like my dishwasher to send me a push notification when it is done. And, yeah, I wouldn’t mind if it ordered new salt and rinse-aid when it is running low.

An ultrasonic sensor in my recycling bin’s lid would let me know that I shouldn’t bother going outside because the bin is already full. It could even form a mesh network with the other bins to let the refuse collectors know how busy they’ll be each morning. Perhaps it would refuse to open if I tried to add something which didn’t have an RFID chip indicating its recyclablility.

Digital photo frames with a built in lens could do facial recognition of the person looking at the photo – and can then display the photos best tuned to them.

Shoes which know how many miles you’ve walked – and can discreetly alert you to foot odour.

A jacket which has a large flexible display to show people what cool music your phone is sending to your headphones. And a camera on the back to snap photos of people who are checking out your arse.

A sensor in your stomach that tells you that it was last night’s leftovers which gave you gas.

A sensor in your belt that tells you your bladder capacity isn’t sufficient for the rest of the movie you’re watching.

Paving stones which report footfall – and light your way back to your car. You follow the yellow-brick road, I’m following the pulsing polka-dots.

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He’s got a few more, and they’re both spooky and logical. Always assuming, of course, that the servers for the sensors keep working. On which topic…
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Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users’ smart homes • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

The smart home company Insteon has vanished.

The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users’ cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, “All Services Online”. The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.

As Internet of Things reporter Stacey Higginbotham points out, high-ranking Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts. In the time it took to write this article, Lilleness also removed his name and picture from his LinkedIn profile. It seems like that is the most communication longtime Insteon customers are going to get.

Insteon is (or, more likely, “was”) a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon’s propriety networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee. Insteon’s “unique and patented dual-mesh technology” used both a 900 MHz wireless protocol and powerline networking, which the company said created a more reliable network than wireless alone. The Insteon Hub would bridge all your gear to the Internet and enable use of the Insteon app.

Insteon technically has a parent company, Smartlabs Inc., though Smartlabs and Insteon seem to share the same executives. Smartlabs Inc. owns the website smarthome.com, which primarily sells Insteon equipment, and it actually licenses the Nokia name for “Nokia Smart Lighting,” which just seems to be rebranded Insteon equipment.

«

Time for a law where companies that go bust have to open source their code? Though you’d still need some sort of server system in this case. Recall how Wink shifted abruptly to a subscription service in July 2020, having been free, which displeased a lot of people.

The smart home pool seems to be drying up.
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China’s costly exceptionalism • The Atlantic

Michael Schuman:

»

That the communist party is willing to cause a humanitarian crisis in the name of preventing a humanitarian crisis says a lot about the motivations behind its zero-COVID policy. The fact is, the government has real and legitimate concerns about what might happen without it. China still has more than 50 million residents over 60 who are not fully vaccinated and are therefore especially vulnerable in an uncontrolled outbreak. Loosening up would risk quickly overwhelming the health-care system, which is ill-equipped for a raging pandemic: China has only one-sixth the intensive-care-unit capacity of the US and less than one-fifth the number of nurses on a per-capita basis, according to a January report by Morgan Stanley.

Signs of strain are apparent in Shanghai. Videos purportedly of a children’s COVID ward that emerged on Chinese social media showed sick babies stacked up in cribs with a handful of obviously harried adults attempting to care for them. Under such conditions, the possibility that COVID, if unchecked, could kill millions in China is very real.

Xi compounded this already grim situation with his pursuit of Chinese exceptionalism. To promote China’s technology, and along with it global influence, Beijing chose to vaccinate its population with only homemade jabs. The Chinese vaccines are based on older technology than Western competitors’ and are known to be less effective, especially against the more recent coronavirus variants. A study by two Hong Kong universities released in December showed that even three shots of China’s popular Sinovac vaccine were insufficient to protect against the Omicron variant. Xi thus left his population undervaccinated and vulnerable, and it was clearly political. Fosun Pharma, a major Chinese drugmaker, could have manufactured the more effective BioNTech vaccine for China as part of a partnership with the German firm, and planned to build a factory large enough to churn out 1 billion doses annually. Fosun distributed the BioNTech vaccine in Hong Kong, but Beijing’s regulators never approved it for use on the mainland.

