When do you think we’ll reach our peak use of agricultural land – in five years, 10 or 20? Or could the story be more complicated? CC-licensed photo by Ian SaneIan Sane 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. Out of office yet? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary? • The Guardian

Patrick Collinson:

»

When my 87-year-old mother, Patricia Collinson, was given an Alexa speaker by my sister, she was delighted to find she could ask it to say the Hail Mary. Every morning for a week the devout Catholic asked Alexa to recite the prayer.

What she was less delighted to learn was that she had unwittingly ordered a premium subscription payable through Amazon to a private company called Catholic Prayers.

Patricia, a retired district nurse in Hastings, does not own a computer, and does not know how to use one. She had signed up by voice command, without being presented with the kind of outline or terms and conditions that now comes as standard when you pay for things online.

Her experience throws a spotlight on a relatively new phenomenon, Alexa “skills”. Launched in the UK in 2016, these are the voice service’s version of apps. There are 45,000 in the UK, which range from security offerings (such as enabling your Alexa to hear breaking glass or a smoke alarm) through to recipe ideas and even “send a hug” services.

Although they are usually free to order verbally over Amazon’s Alexa, many also encourage in-app purchases – which can be made simply by saying “yes”.

Patricia says that at no point did she understand she was making a purchase or entering into a subscription.

“I got into the habit most mornings of coming downstairs, sitting in my recliner and saying: ‘Good morning, Alexa. Can you say the Hail Mary please,’” she says.

“It never asked for money. It never said it was charging me. It was completely news to me.”

The Alexa was set up by my sister, Catherine, and is attached to her Amazon account. She spotted an unusual email from the retailer, which said: “Order confirmation. Your payment has been processed and your subscription term has started.”

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I saw this story in the paper and it stopped me cold. This is a very weird outgrowth of Alexa “skills”. Skilled at emptying your pocket?
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After millennia of agricultural expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’ • Our World in Data

Hannah Ritchie:

»

Agricultural land is the total of arable land that is used to grow crops, and pasture used to raise livestock.

Measuring exactly how much land we use for agriculture is difficult. If all farms were simply rows of densely-planted crops it would be straightforward to calculate how much land is being used. Just draw a square around the field and calculate its area. But across much of the world, this is not how farming looks: it’s often low-density; mixed in with rural villages; in tiny smallholdings that are somewhere between a garden and a farm. Where farmland starts and ends is not always clear-cut.

As a result, there are a range of estimates for how much land is used for agriculture. 

Here I have brought together the three leading analyses on the change in global land use – these are shown in the visualization [with the article]. Each uses a different methodology, as explained in the chart. The UN FAO produces the bedrock data for each of these analyses from 1961 onwards; however, the researchers apply their own methodologies on top, and extend this series further back in time.

As you can see, they disagree on how much land is used for agriculture, and the time at which land use peaked. But they do all agree that we have passed the peak. 

This marks a historic moment in humanity’s relationship to the planet; a crucial step in its protection of the world’s ecosystems.

It shows that the future of food production does not need to follow the destructive path that it did in the past. If we continue on this path we will be able to restore space for the planet’s wilderness and wildlife.

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Do hope someone tells the Amazon rainforest, or more usefully Brazil’s politicians. The “peak” seems to have been some time around 1990-2000, which is a surprise.
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Molly White is becoming the crypto world’s biggest critic • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck:

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A 28-year-old software engineer who writes Wikipedia articles for fun, White is an odd figure to make the crypto industry cower. On her website, “Web3 is Going Just Great,” White documents case after case of crypto malfeasance: investments that turn out to be scams, poorly-run projects that collapse under mismanagement and hacks that drain supporters’ money.

As much of the financial and tech elite has rallied around crypto, White has led a small but scrappy group of skeptics pushing the other way whose warnings have seemed vindicated by the cratering in recent weeks of cryptocurrency prices.

“Most of my disdain is reserved for the big players who are marketing this to a mainstream audience as though it’s an investment, often promising to be a ticket out of a really tough financial spot for people who don’t have many options,” White said. “It’s very predatory.”

To White and her fellow critics, crypto company founders and the venture capitalists backing them are presiding over a massive, unregulated attempt to rid regular people of their money by exaggerating the potential of crypto technology. Years spent online, researching esoteric Internet cultures have made White a rare figure who can maneuver the technically complex, meme-filled world of crypto, translating it into digestible prose.

White works from her home in Massachusetts, which she shares with two cats and a 70-pound pandemic puppy. She sports a youthful uniform of jeans, sweaters and Converse sneakers and communicates with her fellow crypto skeptics through Zoom and Twitter direct messages. She’s declined several offers to speak at in-person conferences, citing the time commitment.

As more people begin to question cryptomania, White’s prominence has grown: Journalists call her to gut-check stories, and she has lectured for students at Stanford University and provided advice to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on potential crypto legislation.

«

The headline makes it sound slightly as though she’s just disdainful. In reality, she’s impartial in her approach to writing up these scams. Like many, she’s willing to listen to the claims that *this time* there’s a really good use for blockchain. But she’s also a little angry that people keep being ripped off.
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Misinformation and professional news on largely unmoderated platforms: the case of Telegram • Tandfonline

Aliaksandr Herasimenka et al:

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To date, there is little research to measure the scale of misinformation and understand how it spreads on largely unmoderated platforms. Our analysis of 200,000 Telegram posts demonstrates that links to known sources of misleading information are shared more often than links to professional news content, but the former stays confined to relatively few channels. We conclude that, contrary to popular received wisdom, the audience for misinformation is not a general one, but a small and active community of users. Our study strengthens an empirical consensus regarding the spread of misinformation and expands it for the case of Telegram.

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So the good news is it’s only a small audience for misinformation, but the bad news is that they’re active. It’s a nuanced study, though; worth reading if this is a topic you’re into.
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How a cheap component could help kill off combustion cars • Reuters via Yahoo

Nick Carey and Christina Amann:

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The humble wire harness, a cheap component that bundles cables together, has become an unlikely scourge of the auto industry. Some predict it could hasten the downfall of combustion cars.

Supplies of the auto part were choked by the war in Ukraine, which is home to a significant chunk of the world’s production, with wire harnesses made there fitted in hundreds of thousands of new vehicles every year.

These low-tech and low-margin parts – made from wire, plastic and rubber with lots of low-cost manual labour – may not command the kudos of microchips and motors, yet cars can’t be built without them.

The supply crunch could accelerate the plans of some legacy auto firms to switch to a new generation of lighter, machine-made harnesses designed for electric vehicles, according to interviews with more than a dozen industry players and experts.

“This is just one more rationale for the industry to make the transition to electric quicker,” said Sam Fiorani, head of production forecasting firm AutoForecast Solutions.

«

Noble gases, wheat, now wire harnesses – is there anything Ukraine doesn’t make that the world doesn’t depend on?
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Apple’s RealityOS trademarked for deadline two days after WWDC • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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Apple’s RealityOS has appeared in a trademark filing with a deadline two days after WWDC, Apple’s yearly developer conference.

The filing was spotted by Vox Media’s Parker Ortolani. The listed applicant is ‘Realityo Systems LLC’, a company with no other public presence. Apple has in the past used the shell company ‘Yosemite Research LLC’ to file macOS update names, 9to5Mac reports – and Realityo Systems LLC is registered at the same address.

The existence of realityOS, or rOS, was first reported by Bloomberg all the way back in 2017. In 2021 Bloomberg, The Information, and supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo released reports claiming Apple is preparing to release a premium headset for VR and AR with high resolution color passthrough. Recent notes from Kuo claim this headset will weigh significantly less than Meta’s Quest 2, feature dual 4K OLED microdisplays, and use a new chip with “similar computing power as the M1 for Mac”.

In January iOS Developer Rens Verhoeven spotted a new platform “com.apple.platform.realityos” in the App Store app upload logs. Apple’s existing operating systems include iOS (com.apple.platform.iphoneos), iPadOS, watchOS (com.apple.platform.watchos), macOS, and tvOS.

In February, “award-winning git repository surgeon” Nicolás Álvarez spotted Apple committing code to its open source GitHub repository referencing ‘TARGET_FEATURE_REALITYOS’ and ‘realityOS_simulator’ – the latter likely a feature to allow developers without the headset to test building AR or VR applications. Álvarez said Apple quickly force-pushed the repo to try & hide the change, suggesting making this public was a mistake.

«

Growing amounts of noise, but no real clarity on what it will be like – unsurprisingly. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg said a few days ago that the headset had been demonstrated to the Apple board, but it still feels like now is not quite the time for this to go on sale. And Apple doesn’t do “developer kit”. Would it reveal a headset and then say “we’ll sell this next year”, as Google just did over its tablet? It did with the original Apple Watch, but that was going to consumers. Again, this doesn’t quite feel like the time for this product. Can’t explain why; just how the world feels.
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AGL’s coal implosion shows what a disorderly transition to clean energy looks like • The Guardian

Adam Morton:

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The spectacular implosion at AGL Energy, Australia’s biggest corporate greenhouse gas polluter, has been years in the making and should have ramifications across Australia’s political and business classes.

The short story is that this is what a disorderly transition to a clean economy looks like – the kind that we have long been warned will happen if governments don’t plan for the future.

AGL had planned to “demerge” itself into two separate companies, with one taking responsibility for more than 4.5 million retail customers and the other its electricity generators – notably, its three ageing coal-fired power plants, the last of which isn’t due to shut until 2045.

The retail business should have a bright future. The coal plants don’t. The idea was to separate them to boost the former by separating it from the declining value of the latter. AGL management said the split would “unlock value for shareholders”.

The demerger was due to go to a shareholder vote next month, and needed 75% support to pass. AGL management has now conceded it has no chance of reaching that, having been stymied by the software billionaire and renewable energy investor Mike Cannon-Brookes, who earlier this month took control of 11.3% of its shares.

Cannon-Brookes wants the company to stay as one, shut its coal plants by 2030 and spend up big on renewable energy and energy storage, arguing it is the best way to keep electricity prices down for consumers while turning a profit. He successfully made the case to enough major shareholders that a demerger would be, in his words, a “terrible outcome for shareholders, communities and the climate”.

«

A different sort of shareholder activism: extremely rich men who are *pro*-climate, taking action against inactivism. More of this please.
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Why regulators can’t stop Clearview AI • Time

Billy Perrigo:

»

In addition to the $9.4m fine, the U.K. regulator ordered Clearview to delete all data it collected from UK residents. That would ensure its system could no longer identify a picture of a UK user.

But it is not clear whether Clearview will pay the fine, nor comply with that order.

“As long as there are no international agreements, there is no way of enforcing things like what the ICO is trying to do,” [senior fellow for trustworthy AI at Mozilla, Abeba] Birhane says. “This is a clear case where you need a transnational agreement.”

It wasn’t the first time Clearview has been reprimanded by regulators. In February, Italy’s data protection agency fined the company 20 million euros ($21 million) and ordered the company to delete data on Italian residents. Similar orders have been filed by other EU data protection agencies, including in France. The French and Italian agencies did not respond to questions about whether the company has complied.

In an interview with TIME, the UK privacy regulator John Edwards said Clearview had informed his office that it cannot comply with his order to delete UK residents’ data. In an emailed statement, Clearview’s CEO Hoan Ton-That indicated that this was because the company has no way of knowing where people in the photos live. “It is impossible to determine the residency of a citizen from just a public photo from the open internet,” he said. “For example, a group photo posted publicly on social media or in a newspaper might not even include the names of the people in the photo, let alone any information that can determine with any level of certainty if that person is a resident of a particular country.” In response to TIME’s questions about whether the same applied to the rulings by the French and Italian agencies, Clearview’s spokesperson pointed back to Ton-That’s statement.

«

Clearview make clear that they don’t think the UK’s rules apply to them, so I guess the ICO can go whistle. But when it’s done in the US, it does listen. Maybe the ICO’s powers need to be upped from fines to prison sentences, with the ability to apply for extradition. That might concentrate minds.
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Substack’s founders dive headfirst into the culture wars • Vanity Fair

Joe Pompeo:

»

By late April, after the print version of this story was put to bed, [“Welcome to Hell World” writer Luke] O’Neil had had enough—he emailed me a link to a post explaining why he was leaving Substack for the rival startup Ghost: “I cannot emphasize strongly enough how little I want to take part in never mind be the subject of one single more conversation about ‘free speech’ on platforms and cancel culture or whatever.” [Paul] Carr, [Substack cofounder Hamish] McKenzie’s former PandoDaily editor, shared a series of emails he exchanged with McKenzie last year after Carr discontinued his Substack. “I get the free speech argument but there has to be a line. Surely,” Carr wrote. “I think you’ve hit upon the dilemma that’s at the center of everything right now: anti-vaxxing, violent sedition, abortion, gun control, trans rights and of course tech. At what point does someone’s right to free speech outweigh another’s right to live without fearing for their lives? At what point do people like you and me have a moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable from violent bullies?”

In early January, I was on a Zoom with McKenzie asking him about these very issues. I pulled up Substack’s content guidelines and noted that they prohibit hate, threats, violence, criminal behavior, doxing, plagiarism, even pornography. They don’t say anything about misinformation and disinformation. If Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are at least trying to moderate such content on their platforms, why not Substack?

“Our content guidelines protect the platform at the extremes while providing a high bar for intervention but also give us the ability to intervene when it’s necessary. I’m not going to say any more than that,” McKenzie replied. (He told me Substack had taken the step of deactivating accounts but wouldn’t specify how many times.) “Facebook and Twitter and others who are taking a harder-line approach to content moderation are more obliged to, because they’re amplification machines, because of the design of their systems. They are giving you news feeds that are sorted by content that is highly engaging. It encourages the production of this divisive content. These are the world’s most powerful machines ever to encourage the spread of disinformation, and so the burden of action on them is higher.”

«

An interesting argument: if you’re not amplifying, is it OK? (I think it probably is: nobody’s pushing Substacks with content you don’t like on you, just as you don’t have to read every columnist in the newspaper. With Substack’s model, you don’t even pay the columnist you disagree with.)
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There is no such thing as ‘data’ • Financial Times

Benedict Evans, in typically provocative-but-right mood:

»

There is no such thing as “data”, it isn’t worth anything, and it doesn’t belong to you anyway.

Most obviously, data is not one thing, but innumerable different collections of information, each of them specific to a particular application, that can’t be used for anything else.

For instance, Siemens has wind turbine telemetry and Transport for London has ticket swipes, and those aren’t interchangeable. You can’t use the turbine telemetry to plan a new bus route, and if you gave both sets of data to Google or Tencent, that wouldn’t help them build a better image recognition system.

This might seem trivial put so bluntly, but it points to the uselessness of very common assertions on the lines of “China has more data” — more of what data? Meituan delivers 50mn restaurant orders a day, and that lets it build a more efficient routing algorithm, but you can’t use that for a missile guidance system. You can’t even use it to build restaurant delivery in London. “Data” does not exist — there are merely many sets of data.

Of course, when people talk about data they mostly mean “your” data — your information and the things that you do on the internet, some of which is sifted, aggregated and deployed by technology companies. We want more privacy controls, but we also think we should have ownership of that data, wherever it is.

The trouble is, most of the meaning in “your” data is not in you but in all of the interactions with other people. What you post on Instagram means very little: the signal is in who liked your posts and what else they liked, in what you liked and who else liked it, and in who follows you, who else they follow and who follows them, and so on outwards in a mesh of interactions between millions of people.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When all the boomers die, who’s going to have their roomfuls and garages full of junk? CC-licensed photo by Orin Zebest on Flickr.

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

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

People saw stablecoins as a safe haven. They lost everything when Terra crashed • Rest of World

Leo Schwartz and Abubakar Idris:

»

Valeria makes around $300 a month selling prepared food from her home in Buenos Aires. The 47-year-old was nervous about keeping the money saved in Argentine pesos because of the country’s inflation rate, which passed an annualized 50% earlier this year. So she put more than $1,000 — all her savings, plus $500 her friend lent her to buy a new refrigerator — into TerraUSD (UST), a cryptocurrency stablecoin that was advertised as being pegged 1-to-1 with the U.S. dollar. 

Valeria, like others interviewed for this piece, is being identified by only her first name, to preserve her privacy.  

While cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have a reputation for volatility, stablecoins present a promise of security. Typically their prices are tied to a hard currency, like the U.S. dollar, or a commodity, like oil or precious metals. Some, like UST, can also be used to generate yields via protocols, such as Mars and Anchor, whereby users receive a variable or fixed interest rate when they deposit their stablecoins.

Valeria had spent months learning about UST before starting to invest in various protocols about four months ago. In mid-May, the stablecoin lost its peg, meaning that its value diverged from that of the dollar, and its price plunged to mere cents. Valeria watched her savings dwindle to zero, unable to remove the money from the protocols, which had blocked withdrawals. “I invested in a stablecoin that today is worth $0.08,” she told Rest of World. “I feel sickened and helpless.”

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This is the problem, isn’t it. You might completely avoid the risk of the fiat currency – or it might all go completely up in flames. There are plenty of other people quoted in the piece. The burden falls on the poor. And the attempt to reboot Luna has flopped too.
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Kelp is weirdly great at carbon removal • The Atlantic

Robinson Meyer:

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At least in theory, the ocean allows [the company Running Tide] to shortcut some of the hardest aspects of carbon removal. A direct-air-capture (DAC) plant needs to operate giant cooling-tower-like fans in order to suck air into its industrial machinery. The sloshing ocean, meanwhile, is always depositing new material onto the surface of the buoy [made of waste wood and kelp seedlings, which grow rapidly]. Likewise, a DAC plant ends its process by pumping extracted carbon deep into the bedrock. Running Tide doesn’t need to expend energy on that process: gravity and the current simply carry the waste wood and kelp to the bottom of the ocean.