Vaccines are not a cure-all, as we’ve seen around the world. But a better-vaccinated populace might have allowed Xi more flexibility on managing COVID policy. Instead, he finds himself shutting down major business and industrial centers in an already sagging economy. No less a figure than the premier, Li Keqiang, has issued repeated warnings about the risks to economic growth in recent days. Political threats lurk here too.

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I’m reminded of War Of The Worlds, where human efforts come to naught, but the microbes conquer those who think they’ve got all the weapons.
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“Please someone help me.” FaceTime users bombarded with group call spam • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

FaceTime users are getting bombarded with group calls from numbers they’ve never seen before, often as many as 20 times in short succession during late hours of the night.

Griefers behind the pranks call as many as 31 numbers at a time. When a person receiving one of the calls hangs up, a different number will immediately call back. FaceTime doesn’t have the ability to accept only FaceTime calls coming from people in the user’s address book. It also requires that all numbers in a group call must be manually blocked for the call to be stopped.

“I got my first facetime spam starting 4 days ago,” one user reported to an Apple support forum earlier this month. “It has been non-stop, over 300 numbers blocked so far. My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on.”

The high volume of callbacks appears to be the result of other people receiving the call dialing everyone back when the initial call fails shortly after answering. As more and more people receive follow-on calls, they too begin making callbacks.

Apple provides surprisingly few ways for users to stop the nuisance calls. As noted earlier, users can block numbers, but this requires manually blocking each individual person on the group call. That’s not an effective solution for people receiving dozens of group calls, often to a different group of people in a short period of time, often in the wee hours.

A user can also turn off FaceTime in iOS settings or in the macOS app, but that prevents users from receiving wanted calls as well. Last, people can uncheck their phone number under the FaceTime setting “where you can be reached.” Once again, however, this will prevent wanted calls that are initiated using the user’s number.

As the Apple support thread above shows, the nuisance group calls date back at least to last year and have persisted nonstop since then.

«

Wonder if Apple will fix this in a hurry, or slow-walk it for a fix some time much later this year (everything for the next big iOS release will already have been picked by now, with WWDC only two months away). Meanwhile Google hasn’t figured out how to stop spammy Google Drive “notifications”. And talking of spam..

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Americans are drowning in spam • Axios

Margaret Harding McGill and Sara Fischer:

»

The average American received roughly 42 spam texts just in the month of March, according to new data from RoboKiller, an app that blocks spam calls and texts.

Spammers like using text messages because of their high open rates — and are now even mimicking targets’ own phone numbers to get them to click malicious links, the New York Times reported.
What they’re saying: “Just like with robocalls, it’s extremely easy to deploy [spam texts] in enormous volume and hide your identity,” Will Maxson, assistant director of the FTC’s division of marketing practices, told Axios.

“There’s a large number of actors all over the world trying to squeeze spam into the network from almost an infinite number of entry points all the time.”

It’s not just texts. Every form of spam is on the rise.

• There were more spam calls last month than in any of the previous six months, per YouMail’s Robocall Index
• Spam emails rose by 30% from 2020 to 2021, according to a January report from the Washington Post
• There was an unprecedented increase in social media scams last year, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Many scams were related to bogus cryptocurrency investments.

Experts attribute the sharp increase in spam to the pandemic. People’s increased reliance on digital communications turned them into ready targets.

The Federal Communications Commission saw a nearly 146% increase in the number of complaints about unwanted text messages in 2020. And it’s working: Americans reported losing $131m to fraud schemes initiated by text in 2021, a jump over 50% from the year before, according to data from the FTC.

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Seems like the plan to prevent phone number spoofing isn’t going that well, then.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Citizenlab said that “a device connected to the No.10 office network” was infected with the Pegasus spyware, but a subsequent investigation of the phones, including the Prime Minister’s, didn’t identify which one(s). Yesterday’s edition asserted that it was Johnson’s. We don’t know that for sure.

A few months after he went into hospital with Covid, Boris Johnson’s phone was hacked with NSO’s Pegasus software, apparently by the UAE. CC-licensed photo by Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution VenueSteam Pipe Trunk Distribution Venue 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. Back so soon? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

No 10 suspected of being target of NSO spyware attack, Boris Johnson ‘told’ • The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

»

A report released by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said the United Arab Emirates was suspected of orchestrating spyware attacks on No 10 in 2020 and 2021.

Pegasus is the hacking software – or spyware – developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by the Israeli firm NSO Group. It has the capability to infect phones running either iOS or Android operating systems.

Citizen Lab added there had also been suspected attacks on the Foreign Office over the same two years that were also associated with Pegasus operators linked to the UAE – as well as India, Cyprus and Jordan.

The researchers, considered among the world’s leading experts in detecting digital attacks, announced they had taken the rare step of notifying Whitehall of the attack as it “believes that our actions can reduce harm”.

However, they were not able to identify the specific individuals within No 10 and the Foreign Office who are suspected of having been hacked.

In a statement, Citizen Lab said: “We confirm that in 2020 and 2021 we observed and notified the government of the United Kingdom of multiple suspected instances of Pegasus spyware infections within official UK networks. These included: the prime minister’s office (10 Downing Street) [and] the Foreign and Commonwealth Office …

“The suspected infections relating to the FCO were associated with Pegasus operators that we link to the UAE, India, Cyprus and Jordan. The suspected infection at the UK prime minister’s office was associated with a Pegasus operator we link to the UAE.”

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Johnson was most recently in UAE in March, asking for more oil and gas. Doubt this topic came up. His phone number was available on the internet for 15 years. It would be astonishing if the UAE was the only country that was hacking him and his associates.
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How democracies spy on their citizens • The New Yorker

Ronan Farrow:

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NSO Group is perhaps the most successful, controversial, and influential firm in a generation of Israeli startups that have made the country the center of the spyware industry. I first interviewed Shalev Hulio, NSO Group’s C.E.O., in 2019, and since then I have had access to NSO Group’s staff, offices, and technology.

The company is in a state of contradiction and crisis. Its programmers speak with pride about the use of their software in criminal investigations—NSO claims that Pegasus is sold only to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies—but also of the illicit thrill of compromising technology platforms. The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars.

But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to US law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO.

The company said in its statement that it had been “targeted by a number of politically motivated advocacy organizations, many with well-known anti-Israel biases,” and added that “we have repeatedly cooperated with governmental investigations, where credible allegations merit, and have learned from each of these findings and reports, and improved the safeguards in our technologies.”

Hulio told me, “I never imagined in my life that this company would be so famous. . . . I never imagined that we would be so successful.” He paused. “And I never imagined that it would be so controversial.”

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Might have wanted to be a bit more careful about the client list there, buddy. Farrow’s story includes the detail about the No.10 hack. He’s the journalist, you’ll recall, who got the story about Harvey Weinstein into print when multiple papers quailed. Didn’t go well for Weinstein afterwards. Wonder how it’s going to go for NSO Group now.
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Kamikaze drones in Russia’s war against Ukraine point to future “killer robots” • Last Week in AI

Andrey Kurenkov:

»

Concerns about Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), aka ‘Killer Robots’ that can participate in warfare without human control, have been expressed for decades. Many weapons today are semi-automated, but semi automated non-LAWS weapons are either “human-in-the-loop” – a human has to make the decision to use lethal force – or are “human-on-the-loop” – a human is supervising the system’s decisions and can override them in real time. In contrast, once deployed, LAWS could conceivably use AI to perceive targets, categorize them as enemies, and take lethal action against them without human involvement.

Unmanned drones and remotely controlled tanks have come into existence over the past decades, with drones being used extensively in the Russia-Ukraine War, but these are still fundamentally human controlled. However, drones that act as autonomous “loitering munitions,” meaning they fly over an area until they detect a target below them and then dive-bomb to hit it, have – in a few cases – possibly been used under AI control. In 2021, a UN report about the end of the second Syrian Civil War The Kargu-2 included the following quote:

»

Logistics convoys and retreating HAF were subsequently hunted down and remotely engaged by the unmanned combat aerial vehicles or the lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2 (see annex 30) and other loitering munitions. The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true “fire, forget and find” capability.

«

…It is only a matter of time until loitering munitions strike targets under AI control – particularly given that this may have already happened. Development of AI-powered weaponry has been a priority for Russia for years, including such capabilities for drones.