So far, Running Tide has tested thousands of its buoys, although it estimates that they have removed less than 1,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere. It will conduct its largest release ever later this year, off the coast of Iceland.

Although Running Tide’s plan is promising, it’s hardly a sure bet. Scientifically, the company faces at least two major obstacles, David Ho, an oceanography professor at the University of Hawaii, told me. First, it’s not clear that all the carbon captured by kelp remains in the plant as it sinks to the seafloor. Second, the choppy, complicated way that the ocean and sea interact means that not all carbon absorbed by kelp actually comes out of the air. Perhaps only 40 of every 100 tons of carbon sequestered by kelp is actually removed from the atmosphere in the long term, a recent draft study has found. “They think they might have a way to figure out” how to beat those problems, but Ho said he doubted it.

What’s more impressive is how Running Tide approaches the carbon-removal problem as an organization. Right now, it costs $250 to remove a ton of carbon using its technology, which is at the low end of current carbon-removal approaches. For society’s purposes, that’s still way too high: The Department of Energy hopes to get carbon removal to less than $100 a ton by 2030.

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Surveillance tech didn’t stop the Uvalde school shooting • Gizmodo

Lucas Ropek:

»

how do you protect against something [school shootings] that often seems as pitiless and arbitrary as a bolt of lightning? For years, some have insisted that the best strategy is to adopt new security measures and invest in emergent surveillance technologies—the hope being that new products paired with hyper-vigilance will identify and stop the next shooter before he pulls the trigger.

The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD), of which Robb [Elementary School, at which 19 children and two teachers were shot dead] is a member, followed this conventional wisdom and embraced modern security solutions at its schools. Indeed, the district had actually doubled its security budget over the past several years to invest in a variety of recommended precautions.

According to UCISD’s security page, the district employed a safety management system from security vendor Raptor Technologies, designed to monitor school visitors and screen for dangerous individuals. It also used a social media monitoring solution, Social Sentinel, that sifted through children’s online lives to scan for signs of violent or suicidal ideation. Students could download an anti-bullying app (the STOP!T app) to report abusive peers, and an online portal at ucisd.net allowed parents and community members to submit reports of troubling behavior to administrators for further investigation.

As has been noted, UCISD also had its own police force, developed significant ties to the local police department, and had an emergency response plan. It even deployed “Threat Assessment Teams” that were scheduled to meet regularly to “identify, evaluate, classify and address threats or potential threats to school security.”

And yet, none of the new security measures seemed to matter much when a disturbed young man brought a legally purchased weapon to Robb and committed the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history. The perpetrator wasn’t a student and therefore couldn’t be monitored by its security systems.

«

As Ropek then points out, there is nevertheless no shortage of companies offering all sorts of bizarre solutions – “covert weapons scanners”, facial recognition – that obviously won’t solve a problem whose solution is staringly obvious, yet impossible in the US.
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The great junk transfer is coming. A look at the burden (and big business) of decluttering as Canadians inherit piles of their parents’ stuff • The Globe and Mail

Erin Anderssen:

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Over the next 10 years, Canadians will inherit an estimated $1 trillion – the largest transfer of wealth in history. But all those investment portfolios and real estate assets being passed on by aging parents will also come with piles and piles of stuff with nowhere to go.

The parents of baby boomers, the oldest generation alive today, were savers, having learned in the lean times of war and the Great Depression to treasure what they owned. Their children were consumers. Together, they will leave behind houses jammed with mahogany dining room sets, silver platters, crystal figurines and all manner of tchotchkes that their kids don’t want. And, even if they did want them, this Great Intergenerational Dump is happening just as millennials are facing a housing crisis, which will leave many of them either renting or living in much smaller homes. Grandma’s massive china cabinet is not going to fit.

So what’s the result? A booming business for junk companies willing to take it all away. An exponential growth in storage lockers that are never emptied. Endless Saturdays of garage sales, and trips to the landfill. An exhausting cycle of cluttering and decluttering. For every painting you’d fight your siblings for, there’s a Hummel collection – the one your parents said, “would be worth something someday” – that’s going in the garbage. Because, let’s be honest, we all already have too much stuff as it is.

Sorting, culling, and tossing all that “accumulation of life,” as the junk experts call it, makes for lucrative business. According to an investor presentation this month, Storage Vault, the country’s largest publicly traded storage business, went from owning 10 locations in 2014 to 197 in 2022 – with a combined capacity of 10.8 million square feet of space. The company’s share price has soared from 50 cents to more than $6. The association of Professional Organizers in Canada, which started in 1999 with 30 people, now has 600 members ready to help with the handwringing over those cherished Royal Doultons.

Five years ago, Deb Darbyshire, co-owner of the Calgary franchise of Just Junk, estimates that she’d get a call once a month from adult children looking for help cleaning out their parents’ home. Now, she picks up a new job roughly once a week. About one-quarter of the families tell her: “We don’t want any of it. Take it all.”

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It’s only when you deal with the death of a parent that you consider how much stuff they (and then you realise, you) accumulate. Trust the Swedish to have “death cleaning”, done well before death.
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GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor and provides financial assistance to patients in need • CloudSEK

»

GoodWill ransomware was identified by CloudSEK researchers in March 2022. As the threat group’s name suggests, the operators are allegedly interested in promoting social justice rather than conventional financial reasons. CloudSEK researchers have been able to identify the following features of GoodWill:
•
The ransomware is written in .NET and packed with UPX packers
•
It sleeps for 722.45 seconds to interfere with dynamic analysis
•
It leverages the AES_Encrypt function to encrypt, using the AES algorithm.

One of the strings is “GetCurrentCityAsync,” which tries to detect the geolocation of the infected device.
Once infected, the GoodWill ransomware worm encrypts documents, photos, videos, databases, and other important files and renders them inaccessible without the decryption key. The actors suggest that victims perform three socially driven activities in exchange for the decryption key:
Activity 1: Donate new clothes to the homeless, record the action, and post it on social media.

Activity 2: Take five less fortunate children to Dominos, Pizza Hut or KFC for a treat, take pictures and videos, and post them on social media.

Activity 3: Provide financial assistance to anyone who needs urgent medical attention but cannot afford it, at a nearby hospital, record audio, and share it with the operators.

The ransomware group demands that the victims record each activity and mandatorily post the images, videos, etc. on their social media accounts. Once all three activities are completed, the victims should also write a note on social media (Facebook or Instagram) on “How you transformed yourself into a kind human being by becoming a victim of a ransomware called GoodWill.”

Since there are no known victims/ targets for the ransomware group, their Tactics, Techniques and Procedures remain unknown.

«

Was quite excited there until we got to the “no known victims” bit. CloudSEK suggests this originated in India.
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Greece passes first climate law, vows to cut dependence on fossil fuels • Reuters via Yahoo

Angeliki Koutantou:

»

The legislation sets interim targets for Greece to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and by 80% by 2040 before achieving zero-net emissions by 2050.

It also engages the country to cut dependence on fossil fuels, including weaning off indigenous lignite or brown coal – once the main source of energy – in electricity production from 2028 onwards. This target might be brought forward to 2025, taking into account security of supplies.

“It’s an existential matter, a very important one, because it has to do with our lives, because it has to do with our children’s lives,” Energy Minister Kostas Skrekas told lawmakers before the vote.

“Is this just going to help protect the environment? Νο, it’s not. It also helps the country’s energy security.”

Greece is planning investments worth about 10 billion euros to expand its power grid by 2030, while it speeds up the development of renewables to more than double their share in electricity production.

The country, like many others, has been in the grip of rising prices for gas, electricity, fuel and food since last year, a trend that has been exacerbated by Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.

«

I get a feeling that fossil fuel energy prices aren’t going to come down for quite some time. And that investment in renewables is going to rocket.
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Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab • Unite.AI

Martin Anderson:

»

Sometime in the last two weeks, Google has quietly changed the terms of service for its Colab users, adding a stipulation that Colab services may no longer be used to train deepfakes.

The first web-archived version from the Internet Archive that features the deepfake ban was captured last Tuesday, the 24th May. The last captured version of the Colab FAQ that does not mention the ban was on the 14th May.

Of the two popular deepfake-creation distributions, DeepFaceLab (DFL) and FaceSwap, both of which are forks of the controversial and anonymous code posted to Reddit in 2017, only the more notorious DFL appears to have been directly targeted by the ban. According to deepfake developer ‘chervonij’ at the DFL Discord, running the software in Google Colab now produces a warning: “You may be executing code that is disallowed, and this may restrict your ability to use Colab in the future. Please note the prohibited actions specified in our FAQ.”

However, interestingly, the user is currently allowed to continue with the execution of the code.

According to a user in the Discord for rival distribution FaceSwap, that project’s code apparently does not yet trigger the warning, suggesting that code for DeepFaceLab (also the feeding architecture for real-time deepfake streaming implementation DeepFaceLive), by far the most dominant deepfakes method, has been specifically targeted by Colab.

FaceSwap co-lead developer Matt Tora commented:

»

“I find it very unlikely that Google are doing this for any particular ethical reasons, more that Colab’s raison d’être is for students/data scientists/researchers to be able to run computationally expensive GPU code in an easy and accessible manner, free of charge. However, I suspect that a not insignificant amount of users are exploiting this resource to create deepfake models, at scale, which is both computationally expensive and takes a not insignificant amount of training time to produce results.”

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Other details suggest this is applicable to paid users too. (Colab is a cloud system that allows remote training of machine learning systems on very powerful GPUs. Creating deepfakes on it could be simpler than trying to get hold of GPUs, which are like hen’s teeth right now.)
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The hype around DeepMind’s new AI model misses what’s actually cool about it • MIT Technology Review

Melissa Heikkilä:

»

Some technologists, including some at DeepMind, think that one day humans will develop “broader” AI systems that will be able to function as well as or even better than humans. Though some call this artificial general intelligence, others say it is like “belief in magic.“ Many top researchers, such as Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, question whether it is even possible at all.

Gato is a “generalist” in the sense that it can do many different things at the same time. But that is a world apart from a “general” AI that can meaningfully adapt to new tasks that are different from what the model was trained on, says MIT’s [assistant professor specialising in AI and natural-language and speech processing, Jacob] Andreas: “We’re still quite far from being able to do that.”

Making models bigger will also not address the issue that models don’t have “lifelong learning,” which would mean that if taught something once, they would understand all the implications and use it to inform all the other decisions they make, he says.

The hype around tools like Gato is harmful for the general development of AI, argues Emmanuel Kahembwe, an AI and robotics researcher and part of the Black in AI organization cofounded by Timnit Gebru. “There are many interesting topics that are left to the side, that are underfunded, that deserve more attention, but that’s not what the big tech companies and the bulk of researchers in such tech companies are interested in,” he says.

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Black Mirror returns: new series in the works at Netflix • Variety

Manori Ravindran:

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The new season of “Black Mirror” is the first to emerge since creator Charlie Brooker and his creative partner Annabel Jones left their production company House of Tomorrow, which was backed by Endemol Shine Group, in January 2020. It wasn’t long before the pair set up shop under new production banner Broke and Bones, and Netflix quickly invested in the company through a mega deal in which it acquires parts of the business over a five-year period, for a sum that could reach $100 million.

When Brooker and Jones left House of Tomorrow, however, the rights to “Black Mirror” stayed with parent company Endemol Shine Group, which was ultimately acquired by Banijay Group in the summer of 2020. That arrangement effectively prevented Brooker and Jones from producing any more seasons for Netflix until a deal was hammered out with Banijay, and fans worried that that would be the end of the show.

Brooker himself threw doubt on “Black Mirror’s” future two years ago, telling the U.K.’s Radio Times magazine at the height of the pandemic that, “At the moment, I don’t know what stomach there would be for stories about societies falling apart, so I’m not working away on one of those. I’m sort of keen to revisit my comic skill set, so I’ve been writing scripts aimed at making myself laugh.”

Evidently, a deal was finally reached, and Banijay Rights — the distribution arm of the company that holds both the format and finished-tape rights to “Black Mirror” — has licensed its hit show to Netflix.

«

Honestly, one has to wonder how feasible it will be to stay ahead of the curve; though Brooker and Jones have just about managed it (sometimes, as with Bandersnatch, by going back behind the curve).
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Google’s past failures were on full display at I/O 2022 • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Google held its I/O conference earlier this month, and for longtime Google watchers, the event felt like a seance. Google CEO Sundar Pichai stepped on stage for his keynote address and channeled the spirits of long-dead Google products. “I’m hearing… something about an Android tablet? And a smartwatch?” he seemed to say.

By my count, “resurrecting the past” accounted for around half of the company’s major announcements. In all of these cases, Google would be in a much stronger position if it had committed to a long-term plan and continuously iterated on that plan.

Unfortunately, the company doesn’t have that kind of top-down direction. Instead, for most of the resurrected products, Google is trying to catch up to competitors after years of standing still. There’s a question we have to ask for every announcement: “Will things be different this time?”

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This is a bit late, but it’s comprehensive. Amadeo, who is on the Google beat, is extremely hard to impress. He wasn’t impressed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Britain’s government announced a windfall tax on oil and gas producers – and may do the same for electricity generators. CC-licensed photo by Richard Child 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. Ready, steady, go. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The Buffalo attack is a reminder that mass surveillance doesn’t protect us • Jacobin

Branko Marcetic:

»

We know that under the NSA’s mass surveillance, the US government can look at almost everything you and I do on the Internet. We know the FBI has rampantly and illegally tapped into this database as part of its vast domestic spying operation often targeting black activists, partnering as well with private data brokers to amass a vast trove of geolocation and social media data on the US public. We know the CIA has its own legally dubious mass surveillance program that it’s operating at home. And we’ve just found out ICE has now become a de facto domestic spying agency through its access to the many, many public and business records we rack up in our daily lives. This is all really just the tip of the iceberg.

Yet once again, we have another horrific attack, this one in Buffalo where a white supremacist shot to death ten people just days after posting his racist manifesto online on Google Docs.

The devil’s bargain we were forced into demanded we trade away our privacy for the sake of security. Yet the massive database of intimate details about our lives that government agents can track and comb through seems yet again to have failed to guarantee the latter — even though this attacker had recently taunted and threatened law enforcement online and made threats to his school, prompting a visit from state police.

It’s a serious question about what purpose exactly mass surveillance programs serve. Take the NSA’s unfathomably vast mass surveillance system, for example. When the NSA’s spying powers were under threat following the Edward Snowden leaks, its former chief Keith Alexander famously claimed its surveillance had foiled fifty-four terrorist attacks, a claim soon uncritically repeated by a host of congresspeople and media outlets.

Yet when pressed, the only example the government would give of the program’s controversial phone metadata collection program actually being central to foiling a terrorist plot was that of a Somali cab driver in San Diego sending $8,500 to terrorist group al-Shabaab. Alexander soon admitted under oath that not all of those fifty-four plots were actually plots, they weren’t all thwarted, and only thirteen were actually connected to the United States.

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For clarity, Marcetic is writing about the previous mass shooting, which targeted black shoppers. The latest one targeted children. It’s hard to keep up.
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North Sea oil and gas producers hit back at Sunak’s £5bn windfall tax • Financial Times

George Parker, Nathalie Thomas, Chris Giles and Jim Pickard:

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After having repeatedly rejected Labour’s call for a windfall tax, Sunak announced a 25% “energy profit levy” that will increase the rate paid by North Sea producers from 40% to 65%, raising £5bn this year.

The chancellor caused dismay in the sector by announcing in the small print that the windfall tax would remain until December 2025 — unless oil and gas prices “return to historically more normal levels” in the meantime.

“Today’s announcement is not a one-off tax — it is a multiyear proposal,” BP said. “Naturally we will now need to look at the impact of both the new levy and the tax relief on our North Sea investment plans.”

One senior government figure said Bernard Looney, BP chief executive, was partly to blame for the move, after he said this month that a windfall levy would not affect his company’s investment plans.

The government official argued that Johnson felt he could no longer hold the line against a windfall tax after the BP boss’s comments. “It was a game-changer.”

Meanwhile the chancellor also said he was considering “appropriate steps” to target “extraordinary profits” made by electricity generators. A windfall tax on that sector could bring in a further £3bn-£4bn.

…Samuel Tombs of Pantheon Macroeconomics described the package as “hefty” and said it gave the Bank of England more reason to raise interest rates this year.

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Told you this was coming. You could see it on the way from space. But an interest rate rise would not be good news for anyone, given that this is not demand-driven inflation.
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DuckDuckGo browser allows Microsoft trackers due to search agreement • Bleeping Computer

Lawrence Abrams:

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DuckDuckGo is a search engine that prides itself on its privacy by not tracking your searches or your behaviour while performing searches. Furthermore, instead of building user profiles to display interest-based advertisements, DuckDuckGo will use contextual advertisements from partners, like Ads by Microsoft.

While DuckDuckGo does not store any personal identifiers with your search queries, Microsoft advertising may track your IP address and other information when clicking on an ad link for “accounting purposes” but it is not associated with a user advertising profile.

«

Included by popular request. I’m puzzled, though perhaps not surprised, by all the online noise about this. The tracking that everyone’s doing their nut about is not off the search engine – as the above makes clear. Instead, it’s in DDG’s separate, optional browser, which I’d wager only a tiny number of people use. If you click an advert in the search results, Microsoft gets some details, but it’s not for an advertising profile – Microsoft sold its ad business years ago.

Conclusion: not everything discovered by a security researcher is momentous.
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The quest for fusion energy • Inference

Daniel Jassby:

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In recent years, a steady flow of press releases from nuclear fusion research projects has hailed breakthrough advances and new record yields. Despite the relentlessly optimistic tone of these announcements and the repeated claims that the prospects for commercialization have never looked brighter, the stark reality is that practical fusion-based electric power remains a distant prospect. It is likely unachievable anytime in the next half a century.