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You always thoughts killer robots would be on the ground, didn’t you? (I did.) Turns out, not at all.
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The future of the web is marketing copy generated by algorithms • WIRED

Tom Simonite:

»

Generating marketing lines has proven to be one of the first large-scale use cases for text-generation technology, which took a leap forward in 2020 when OpenAI announced the commercial version of GPT-3. [Copywriting service] Jasper alone claims more than 55,000 paying subscribers, and OpenAI says one competitor has more than 1 million users. WIRED counted 14 companies openly offering marketing tools that can generate content like blog posts, headlines, and press releases using OpenAI’s technology. Their users talk of algorithm-propelled writing as if it will quickly become as ubiquitous as automatic spell-checking.

“I’m a terrible writer, and this makes it a lot easier to put together relevant content for Google,” says Chris Chen, founder of InstaPainting, which uses a network of artists to turn photos into low-cost paintings. He uses a copywriting service called ContentEdge to help write pages on topics like how to commission portraits of pets. The service uses technology from OpenAI and IBM combined with in-house software and describes its product as “fast, affordable, and nearly human.”

ContentEdge, like many of its rivals, functions like a conventional online text editor but with added features you won’t find in Google Docs. In a sidebar, the software can suggest keywords needed to rank highly on Google for a chosen title. Clicking a button marked with a lightning bolt generates complete paragraphs or suggested outlines for an article from a title and a short summary. The text includes terms drawn from pages ranked highly by Google.

Chen likes the way the resulting paragraphs sometimes sprinkle in information drawn from the billions of words of online text used to train OpenAI’s algorithms. That it does so in ways that can be garbled or contradictory doesn’t faze him. “You shouldn’t use the output outright, but it’s a starting point to edit and does the boring work of researching things,” he says.

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Throw this forward 10 or 15 years, and do you think he’ll still have a job after some adversarial networks have been to work on the marketing copy Jasper produces?
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Back to the Future of Twitter • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

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This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter.

• First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure
• Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable
• Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial.

Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies.
• One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph
• The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterAppCo would contract with TwitterServiceCo to continue to receive access to the Twitter service and social graph; currently Twitter earns around $13/user/year in advertising, so you could imagine a price of say $7.50/user/year, or perhaps $0.75/user/month. TwitterAppCo would be free to pursue the same business model and moderation policies that Twitter is pursuing today (I can imagine Musk sticking with TwitterServiceCo, and the employees upset about said control being a part of TwitterAppCo).

However, that relationship would not be exclusive: TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would:
• Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph
• Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model)
• Implement their own moderation policy.

This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:
• Market competition would settle the question about whether or not stringent moderation is an important factor in success; some client experiences would be heavily moderated, and some wouldn’t be moderated at all
• The fact that everyone gets access to the same Twitter service and social graph solves the cold start problem for alternative networks; the reason why Twitter alternatives always fail is because Twitter’s network effect is so important
• TwitterServiceCo could wash its hands of difficult moderation decisions or tricky cultural issues; the U.S. might have a whole host of Twitter client options, while Europe might be more stringent, and India more stringent still. Heck, this model could even accommodate a highly-censored China client (although this is highly unlikely).

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It’s a radical, but in many ways sensible, suggestion. Twitter’s problem is that it just doesn’t monetise in its current form.
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Why does Elon Musk’s potential Twitter takeover scare the media so much? • Reason

Robby Soave:

»

More transparency would be a massive improvement: It’s critical for users to know why and how the platform decides to reward and punish certain tweets. The ultimate goal should be to devolve content moderation to users. Instead of Twitter deciding for users what it thinks they ought to see—what it thinks is dangerous, or true, or safe—the platform should give individuals more options to curate their Twitter experiences.

Musk appears to share this vision. Yet many progressive critics are acting as if him taking control of the company would be the most horrible thing to ever happen. Literally.

Here’s a Salon writer saying Elon Musk’s takeover could cause a death blow to the free world. [“If Elon Musk allows Trump back on Twitter, it will be a death blow to the free world. Trump’s Big Lie will spread like a virus. I discussed the danger of Trump’s Big Lie for Salon. Like Hitler’s Big Lie, it must not be normalised, lest fascism return” wrote Matthew Rozsa.]

Axios writes that Musk has gone into “full goblin mode” and is acting like a super villain.

City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis implied that Musk’s takeover would be akin to the rise of Nazi Germany. [“Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany”, Jarvis tweeted.]

These people are desperately scared by the mere possibility that a wealthy person with somewhat different politics—and a somewhat more favourable disposition to unfiltered speech—is going to tweak their favorite toy.

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Strange, isn’t it, how the people putting these views forward are always well-off white guys who live in America. I don’t see it coming from George Floyd’s relatives, say, though they’re a group who won some sort of benefit from social networks. Or from people in Ukraine or Russia.

I can tell Soave how Twitter decides to reward and punish certain tweets: the algorithm(s) look at how much engagement the tweets produce. Not much? Doesn’t get pushed further. A lot? Gets pushed. I explained this in Social Warming.

And Twitter did its own research which was published in December 2021: the algorithm amplifies right-wing, not left-wing [by American standards] content.
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Shanghai targets lockdown turning point by Wednesday, sources say • Reuters via CNBC

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Shanghai has set a target to stop the spread of Covid-19 outside of quarantined areas by Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter said, which would allow city to further ease its lockdown and start returning to normal life as public frustrations grow.

The target will require officials to accelerate Covid testing and the transfer of positive cases to quarantine centers, according to a speech by a local Communist Party official dated Saturday, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.

Ending community-level transmission has been a turning point for other Chinese localities that locked down, such as Shenzhen city which last month reopened public transport and let businesses go back to work shortly after achieving that target.

Shanghai has become the epicentre of China’s largest outbreak since the virus was first identified in Wuhan in late 2019, and has recorded more than 320,000 Covid infections since early March when its surge began.

Frustrated Shanghai residents have taken to social media to vent their anger at local authorities over difficulties sourcing food, lost income, separated families and poor conditions at central quarantine centres. Tensions have on occasion erupted into public protests or scuffles with police.

…China’s definition of “zero-Covid status at the community level” means that no new cases emerge outside quarantined areas.

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I still don’t see how this works, except by defining larger and larger quarantine centres, as seems to be happening. Omicron doesn’t care about your policies; remember, it’s as infectious as measles, and it spreads in the air. All you need is one slightly positive person and you’ve got a spreading event. China’s going to go through this again and again.
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Facebook Papers on Donald Trump, the 2020 Election, and Jan. 6 • Gizmodo

Dell Cameron, Shoshana Wodinsky and Mack DeGeurin:

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In the hours following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, employees at Facebook tasked with preventing “potential offline harm” found themselves under siege by a mob of a different sort. Reports of abusive content from users were flooding in. As one employee put it in an internal forum, many of the flagged posts “called for violence, suggested the overthrow of the government would be desirable, or otherwise voiced support for the protests.” The same day, Instagram employees reported that there were “no existing” protections against an onslaught of inciting content in places like the app’s list of most widely used hashtags.

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer called on his staff to “Hang in there.” In response, employees began to openly accuse the company of fomenting the insurrection. One wrote, “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”

“Schrep, employees are tired of ‘thoughts and prayers’ from leadership,” another response read. “We want action.”

Screenshots of Meta employees’ reactions to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were part of the Facebook Papers, a trove of documents that offer an unprecedented look inside the most powerful social media company in the world. The records were first provided to Congress last year by Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower, and later obtained by hundreds of journalists, including those at Gizmodo. Haugen testified before Congress about Facebook’s harms in October 2021.

“We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”
As part of an ongoing project to make these once-confidential records accessible to the general public, Gizmodo is today—for the first time—publishing 28 of the documents previously exclusively shared with Congress and the media. Meta declined to comment on the release. 

We have undertaken this project to help better inform the public about Facebook’s role in a wide range of controversies, as well as to provide researchers with access to materials that we hope will advance general knowledge of social media’s role in modern history’s most troubling crises. Less than two weeks after Donald Trump’s mob attacked the Capitol, the results of a poll commissioned by Facebook itself showed what already felt anecdotally true to many: that a majority of Americans believed Facebook at least partly responsible for the events of Jan. 6.

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Gizmodo is working with a number of academics. The link of the responses to Schroepfer shows that some in Facebook were heartily sick of inaction. (Note too that for its internal discussion, Facebook uses.. Facebook.)
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Alex Jones’ InfoWars files for bankruptcy in US court • Reuters

Reuters Staff:

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Far-right wing website InfoWars on Sunday filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas in the face of multiple defamation lawsuits.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy procedures put a hold on all civil litigation matters and allow companies to prepare turnaround plans while remaining operational.