Even then, it may still remain beyond our grasp.

…the fusion energy gain, Q, of a reacting plasma configuration is commonly described as the ratio of the fusion energy output released in a pulse, Ef, to the external heating energy deposited in the plasma during that pulse, Eh.

…Scientific feasibility, or fusion energy breakeven, is most often described as the demonstration of Q = 1 or greater. Net electric power production requires a Q of at least 5.

«

The best reported Q by “torus” fusion is perhaps 0.67. “Laser” systems which blast tiny pellets have perhaps produced Q = 3, but nobody’s quite sure, and it didn’t last.

I think this might be the last time I need to link to anything about fusion. (OK, it probably won’t be, but it should be.) Jassby is a retired research physicist who worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. We’re stuck with renewables and fission, it seems.
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Amazon Astro review: living with Amazon’s home robot • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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Amazon’sAmazon’s household robot is exactly what I expected, but it’s not what I wanted and it definitely isn’t what anyone asked for. Instead of a multitasking mimicry of me that can empty the dishwasher, pick up my kids’ shoes, feed the dog, and clean the house, Amazon’s first attempt at a home bot is simply a souped-up Echo Show on wheels.

Granted, the $1,449.99 (or $999.99 for early adopters who get invites for the chance to buy it) Astro has some impressive wheels, which let the 17-inch tall robot nimbly follow you around the house while playing music or streaming your favorite show. It also has two cameras that it uses to find people and places in your home to deliver items, reminders, or timers. It can act as a security guard and patrol your home when paired with a Ring subscription, and it can fart and burp. In short, the Astro does everything Amazon’s smart home products and services already do — only on wheels.

…Like a regular Echo smart display, you can ask Astro to play music, set timers, stream an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Hulu, lock the front door, or call mom for a video chat (Amazon’s own Alexa calling only — there’s no Zoom support). What’s different is that it can do all of these things on the move. As I’m roaming around the house picking up shoes, making dinner, and feeding the dog, the Astro can come with me, keeping me entertained or chatting to my mom on a video call. It was also surprisingly handy to have it roll up beside me when I was sitting on the couch, giving me easy access to music or movies on a hands-free, somewhat personal device.

But if you already have a few Echo speakers and displays in your home, the utility of one following you around is more novelty than necessity.

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A face search engine anyone can use is alarmingly accurate • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes offers a potentially dangerous superpower from the world of science fiction: the ability to search for a face, finding obscure photos that would otherwise have been as safe as the proverbial needle in the vast digital haystack of the internet.

A search takes mere seconds. You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists, with their consent, to test its powers.

PimEyes found photos of every person, some that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or their face was turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search.

PimEyes found one reporter dancing at an art museum event a decade ago, and crying after being proposed to, a photo that she didn’t particularly like but that the photographer had decided to use to advertise his business on Yelp. A tech reporter’s younger self was spotted in an awkward crush of fans at the Coachella music festival in 2011. A foreign correspondent appeared in countless wedding photos, evidently the life of every party, and in the blurry background of a photo taken of someone else at a Greek airport in 2019. A journalist’s past life in a rock band was unearthed, as was another’s preferred summer camp getaway.

Unlike Clearview AI, a similar facial recognition tool available only to law enforcement, PimEyes does not include results from social media sites. The sometimes surprising images that PimEyes surfaced came instead from news articles, wedding photography pages, review sites, blogs and pornography sites. Most of the matches for the dozen journalists’ faces were correct.

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All these powerful technologies are coming more and more into the realm of the everyday. And they’ll become routine for police forces and others. This genie is long out of the bottle.
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Twitter rescinded job offer points to turmoil as Musk deal nears • Bloomberg

Kurt Wagner:

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Last Thursday, a tech worker in Palo Alto woke up in the morning thinking that in just four days, he’d start his dream job. The man had recently accepted an offer from Twitter for a media partnerships position based out of an office in Mexico.

In preparation for the new gig, he quit his job in the Bay Area, gave up his Palo Alto lease and arranged six months of temporary housing in Mexico City. That afternoon he got a call from Twitter HR. He thought it was about the delivery of a new, company-issued laptop.

Instead, the Twitter rep told him his job offer was being rescinded due to the company’s “current situation.”

“My whole world just got destroyed in 25 seconds,” said the man, who asked not to be identified, citing concerns over future job prospects. “It wasn’t just any random job. I celebrated. I called my dad.” He said that before getting the offer, he had been applying to work at Twitter for years.

The “current situation” at Twitter is not good. The company is bracing for a takeover from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the service’s most polarizing user, whose $44bn deal to acquire the social media site was approved by the board but is still far from closing. In the interim, Musk has been openly criticizing Twitter’s product, its executives and its business. At times, it has looked like Musk wants to torpedo his own deal, and many Twitter employees have been publicly vocal about their disdain for the billionaire and his rabid followers.

…The man who accepted the Twitter position in Mexico was able to get his old job back from his previous employer, but he admitted that he’s still trying to “reshape” his life, which includes figuring out what to do with a six-month lease in another country.

“I told [Twitter’s] lawyers ‘don’t talk to me for the future. Don’t consider me for anything for the future,’” he said. “I don’t ever want to hear the word Twitter.”

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“Tough to forge” Australian digital driver’s license is… easy to forge • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Australia’s DDLs [digital driving licences] require an iOS or Android app that displays each person’s credentials. The same app allows police and venues to verify that the credentials are authentic. Features designed to confirm the ID is authentic and current include:

• Animated NSW Government logo
• Display of the last refreshed date and time
• A QR code expires and reloads
• A hologram that moves when the phone is tilted
• A watermark that matches the license photo
• Address details that don’t require scrolling.

The technique for overcoming these safeguards is surprisingly simple. The key is the ability to brute-force the PIN that encrypts the data. Since it’s only four digits long, there are only 10,000 possible combinations. Using publicly available scripts and a commodity computer, someone can learn the correct combination in a matter of a few minutes, as this video, showing the process on an iPhone, demonstrates.

Once a fraudster gets access to someone’s encrypted DDL license data—either with permission, by stealing a copy stored in an iPhone backup, or through remote compromise—the brute force gives them the ability to read and modify any of the data stored on the file.

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A four-digit encryption PIN in the 21st century? Four? Digits?
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NFT auctions from Beeple, Madonna flop amid crypto crash • NY Post

Lydia Moynihan:

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Last spring, the little-known crypto artist Beeple sold an NFT for an eye-popping $69m. This month, he revealed he’d been working with Madonna for a year to create a trio of racy NFTs that depicted the “Material Girl” giving birth to a tree, a centipede, and butterflies.

They sold for $135,000, $346,000 and $146,000, respectively.

“It was unexpectedly low,” Nick Rose, founder and CEO of NFT platform Ethernity Chain, told The Post.

The flop wasn’t unusual, however, amid the carnage that lately has engulfed so-called NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, which are unique digital assets on the blockchain that are often used for art. Last March, Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi bought an NFT of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $2.9 million, calling it the “Mona Lisa of the digital world.” Last month, he scrapped an auction to resell it after the highest bid came in below $14,000.

“This has been fueled by ridiculously inflated cryptocurrency prices and hysterical bidding,” Jeff Bell, CEO of LegalShield, a legal protection firm for consumers, told The Post. “This is no different than the Gold Rush or the dot-com bubble where people get ahead of themselves — everyone wants to get rich quick.”

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Forget it Jake, it’s ChiNFTown.
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What is the meaning of the line ‘Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown’? • Quora

Ben Austin:

»

the key to the plot is the line just before the titular line that everyone quotes, “forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Most people can barely hear it, even though it is the last line in the movie by our fallen hero, Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, because it’s said in a whisper.

JAKE GITTES: (under his breath): “As little as possible.”

Took me a long time to figure it out, but this is why Robert Towne is such a great writer, and Chinatown considered his best screenplay. You get new meanings to the film each time you see it, and I’ve seen it at least 20 times.

So back to our show – why “forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”? And what does “as little as possible” mean?

It all relates to Jake Gittes, long before he was in his current job as “private detective,” when he worked for the Los Angeles Police in Chinatown. He worked with Lou Escobar, the police captain who takes control at the end of the film.

«

Now then: I quoted the “forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” line yesterday in relation to NFTs, and in order to make sure I quoted it correctly, I looked it up, and found myself at this Quora page. (You know Quora. Answers to questions.)

If you’ve seen the film, I highly recommend this explanation of what that line means, and how it ties together with what we’ve seen earlier. I haven’t watched the film 20 times, but it might be getting into double digits, and I still hadn’t picked up on the point Austin makes.

If you haven’t seen Chinatown – it’s on the streaming services. Rectify your mistake at once.
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Tom Cruise runs. But is he any good at it? • ESPN

Ryan Hockensmith:

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In 2018, Tom Cruise finally joined Instagram, and fans sure felt the need for speed: He picked up 550,000 followers in less than an hour. Now he’s up to 6.5 million followers, and they’re greeted by the actor’s self-assessment of his own career in his bio. He could have gone with “Three-time Oscar nominee,” or “Sold $10 billion worth of movie tickets.”

But instead, he picked: “Actor, producer, running in movies since 1981.”

It’s a winking, self-aware nod to this much-memed chapter of his Hollywood career. He always gets the rogue bad guy with the rogue nuclear codes from the rogue country, and he does it in a sprint. By one running blog’s count, he’s run in 44 of his 52 movies, and that includes two running scenes in his newest movie, “Top Gun: Maverick,” which opens this week nationwide. A quick reminder: Tom Cruise is 59 years old, the same age as Wilford Brimley when he was chasing Mitch McDeere in “The Firm.”

But that raises the question… Is Tom Cruise actually a good runner?

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You might think it’s movie trickery. But.. what if it isn’t? ESPN convenes an amazing panel of real runners who analyse how his film running has changed over the years, and whether he’s just a slow person being made to look fast, or.. someone who is actually fast?

Can confirm, by the way, that he runs in the most recently released film, Top Gun: Maverick. (Thanks Ravi for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Now that some Apple retail staff are considering forming a union, the company is suddenly very solicitous of their wellbeing – as long as they don’t join. CC-licensed photo by Joakim Jardenberg 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 7 links for you. Sparse. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

FTC charges Twitter with deceptively using account security data to sell targeted ads • Federal Trade Commission

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The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against Twitter, Inc. for deceptively using account security data for targeted advertising. Twitter asked users to give their phone numbers and email addresses to protect their accounts. The firm then profited by allowing advertisers to use this data to target specific users. Twitter’s deception violates a 2011 FTC order that explicitly prohibited the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices. Under the proposed order, Twitter must pay a $150m penalty and is banned from profiting from its deceptively collected data.

“As the complaint notes, Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter’s primary source of revenue.”

“The Department of Justice is committed to protecting the privacy of consumers’ sensitive data,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “The $150m penalty reflects the seriousness of the allegations against Twitter, and the substantial new compliance measures to be imposed as a result of today’s proposed settlement will help prevent further misleading tactics that threaten users’ privacy.” 

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This is about the period from 2014 to 2019, when it collected 140 million numbers and “failed to mention” that they would also be used for targeted advertising. Such an oversight.
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Elon Musk plans to rely more heavily on equity for Twitter deal • WSJ

Rebecca Elliott and Meghan Bobrowsky:

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Elon Musk plans to rely more heavily on equity to finance his $44bn deal for Twitter amid a sharp decline in Tesla stock in recent weeks.

Mr. Musk’s funding plan now includes $33.5bn in equity, up from $27.25bn, according to a Wednesday regulatory filing. He no longer plans to rely on a margin loan backed by Tesla shares, which are down by about a third since he struck a deal with Twitter in late April.

As of early May, Mr. Musk had lined up about $7.14bn from 19 investors whose participation effectively reduces the personal risk Mr. Musk has to take to close the $44bn deal for the social-media company.

The disclosure came soon after Twitter’s chief executive on Wednesday told shareholders the company is proceeding with work on the deal after Mr. Musk previously said the deal was “temporarily on hold.”

“We are working through this transaction process,” CEO Parag Agrawal said at Twitter’s annual shareholder gathering. “Even as we work toward closing this transaction, our teams and I remain focused on the important work we do every day.”

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So not really on hold; it’s gone quiet because they’re working out the money. Separately, Jack Dorsey is leaving the Twitter board, the last of the three founders to exit. He’s thought to be closely involved with Musk on this deal, so it might only be a temporary thing. Or his departure might be a big thing. We really don’t know.
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‘How to Murder Your Husband’ author Nancy Crampton Brophy found guilty of murdering her husband • Daily Beast

Winston Ross:

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Before the trial even began, Judge Christopher A. Ramras scrubbed the very piece of writing that rocketed the case into national orbit: Brophy’s 2011 post entitled “How to Murder Your Husband,” an essay that laid out a detailed list of supposedly tongue-in-cheek advice for anyone interested in offing their spouse.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about murder and, consequently, about police procedure. After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail. And let me say clearly for the record, I don’t like jumpsuits and orange isn’t my color,” she wrote.

The jury never got to read the post, which turned out to be a chilling prophecy. Divorce is expensive, Brophy suggested, and “if you married for money, aren’t you entitled to all of it?” But to carry out a successful murder would require you to be “organized, ruthless and very clever,” because “the police aren’t stupid. They are looking at you first.”

The Portland Police detectives who investigated Dan Brophy’s killing aren’t stupid, presumably, but in the hours following the shooting, they assumed his wife was a grieving widow, not a murderer.

Then, the damning evidence poured in: surveillance footage showing Brophy driving to and from the crime scene, during the exact window her husband was shot, contradicting the writer’s claim that she’d been at home in bed the whole time. Research she conducted on her own computer, about how to buy and assemble an untraceable “ghost gun,” then the purchase of an already assembled Glock from a Portland gun show, and an untraceable replacement slide and barrel on eBay.

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You may have heard of nominative determinism (where your name fits your career), but this surely goes above and beyond.
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Apple VP discourages retail workers from joining a union in leaked video • The Verge

Mitchell Clark and Zoe Schiffer:

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Apple vice president of people and retail Deirdre O’Brien is explicitly dissuading employees from joining a union in an internal video leaked to The Verge. “I worry about what it would mean to put another organization in the middle of our relationship,” she says. “An organization that does not have a deep understanding of Apple or our business. And most importantly one that I do not believe shares our commitment to you.”

This message comes amid union drives at three of Apple’s retail stores — one in New York, one in Maryland, and one in Georgia. The latter two have set dates to hold elections, which they agreed to with Apple. Workers at the Cumberland Mall Apple store will vote on whether to unionize starting June 2nd, and employees at Apple’s Towson Town Center store in Maryland do the same starting June 15th.

In the video, O’Brien shares common anti-union talking points, including that a union would slow the company’s ability to respond to employee concerns. “Apple moves incredibly fast,” she said. “It’s one thing I love about our work in retail. It means that we need to be able to move fast too. And I worry that because the union will bring its own legally mandated rules that would determine how we work through issues it could make it harder for us to act swiftly to address things that you raise. I’m committed to and proud of our ability to act fast to support our teams, to support you. But I don’t know that we could have moved as quickly under a collective bargaining agreement, as it could limit our ability to make immediate widespread changes to improve your experience. And I think that’s what really is at stake here.”

One of the primary issues Apple retail workers are organizing around is pay. In the United States, unionized workers make about 13.2% more than their non-unionized peers in the same sector, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

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Can’t imagine what it might be about workers getting paid more that Apple finds unattractive.
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Russian hackers are linked to new Brexit leak website, Google says • Reuters via Yahoo

Raphael Satter, James Pearson and Christopher Bing:

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A new website that published leaked emails from several leading proponents of Britain’s exit from the European Union is tied to Russian hackers, according to a Google cybersecurity official and the former head of UK foreign intelligence.

The website – titled “Very English Coop d’Etat” – says it has published private emails from former British spymaster Richard Dearlove, leading Brexit campaigner Gisela Stuart, pro-Brexit historian Robert Tombs, and other supporters of Britain’s divorce from the EU, which was finalized in January 2020.

The site contends that they are part of a group of hardline pro-Brexit figures secretly calling the shots in the United Kingdom.

Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the emails, but two victims of the leak on Wednesday confirmed that they had been targeted by hackers and blamed the Russian government.

…The “English Coop” site makes a variety of allegations, including one that Dearlove was at the center of a conspiracy by Brexit hardliners to oust former British Prime Minister Theresa May, who had negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the European Union in early 2019, and replace her with Johnson, who took a more uncompromising position.

Dearlove said that the emails captured a “legitimate lobbying exercise which, seen through this antagonistic optic, is now subject to distortion.”

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Dearlove seems not to have learnt that you don’t make these things better by trying to explain them. But – a Russian hacking operation related to Brexit? It’s like 2016 again.
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Why Chinese sellers are quitting Amazon • Rest of World

Rui Ma:

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You might have seen the headlines over the past year: Chinese sellers are leaving Amazon. Since early 2021, the e-commerce giant says it has banned 3,000 Chinese accounts for using paid reviewers to artificially inflate ratings, a practice known as “brushing.” The narrative sounds pretty simple, right? Dishonest Chinese sellers gaming the system! Of course they should be punished.

Amazon has said that it issued the bans after repeated warnings over manipulated reviews, and that no seller has been targeted by nationality. Meanwhile, in Chinese media, the sellers have a different account. They describe paying ever-rising costs, while struggling with restrictions on how they sell on the platform.

When they have brushed up their ratings, sellers told Chinese tech media Pingwest, it’s because Amazon’s stringent requirements have pushed them to, in order to survive. (A Chinese e-commerce industry association estimates at least 50,000 banned.)

Either way, the relationship has somewhat soured.