Alex Jones, founder of InfoWars, was found liable for damages in a trio of lawsuits last year filed after he falsely claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax.

Jones claimed the shooting, in which 20 children and six school employees were shot dead at the school in Newtown, Connecticut, was fabricated by gun-control advocates and mainstream media.

Sandy Hook families in late March rejected Jones’ offer to settle their defamation lawsuit and reopened the case. Jones had offered to pay $120,000 to each of the 13 plaintiffs to settle the case.

Each of the plaintiffs turned down the settlement offer in court documents, saying, “The so-called offer is a transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.”

According to Sunday’s court filings, InfoWars listed its estimated assets in the range of $0-$50,000 and estimated liabilities in the range of $1m to $10m.

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This is a transparent attempt to evade all consequence for the lies he told. I hope they’re suing him personally as well: making him, not just the company, bankrupt would make a big difference.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: 1: Tim Harford is the undercover economist, not Hardford. 2: Monday’s illustration looked like a Zen garden, but was instead of a frozen puddle with some rocks. Hope this didn’t disrupt your meditation.

Contemplate the meaning of a Zen garden. It’s much deeper than just gravel and stones. CC-licensed photo by Thomas Quine 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 8 links for you. Still quite Musk-y by the end. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Attacker drains $182m from Beanstalk Stablecoin Protocol • Coindesk

Sam Kesdsler:

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According to the summary, the attacker took out a flash loan on lending platform Aave which enabled them to amass a large amount of Beanstalk’s native governance token, Stalk. With the voting power granted by these Stalk tokens, the attacker was able to quickly pass a malicious governance proposal that drained all protocol funds into a private Ethereum wallet.

Project leads wrote in the attack summary:

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“Beanstalk did not use a flash loan resistant measure to determine the % of Stalk that had voted in favor of the BIP. This was the fault that allowed the hacker to exploit Beanstalk.”

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Beanstalk’s smart contracts were audited by the blockchain security firm Omnicia. However, the audit was completed before the introduction of the flash loan vulnerability, the firm said in a Sunday post-mortem.

Beanstalk declined to provide details to CoinDesk regarding whether funds would be reimbursed to users, saying more news will be coming in a town hall event scheduled for Sunday. According to PeckShield, the attacker appeared to donate $250,000 of the stolen funds to a Ukrainian relief wallet.

This is the latest in a string of major decentralized finance (DeFi) exploits to occur in the past few weeks. In March, Axie Infinity’s Ronin Blockchain was exploited for $625m in an attack that US officials have linked to North Korea.

«

Pause for long deep sigh, and eyeroll.

It says that the market for the coin dropped by 86% from its “$1 peg”, so 14c – so does that mean that the attacker got $182m or $29m? Peckshield, a “blockchain security firm” (?), says the attacker got away with “at least $80m in crypto”, which might be rather less in actual money.
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Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet. Is it? • The Verge

Nilay Patel (who, it’s worth noting, is an ex-lawyer who specialised in copyright), interviews the partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which has poured real money into “web3” companies:

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NP: Why do we think the NFT blockchain scenario here is going to be more successful and lucrative than a music service that connects people directly to artists at high levels for MP3s?

CD: Well, I think there are two things with NFTs. One, I do think architecturally it is very different from other objects on the internet, in the sense that most objects are controlled by an application and NFTs are controlled by users. It switches the polarity, and I think that is important. As we see the rise of Web3 gaming, you will see a whole different class of things where people own characters and other kinds of objects that they can take across different experiences. Instead of it being contained in an app, it is contained at the user level. There is an architectural aspect, and there is a social aspect. Why do people value wearing fashion — like Supreme T-shirts — or cars? A lot of value in the world is about showing that you are early to something, that you are high-status, and that you have great taste.