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An absorbing read, and it’s not quite as simple as we’ve been led to believe.
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The owner of Seth Green’s stolen Bored Ape has no plans to return it • Buzzfeed News

Sarah Emerson:

»

In what has become something of a hostage scenario, Green has since tried to negotiate the return of what he has called his “kidnapped” ape.

According to blockchain records, Bored Ape #8398 was purchased from the anonymous scammer by “DarkWing84,” a pseudonymous user who dropped more than $200,000 on the NFT before transferring it to another collection named “GBE_Vault.” The transfer happened within minutes, leading some internet sleuths to wonder if they were in fact the same person. Based on this information, Green located DarkWing84 on Twitter but thus far has failed to make contact.

“I’m happy to chat to Seth directly,” the individual claiming to now own the Bored Ape told BuzzFeed News in a Twitter DM. “Just woke up and have seen this craziness. Please put him in contact with me.”

On Tuesday, BuzzFeed News received a tip about a Twitter account belonging to GBE_Vault, which identified them as the Bored Ape’s new owner. BuzzFeed News was able to find this person’s Discord history based on a tweet in which they mentioned having purchased a Damien Hirst canvas titled “Lascaux Gouache.” This transaction was discussed at length by the art marketplace HENI, which described them as an Australian surgeon who goes by the pseudonym “Mr Cheese.” On HENI’s Discord server, Mr Cheese has referenced DarkWing84 numerous times. And to top it off, their profile picture is none other than Bored Ape #8398.

“You are a good detective,” Mr Cheese wrote after BuzzFeed News asked them to confirm ownership of the contentious ape.

Mr Cheese, who uses the Twitter handle “drwerty,” told BuzzFeed News how they buy NFTs using their DarkWing84 account and then transfer more valuable tokens to their secondary vault. Transactions between Ethereum wallets associated with the two accounts support this, and at the moment their cache includes three Bored Apes, three Mutant Apes, and a CryptoPunk.

“I have no plans for the ape,” Mr Cheese added.

«

Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The original Pong game from Atari was hugely successful, but how many lines of code do you think it had – ten, a hundred, a thousand? CC-licensed photo by Axel Tregoning 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. Beep boop boop. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Ukraine is using quiet electric bikes to haul anti-tank weapons • Motherboard

Matthew Gault:

»

The Ukrainian military is using stealthy electric bikes modified to carry next-generation light anti-tank weapons (NLAWS) to fight Russia.

Soldiers on electric bikes have been spotted across Ukraine since the early days of the war, mostly on ELEEK brand bikes. e-bikes are fast and, critically, much quieter than a gas powered bike. They allow soldiers to perform quick guard patrols or move swiftly into position.

On Telegram last week, pictures surfaced of the Delfast branded bikes that had been modified to carry massive anti-tank weapons. The two photos showed the e-bike modified with a crate on the back and a huge missile launcher poking from the back.

The e-bikes are used for transporting the launchers; the anti-tank weapons aren’t fired from the back of the bikes. The quiet design and fast speed—a Delfast can reach speeds up to 50 mph—allow the bikes to move NLAWS into position and quickly flee once fired.

Both Delfast and ELEEK are Ukrainian companies. When reached for comment, representatives of Delfast in the United States denied it had sold Ukraine any of its bikes. “Delfast continues to support the people of Ukraine. We are working with governments and the larger tech community to end this war,” a representative of Delfast in the U.S. told Motherboard. “We have not sold Delfast bikes or made modifications to our e-bikes to support any military action. We are also donating 5% of all sales to fund humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.”

This is technically true: Delfast has not sold the Ukrainian military any of its bikes. It gave them away.

«

It’s the silence: if they were carried on normal motorcycles, the noise would be a clue from miles away. The first war where electric vehicles become a key player?
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Touch screens in cars solve a problem we didn’t have • The New York Times

Jay Caspian King:

»

The question of whether touch screens are good or bad was broached way back in 1986, when Buick put something called the Graphic Control Center in its Riviera line. What’s particularly striking about the Graphic Control Center, a nine-inch touch screen in the center of the dashboard, was that it wasn’t all that functionally different from today’s versions.

You could turn the fan up and down, you could set your car’s temperature, and you could change the radio station. There was a five-band sound equalizer that you could use to turn up the bass in your speakers. (The funniest, and perhaps most useful, feature was the Reminder function, which was like a to-do list for the driver. Here’s a video showing all the functions.)

But by 1990, Buick had abandoned the Graphic Control Center after drivers complained that every small adjustment to the car’s temperature or radio caused them to take their eyes off the road while they prodded a touch screen.

Thirty-two years later, touch screens are not only back but mostly standard. The complaints are the same: The screens are equally useless and enraging. Distracted, frustrated drivers, of course, are dangers to themselves and everyone else on the road.

The only difference now is that the evidence of the effects that glowing screens have on automotive safety is overwhelming. In 2017 the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that performing tasks on a car’s screen took a driver’s attention away from the road for more than 40 seconds.

«

As he says, the incentives are obvious for the car makers: touchscreens are cheap and easier to install than mechanical panels. Those incentives don’t work for drivers, though.
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The faces from China’s Uyghur detention camps • BBC News

John Sudworth:

»

Thousands of photographs from the heart of China’s highly secretive system of mass incarceration in Xinjiang, as well as a shoot-to-kill policy for those who try to escape, are among a huge cache of data hacked from police computer servers in the region.

The Xinjiang Police Files, as they’re being called, were passed to the BBC earlier this year. After a months-long effort to investigate and authenticate them, they can be shown to offer significant new insights into the internment of the region’s Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.

Their publication coincides with the recent arrival in China of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, for a controversial visit to Xinjiang, with critics concerned that her itinerary will be under the tight control of the government.

The cache reveals, in unprecedented detail, China’s use of “re-education” camps and formal prisons as two separate but related systems of mass detention for Uyghurs – and seriously calls into question its well-honed public narrative about both.

The government’s claim that the re-education camps built across Xinjiang since 2017 are nothing more than “schools” is contradicted by internal police instructions, guarding rosters and the never-before-seen images of detainees.

«

Proof, if it were needed, that hacking can be a force for good. Expect that this will reveal much more about what has been happening. As with Tibet, the Chinese Communist Party flattens difference and demands obedience, and exacts the highest price for not obeying.
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Someone stole Seth Green’s Bored Ape and star of his new NFT show • Buzzfeed News

Sarah Emerson:

»

Actor and producer Seth Green was robbed of several NFTs this month after succumbing to a phishing scam that inadvertently threw a monkey wrench into the plan for his new animated series. The forthcoming show was developed from characters in Green’s expansive NFT collection, but in light of the recent hack, the project’s blatant crypto optimism has become a tragically ironic reminder of the industry’s shadier side.

On Saturday, Green teased a trailer for White Horse Tavern at the NFT conference VeeCon. A twee comedy, the show seems to be based on the question, “What if your friendly neighborhood bartender was Bored Ape Yacht Club #8398?” In an interview with entrepreneur and crypto hype man Gary Vaynerchuk, Green said he wanted to imagine a universe where “it doesn’t matter what you look like, what only matters is your attitude.”

Unfortunately for Green, what also matters is copyright law. And when the actor’s NFT collection was pilfered by a scammer in early May, he lost the commercial rights to his show’s cartoon protagonist, a scruffy Bored Ape named Fred Simian, whose likeness and usage rights now belong to someone else.

“I bought that ape in July 2021, and have spent the last several months developing and exploiting the IP to make it into the star of this show,” Green told Vaynerchuk. “Then days before — his name is Fred by the way — days before he’s set to make his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped.” Green did not respond to a tweet from BuzzFeed News regarding the show.

…If the current owner “wanted to cause trouble for Seth Green they probably could, because that person becomes the holder” of the commercial usage rights, said Daniel Dubin, an intellectual property attorney at Alston & Bird LLP.

NFT copyright law can be “a particularly thorny issue,” Dubin said, and has only begun to be tested in court.

«

Having watched some of the trailer, it’s hard not to think that the phisher has done us all a favour. But look, it’s hardly as if drawing a new, slightly different cartoon figure is beyond the wit of humans, is it? The whole thing is bonkers.
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2012: The Great Depression and the rise of the refrigerator • Pacific Standard

Matt Novak:

»

When I moved to Los Angeles and began my search for an apartment I was a little surprised by the fact that a refrigerator wasn’t included with most of the units I toured. In every other city where I’ve ever lived, the average apartment always included a refrigerator with the cost of rent. I was only looking for a one-bedroom apartment, but I was expecting that this was the norm everywhere for the most basic of apartments.

When I asked the manager of the apartment building I wound up renting from why there was no refrigerator, she explained that the property only supplies “the essentials.” When I pointed out that the building came with an underground parking space, she just stared at me blankly. It was in her silence that I came to understand a subtle difference between Los Angeles and the rest of the country: parking is essential, keeping perishable food fresh is not.

«

The puzzle – in 2012, 2017 (when the article was updated) and now in 2022, when the LA Times has returned to the question – is why so many rental apartments in Los Angeles specifically don’t have refrigerators. The answer seems to be “because things just went that way”.
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Pong: the no-code video game : r/EngineeringPorn

“Jedi_Lucky”:

»

The original Pong video game had no code and was built using hardware circuitry. Here’s the original schematics from Atari

«

Amazing. The logic is a few AND and OR and NOR and NAND gates. No stored program at all. (More details at falstad.com, which takes you through each part of the system.) A fabulous piece of creativity.
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Making the metaverse: what it is, how it will be built, and why it matters • Medium

Nick Clegg:

»

The word ‘metaverse’ is actually a little misleading, as ‘verse’ implies you are transported to another ‘universe’. Of course, there is escapism inherent in using some of these technologies — like an immersive gaming experience. But the metaverse is much more than that. It’s ultimately about finding ever more ways for the benefits of the online world to be felt in our daily lives — enriching our experiences, not replacing them.

Imagine, for example, how useful it could be to wear glasses that give you virtual directions in your line of sight, or immediate translations of street signs in foreign languages. Or even make it possible for you to have a conversation with someone who is thousands of miles away as a three-dimensional hologram in your living room instead of a head and shoulders on a flat screen. And, as I will go on to explain in more detail, the potential societal benefits — particularly in education and healthcare — are vast, from helping med students practice surgical techniques to bringing school lessons to life in new and exciting ways.

As someone in their mid-50s who has spent most of my career in British and European politics rather than Silicon Valley, it wasn’t until I started using some of the early products that I started to properly grasp the potential. For several months now my close team has been meeting weekly in Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, in which you interact with colleagues as avatars in virtual meeting rooms, complete with whiteboards, boardroom tables, wall art, and futuristic cityscapes visible through the windows. Yes, we are meeting as stylized representations of ourselves, but there really is something about the sense of place and space, and the directional sound in particular, that makes the meetings feel much more human than talking to thumbnail faces on a laptop.

«

Realising the “societal benefits” in education and healthcare would be very expensive: how much will it cost to equip a class, let alone a school? But Clegg’s only getting warmed up here – the article is very long (“31 min read”, says Medium). Something of a kitchen sink approach to the topic.
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How ‘Zuck Bucks’ saved the 2020 election — and fuelled the Big Lie • Protocol

Issie Lapowsky:

»

If Mark Zuckerberg could have imagined the worst possible outcome of his decision to insert himself into the 2020 election, it might have looked something like the scene that unfolded inside Mar-a-Lago on a steamy evening in early April.

There in a gilded ballroom-turned-theater, MAGA world icons including Kellyanne Conway, Corey Lewandowski, Hope Hicks and former president Donald Trump himself were gathered for the premiere of “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump.”

The 41-minute film, produced by Citizens United’s David Bossie, accuses Zuckerberg of buying the election for President Biden. Its smoking gun? The very public $419 million in grants Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated to local and state election officials in 2020 to help them prepare for the unprecedented challenge of pulling off an election in a pandemic. On the film’s poster, Zuckerberg is pictured smugly dropping a crisp Benjamin into a ballot box.

Suffice it to say, this was not exactly what Zuckerberg had in mind.

The Facebook founder had tried in vain to make his grand entrance into the election appear impartial. He didn’t plow tens of millions of dollars into a single candidate’s super PAC, like his buddy Dustin Moskovitz did for Biden. He didn’t spread his wealth between Senate campaigns, like his other buddy Peter Thiel is doing right now.

He did it the Zuckerberg way. The Facebook way. Instead of explicitly picking a party — God forbid he be the arbiter of anything — he threw open the vault to his vast fortune and said: Have at it, America. He offered grants to any election official who wanted one, so long as they spent it on what a lot of people would consider mundane essentials that make it easier and safer for everyone to vote: ballot sorters, drop boxes, poll workers and — because it was 2020 — hand sanitizer.

«

Beautifully reported piece of work, which goes to show that in the US in particular no good deed goes unpunished.
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The world’s car buyers are ready to go electric, new data shows • Axios

Joann Muller:

»

52% of respondents to Ernst & Young’s (EY) annual Mobility Consumer Index who are looking to buy a car want an EV, according to the survey of 13,000 people in 18 countries.

That’s a leap of 22 percentage points in two years, and the first time that EV interest exceeded 50%, the company said.

Buyers in Italy (73%), China (69%) and South Korea (63%) were the most interested. Consumers in Australia (38%) and the US (29%) showed less interest.

Government policies are probably driving consumer choices in many markets.
• The European Union, for example, plans to ban sales of conventional gas-powered vehicles by 2035
• China wants 40% of vehicles sold to be electric by 2030 and has used buyer subsidies and other policy measures to support the transition
• In the US, President Biden set a target for 50% of new cars to be electric by 2030. But with gas prices spiking, a proposal to boost tax credits for consumers who choose EVs is now getting congressional pushback
• For the first time in the poll, 34% of respondents identified rising penalties on conventional cars as a key factor in their purchase decision, E&Y found
• And 88% say they would pay more for an EV.

One issue that’s starting to fade: range anxiety, especially for second-time EV owners, the survey showed. As battery technology advances and access to charging infrastructure improves, such worries will disappear, said EY.

«

But of course the US, one of the biggest polluters from vehicles, would be getting “congressional pushback” against proposals that would encourage less pollution. We’d expect nothing less in a country that anyway shows less interest in EVs than pretty much anywhere else. The full report has other detail – notably that people don’t want to go back on public transport post-Covid.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might think that you can’t get in touch with Facebook’s customer service, but VR headset users can demonstrate how that’s wrong. CC-licensed photo by dronepicrdronepicr 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. Unrecognisable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

UK fines Clearview just under $10m for privacy breaches • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

The U.K.’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI — announcing a fine of just over £7.5m today for a string of breaches of local privacy laws.

The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet; and telling it to delete the information of UK residents from its systems.

The US company has amassed a database of 20 billion+ facial images by scraping data off the public internet, such as from social media services, to create an online database that it uses to power an AI-based identity-matching service which it sells to entities such as law enforcement. The problem is Clearview has never asked individuals whether it can use their selfies for that. And in many countries it has been found in breach of privacy laws.

…One thing to note is the level of fine is considerably lower than the £17M+ the ICO announced last fall in its provisional order against Clearview. We asked the regulator about the reduction — and it told us that reductions following a notice of intent to fine may be related to representations from the company, which it may consider before deciding on whether to issue the organisation with a final monetary penalty notice.

«

Could be academic if Clearview refuses to pay, which it might well do given that it doesn’t have any operations in the UK now. Also unclear how the ICO will enforce the deletion of UK citizens from its database. How would it know? How would the ICO know? Meanwhile, a system closely resembling it is being used by Ukrainian soldiers to identify Russian prisoners of war. Not always a bad thing?
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Sunak orders plan for windfall tax on electricity generators • Financial Times

George Parker, Jim Pickard and Nathalie Thomas:

»

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has ordered officials to draw up plans for a possible windfall tax on more than £10bn of excess profits by electricity generators, including wind farm operators, on top of a hit on North Sea oil and gas producers.

Treasury officials are working on a scheme that would go well beyond Labour’s original windfall tax plan, as Sunak looks to raise billions of pounds of financial support for households struggling with soaring energy bills.

“North Sea oil and gas producers are only half the picture,” said one government insider. “The other half is that high gas prices have led to some pretty substantial windfall profits for all electricity generation.”

By pulling big power generators such as SSE, ScottishPower, EDF Energy and RWE into the scope of any windfall tax Sunak would sharply increase the revenue it brings in.

Sunak and Boris Johnson urgently want to set out measures to address rising energy bills and how to pay for them, officials say. An announcement could come this week or after the Jubilee bank holiday in early June.

«

Adding in the generators isn’t going to be popular (with the generators), and will puzzle people: don’t the generators have to pay for the source of the fuel? If they’re using renewables, those have substantial paybacks – a wind farm isn’t cheaper in year 1 than a gas turbine.

But this (in general) has been predictable for weeks.
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How GDPR is failing • WIRED

Matt Burgess:

»

Despite clear enforcement problems [detailed earlier in the article], GDPR has had an incalculable effect on data practices broadly. EU countries have made decisions in thousands of local cases and issued guidance to organizations to say how they should use people’s data. Spain’s LaLiga soccer league was fined after its app spied on users, retailer H&M was fined in Germany after it saved details about employees’ personal lives, the Netherlands’ tax body was fined over its use of a ‘blacklist,’ and these are just a handful of the successful cases.

Some of GDPR’s impact is also hidden—the law isn’t just about fines and ordering companies to change—and it has improved company behaviors. “If you compare the awareness about cybersecurity, about data protection, about privacy, as it looked like 10 years ago and it looks today, these are completely different worlds,” says Wojciech Wiewiórowski, the European Data Protection Supervisor, who oversees GDPR cases against European institutions, such as Europol.

Companies have been put off using people’s data in dubious ways, experts say, when they wouldn’t have thought twice about it pre-GDPR. One recent study estimated that the number of Android apps on Google’s Play store has dropped by a third since the introduction of GDPR, citing better privacy protections. “More and more businesses have allocated significant budgets to doing data protection compliance,” says Hazel Grant, head of the privacy, security, and information group at London-headquartered law firm Fieldfisher. Grant says that when GDPR decisions are made—such as Austria’s decision to make the use of Google Analytics unlawful—companies are concerned about what it means for them. “Four or five years ago, that enforcement wouldn’t have happened,” Grant says. “And if it had happened, maybe a few data protection lawyers would have known about it—it wouldn’t have been out there with clients coming to us saying we need advice on this.”

«

From everything in the article, “failing” overstates it. “Struggling” might be a better word; regulators have big backlogs of cases, and some of the big companies are a bit unsure how well they comply. But if it has improved privacy, that has to be a plus.
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Hello? Hello? Is this Facebook? Anybody there? (Nope.) • WSJ

Kirsten Grind:

»

You thought you had to wait forever to speak with a customer service representative? Facebook and Instagram serve nearly 3 billion users a day with a help desk that numbers closer to zero.

So pity John Bacon, a 72-year-old retiree of Cleveland, Ohio. Facebook disabled his account after it was hacked last year, and he expected to speak with someone about getting it up and running.

Mr. Bacon hunted for a customer help line or an email address and learned what many others before him have discovered: There are none. “I have never been able to speak to a human,” he said of what turned out to be a monthslong quest to restore his Facebook account.

Users of the free services in the empire of Meta Platforms Inc., which includes WhatsApp, sometimes go to great and unusual lengths to get help. Few succeed.

Customer service at TikTok and Twitter is about the same. Some Twitter users hope Elon Musk’s purchase of the company will help. “I beg you to please look at customer service,” one user recently tweeted at Mr. Musk, saying he had to send a letter to Twitter headquarters via FedEx for a minor problem.

Mr. Bacon said he patiently followed Facebook’s instructions. He changed his password, twice, and provided identification. Nothing happened.

…Meta hasn’t expanded its customer service to accommodate its billions of users because of the enormous scale and expense of the undertaking, according to people familiar with the company. It also has viewed a call center as its own security risk, a potential path for bad actors to gain access to accounts for criminal or other nefarious purposes.

…One idea that spread last year on Reddit and Quora involved buying a roughly $300 Oculus virtual-reality headset. Oculus, which is owned by Meta, has a dedicated customer-service line for the devices.

«

Which turned out to be the least-cost path for Mr Bacon.

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Expert: monkeypox likely spread by sex at two raves in Europe • AP News

Maria Cheng:

»

A leading adviser to the World Health Organization described the unprecedented outbreak of monkeypox in developed countries as “a random event” that appears to have been caused by sexual activity at two recent raves in Europe.

Dr. David Heymann, who formerly headed WHO’s emergencies department, told The Associated Press that the leading theory to explain the spread of the disease was sexual transmission at raves held in Spain and Belgium. Monkeypox has not previously triggered widespread outbreaks beyond Africa, where it is endemic in animals.

“We know monkeypox can spread when there is close contact with the lesions of someone who is infected, and it looks like sexual contact has now amplified that transmission,” said Heymann.

That marks a significant departure from the disease’s typical pattern of spread in central and western Africa, where people are mainly infected by animals like wild rodents and primates and outbreaks have not spilled across borders.

Health officials say most of the known cases in Europe have been among men who have sex with men, but anyone can be infected through close contact with a sick person, their clothing or bedsheets. Scientists say it will be difficult to disentangle whether the spread is being driven by sex or merely close contact.

«

OK, I did not have this on my bingo card. What’s unusual is how contagious this version seems to be.
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Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard • The Economist

»

The “crypto-crash” hit millions of investors. Some lost their life savings. The turmoil may have a particularly big impact on black Americans. They tend to earn less and have less savings than their white counterparts, on average. A survey released last month by Ariel Investments and Charles Schwab, two financial-services companies, found that 25% of black Americans own cryptocurrency, compared with 15% of white Americans. Young African-Americans are even more likely to have invested: almost two-fifths of those under 40 own cryptocurrency, compared with 29% of whites.

The Ariel-Schwab survey found that black respondents were more likely to be both new to investing and highly enthusiastic about crypto: 23% said excitement about cryptocurrency was the reason they started investing; just 10% of white respondents said the same. Black Americans are almost three times as likely to choose cryptocurrency as their first investment (11% versus 4%) and were twice as likely to describe it as the best investment overall (8% versus 4%). The survey also found that black Americans were less likely to invest in conventional financial products—meaning their portfolios may be overexposed to crypto.

Many people are drawn into the cryptosphere by the thrill of its high risks and potential for high reward. But black Americans are typically cautious investors: surveys indicate that they have a lower appetite than average for risk. They are, however, almost twice as likely to describe cryptocurrencies as a safe investment. Fully 30% of black investors believe crypto is regulated by the government (14% of white investors thought the same). In reality it is almost entirely unregulated.

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Would guess that everyone who didn’t already know this is surprised by it. (Via Sophie Warnes’s Fair Warning.)
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DC attorney general Karl A. Racine sues Mark Zuckerberg for misleading privacy practices • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski:

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DC Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) on Monday sued Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold the CEO of Facebook parent company Meta liable for data abuses and for misleading Facebook users about their privacy protections.

The suit, filed in DC Superior Court, alleges that Zuckerberg directly participated in decisions that enabled the Trump-allied political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to siphon the personal data of millions of users. Racine sued the company over its data practices in 2018 in a case that is ongoing, but he is now seeking to fine Zuckerberg personally over his role in the events.

“This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct,” Racine said in a news release. “This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including CEOs, will be held accountable for their actions.”

…Racine’s office said this new lawsuit is based on hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that his staff did not have access to until litigation during the Cambridge Analytica suit, including depositions of Facebook employees and other whistleblowers.

…The lawsuit argues that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the result of Zuckerberg’s vision to open up the Facebook platform to third party developers. It also alleges that he was aware of the potential harms that might result from sharing consumers’ data but failed to act on them. In one email discussing data leakage, Zuckerberg wrote “there is clear risk on the advertiser side,” according to the lawsuit.

«

Honestly, this story is from Monday, May 23, 2022. Yes, the FTC settled in for $5bn in 2019. No, I don’t know how Racine is going to justify the tiny number of people in Washington DC who would have been affected for the time and money spent on this.
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YouTube removes more than 9,000 channels relating to Ukraine war • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

YouTube has taken down more than 70,000 videos and 9,000 channels related to the war in Ukraine for violating content guidelines, including removal of videos that referred to the invasion as a “liberation mission”.

The platform is hugely popular in Russia, where, unlike some of its US peers, it has not been shut down despite hosting content from opposition figures such as Alexei Navalny. YouTube has also been able to operate in Russia despite cracking down on pro-Kremlin content that has broken guidelines including its major violent events policy, which prohibits denying or trivialising the invasion.

Since the conflict began in February, YouTube has taken down channels including that of the pro-Kremlin journalist Vladimir Solovyov. Channels associated with Russia’s Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs have also been temporarily suspended from uploading videos in recent months for describing the war as a “liberation mission”.

YouTube’s chief product officer, Neal Mohan, said: “We have a major violent events policy and that applies to things like denial of major violent events: everything from the Holocaust to Sandy Hook. And of course, what’s happening in Ukraine is a major violent event. And so we’ve used that policy to take unprecedented action.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Mohan added that YouTube’s news content on the conflict had received more than 40m views in Ukraine alone.

“The first and probably most paramount responsibility is making sure that people who are looking for information about this event can get accurate, high-quality, credible information on YouTube,” he said.

«

Google’s office has shut, but keeping YouTube going – and filtering the content – remains important. Notable how Twitter and Google have developed policies around “crises” (or “major violent events” in Google’s words).
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Apple shipped me a 79-pound iPhone repair kit to fix a 1.1-ounce battery • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Last month, Apple launched its Self-Service Repair program, letting US customers fix broken screens, batteries, and cameras on the latest iPhones using Apple’s own parts and tools for the first time ever. I couldn’t wait. I’d never successfully repaired a phone — and my wife has never let me live down the one time I broke her Samsung Galaxy while using a hair dryer to replace the screen. This time, armed with an official repair manual and genuine parts, I’d make it right.

That Apple would even let me buy those parts, much less read its manuals and rent its tools, is a major change of pace for the company. For years, Apple has been lobbying to suppress right-to-repair policies around the country, with the company accused of doing everything it can to keep customers from repairing their own phones. It’s easy to see this as a huge moment for DIY advocates. But having tried the repair process, I actually can’t recommend it at all — and I have a sneaking suspicion that Apple likes it that way.

The thing you should understand about Apple’s home repair process is that it’s a far cry from traditional DIY if you opt for the kit — which I did, once I saw the repair manual only contains instructions for Apple’s own tools. (You can just buy a battery if you want.)

I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all. Instead, I found two giant Pelican cases — 79 pounds of tools — on my front porch. I couldn’t believe just how big and heavy they were considering Apple’s paying to ship them both ways.

I lugged those cases onto a BART train to San Francisco and dragged them down the streets to our office. Then, I set everything out on a table and got started.

«

The machines that Apple hired out are remarkable devices: proper industrial systems. How many does Apple have, one has to wonder?
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New ‘smart’ cheese rinds help fight Parmesan fraud • Food & Wine

Mike Pomranz:

»

Like many European products, true “Parmesan” cheese has a protected designation of origin, and according to the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium (the official trade group for the cheese) the amount of fraud is almost as big as product sales: Authentic Parmigiano Reggiano sales are around $2.44bn while fraudulent cheese is a $2.08bn market.

But now, Parmigiano Reggiano has a new high-tech partner to fight against counterfeit cheese and it involves technology you shouldn’t even be able to notice. The Consortium has teamed up with Kaasmerk Matec — a leading producer of casein cheesemarks — and p-Chip — which creates digital tracing technology — to put tiny, food-safe transponders in legitimate wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano.

For the past two decades, Parmigiano Reggiano wheels have already featured a unique alphanumeric tracking code, but now, the Consortium has tested embedding p-Chip micro transponders into the casein label. As the Consortium explains, “The innovation combines food-safe Casein labels with the p-Chip micro transponder — a blockchain crypto-anchor that creates a digital ‘twin’ for physical items. This scannable new food tag is smaller than a grain of salt and highly durable, delivering next-generation visibility and traceability.”

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If they’re smaller than a grain of salt it won’t matter if you swallow it?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Uber service used to be synonymous with cheap travel, but no longer – and its effects on public transport have been negative. CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Not ignoble. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Fake news about our fake news study spread faster than its truth… just as we predicted • Medium

Sinan Aral:

»

recently, Kai Kuperschmidt, a contributing correspondent for Science magazine, and Daniel Engber, a senior editor at The Atlantic, claimed that this study had been debunked and overturned in dramatic fashion by a newer study, published in 2021 by Johan Ugander and Jonas Juul, analyzing the same data. Kuperschmidt wrote, in an article for Science magazine, that our paper “used data on misinformation that had been fact-checked by independent organizations…” and that when Ugander and Juul “factored in this bias, the difference between the speed and reach of false news and true news disappeared.”

Engber picked up on this thread, linked to Kuperschmidt’s article, and tweeted “I love this so much: Remember the Science paper showing that misinformation travels farther and faster on social media than the truth? It was wrong!”

News of the prominent debunking spread like wildfire. Engber’s tweet was retweeted 390 times and liked over 1200 times within a few days. The quote tweets cheerfully glorified the debunking.

Dr Rohin Francis, @MedCrisis on Twitter, tweeted “Absolute classic. That study everyone cited with righteous glee, that misinformation spreads faster than true information, was in fact misinformation.” His quote tweet was retweeted 68 times with over 250 likes.

Unfortunately, for us and for misinformation science, they were all wrong. After fact checking their claims, the journalists discovered that they had been the ones spreading misinformation.
When they talked to Ugander and Juul, they learned that the new study actually confirmed our work and replicated our findings: fake news did reach more people than the truth, on average, and it did so while spreading deeper, faster, and more broadly through layers of connections. They also discovered that we had ourselves had double-checked the generalizability of our results in a separate robustness data set of articles that had never been fact checked, which also confirmed what we had found.

Three separate replications had confirmed our results and, in fact, since we published our paper, many more studies have replicated our findings in a variety of data sets and contexts.

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As this point about the virality of fake news is pretty crucial to explaining social warming, I’m quite relieved too.
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HSBC suspends head of responsible investing who called climate warnings ‘shrill’ • The Guardian

Kalyeena Makortoff:

»

HSBC has suspended a senior banker after he referred to climate crisis warnings as “unsubstantiated” and “shrill” during a conference speech that has since been denounced by the lender’s chief executive.

Stuart Kirk, who has been HSBC’s head of responsible investing since last July, will remain suspended until the bank completes an internal investigation into the matter.

HSBC came under pressure to fire Kirk after he gave a presentation in London entitled “why investors need not worry about climate risk”, in which he made light of major flooding risks, and complained about having to spend time “looking at something that’s going to happen in 20 or 30 years”.

HSBC declined to comment on Kirk’s suspension, which was first reported by the Financial Times. Kirk did not respond to requests to comment sent via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Kirk’s presentation controversially included slides that said “Unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan, self-serving, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong”, while referring to comments made by officials at the UN and Bank of England, who have tried to raise the alarm over global heating.

“Human beings have been fantastic at adapting to change, adapting to climate emergencies, and we will continue to do so,” Kirk told attenders at the Financial Times’ Moral Money conference on Thursday. “Who cares if Miami is six metres underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six metres underwater for ages and that’s a really nice place.”

His comments have sparked a public relations controversy for the bank, which has struggled to burnish its green credentials, despite pledges to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

«

Wonder what an examination of Kirk’s investment decisions would reveal when it comes to climate-affecting projects, if those are his views. That would filter down to his subordinates, after all.
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September 2010: Elon Musk’s first wife Justine Musk talks their messy divorce • Marie Claire

Justine Musk, in September 2010:

»

By the time eBay bought PayPal in 2002, we had moved to Los Angeles and had our first child, a boy named Nevada Alexander. The sale of PayPal vaulted Elon’s net worth to well over $100 million. The same week, Nevada went down for a nap, placed on his back as always, and stopped breathing. He was 10 weeks old, the age when male infants are most susceptible to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). By the time the paramedics resuscitated him, he had been deprived of oxygen for so long that he was brain-dead. He spent three days on life support in a hospital in Orange County before we made the decision to take him off it. I held him in my arms when he died.

Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada’s death. I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly, which he regarded as “emotionally manipulative.” I buried my feelings instead, coping with Nevada’s death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible. Within the next five years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets, and I sold three novels to Penguin and Simon & Schuster. Even so, Nevada’s death sent me on a years-long inward spiral of depression and distraction that would be continuing today if one of our nannies hadn’t noticed me struggling. She approached me with the name of an excellent therapist. Dubious, I gave it a shot. In those weekly sessions, I began to get perspective on what had become my life.

«

She had a serious car accident:

»

Not long after the accident, I sat on our bed with my knees pulled up to my chest and tears in my eyes. I told Elon, in a soft voice that was nonetheless filled with conviction, that I needed our life to change. I didn’t want to be a sideline player in the multimillion-dollar spectacle of my husband’s life. I wanted equality. I wanted partnership. I wanted to love and be loved, the way we had before he made all his millions.

Elon agreed to enter counseling, but he was running two companies and carrying a planet of stress. One month and three sessions later, he gave me an ultimatum: Either we fix this marriage today or I will divorce you tomorrow, by which I understood he meant, Our status quo works for me, so it should work for you. He filed for divorce the next morning. I felt numb, but strangely relieved.

«

If you need to understand Musk, this might help.
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Twitter announces crisis misinformation policy in Ukraine • Protocol

Issie Lapowsky:

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Twitter will begin taking action against misinformation in crisis situations, the company said Thursday. The new policy will be immediately applied to misinformation surrounding the war in Ukraine.

Given the way misinformation and disinformation have been weaponized in that war, it’s an important update. But it’s also a challenging one for Twitter to pull off, and not just because Twitter’s would-be new owner believes the company should let all legal speech stand. It also puts Twitter in a position of defining what’s true — or not true — in often chaotic situations and, perhaps even more challenging, deciding what constitutes a crisis to begin with.

“During periods of crisis like international armed conflict, public health emergencies and large-scale natural disasters, we find misinformation can undermine public trust and cause further harm to already vulnerable communities,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of Safety and Integrity, said on a call with reporters. Roth said the company eventually plans to deploy this policy in “any situation in which there’s a widespread threat to life, physical safety, health or basic subsistence,” but that the company was starting off in Ukraine because of “the unique role that disinformation has played in this conflict.”

To figure out what’s true and not, Roth said, Twitter is relying on public information from multiple “credible sources,” including humanitarian groups, news organizations, conflict-monitoring services and open-source intelligence investigators. Once Twitter determines that a given post is misinformation, it’ll stop amplifying and recommending it, and will add warning notices that users have to click through in order to view the tweet.

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Will it shut down the Russian bots? That could make a difference.
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TikTok boom • No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway:

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Just as algorithms require large pools of signals, content production requires large pools of talent. For a hundred years, video talent congregated in a few geographies: Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London, and Mumbai. Every HR manager knows there are talented people populating every corner of the Earth. But geography still matters, and the majority of platforms and talent do not find each other. YouTube and Instagram recruited talent faster than any business in history. Until TikTok. Fifty-five% of TikTok users create their own videos on the platform. That’s a talent pool the depth of the Mariana Trench: 870 million people, or 1,000 times the number of people employed by the entire film and TV industry.

The world’s largest reserve of talent also has a near-zero cost of extraction. The top eight U.S. media firms will spend $115bn on original content this year. Netflix alone will spend $17bn. TikTok produces its content for almost nothing —  the company’s payout to top creators is a rounding error, at $200m per year. The primary incentive it offers is social expression, and the company’s A&R team is the app itself. Users are never more than a few taps from creating their own content — TikTok streamlines the creation process, with an option to create a video at the center of its UI, simple tools for recording and manipulating those videos, and a huge library of licensed music available for the creator’s use. On YouTube and Netflix, there are creators and consumers. On TikTok, they are the same person.

…The biggest mistake we make in marketing is believing choice is a benefit. No, it’s a tax. Consumers don’t want more choices, they want more confidence in the choices presented. TikTok has taken this to a new level by eliminating the burden of choice entirely. Its content is a continuous stream of videos where the decisions are made for you. Your only choice: what not to watch.

«

It’s worth making the point again about TikTok: it’s utterly unlike the networks that we – well, adults – think we’re used to. It’s wiping the floor with Facebook for attention. I’d guess nobody could describe exactly how its algorithm functions; only what the desired outcomes it aims for are.
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The Decade of Cheap Rides is over • Slate

Henry Grabar:

»

Average Uber prices rose 92% between 2018 and 2021, according to data from Rakuten; a separate analysis reports an increase of 45% between 2019 and 2022. Both Uber and Lyft have added a surcharge for riders that helps drivers account for high fuel prices. And all that was before last week’s ultimatum.

Think of it as a city-transportation parallel to what economists are calling the end of the “era of free money,” as interest rates finally rise. It’s the end of a decade in which we changed our systems, our habits, even our architecture, around the assumption that we could be driven around for cheap.

The cynical assumption was always that Uber was burning all that investor cash in order to corner the market. Once it killed off car service, taxi cartels, and its ride-hail rivals, the company would stop charging riders less than it was paying drivers and prices would have to go up. On Monday morning, an Uber from Manhattan to JFK Airport was $100—nearly double the fixed yellow cab rate. But good luck finding a yellow cab!

The Uber-taxicab showdown is how most people conceive of Uber’s market-swallowing impact, but the Decade of Cheap Rides had more profound effects on how we live and get around. The failure of car-sharing companies like Maven and car2go is one example of how all that subsidy distorted the market, quashed business models that might otherwise have thrived, and changed habits that might have otherwise endured. It did this for the good—reducing the size of parking lots, suppressing drunken driving—and for the bad, increasing car ownership and traffic congestion.

One well-known consequence of the rider subsidy is the decline in public transit. One study estimates the arrival of Uber and Lyft in a city decreases rail ridership by 1.29% and bus ridership by 1.7% each year. In San Francisco, where Uber was founded, the authors estimate Uber has decreased bus ridership by 12.7%. A second study concluded a 5.4% decline in bus ridership in midsize cities. A third study clocked the decline at 8.9%. A related Uber phenomenon has been a sizable increase in downtown traffic congestion.

Those effects might reverse if rising prices push people back onto the bus. But other changes have more sticking power: The assumption that Uber would debut flying cars and autonomous vehicles any minute now helped discourage investment in better transit service and capital projects

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So, have you heard about monkeypox? • The Atlantic

Ed Yong:

»

[Boghuma Kabisen] Titanji [a physician at Emory University] notes that our knowledge of monkeypox is based on just 1,500 or so recorded cases, as of 2018. “I’ve seen a lot of people writing as if everything we know about monkeypox is definitive and finalized, but the reality is that it is still a rare zoonotic infection,” she said. For that reason, “I’m in Team Cautious,” she said. “We can’t use what happened with previous monkeypox outbreaks to make sweeping statements. If we’ve learned anything from COVID, it’s to have humility.”

For decades, a few scientists have voiced concerns that the monkeypox virus could have become better at infecting people—ironically because we eradicated its relative, smallpox, in the late 1970s. The smallpox vaccine incidentally protected against monkeypox. And when new generations were born into a world without either smallpox or smallpox-vaccination campaigns, they grew up vulnerable to monkeypox. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, this dwindling immunity meant that monkeypox infections increased 20-fold in the three decades after smallpox vanished, as Rimoin showed in 2010. That gives the virus more chances to evolve into a more transmissible pathogen in humans. To date, its R0—the average number of people who catch the disease from one infected person—has been less than 1, which means that outbreaks naturally peter out. But it could eventually evolve above that threshold, and cause more protracted epidemics, as [University of Washington professor, Carl] Bergstrom simulated in 2003. “We saw monkeypox as a ticking time bomb,” he told me.

This possibility casts a cloud of uncertainty over the current unusual outbreaks, which everyone I spoke with is concerned about. Are they the work of a new and more transmissible strain of monkeypox? Or are they simply the result of people traveling more after global COVID restrictions were lifted? Or could they be due to something else entirely? So far, the cases are more numerous than a normal monkeypox outbreak, but not so numerous as to suggest a radically different virus, Inglesby told me. But he also doesn’t have a clear explanation for the outbreak’s unusual patterns—nor does anyone else.

«

Cases now found in 14 countries (Israel and Switzerland the latest to join the dance), up to 80 cases confirmed and a further 50 being investigated, as of mid-Sunday.

One expert I heard being interviewed on the radio said it’s “very unlikely” to become a pandemic. Er.. great?
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Disinformation Governance Board ‘paused’ after just three weeks • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

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Just hours after [Nina] Jankowicz tweeted about her new job, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted tweets accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth.” Posobiec’s 1.7 million followers quickly sprung into action. By the end of the day, there were at least 53,235 posts on Twitter mentioning “Disinformation Governance Board,” many referencing Jankowicz by name, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public-interest research. In the days following, that number skyrocketed.

The board was created to study best practices in combating the harmful effects of disinformation and to help DHS counter viral lies and propaganda that could threaten domestic security. Unlike the “Ministry of Truth” in George Orwell’s “1984” that became a derogatory comparison point, neither the board nor Jankowicz had any power or ability to declare what is true or false, or compel Internet providers, social media platforms or public schools to take action against certain types of speech. In fact, the board itself had no power or authority to make any operational decisions.

“The Board’s purpose has been grossly mischaracterized; it will not police speech,” the DHS spokesperson said. “Quite the opposite, its focus is to ensure that freedom of speech is protected.”
Posobiec’s early tweets shaped the narrative and Jankowicz was positioned as the primary target. Republican lawmakers echoed Posobiec’s framing and amplified it to their audiences. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is a US Senate hopeful, and Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) both posted tweets similar to Posobiec’s. Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) also posted a video repeating Posobiec’s statements.

The week following the announcement, approximately 70% of Fox News’s one-hour segments mentioned either Jankowicz or the board, with correspondents frequently deriding the board as a “Ministry of Truth,” according to Advance Democracy. The Fox News coverage was referenced in some of the most popular posts on Facebook and Twitter criticizing Jankowicz.

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Absolutely astonishing how huge swathes of the US Democrats (especially the ones in government) are completely clueless about what to do about bad-faith right-wing attacks. It’s been going on since Bill Clinton was president, when Hillary Clinton was pilloried over her healthcare plans (by what she correctly called “a vast right-wing conspiracy”). Nobody seems to learn.
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Lagarde says crypto is ‘worth nothing’ and should be regulated • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Cagan Koc:

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European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said crypto-currencies are “based on nothing” and should be regulated to steer people away from speculating on them with their life savings.

Lagarde told Dutch television that she’s concerned about people “who have no understanding of the risks, who will lose it all and who will be terribly disappointed, which is why I believe that that should be regulated.”

…Lagarde said she’s skeptical of crypto’s value, contrasting it with the ECB’s digital euro – a project that may come to fruition in the next four years.

“My very humble assessment is that it is worth nothing, it is based on nothing, there is no underlying asset to act as an anchor of safety,” she said.

“The day when we have the central bank digital currency out, any digital euro, I will guarantee – so the central bank will behind it and I think it’s vastly different than many of those things,” Lagarde said.

…Lagarde said she doesn’t hold any crypto assets herself because “I want to practice what I preach.” But she follows them “very carefully” as one of her sons invested – against her advice. “He’s a free man,” she said.

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Very much like to be a fly on the Largarde family wall for the surely upcoming conversation on this one.
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The noble gases neon and helium are suffering from Putin’s War • Bloomberg

Izabella Kaminska:

»

Neon, for example, is a key input for the semiconductor manufacturing process. The gas is a byproduct of steel production and is only commercially viable when it’s produced in significant quantities from very large steel plants such as Azovstal [in Mariupol, besieged by Russian forces]. Producers such as Ingas (linked to Mariupol) and Cryoin in Odessa can then pull the neon from the air and make it available for use. But with production at both companies now indefinitely suspended, analysts worry about the supply of neon and other gases, especially to Western manufacturers. 

A big problem is that the noble gas market remains dependent on a handful of specialists — firms such as Linde Plc, Air Liquide SA and Air Products and Chemicals Inc. — which prefer to engage in confidential long-term contracts. The lack of transparency has impeded the development of a spot market (where uncontracted supplies can be sold at current market prices) and discouraged natural price discovery. 

Since nobody can be sure of current pricing, it’s hard to assess just how much noble gas supply there is. What we do know is that, until the war in Ukraine broke out in 2014, as much as 90% of global neon supply was sourced from Ukraine. The bulk of this came from Mariupol, and most of it went to Western markets. 

Cliff Cain, of the Edelgas Group, an independent consultancy, told me that some production has since shifted to China, with Ukraine now probably representing 50% to 70% of global neon production. South Korea’s Posco steel-making company too has begun producing a small amount to cater to domestic demand. 

…But if Russia retains control of Mariupol and restarts the city’s damaged plants, 95% of the market could wind up in the hands of just two potentially “unfriendly” players, according to Cain. 

«

When Russia invaded Crime in 2014, neon prices quintupled. Earlier this year, prices from Chinese companies quadrupled. It’s used in lasers for chipmaking, and makes up about 18 parts per million of air – which is the only source. Ramping up production from other sources could take between 9 and 24 months. The chip shortage doesn’t look likely to go away soon.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The minister responsible for media, Nadine Dorries, admitted illicitly sharing her Netflix password outside her house. Will she get cut off? CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog 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. No, you’re on mute. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

We need to take back our privacy • The New York Times

The indispensable Zeynep Tufekci:

»

Surveillance made possible by minimally-regulated digital technologies could help law enforcement track down women who might seek abortions and medical providers who perform them in places where it would become criminalized. Women are urging one another to delete phone apps like period trackers that can indicate they are pregnant.

But frantic individual efforts to swat away digital intrusions will do too little. What’s needed, for all Americans, is a full legal and political reckoning with the reckless manner in which digital technology has been allowed to invade our lives. The collection, use and manipulation of electronic data must finally be regulated and severely limited. Only then can we comfortably enjoy all the good that can come from these technologies.

…Protections you think you have may not be as broad as you think. The confidentiality that federal health privacy law provides to conversations with a doctor doesn’t always apply to prescriptions. In 2020, Consumer Reports exposed that GoodRX, a popular drug discount and coupons service, was selling information on what medications people were searching or buying to Facebook, Google and other data marketing firms. GoodRX said it would stop, but there is no law against them, or any pharmacy, doing this.

That data becomes an even more powerful form of surveillance when it is combined with other data. A woman who regularly eats sushi and suddenly stops, or stops taking Pepto-Bismol, or starts taking vitamin B6 may be easily identified as someone following guidelines for pregnancy. If that woman doesn’t give birth she might find herself being questioned by the police, who may think she had an abortion. (Already, in some places, women who seek medical help after miscarriages have reported questioning to this effect.)

…our digital infrastructure has become the infrastructure of authoritarianism.

When I started saying this awhile back, many people would tell me that I was conflating the situation in China with that of Western countries where such surveillance is usually undertaken for commercial purposes and we have limits to what governments would want to do. I always thought: If you build it they will come for it. Criminalization of abortion may well be the first wide-scale test of this, but even if that doesn’t come to pass, we’re just biding our time.

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In 1998 the US passed the DMCA – Digital Millennium Copyright Act – to protect copyright holders, but it has never passed anything to protect the online privacy of individuals.
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Why the media keeps botching car crash coverage • Slate

David Zipper:

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On the evening of Nov. 13, Roy Saravia Alvarez was walking home along the sidewalk of West Glebe Road in Alexandria, Virginia. At around 8 p.m., the driver of a truck jumped the sidewalk while turning left, striking Saravia Alvarez and pinning the 46-year-old underneath the vehicle. The driver, later identified by authorities as Fredy Ortiz-Dominguez, remained in the truck, spinning its wheels and rocking it back and forth for nearly five minutes. A passerby stopped and told Ortiz-Dominguez to get out of his vehicle, but he did so only when police arrived. By then, Saravia Alvarez was dead.

We know these details because a television journalist chose to investigate. “I saw the Alexandria police tweet about it,” says Julie Carey, the Northern Virginia bureau chief of local TV station NBC4. But “the police report was terrible,” she says. The report stated that “the incident involved a single vehicle striking a pedestrian,” and that while the pedestrian died, “the driver of the vehicle remained at the scene and sustained no injuries.”

Faced with that vague report, Carey went to the crash site. “I could see skid marks on the sidewalk. When we found out that Saravia Alvarez wasn’t crossing the street, that changed the whole complexion of the story.” She said the police report “gave no indication that the driver was at fault, that the victim was just a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk.” Carey approached a nearby vape store, which offered her security camera footage of the collision. “He played it for us on a big screen in the store,” she says.

NBC4’s story about the crash aired on Nov. 15, two days after it happened. In a follow-up segment, Carey noted that an autopsy indicated that Saravia Alvarez had survived the initial impact of the collision, and that the rocking of the truck likely killed him.

This reporting is notable because it was exceptional. To find out the basics of what happened, Carey had to examine skid marks and obtain security footage, because that information existed nowhere else.

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This is a terrific piece about the framing of pedestrians being killed by car and truck drivers: how the implication tends to be the vehicle took on a life of its own, and/or the foolish pedestrian erred in being there.
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This viral ‘Bionic Reading’ tool for iPhone and Mac will blow your mind • iMore

Stephen Warwick:

»

new viral ‘Bionic Reading’ tool is taking the internet by storm because it could completely change the way you read and consume content.

Bionic Reading was created by Swiss developer Renato Casutt. The tool is described as “a new method facilitating the reading process by guiding the eyes through text with artificial fixation points.” In short, this tool makes different parts of words stand out, only highlighting the initial letters and letting your brain do the rest.

Still don’t get it? Let the picture below explain, reading first the left side, then the right. If the tool works for you, you should find the right-hand side much easier to read.

Source: Bionic Reading

Understandably, Bionic Reading is going absolutely rival on the web right now, a Tweet of the above picture has nearly more than 10,000 retweets and more than 56,000 likes in less than 24 hours.

The Bionic Reading API already exists online as a tool you can use to convert text, but it’s also already available on both the iPhone and the Mac. Two iPhone apps, Reeder 5 and lire, as well as the Mac app Fiery Feeds (also an RSS reader) have incorporated the technology on both Mac and iPhone, giving developers a look at how Bionic Reading could completely revolutionize the way we read content on devices like Apple’s best iPhones, the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13, as well as Macs and iPads.

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One certainly feels like it’s easier to read the tweaked text than normal one. I’d love to see a proper examination of this.
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GOP-led legislation would force breakup of Google’s ad business • WSJ

Keach Hagey:

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A bipartisan group of senators led by Utah Republican Mike Lee introduced legislation Thursday that would take aim at conflicts of interest in the advertising technology industry and force Google to break up its dominant online-ad business.

The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), is among the most aggressive of the legislative proposals circulating in Congress that aim to rein in the power of Big Tech.

The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act would prohibit companies processing more than $20bn in digital ad transactions annually from participating in more than one part of the digital advertising ecosystem.

That would directly impact Google, a unit of Alphabet, which is the dominant player at every link in the chain that connects buyers and sellers of online advertising. Google operates tools that help companies sell and purchase ads, as well as the auction houses, or exchanges, where transactions happen in split seconds.

Under the legislation, Google wouldn’t be able to stay in all those businesses.

Similar legislation is expected to be introduced in the House as soon as Thursday, led by Republican Ken Buck of Colorado and Democrat Pramila Jayapal of Washington, congressional aides said.

“When you have Google simultaneously serving as a seller and a buyer and running an exchange, that gives them an unfair, undue advantage in the marketplace, one that doesn’t necessarily reflect the value they are providing,” said Mr. Lee in an interview. “When a company can wear all these hats simultaneously, it can engage in conduct that harms everyone.”

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Google’s 2021 advertising network revenues was $31.7bn, so this looks very carefully targeted. Facebook would also be affected. No guarantee this will make any progress, but it would be a hell of a change to US antitrust law interpretation to say that because a company’s big in multiple parts of the same ecosystem, that it can’t be big any more.
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GOP senators’ private meeting with Google turns tense over email bias claims • POLITICO

Emily Birnbaum and Marianne Levine:

»

The Senate Republican Steering Committee, the policy arm of the Senate GOP, had invited Google’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, to discuss a recent study that found the company has disproportionately filtered Republican lawmakers’ emails into hidden spam folders compared to emails from Democratic lawmakers. Walker said there is no bias in how Google deals with spam.

The group lunch grew unusually tense, according to three people familiar with the meeting, granted anonymity to discuss private matters. “The lunch was spirited,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of the more vocal attendees. “Google deflected, refused to provide any data, repeatedly refused to answer direct questions.”

The senators’ furor is part of the broader conservative crusade against the major tech companies, who they claim routinely stifle right-wing speech. The companies, including Facebook and Google, have denied these allegations, while researchers have found that there is no evidence that the social media platforms disproportionately take action against content from conservatives.

The meeting’s host was Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Several NRSC staffers and Republican political strategists were in attendance, an unusual dynamic given the traditional Capitol Hill separation between policymaking and politics.

One senator who attended the meeting, granted anonymity to describe the gathering, said it was “short of hostile, but confrontational.” GOP lawmakers have laid into Google at public hearings, but the senator said the private meeting was even more heated. “They want to come and explain and dispute and do a tutorial, just as I expected they would do,” the senator said. “But their problem was that we weren’t confined to five minutes or congeniality.”

The researchers behind the North Carolina State University study have denied that Google’s filtering is related to political discrimination, concluding it has more to do with factors like past user behaviour.

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Everything becomes a point of leverage, whether or not it’s related to the truth.
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Justice Department pledges not to charge security researchers with hacking crimes • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

The US Department of Justice says it won’t subject “good-faith security research” to charges under anti-hacking laws, acknowledging long-standing concerns around the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Prosecutors must also avoid charging people for simply violating a website’s terms of service — including minor rule-breaking like embellishing a dating profile — or using a work-related computer for personal tasks.

The new DOJ policy attempts to allay fears about the CFAA’s broad and ambiguous scope following a 2021 Supreme Court ruling that encouraged reading the law more narrowly. The ruling warned that government prosecutors’ earlier interpretation risked criminalizing a “breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity,” laying out several hypothetical examples that the DOJ now promises it won’t prosecute. That change is paired with a safe harbor for researchers carrying out “good-faith testing, investigation, and/or correction of a security flaw or vulnerability.” The new rules take effect immediately, replacing old guidelines issued in 2014.

“The policy clarifies that hypothetical CFAA violations that have concerned some courts and commentators are not to be charged,” says a DOJ press release.

…The policy doesn’t settle all criticisms of the CFAA, like its potential for disproportionately long prison sentences. It doesn’t make the underlying law any less vague since it only affects how prosecutors interpret it. The DOJ also warns that the security research exception isn’t a “free pass” for probing networks. Someone who found a bug and extorted the system’s owner using that knowledge, for instance, could be charged for performing that research in bad faith. Even with these limits, though, the rulemaking is a pledge to avoid slapping punitive anti-hacking charges on anyone who uses a computer system in a way its owner doesn’t like.

«

Overdue. But welcome.
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More subprime borrowers are missing loan payments • WSJ

AnnaMaria Andriotis:

»

Consumers with low credit scores are falling behind on payments for car loans, personal loans and credit cards, a sign that the healthiest consumer lending environment on record in the U.S. is coming to an end.

The share of subprime credit cards and personal loans that are at least 60 days late is rising faster than normal, according to credit-reporting firm Equifax Inc. In March, those delinquencies rose month over month for the eighth time in a row, nearing their prepandemic levels.

Rising delinquencies were inevitable following their decline during the pandemic, many lenders and analysts said. Even so, the increase is getting attention from investors partly because the Federal Reserve, facing the highest inflation since the early 1980s, is embarking on what is expected to be the sharpest series of interest-rate rises in years. Higher loan delinquency figures can indicate stress on the part of consumers whose spending is a significant driver of economic activity.

Fears that rising rates will throw the economy into recession have fueled the worst start of the year for stocks in decades. A poor earnings season for major US retail chains has intensified those concerns this week, prompting large declines in major retail shares and sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its steepest drop of the year Wednesday.

Delinquencies on subprime car loans and leases hit an all-time high in February, based on Equifax’s tracking that goes back to 2007.

Many people, including those with less-than-perfect credit, paid off debts and built up savings during the pandemic, a surprising outcome considering that lenders at first thought borrowers would default en masse when Covid-19 hit. The government’s response, including stimulus payments and child tax credits, boosted many families’ financial health.

But now many of those benefits have run out. Subprime borrowers, who sometimes have lower incomes or less savings, are being hit hard. Inflation, running near its highest point in four decades, is also forcing many households to choose between paying for essentials and paying their monthly loans.

«

Subprime was the canary in the coalmine for the Great Recession, but this feels different. Possibly it’s the vehicle loans business – and hence the car business – that’s going to get hit.

And in the US they won’t even try a windfall tax on the oil companies, which looks inevitable in the UK some time in the next few weeks.
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A new Omicron variant, BA.2.12.1, has taken over in Massachusetts. Here’s what you need to know • The Boston Globe

Kay Lazar:

»

The virus that causes COVID-19 didn’t change much in the early days of the pandemic. Then the number of mutations started increasing, and scientists began using an alphabet soup of letters and numbers to distinguish them.

But nothing prepared them for the dizzying array of strains that the mighty Omicron variant has been spitting out.

As one of the newest Omicron variants, BA.2.12.1, overtakes its predecessors, here’s what you need to know.

Q: What is this BA.2.12.1 that is racing across the country?
First things first. The original Omicron variant, called B.1.1.529, emerged in South Africa last year and spread quickly around the world. By late January, another Omicron subvariant, BA.1.1, already was dominant in the United States.

Fast forward to this spring. The BA.2.12.1 subvariant from the fast-moving Omicron lineage was first detected in New York in March, along with its sibling, BA.2.1. These two subvariants are estimated to spread 23% to 27% faster than their predecessor, the BA.2 variant. Consider that in early March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that BA.2 accounted for about 26% of all cases in the US, and BA.2.12.1 accounted for less than 1 percent. By May 7, BA.2 had roughly doubled its prevalence, to about 56% of all cases — but BA.2.12.1 had exploded and now accounts for 43% of the country’s COVID cases. (It’s about 40% of New England cases, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard estimates that it has taken over in Massachusetts, accounting for nearly 70% of cases.)

Q: Will BA.2.12.1 elbow out its sibling for top spot?
Scientists tracking Omicron say that’s already happening. Yet its extraordinary speed, fueling another rapid rise in cases, is puzzling researchers because its structure is not all that different from its predecessor’s. “It’s almost like having somebody who runs a 2:30 marathon changing their sneakers and all of a sudden running a two-hour marathon. It doesn’t make sense,” said Dr. Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who is also coleader of the viral variants program at the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness.

«

The increasing infectivity of SARS-Cov-2 is stunning; it’s gone from very ordinary to extraordinary in the course of a couple of years. In the UK, BA.2 is a long way behind Omicron.
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Nadine Dorries admits to sharing her Netflix password with four other households • Mirror Online

Aletha Adu:

»

Nadine Dorries admitted to sharing her Netflix account password with four other households in a bizarre Commons hearing.

The Culture Secretary said four other people including her mum have access to her account in breach of its terms and conditions.

Netflix prohibits users from password sharing. But she only learned of this today, speaking to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

She told MPs: “My mum has access to my account, the kids do. I have Netflix but there are four other people who can use my Netflix account in different parts of the country.” Laughing, she added: “Am I not supposed to do that?”

The DCMS permanent secretary Sarah Healey, sitting next to her in front of MPs added: “So many people watch it in my house I had to pay for the more expensive one.”

Ms Healey reportedly later told the Culture Secretary password sharing was not allowed on the service.

The Commons committee also quizzed the Culture Secretary on the future of Channel 4 after the Government announced plans to go ahead with its privatisation.

«

Netflix is blunt that “people who do not live in your household will need to use their own account to watch Netflix”. It can then demand that devices outside the household are “verified” (details on the same page). Healey is referring to the higher-tier account which allows five different profiles, but that’s not about location.

So yes, it looks like Dorries is indeed breaching the T&Cs for Netflix. Who’d like to be the brave person from customer relations making the phone call to tell her? Or are we in Elon Musk territory here?
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Defiant Chinese netizens skirt lockdown censorship using blockchain • Financial Times

Eleanor Olcott and Gloria Li:

»

In late April, Shanghai’s Tongji University students found rotting pork inside a meal box delivered several weeks into the city’s Omicron outbreak.

The maggot-infested meal struck a chord with the disgruntled Shanghai public weeks into an indefinite lockdown without access to basic food and medical supplies.

One student penned an angry response that quickly became a symbol of silent resistance, spreading across social media platforms. Censors deleted reposts of his outburst on the microblogging site Weibo, but the expletive-laden message was immortalised online after being turned into a small piece of digital art preserved on the blockchain.

The incident spawned a series of non-fungible tokens, a form of digital artwork, which have spread during the Shanghai lockdown as a way to preserve criticism of the city’s Omicron outbreak beyond the reach of censors.

China’s censors have been at the forefront of the information battle during the country’s worst coronavirus outbreak in two years. They have systematically erased critical articles and posts on mainstream social media sites about the heavy burden of the strict lockdown measures.

But the growing popularity of blockchain technology has presented a fresh challenge to the country’s censorship regime. Once data is sent to a blockchain network, it cannot be deleted or altered by higher authorities.

…“Censors cannot delete information from the blockchain,” said Barney Tan, head of the school of information systems and technology management at UNSW Sydney.

«

A real use for the blockchain to get around censorsh—

»

But Tan noted that even though censors cannot scrub out information from the blockchain, “they can still block access to it” by preventing people from sharing links on social media.

«

Oh well. But: it’s better than nothing, and it might at least exist outside the censorship space.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you ask a software engineer to build a billing system, you’ll discover why utilities bills are so perplexing and inflexible. CC-licensed photo by Uswitch.com Images 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. Every three months, right? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s Russian subsidiary to file for bankruptcy after bank account seized • Reuters

»

Google’s Russian subsidiary plans to file for bankruptcy after authorities seized its bank account, making it impossible to pay staff and vendors, but free services including search and YouTube will keep operating, a Google spokesperson said on Wednesday.

The Alphabet unit has been under pressure in Russia for months for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal and for restricting access to some Russian media on YouTube, but the Kremlin has so far stopped short of blocking access to the company’s services.

“The Russian authorities seizure of Google Russia’s bank account has made it untenable for our Russia office to function, including employing and paying Russia-based employees, paying suppliers and vendors, and meeting other financial obligations,” a Google spokesperson said. “Google Russia has published a notice of its intention to file for bankruptcy.”

A TV channel owned by a sanctioned Russian businessman said in April that bailiffs had seized 1 billion roubles ($15m) from Google over its failure to restore access to its YouTube account, but this is the first time the US tech giant has said its bank account as whole has been seized.

«

Even China just ticked some boxes to force Google out back in 2010. But will Russia block access? It’s the logical next step.
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Why Tesla was kicked out of the S&P 500’s ESG index • CNBC

Lora Kolodny:

»

Changes to the index took effect on May 2, and a spokesperson for the index explained why they were made in a blog post published Wednesday.

It said that Tesla’s “lack of a low-carbon strategy” and “codes of business conduct,” along with racism and poor working conditions reported at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, affected the score. Tesla’s handling of an investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration also weighed on its score.

While Tesla’s stated mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, in February this year it settled with the Environmental Protection Agency after years of Clean Air Act violations and neglecting to track its own emissions. Tesla ranked 22nd on last year’s Toxic 100 Air Polluters Index, compiled annually by U-Mass Amherst Political Economy Research Institute — worse than Exxon Mobil, which came in 26th. (The index uses data from 2019, the most recently available.)

In Tesla’s first-quarter filing the company also disclosed it is being investigated for its handling of waste in the state of California, and that it had to pay a fine in Germany for failures to meet “take back” obligations in the country for spent batteries.

«

Certainly it feels pretty weird that Exxon – as in, the oil company – should be on the list when Tesla is not. Elon Musk was, predictably, annoyed about this and called ESG [environment, social, governance) “a scam” that has “been weaponised by phony social justice warriors”. Sure, a chunk of it is a scam (observe: Exxon). But Tesla really isn’t the shiny clean company Musk claims – observe its trading in bitcoin, which hardly helps reduce energy use.
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Elon Musk’s silence on how he’d moderate the Buffalo shooting livestream is deafening • The Verge

Corin Faife:

»

Under Elon Musk’s view of content moderation, any restriction on speech beyond what the law proscribes is censorship. And by that standard, the video of the attack in Buffalo — however graphic — should have remained on the platform since videos of graphic violence are not illegal speech. In practice, platforms were criticized for being too slow to remove them, and Musk found no need to weigh in on the debate.

The details of the Buffalo, New York shooting are widely known and still painful to report. Ten people were killed on a Saturday afternoon in a supermarket that was a mainstay for residents of Buffalo’s predominantly Black East Side. A gunman livestreamed the murderous violence on Twitch and planned to inflict yet more before being stopped by police.

The Buffalo gunman was, beyond doubt, radicalized online. He cited the Christchurch mass shooter as an inspiration, copying large parts of the New Zealand terrorist’s manifesto into one of his own. He was motivated by the “great replacement” theory, which holds that white people are being intentionally dispossessed from their positions of power through immigration and interracial marriage. He wrote that he had learned of the theory through 4chan, the online message board that spawned QAnon and has been linked to many other acts of white supremacist terrorism.

…If [Musk] had stopped tweeting entirely over the weekend, it would be fair to suggest that he was occupied elsewhere.

In reality, within hours of the shooting, Musk had posted a number of tweets, some of them even touching on content moderation. Approximately five hours after the shooting took place, he explained to users how they could access the chronological feed to avoid being “manipulated by the algorithm.” Later on in the evening, he found time to share a newsletter from Matt Taibbi on corporate regulation in California, some images of a recent Space X launch, and a royal portrait of King Louis XIV of France. The next day, he revisited the thread on chronological ordering with a tweet about the importance of open-source code. On Monday, he found enough time to troll Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in a conversation about spam. But watchers looking for any comment on Buffalo found nothing.

«

Good to see The Verge calling Musk out on this. It’s the sort of thing that people think is easy to sort. It isn’t.
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Grain: world markets and trade forecasts • US Department of Agriculture

»

Global wheat consumption is projected at 788 million tons, down 3 million from last year as reductions in Feed and Residual use are only partially offset by higher Food, Seed and Industrial (FSI) use. High global food inflation will impact consumers’ ability to purchase wheat and wheat products in developing markets and may direct consumers to alternative food grains. However, the global economic recovery following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in most countries, as well as emerging market consumers’ general shift toward more wheat-based diets with rising incomes and increased urbanization, continue to push FSI consumption higher. FSI is forecast at a record in 2022/23, with growth seen across nearly all regions.

«

That consumption figure is projected higher than production, which is put at 775m tonnes, down 4m on last year; and of course the big cut in production is Ukraine. Wheat had some boom production years in 2016, 2017 and 2019, but for four of the past seven years (including this one) consumption has exceeded production.

And just take a look at wheat futures prices.
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The Apple Car could feature VR technology and no windows • VRScout

Kyle Melnick:

»

On May 3rd, 2022, Apple filed a patent with the United States Patent & Trademark Office for an in-car VR entertainment system that utilizes the motion of the vehicle to further immerse passengers in their in-headset experiences. VR content is synchronized with the movement and acceleration of the autonomous vehicle as it travels to the desired location, offering a unique location-based experience that changes based on your commute.

In addition to entertainment, the patent details how the technology referenced could be used to reduce motion sickness. Instead of conventional windows, passengers would view the outside world by using their VR headset to access cameras mounted on the outside of the vehicle. The technology could also be used to watch videos and read books in a stabilized environment as well as conduct virtual meetings while on the road.

«

There’s no way on this earth that any Apple Car would have no windows. Apart from anything, if you’re wearing a VR headset, you don’t know if there are windows or not. And the patent doesn’t imply “no windows”. But well done to VR Scout for a headline that puts such a ludicrous spin on things that linking to it was irresistible.
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Four surefire ways to eliminate spam from Google Messages • Android Police

Karandeep Singh:

»

Armed with RCS, Google Messages is the current face of the company’s longstanding quest for a worthy messaging app. While the multipurpose SMS app now has the features to rival the likes of WhatsApp, it still fails in one key area—and that area is spam. That’s especially true when the sources are verified business accounts that have been hassling scores of users lately with spammy in-chat advertisements within Google Messages.

While Google and ads usually go hand in hand, the search giant has little part to play in this case. Several pushy financial services brands have been exploiting their verified business privileges to spam users (or anyone whose number they have) with rich media ads in Google Messages over past year. The trend initially blew up with Kotak Mahindra Bank, Bajaj Finserv, Buddy Loan, and PolicyBazaar have turned out to be the biggest offenders.

Moreover, this isn’t limited to Pixel or Android One users, as the Messages app now comes as the default SMS app on most smartphones. Some Samsung phone owners have also seen these ads in their preinstalled SMS app, leading us to believe that the RCS protocol is being used to relay these ad banners.

So, how do we get rid of these spammy ads in Google Messages?

«

The answer turns out to be: turn off the RCS capability. (RCS, as a reminder, is a WhatsApp-like data-borne method of messaging. Of course when data is effectively free, it’s going to be abused. Maybe Apple’s unwillingness to embrace it makes sense. Not that SMS (or indeed iMessage) is totally free of spam, but abuse of low-cost products that reach a lot of people is a certainty.
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Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste • UT News

»

An enzyme variant created by engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days.

This discovery, published in Nature, could help solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would allow major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level.

“The possibilities are endless across industries to leverage this leading-edge recycling process,” said Hal Alper, professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at UT Austin. “Beyond the obvious waste management industry, this also provides corporations from every sector the opportunity to take a lead in recycling their products. Through these more sustainable enzyme approaches, we can begin to envision a true circular plastics economy.”

The project focuses on polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a significant polymer found in most consumer packaging, including cookie containers, soda bottles, fruit and salad packaging, and certain fibers and textiles. It makes up 12% of all global waste.

The enzyme was able to complete a “circular process” of breaking down the plastic into smaller parts (depolymerization) and then chemically putting it back together (repolymerization). In some cases, these plastics can be fully broken down to monomers in as little as 24 hours.

«

Looking back through collected links (nearly 19,000 presently), a version of this tech seems to come up every few years. (Here’s the previous one, in 2019, and the one before that in 2018.) Still not seeing it in use.
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😵‍💫 Why billing systems are a nightmare for engineers • Lago blog

Anh-To:

»

When implementing a billing system, dealing with dates is often the number 1 complexity. Somehow, all your subscriptions and charges deal with a number of days. Whether you make your customers pay weekly, monthly or yearly, you need to roll things over a period of time called the billing period.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of difficulties for engineers:
1. How to deal with leap years?
2. Do your subscriptions start at the beginning of the month or at the creation date of the customer?
3. How many days/months of trial do you offer?
4. Who decided February only holds 28 days? 🤔
5. Wait, bullet 1 is also important for February… 🤯
6. How to calculate a usage-based charge (price per seconds, hours, days…)?
7. Do I resume the consumption or do I stack it month over month? Year over year?
8. Do I apply a pro-rata based on the number of days consumed by my customer?

Although every decision is reversible, billing cycle questions are often the most important source of customer support tickets, and iterating on them is a highly complex and sensitive engineering project.

«

This is just the very tip of the iceberg. So you look at the big billing systems run particularly by utilities (and most especially by the newest utilities, ie broadband and mobile companies) and realise that there are all sorts of implicit problems that they’re struggling with.
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Time Traveler: search words by first known use date • Merriam-Webster Dictionary

»

When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year.

In explanation: It is essential to keep a few factors in mind when assessing the First Known Use Date:
• The date may not represent the very oldest sense of the word. Many obsolete, archaic, and uncommon senses have been excluded from this dictionary, and such senses have not been taken into consideration in determining the date.
• The date most often does not mark the very first time that the word was used in English. Many words were in spoken use for decades or even longer before they passed into the written language. The date is for the earliest written or printed use that the editors have been able to discover.
• The date is subject to change. Many of the dates provided will undoubtedly be updated as evidence of still earlier use emerges.

The First Known Use Date will appear in one of three styles:
• For the Old English period (700-1099), “before 12th century”
• For the Middle English period (1100-1499), by century (e.g., “14th century”)
• For the Modern English period (1500-present), by year (for example, “1942”)

«

You can pick individual years all the way back to 1500. Could I suggest you try 1884? Might need to scroll a little.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Playing video games has a positive effect on children’s intelligence, according to a new study. Unexpected result, eh? CC-licensed photo by Sherif Salama 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. Best not viewed through a headset. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple’s mixed reality headset project challenges explained • 9to5Mac

Michael Potuck, filleting The Information’s report on this:

»

When the headset team founder and leader Mike Rockwell was working on getting buy-in from Apple’s various teams to help with the development, his team was shut down on the idea of making it a VR headset. Ive’s team also pushed back on “practical uses” and doubted consumers would want to wear headsets for any considerable amount of time.

»

Rockwell, Meier and Rothkopf soon encountered pushback from Ive’s team. The three men had initially wanted to build a VR headset, but Ive’s group had concerns about the technology, said three people who worked on the project. They believed VR alienated users from other people by cutting them off from the outside world, made users look unfashionable and lacked practical uses. Apple’s industrial designers were unconvinced that consumers would be willing to wear headsets for long periods of time, two of the people said.

«

That ended up birthing the idea of a mixed reality headset:

»

The men came up with a solution to address the concerns of Ive’s team. For example, they proposed adding cameras to the front of the headset so that people wearing the device could see their surroundings, said the three people. But the feature that ultimately sold the industrial designers on the project was a concept for an outward-facing screen on the headset. The screen could display video images of the eyes and facial expressions of the person wearing the headset to other people in the room.

These features addressed the industrial design group’s worries about VR-induced alienation—they allowed other people in a room to interact and collaborate with a person wearing a headset in a way not possible with other VR gear. For years, the existence of such a display, internally code-named T429, was known only to a small circle of people even within Rockwell’s group.

«

The Information’s report hints that a follow-up piece will cover a “pivotal moment for the Apple headset” that occurred in 2019. That’s likely when Jony Ive “balked” at the idea of selling a headset that required a base station device to operate. That’s when the team pivoted to working on a less powerful, but more independent AR/VR device.

The latest expectation is that Apple could announce its mixed reality headset in 2023. As far as price, we’ve heard reports that it could sell from above $2,000 to $3,000.

«

I talked about life in the metaverse for an upcoming episode of The Bunker podcast. I feel that if they get it right, it’ll get takeup in business. Not sure how much more widely, though.
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In hot pursuit of ‘cryware’: Defending hot wallets from attacks • Microsoft Security Blog

“Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team”:

»

The steep rise in cryptocurrency market capitalization, not surprisingly, mirrors a marked increase in threats and attacks that target or leverage cryptocurrencies. But Microsoft researchers are observing an even more interesting trend: the evolution of related malware and their techniques, and the emergence of a threat type we’re referring to as “cryware”.

Cryware are information stealers that collect and exfiltrate data directly from non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets, also known as hot wallets. Because hot wallets, unlike custodial wallets, are stored locally on a device and provide easier access to cryptographic keys needed to perform transactions, more and more threats are targeting them.

Cryware signifies a shift in the use of cryptocurrencies in attacks: no longer as a means to an end but the end itself. Before cryware, the role of cryptocurrencies in an attack or the attack stage where they figured varied depending on the attacker’s overall intent. For example, some ransomware campaigns prefer cryptocurrency as a ransom payment. However, that requires the target user to manually do the transfer. Meanwhile, cryptojackers—one of the prevalent cryptocurrency-related malware—do try to mine cryptocurrencies on their own, but such a technique is heavily dependent on the target device’s resources and capabilities.

With cryware, attackers who gain access to hot wallet data can use it to quickly transfer the target’s cryptocurrencies to their own wallets. Unfortunately for the users, such theft is irreversible: blockchain transactions are final even if they were made without a user’s consent or knowledge.

«

They go into a lot of detail here, but it’s the “cryware” epithet that’s novel.
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Warning: another stablecoin loses peg – DEI team working to restore the peg • Finbold

Dino Kurbegovic:

»

Deus Finance’s stablecoin Dei (DEI) is the latest stablecoin to lose its 1-to-1 peg to the US dollar. The coin is currently trading at $0.64, as this drop follows several algorithmic stablecoins losing their peg last week, the most notable of which was the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST). 

Deus Finance uses DEUS and DEI tokens for their DeFi protocol, where minting 1 DEI requires $1 of collateral. When redeeming, for instance, one DEI, users would get 80% of the value in USDC and 20% in DEUS if USDC was used as collateral for the creation of DEI in the first place. 

This is important because the collateral ratio fell to 43%; according to data from Deus Finance, low collateral meant difficult redemption of DEI tokens since there is not enough capital behind the stablecoin.   

Traders are taking advantage of this arbitrage mismatch, buying up DEI coins and exchanging them for $1 worth of collateral, making matters worse. Deus Finance reacted by halting the redemption process in order to try and stabilize the coin.  

«

When I checked about seven hours ago, that wasn’t going too well: down to $0.57. USDC never seems to have been very well capitalised. Still, to lose one peg might look like accident, to lose two…
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Intel can’t even grow profits during a global chip shortage; where did it all go wrong? • The Conversation

Howard Yu is professor of management and innovation at the International Institute for Management Development:

»

TSMC doesn’t have to shoulder the risks of launching a new product. It just needs to excel in manufacturing, because if a Qualcomm product fails, AMD’s may take off. TSMC can switch capacity from one client to another. Risk is mitigated when demand is pooled.

For chip designers, outsourcing to TSMC has gradually meant they can afford to be fast-moving and bold in product design. If a new chip doesn’t sell, they can pull the plug without having to worry about the factory: that’s TSMC’s problem.

That’s how Nvidia has evolved beyond deploying graphic processors only in the gaming sector; it’s now leading in designing chipsets for AI applications. And AMD, an underdog close to bankruptcy in 2014, now makes some of the most powerful processors.

Intel, meanwhile, still needs to ensure that every product wins with enough volume to feed its network of factories, each costing billions of dollars. This has made the company more and more conservative. And having stuck to supplying chips to PCs, servers and data centres, it is struggling to innovate. Tellingly, the company’s gross margin – total revenue minus the cost of production – has been sliding for nearly a decade. The biggest danger for a technology company is that it’s not developing leading-edge products fast enough, backsliding into selling commodities.

«

Intel’s was the utterly winning formula while desktop/laptop was the only game in town. But as soon as that diversified, the formula became a deadweight. Intel’s now-CEO argued strongly against RISC as a design architecture, insisting that CISC was the better option. That was absolutely correct as long as power consumption wasn’t a relevant metric. Now, though, it is.
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The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background • Scientific Reports

Bruno Sauce et al (from Holland, Germany and Sweden):

»

Digital media defines modern childhood, but its cognitive effects are unclear and hotly debated. We believe that studies with genetic data could clarify causal claims and correct for the typically unaccounted role of genetic predispositions. Here, we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic status.

We analyzed 9,855 children from the USA who were part of the ABCD dataset with measures of intelligence at baseline (ages 9–10) and after two years. At baseline, time watching (r = − 0.12) and socializing (r = − 0.10) were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β =  + 0.17), but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming. Unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence (standardized β =  + 0.12), contrary to prior research on the effect of watching TV. Although, in a posthoc analysis, this was not significant if parental education (instead of SES) was controlled for.

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“Gaming positively impacted intelligence”. Bet you didn’t expect that one.
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Tesla hacker proves a way of unlocking doors, starting engine • Bloomberg

Margi Murphy:

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Tesla customers might love the carmakers’ nifty keyless entry system, but one cybersecurity researcher has demonstrated how the same technology could allow thieves to drive off with certain models of the electric vehicles.

A hack effective on the Tesla Model 3 and Y cars would allow a thief to unlock a vehicle, start it and speed away, according to Sultan Qasim Khan, principal security consultant at the Manchester, UK-based security firm NCC Group. By redirecting communications between a car owner’s mobile phone, or key fob, and the car, outsiders can fool the entry system into thinking the owner is located physically near the vehicle. 

The hack, Khan said, isn’t specific to Tesla, though he demonstrated the technique to Bloomberg News on one of its car models. Rather, it’s the result of his tinkering with Tesla’s keyless entry system, which relies on what’s known as a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol. 

There’s no evidence that thieves have used the hack to improperly access Tesla vehicles. The carmaker didn’t respond to a request for comment. NCC provided details of its findings to its clients in a note on Sunday, an official there said.

Khan said he had disclosed the potential for attack to Tesla and that company officials didn’t deem the issue a significant risk. To fix it, the carmaker would need to alter its hardware and change its keyless entry system, Khan said. The revelation comes after another security researcher, David Colombo, revealed a way of hijacking some functions on Tesla vehicles, such as opening and closing doors and controlling music volume.

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It’s a little difficult to evaluate how much of a risk this is. “Redirecting communication” sounds like they’re trying to unlock the car and the thief intercepts that? Not sure how dangerous that would really be.
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Elon Musk does not care about spam bots • Bloomberg

Matt Levine, whose newsletter is an excellent choice of reading:

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I think it is important to be clear here that Musk is lying. The spam bots are not why he is backing away from the deal, as you can tell from the fact that the spam bots are why he did the deal. He has produced no evidence at all that Twitter’s estimates are wrong, and certainly not that they are materially wrong or made in bad faith. (Musk can only get out of the deal if Twitter’s filings are wrong in a way that would cause a “material adverse effect” on Twitter, which is vanishingly unlikely.) His own supposed methodology for counting spam bots is laughable. Yesterday Twitter’s chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal, tweeted a thread explaining in general terms how Twitter estimates that fake accounts represent fewer than 5% of its count of active users, and how this analysis can’t be easily replicated by outsiders (because they don’t know which accounts are real, and also because they don’t know which accounts Twitter counts as daily active users). It seems clear that Agrawal’s thoughtful answer is basically correct. 1  Musk responded with a poop emoji.

More important, nothing has changed about the bot problem since Musk signed the merger agreement. Twitter has published the same qualified estimate — that fewer than 5% of monetizable accounts are fake — for the last eight years. Musk knew those estimates, and declined to do any nonpublic due diligence before signing the merger agreement. He knew about the spam bot problem before signing the merger agreement, as we know because he talked about it constantly, including while announcing the merger agreement. If he didn’t want to buy Twitter because there are spam bots, he should not have signed a contract to buy Twitter. No new information has come to light about spam bots in the last three weeks. 

What has happened in the last three weeks? Well, the prices of tech stocks have gone down, making the $54.20 price that Musk agreed to look a bit rich.

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Levine is, it should be said, a fan of italics. I now put the chances of this deal happening at around 10%. That is, if someone offers you £10 for a £1 bet that it happens, take it. But not for £9.

Also: remember a fortnight ago, when everyone was sure the deal was all done bar a couple of dotted i’s?
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About that passenger who landed a plane • Breaking the News

James Fallows, an experienced pilot, on some of the things that the guy who landed the plane when the pilot passed out (here’s the FAA account):

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What’s hard about landing a plane includes the following elements, which are distinct from the other parts of “learning to fly”—weather, radio work, regulations, avionics, mechanical and electrical systems, etc.

• You’re intentionally pointing the plane toward the ground. This can be disconcerting
• You have to maintain the “sight picture.” You can judge whether you’re on the right vertical descent path, by how the approach end of the runway looks as you head down. When the winds are smooth, this can be like riding an escalator down toward the runway. It becomes second nature, just like judging the traffic flow when you’re changing lanes on a busy freeway. But it’s not first nature
• You have to manage step-downs in altitude and speed. Planes typically cruise at speeds that are many multiples of their proper touch-down speed for landing. They need to reduce the speed in predictable increments —meanwhile while descending, which (unless offset) increases the airplane’s speed
• Managing the speed, and altitude, and alignment through these processes again becomes as natural as guiding a bike in a turn. But not the first time—or, for most people, the 10th, or the 50th
• You have to manage “pitch and power,” which I’m not going to get into. Nor the use of “flaps.” Again, everyone learns to do this by muscle memory, but no one starts that way
• You have to manage winds. When there’s a crosswind, which seems to be most of the time, you “crab” into the wind, pointing the plane’s nose upwind so that its course remains aligned with the runway. And then there is “wind shear,” and allowing for “gust factor
• You have to manage the “flare.” The difference between what feels like a “rough” and “smooth” landing often comes down to a difference of a few inches, and a few knots, in how the plane goes through the last little bit of descent.

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As Fallows points out, we haven’t had the tapes of the conversation between air traffic control and the (presumed completely amateur) passenger. So we don’t know what the conversation was. It’s going to be absolutely fascinating to know how they literally talked him down. (Via John Naughton.)
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MetaFilter’s rule-laden mini-utopia • New_ Public

“New_ Public” (a “community of thinkers, designers and technologists building the digital public spaces of the future”):

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Today, there’s an expectation that if you want to join a social media network, the experience should be “frictionless” — you should be able to start as easily and seamlessly as possible. The quicker a platform can get you comfortable and interested (and typically, at least casually addicted), the better. MetaFilter, which comes from an era of image-less forums, where you can’t even reply to a post in-line, takes a different approach. Anyone can read the site, but to post you must pay $5 and wait one week. As they explain on their new user page, these rules, and other waiting periods, are partly to combat spam and bots. But primarily, they want users to understand what MetaFilter is, how it works, and what’s expected of users before they jump in completely.

It may take a little time and effort to get into MetaFilter, but every decision about how the site works is instantly available for any visitor to read through the MetaTalk subpage. This goes far beyond basic policies and terms of service. For example, the site is currently moving to a new moderation model, which is being chronicled by the users. 

The owner since 2017 has been Josh Millard, who goes by cortex on MetaFilter. Millard is now ceding control of the site to a transition team of longtime users who will decide how to proceed. In a recent candid post, Millard opened up about what it takes to run the site. “I’ve been especially aware of both the toll the job has been taking on me and the degree to which my burnout and mental health challenges have been preventing me from being as effective a manager, moderator, and business administrator as I want MetaFilter to have,” he wrote.

Here, the gulf between MetaFilter and the largest social platforms gets even wider. If Elon Musk’s stated goal of a Twitter with no restrictions on speech is one end of the spectrum, then MetaFilter might be the other end. It’s important to know that the amount of new content each day is extremely low (maybe 10 posts) and the site has a deep catalog of posts that mods do not want to be repeated. The FAQ could not be more clear: “MetaFilter is a moderated site and not all posts pass muster.”

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But, of course, that takes a lot of work. Metafilter came close to death a few years ago when Google downranked it.
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Napster gets bought again, this time with a web3 pivot in the works • Music Ally

Stuart Dredge:

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How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man, wondered Bob Dylan in 1963. How many owners must a Napster change hands between before you call it a revolutionary blockchain and web3 platform, wonders Music Ally in 2022. Whatever the number, you can add one to it this morning.

Yes, Napster has been acquired again, this time by two companies from the web3 sector: Hivemind and Algorand. “Dear friends, we are excited to share that we’ve taken Napster Group private, and to bring the iconic music brand to web3,” wrote Hivemind founder Matt Zhang on LinkedIn.

“Volatile market and uncertain times often bring exciting opportunities. At Hivemind, we believe in developing thesis and building enduring value. Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we’ve come across, and we are thrilled to work with Emmy Lovell and many talents to unlock value for the entire ecosystem and revolutionize how artists and fans enjoy music.”

Lovell has been named interim CEO of Napster, with the former WMG exec stepping up from her previous role as chief strategy officer, having joined the company in April 2021 shortly after its last acquisition by music VR company MelodyVR.

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I honestly thought Napster was still going in its second incarnation, as a music service. Seems not. It’s changed hands more times than Delicious (which finally got bought by Pinboard, to stop other people buying it and passing it round).
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