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That last sentence, to me, shows that Dixon has a horribly shallow concept of what “value” is. He’s mistaking a false “prestige” with something timeless and far deeper. It’s a long interview, but I feel that Patel exposes the contradictions of Dixon’s position multiple times.
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The pandemic was supposed to push all shopping online. It didn’t • WSJ

Peter Rudegeair, Charity Scott and Sebastian Herrera:

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Even as pandemic restrictions end, and many people continue working and watching movies at home, stores are mounting a comeback. E-commerce companies that were counting on a broad secular shift are now facing slowdowns, and the prospect of expensive investments in bricks-and-mortar retailing while speeding up delivery times.

It turns out there are limits to buying stuff on screens. Foot traffic to malls and bricks-and-mortar stores has rebounded since vaccines and booster shots became widely available and the worst waves of the virus receded. Sales slowed at many digital storefronts specializing in apparel, home furnishings and other categories where many consumers prefer to see in-person and touch what they are buying.

“We’ve got over 100 years as a society of going into a store to buy something,” Bernstein Research analyst Mark Shmulik said. “That muscle memory doesn’t just switch off because you were forced to buy things online a couple of times during a pandemic.”

Data suggests consumers are finding a new balance between online and in-person shopping. In the second quarter of 2020, as stay-at-home measures were in place, the share of US retail sales that happened online surged more than four percentage points to 15.7%, according to Census Bureau data adjusted for seasonal factors. By the fourth quarter of 2021, that share had dropped to 12.9%, putting consumer buying habits roughly back to their prepandemic trend.

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The graph of e-commerce as a percentage of retail sales shows a vertical spike at the start of 2020, which has abruptly dropped off and, as they say, returned to the trend line – which is, however, still growing.
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The meaning behind the Japanese Zen garden • BBC Culture

Steve John Powell and Angeles Marin Cabello:

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The first time you visit a Zen garden, it’s hard to avoid a sense of awe at the mesmerising sight of the immaculately raked gravel – in wavy lines, straight lines or concentric circles – broken only by a handful of rocks, perhaps a shrub or two or a clump of moss, but definitely no flowers. Intuitively, you know you’re in the presence of something profound and powerful, designed “to give the viewer that smack in the face that must happen before reflection intervenes,” as painter Joan Miró said about art, according to the book Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting (MoMA). After reflection does intervene, you’re left with the question – just what does it mean?

Intrigued by the idea that a garden could be something that needs to be understood, rather than simply viewed for pleasure, we resolved to find out exactly what the sekitei are trying to tell us. We’d heard some say they represent islands floating in the ocean. Others claim they are 3D versions of traditional Chinese ink drawings of jagged mountain landscapes. Still others reckon that they symbolise something far deeper, mystical even. DT Suzuki (1870-1966) – Japan’s foremost Zen authority – maintained that Japanese gardens express the spirit of Zen.

Puzzled by these conflicting accounts, and driven by a Western obsession with rational explanations, we visited Saizoji, our local Zen temple in Hiroshima, which has its own splendid, raked gravel garden. The head priest came out to greet us. We talked a little about how much work was involved in maintaining the gravel. But when we asked him to elucidate on the garden’s meaning, he sighed, smiled, and said, “It’s not something you can explain. You have to experience it.”

We next asked Reina Ikeda, a graduate of Kyoto’s University of Foreign Studies. Kyoto after all is home to some of Japan’s most beautiful gardens, the ones Steve Jobs referred to as “the most sublime thing I’ve ever seen”. The most famous, and most visited of these is the gravel and rock mindscape at Ryoanji Temple.

“The meaning of Ryoanji’s garden is still a mystery,” says Ikeda. “There are 15 rocks in the garden, but you can see only 14 of them at a time – whichever angle you look from. The number 15 means ‘perfect’ in Oriental culture. The number 14 means ‘imperfect’. For Japanese people, it’s beautiful precisely because it’s not perfect. This idea is called wabi-sabi.”

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What excess mortality tells us about the COVID-19 pandemic • NY Mag

David Wallace-Wells on a new paper examining excess deaths (the most reliable indicator of how Covid has affected countries), country by country:

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In the country-by-country data, the divergences grow even bigger. Perhaps most striking, given both self-flagellating American narratives about the pandemic and current events elsewhere on the globe, is that the worst-hit large country in the world was not the US, which registered the most official deaths of any country but ranks 47th in per capita excess mortality, or Britain, which ranks 85th, or even India, which ranks 36th. It is Russia, which has lost, The Economist estimates, between 1.2 million and 1.3 million citizens over the course of the pandemic, a mortality rate more than twice as high as the American one.

Russia is not an outlier. While we have heard again and again in the US about the experience of the pandemic in western Europe — sometimes in admiration, sometimes to mock — it has been eastern Europe that, of any region in the world, has the ugliest excess-mortality data. This, then, is where the pandemic hit hardest — in the countries of the old Warsaw Pact and formerly of the Soviet bloc. In fact, of the ten worst-performing countries, only one is outside eastern Europe. The world’s worst pandemic, according to the data, has been in Bulgaria, followed by Serbia, North Macedonia, and Russia, then Lithuania, Bosnia, Belarus, Georgia, Romania, and Sudan. (Have you read much about pandemic policy in any of these countries?) Peru, which had what is often described as the most brutal pandemic in the world, ranks 11th — with the smallest gap, among those countries with the most devastating pandemics, between the official Covid data and the estimated excess mortality.

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Russia’s population is – was – 141 million, so the suggestion I’ve seen that the war in Ukraine was started to try to make up for that loss doesn’t quite make sense. But it does point to tensions that might be felt by those in charge as they try to plot their futures.
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Musk or not, Twitter’s CEO needs to go • On my Om

Om Malik:

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Twitter is a poorly run, underperforming company. 

And if you view it from that lens, the $54.20 share offer is good. It suggests that 6x revenue multiple and 28x EBITDA on 2023 estimates. In rejecting this offer, Twitter’s management and board believe that it can grow its user base and build new revenue avenues. I have my doubts. 

The company has shown negligible growth — it added a mere 6m monetizable daily active Twitter users during the fourth quarter of 2021 to bring the total to 217m. Somehow the company forecasts that it will magically reach 315 million monetizable daily actives and hit revenues of $7.5bn in 2023. It seems to be a herculean task — unless something changes drastically. 

Of the total 217m, a mere 38m of Twitter’s mDAUs are in the U.S. — a figure that has been essentially flat for over a year. For the year, Twitter had revenues of $5.08bn and lost $221m.

As a comparison, Snap had 319m daily active users, up by 13m during the comparable timeframe. Snap has 97m daily active users in the US.

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The US accounts for more than half of Twitter’s revenues, Malik points out. Which only goes to emphasise what a strangely unbalanced system advertising creates, given that Twitter’s value is as a worldwide communications system.
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If Elon buys Twitter, he’s in for a world of pain • Thread Reader App

Yishan Wong is a former CEO of Reddit:

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I’ve now been asked multiple times for my take on Elon’s offer for Twitter.

So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private. (I have little knowledge/insight into how actual takeover battles work or play out)

(long 🧵)
I think if Elon takes over Twitter, he is in for a world of pain. He has no idea.

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This is a fantastically informative thread about all it takes to moderate a social network, and what the main source of the problem is: the users. (In its way, it’s very much Social Warming in miniature.)
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Elon Musk demonstrates how little he understands about content moderation • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

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Lots of talk on Thursday as Elon Musk made a hostile takeover bid for all of Twitter. This was always a possibility, and one that we discussed before in looking at how little Musk seemed to understand about free speech. But soon after the bid was made public, Musk went on stage at TED to be interviewed by Chris Anderson and spoke more about his thoughts on Twitter and content moderation.

It’s worth watching, though mostly for how it shows how very, very little Musk understands about all of this. Indeed, what struck me about his views is how much they sound like what the techies who originally created social media said in the early days. And here’s the important bit: all of them eventually learned that their simplistic belief in how things should work does not work in reality and have spent the past few decades trying to iterate. And Musk ignores all of that while (somewhat hilariously) suggesting that all of those things can be figured out eventually, despite all of the hard work many, many overworked and underpaid people have been doing figuring exactly that out, only to be told by Musk he’s sure they’re doing it wrong.

Because these posts tend to attract very, very angry people who are very, very sure of themselves on this topic they have no experience with, I’d ask that before any of you scream in the comments, please read all of Prof. Kate Klonick’s seminal paper on the history of content moderation and free speech called The New Governors. It is difficult to take seriously anyone on this topic who is not aware of the history.

But, just for fun, let’s go through what Musk said.

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As you’d expect, and I agree, Masnick is unimpressed. Musk really talked a lot of rubbish.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified