Water levels on the Rhine river have fallen so low that barge traffic, essential for coal powered stations and chemicals production, is at risk. CC-licensed photo by Roger W on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Toot toot! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

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Facebook accused of ‘whitewashing’ India human rights report • Time

Billy Perrigo:

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Facebook’s parent company Meta has been accused of “whitewashing” a long-awaited report on its human rights impact in India, which the company released in a highly summarized form on Thursday, drawing fire from civil society groups.

TIME first reported in August 2020 that Facebook had commissioned the human rights impact assessment (HRIA), in an effort to determine its role in the spread of hate speech online. The report has been anticipated for nearly two years by rights groups who have long raised the alarm that Facebook is contributing to an erosion of civil liberties in India and to dangers faced by minorities.

Ankhi Das, Facebook’s most senior executive in India, resigned in October 2020 after the Wall Street Journal reported she had intervened to prevent the platform removing accounts of members of the country’s Hindu nationalist ruling party, some of whom had called for violence against India’s Muslim minority. India is Facebook’s largest market by users.

The India HRIA was carried out by an independent law firm, Foley Hoag, which interviewed more than 40 civil society stakeholders, activists, and journalists to complete the report. But Facebook drew criticism from rights groups on Thursday after it released its own four-page summary of the law firm’s findings that was almost bereft of any meaningful details.

Ritumbra Manuvie, an academic who was one of the civil society members interviewed by Foley Hoag for the report, said Facebook’s summary was a “cover up of its acute faultlines in India,” and showed that its “commitment to human rights is rather limited.”

The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a pressure organization made up of critics of the platform, said in a statement that the report was “a master-class in spin and obfuscation” and a “whitewashing [of] the religious violence fomented in India across [Meta’s] platforms.”

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Largest market by users, with a government that is very apt to censor content it doesn’t like. Facebook has a tiger by the tail there.
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The US military wants to understand the most important software on Earth • MIT Technology Review

Patrick Howell O’Neill:

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while the open-source movement has spawned a colossal ecosystem that we all depend on, we do not fully understand it, experts like [cybersecurity researcher and former NSA computer security scientist, Dave] Aitel argue. There are countless software projects, millions of lines of code, numerous mailing lists and forums, and an ocean of contributors whose identities and motivation are often obscure, making it hard to hold them accountable.

That can be dangerous. For example, hackers have quietly inserted malicious code into open-source projects numerous times in recent years. Back doors can long escape detection, and, in the worst case, entire projects have been handed over to bad actors who take advantage of the trust people place in open-source communities and code. Sometimes there are disruptions or even takeovers of the very social networks that these projects depend on. Tracking it all has been mostly—though not entirely—a manual effort, which means it does not match the astronomical size of the problem.

[DARPA program manager, Sergey] Bratus argues that we need machine learning to digest and comprehend the expanding universe of code—meaning useful tricks like automated vulnerability discovery—as well as tools to understand the community of people who write, fix, implement, and influence that code.

The ultimate goal is to detect and counteract any malicious campaigns to submit flawed code, launch influence operations, sabotage development, or even take control of open-source projects.

To do this, the researchers will use tools such as sentiment analysis to analyze the social interactions within open-source communities such as the Linux kernel mailing list, which should help identify who is being positive or constructive and who is being negative and destructive.

The researchers want insight into what kinds of events and behavior can disrupt or hurt open-source communities, which members are trustworthy, and whether there are particular groups that justify extra vigilance. These answers are necessarily subjective. But right now there are few ways to find them at all.

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(Thanks Gregory for the link.)
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Black Americans’ views on facial recognition use by police • Pew Research Center

Emily Vogels and Andrew Perrin:

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Black Americans are less likely than White or Hispanic Americans to believe that the widespread use of facial recognition technology will make policing fairer. Only 22% of Black adults say it will make policing fairer, while 29% say it will make policing less fair and about half say it will make no difference. Hispanic and White Americans are more likely than Black Americans to say the widespread use of this technology will make policing fairer (40% and 36% say this, respectively).

Like Americans overall, most Black Americans are skeptical about whether face recognition technology should be used as evidence to arrest people. A majority of Americans, including 74% of Black adults, say that if a facial recognition program said that someone was involved in a crime, it should not be good enough evidence for police to arrest them. Roughly a third or fewer of adults in each major racial or ethnic group say the technology should be good enough evidence, even if there was a small chance the program was wrong.

Black Americans are more likely than other Americans to see certain negative outcomes from the widespread use of face recognition technology by police. For example, nearly half of Black adults (48%) think police definitely would use facial recognition technology to monitor Black and Hispanic neighborhoods much more often than other neighborhoods. That is higher than the shares of Hispanic (37%) and White (18%) adults who say the same.

…The findings come as other studies have found that face recognition technology may be accurate for identifying White men but is less accurate when it comes to identifying others.

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Low Rhine water levels risk worsening Europe’s energy crunch • BNN Bloomberg

Todd Gillespie and Jack Wittels:

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A heatwave has reduced parts of the river, western Europe’s most important waterway, to the lowest seasonal levels in at least 15 years. That could affect the delivery of everything from coal to oil products as the region races to stockpile energy supplies ahead of winter.

“Low water levels on the Rhine mean that barges cannot load steam coal at full capacity” for power plants in Germany, said Guillaume Perret, founder of energy consultancy Perret Associates. “This could be a double whammy for the German utilities, as they were already facing a shortage of barges.”

For now, most utilities have ample stockpiles, though that could change if the situation runs into late next month, he added.

…The water level at Kaub, a bottleneck point near Frankfurt, is at the lowest seasonal level since at least 2007, according to data from the German waterways administration. The situation is similar near Duisburg and Dusseldorf.

Dry spells occasionally restrict traffic on the Rhine, forcing barges to carry smaller loads. A barge with 2,500 tons of capacity loading diesel-type fuel in the Rotterdam region sailing beyond Kaub can only take on about 1,600 tons of product, maritime brokerage Riverlake said in a report this week.

“If there are low water levels in combination with limited diesel supplies, some storage tanks in Germany could run out, it happened before,” said Jelle Vreeman, a senior broker at the company. “Significant barge capacity is already taken off the market” because of the demand to cover deliveries during summer, he added.

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Barges are also essential for shipping chemicals, one of Germany’s biggest businesses. And there are nuclear power stations which use the Rhine’s water for cooling. If the drought continues, winter fuel stocks might be affected. (Coal-powered stations, blah.)

A year ago, people were dying in floods on the Rhine. Variability is the biggest variable.
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Apple MacBook Air M2 (2022) review: a whole new Air-a • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

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Despite the lower performance in benchmark tests compared to the M2 MacBook Pro, the M2 Air didn’t present any issues for me when I used it to do my regular knowledge worker job. I was able to use dozens of tabs in multiple windows of Chrome, bounce between multiple Spaces with Slack, email, and other apps, take endless Zoom calls, and play media in the background while I continued to get my work done without missing a beat. It also didn’t heat up on the bottom panel or under the keyboard during my daily workload. For the tasks that a thin-and-light computer like the Air is ideal for — productivity work, browsing the web, video calls, watching TV shows or movies, writing term papers, etc. — the M2 is more than capable.

It’s also totally fine for the occasional light photo and video editing, especially if you’re using Apple’s Photos or iMovie apps for those tasks. On my review unit with 8GB of RAM, I was able to saturate the memory and force the system to swap memory to the SSD with my daily workload, but thanks to the speedy enough storage, that didn’t slow me down. If I had been using a base model with that single-chip 256GB of storage, the story might be different, however.

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8GB wasn’t enough for an M1 device, so can’t think it would really meet the needs of the M2. Everyone’s really happy with it, judging by the reviews.
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Netflix teams up with Microsoft on cheaper streaming with adverts • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

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The streaming platform first announced plans to launch a cheaper service – giving subscribers the chance to pay less in return for viewing ads – in April after reporting the first loss of subscribers in a decade, wiping almost $60bn (£51bn) off its market value.

Greg Peters, the Netflix chief operating officer, said: “Microsoft has the proven ability to support all our advertising needs as we work together to build a new ad-supported offering.

“More importantly, Microsoft offered the flexibility to innovate over time on both the technology and sales side, as well as strong privacy protections for our members.”

Netflix’s surprise move to belatedly follow rivals such as Hulu, HBO Max and Paramount+ by launching an ad-supported package this year is expected to precede the announcement next week of a further loss of 2 million global subscribers in the three months to the end of June.

“It’s very early days and we have much to work through,” Peters said. “But our long-term goal is clear. More choice for consumers and a premium, better-than-linear TV brand experience for advertisers.”

Netflix had reportedly been in talks with a number of partners to deliver advertising sales, including Google, and Sky owner Comcast’s NBCUniversal, before signing up with Microsoft.

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Would not have guessed at Microsoft as the ad provider. It essentially wrote down the value of aQuantive, the online ad firm it bought for $6.3bn, to zero ten years ago.
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Crypto crash drags lender Celsius Network into bankruptcy • WSJ

Alexander Gladstone, Vicky Ge Huang and Soma Biswas:

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The chapter 11 filing in New York follows weeks of market speculation about Celsius, which built itself into one of the biggest cryptocurrency lenders on a pitch that it was less risky than a bank, and with better returns for its customers. But it overextended itself offering lofty yields to crypto depositors and making large loans backed by little collateral, leaving itself little cushion in the event of a market downturn.

The company was caught in the chain reaction rippling across crypto markets following selloffs in digital currencies this year, and it froze withdrawals, swaps, and transfers last month. Founded in 2017 by entrepreneur Alex Mashinsky, Celsius was valued at more than $3bn last fall in its latest venture round.

“This is the right decision for our community and company,” Mr. Mashinsky said Wednesday. “I am confident that when we look back at the history of Celsius, we will see this as a defining moment.”

Some members of Celsius’s board of directors said the suspension of withdrawals was a “difficult but necessary step” to stabilize the company’s business and protect its customers.

“Without a pause, the acceleration of withdrawals would have allowed certain customers—those who were first to act—to be paid in full while leaving others behind to wait for Celsius to harvest value from illiquid or longer-term assets before they receive a recovery,” those directors said Wednesday.

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Leaves 100,000 creditors (including other crypto funds): had $4.3bn in assets but, oh dear, $5.5bn in liabilities at the time of filing. Amazing that a company offering 18% interest rates in a time when central bank rates were less than 1% might crash and burn, do you think?
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Theranos’s Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani found guilty on all 12 fraud counts • WSJ

Heather Somerville and Meghan Bobrowsky:

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A federal jury convicted Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the former top lieutenant to Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes, on all 12 charges that he helped perpetuate a yearslong fraud scheme at the blood-testing startup.

The verdict is the second conviction against Theranos leadership and comes six months after a jury found Ms. Holmes guilty of fraud; it secures another major victory for the U.S. government, which brought the case against the pair in 2018. It brings to conclusion one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious startup implosions, which saw nearly $1bn of investor money evaporate after revelations that the company delivered inaccurate blood-test results to patients, including for life-threatening conditions, and Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani lied about its proprietary technology.

Mr. Balwani, Theranos’s former president and chief operating officer, was charged with 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. His case, like Ms. Holmes’s, marked a rare prosecution of a technology executive, and served as a referendum on startups taking the culture of “fake it until you make it” too far. Mr. Balwani faces up to 20 years in prison for each count for which he was found guilty, but former prosecutors said such a stiff sentence is rare in white-collar cases.

Mr. Balwani’s lawyers argued he wasn’t in charge at Theranos, and the responsibility for the company rested with Ms. Holmes. He used investor money as promised, to build the company, they said, and invested his own money to help the startup succeed. Mr. Balwani’s verdict shows how the government, in its second time prosecuting the case against the Theranos executives, appeared to have buttoned up its arguments following Ms. Holmes’s trial, which had a more mixed result.

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This was last week, but sentencing won’t be until November. Unlike Holmes, he didn’t testify in his own defence – though probably it wouldn’t have made much difference.
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Working all day in VR does not increase productivity • Inavate

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A new study from Germany has found that working in virtual reality does not increase productivity, comfort, or wellbeing, but does say the report will help identify opportunities for improving the experience of working in VR in the future.

The project was heded up by Dr Jens Grubert, a specialist in human-computer interaction at Coburg University, Germany.

It involved 16 people who had to work for five days, eight hours a week (with 45 mins lunch break), in VR. The participants used Meta Quest 2 VR headsets combined with a Logitech K830 keyboard and Chrome Remote Desktop. The equipment was chosen specifically to create a realistic scenario of what users would be using in today’s world.

Participants were also asked specific VR-related questions (‘do you feel sick?’ or ‘are your eyes starting to hurt?’). The research team also monitored the worker’s heartbeats and typing speed.

The published paper, entitled ‘Quantifying the Effects of Working in VR for One Week‘ found “concerning levels of simulator sickness, below average usability ratings and two participants dropped out on the first day using VR, due to migraine, nausea and anxiety.”

The study found that, as expected, VR results in significantly worse ratings across most measures. Each test subject scored their VR working experience versus working in a physical environment, many felt their task load had increased, on average by 35%. Frustration was by 42%, the ‘negative affect’ was up 11%, and anxiety rose by 19%.

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Wonder how this news is going to go down when it flashes across the visors of Mark Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg, assuming they’re not at the moment puking over a toilet. Though data finding that using VR systems for extended periods leaves significant proportions of people feeling queasy is longstanding – it goes back at least to the early 1990s when Atari was looking at launching the Jaguar VR headset.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Digital roadside signs can be distracting to drivers – especially if they focus on how many people die on the stretch of road. CC-licensed photo by Oregon Department of Transportation 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. Observing the limit. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google exec suggests Instagram and TikTok are eating into Google’s core products, Search and Maps • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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In a discussion about the evolution of search, [Google svp of Knowledge and Information Prabhakar Raghavan] somewhat offhandedly noted that younger users were now often turning to apps like Instagram and TikTok instead of Google Search or Maps for discovery purposes.

“We keep learning, over and over again, that new internet users don’t have the expectations and the mindset that we have become accustomed to.” Raghavan said, adding, “the queries they ask are completely different.”

These users don’t tend to type in keywords but rather look to discover content in new, more immersive ways, he said.

“In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search,” he continued. “They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

The figure sounds a bit shocking, we have to admit. Google confirmed to us his comments were based on internal research that involved a survey of US users, ages 18 to 24. The data has not yet been made public, we’re told, but may later be added to Google’s competition site, alongside other stats — like how 55% of product searches now begin on Amazon, for example.

While older internet users may not be able to wrap their minds around turning to a social video app to find a restaurant, this trend could cut into Google’s core business of search and discovery over time — not to mention the ads sold against those sorts of queries. While younger users may eventually launch some sort of maps app for navigation purposes, this data indicates they don’t necessarily start their journey on Google anymore. That means all the work Google did over the years to organize, curate and recommend various businesses — such as local restaurants —  or its creation of discovery tools inside Google Maps — could be lost on these younger internet users.

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Tempora mutantur, and that sort of thing.
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Can behavioral interventions be too salient? Evidence from traffic safety messages • Science

Jonathan Hall and Joshua Madsen:

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Contrary to policy-makers’ expectations, we found that displaying fatality messages increases the number of traffic crashes. Campaign weeks realize a 1.52% increase in crashes within 5 km of DMSs [dynamic message signs over/beside motorways], slightly diminishing to a 1.35% increase over the 10 km after DMSs. We used instrumental variables to recover the effect of displaying a fatality message and document a significant 4.5% increase in the number of crashes over 10 km.

The effect of displaying fatality messages is comparable to raising the speed limit by 3 to 5 miles per hour or reducing the number of highway troopers by 6 to 14%. We also found that the total number of statewide on-highway crashes is higher during campaign weeks. The social costs of these fatality messages are large: Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this campaign causes an additional 2600 crashes and 16 fatalities per year in Texas alone, with a social cost of $377m per year.

Our proposed explanation for this surprising finding is that these “in-your-face,” “sobering,” negatively framed messages seize too much attention (i.e., are too salient), interfering with drivers’ ability to respond to changes in traffic conditions.

Supporting this explanation, we found that displaying a higher fatality count (i.e., a plausibly more attention-grabbing statistic) causes more crashes than displaying a small one, that fatality messages are more harmful when displayed on more complex road segments, that fatality messages increase multi-vehicle crashes (but not single-vehicle crashes), and that the impact is largest close to DMSs and decreases over longer distances.

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I’d wonder if showing those statistics just makes you fret more about how dangerous the road must be.
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Doom hacker gets Doom running in Doom • PC Gamer

Andy Chalk:

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Getting Doom to run on things that were never meant to run Doom is something of a cottage industry among a die-hard subset of PC hackers and coders. Your motherboard’s BIOS (opens in new tab), a bunch of old potatoes (opens in new tab), a Lego brick (opens in new tab), a home pregnancy test (opens in new tab): The list goes on and on. But YouTuber and Doomworld community member kgsws has set a new standard for, well, something with this brilliant bit of techno-recursion: Doom running in Doom.

The full explanation for how it works gets technical (and, frankly, a bit dull, unless hacking is your hobby) but what it comes down to is an exploit that enables code execution within the game itself. That’s why this bit of trickery only works with the original DOS-based Doom 2, and not any of the more modern ports like GZDoom, which lack the exploit. (That’s not convenient for this project but it’s a good thing overall, kgsws noted: “People would abuse it to spread malicious code.”)

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Congressional staffers send letter to Pelosi and Schumer urging action on climate • CNNPolitics

Ella Nilsen:

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In a rare move, more than 200 congressional staffers have sent a letter to Democratic leadership in the House and Senate, demanding they close the deal on a climate and clean energy package and warning that failure could doom younger generations.

“We’ve crafted the legislation necessary to avert climate catastrophe. It’s time for you to pass it,” the staffers wrote in a letter, sent to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday evening. The letter, which staffers signed anonymously with initials, was shared first with CNN.

“Our country is nearing the end of a two-year window that represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to pass transformative climate policy,” the letter continues. “The silence on expansive climate justice policy on Capitol Hill this year has been deafening. We write to distance ourselves from your dangerous inaction.”

The staffers’ grievances were delivered as Schumer negotiates with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia on a Democrat-only package that is expected to address inflation, the cost of prescription drugs, energy and the climate crisis. The climate and energy portion has remained the largest sticking point in negotiations, as Manchin has publicly stated he wants to lower gas prices by increasing US energy production.

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There’s always a short-term reason. Though the real short-term reason is that they want to stay in power; all else subsumes to that.
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And we’re off: Twitter sues Elon Musk and lays out a strong case • Techdirt

Mike Masnick read the Twitter lawsuit against Musk so you don’t have to, and pretty amazing it is in so many ways:

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even if — as many Musk fans keep wanting to insist — Twitter misled the SEC (and there’s little to no evidence to support that claim), in the merger agreement Musk explicitly said that he didn’t rely on such statements in the first place, and thus it wouldn’t make any difference at all.

I mean, kudos to Twitter’s lawyers who put together this purchase agreement, because they appear to have anticipated every stupid trick that Musk would try to pull.

Now, as for the other information sharing bit — the pretextual nonsense where Musk pretends Twitter isn’t sharing the info it promised him and which he needs to close the deal — Twitter’s lawyers dismantle that rather aggressively as well.

…Given all that, for Musk to claim that employees leaving was a reason he’s backing out of the deal is just so so incredibly rich. This entire complaint is basically showing that everything Musk does is in bad faith. Honestly, reading this, it’s difficult to see why anyone should ever trust Musk in any business deal ever again.

The lawyers even included some late breaking tweets, in which Musk posted ridiculously laughable memes implying that this whole mess was all part of his plan to force Twitter into court to reveal the information he wanted revealed. But, in doing so, he’s effectively admitting that this entire thing was pretextual bad faith actions — which… um.. does not make him look good. Especially not in the eyes of a court that deals with business disputes all the time.

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The growing expectation is that Musk is going to come off worse in this. He owns 9.6% of the company shares (presently worth about $3bn); maybe he’ll give those up plus a chunk of cash (the $1bn penalty fee?). That would roughly double its cash on hand. Not a bad outcome.
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After the pandemic, what next for Zoom? – Protocol

Aisha Counts:

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From the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021 to 2022, revenue growth slowed to 21% year-over-year. While still healthy compared to Zoom’s enterprise-tech peers, it was a far cry from the heyday of the pandemic. And last quarter, year-over-year revenue was up only 12%.

That sort of late-pandemic shock was expected to some extent, but not in such a drastic manner. “I think what is a surprise to investors, and this is reflected in the stock price, is how quickly things slowed down and how dramatically. I think people were expecting growth to be 30%, not mid-teens,” said Rishi Jaluria, managing director at RBC Capital Markets.

In many ways Zoom’s explosive growth during the pandemic may have been its Achilles’ heel. While the number of customers more than quadrupled, the company also seemed to have captured its entire target market — a concern investors have held for a while. “It’s renewing questions of No. 1, did they just pull forward all of their [total addressable market], and No. 2, if that’s the case, how do they grow from here?” asked Jaluria.

The natural approach would be by expanding into new markets and products, which explains Zoom’s vision for becoming a platform player. But Zoom has had a number of setbacks along the way.

Not long after the company announced its plan to expand into the contact center space, its acquisition of cloud-based contact center company Five9 fell through. Zoom announced its all-stock offer for Five9 in July of 2021, but by the time the deal was supposed to close, Zoom’s stock price had plummeted almost 30%. Five9 shareholders felt the purchase price was undervaluing the company and subsequently rejected the $14.7bn deal, forcing Zoom back to the drawing board.

To many, the failed Five9 acquisition was a major miss. “Five9 is on a roll right now and that would have enabled Zoom to strengthen its portfolio and provide more of a platform approach to their clients,” said Steven Dickens, a senior analyst at Futurum Research.

Zoom’s platform vision is also under serious threat from competitors who can offer video capabilities alongside broader and more robust collaboration products.

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The idea that Zoom has captured its entire addressable market seems plausible. Its name awareness is astronomic. But it’s also not necessarily used for enterprise work, which is where the money is.

And talking of pandemic stock darlings…
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Peloton to halt in-house production of exercise bikes in latest U-turn • Financial Times

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

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The New York-based group said it would suspend operations at Tonic Fitness Technology, the Taiwanese manufacturing facility it acquired for about $45m less than three years ago. Rexon Industrial, another Taiwanese company with which it has worked for several years, will become the primary manufacturer of Peloton’s bikes and treadmills.

Barry McCarthy, the former Netflix and Spotify executive Peloton brought in as chief executive in February, portrayed the move as a natural progression in a strategy of simplifying the company’s supply chain and focusing on software and content rather than on hardware, where he has been trying to improve its profit margins.

“We believe that this along with other initiatives will enable us to continue reducing the cash burden on the business and increase our flexibility,” he added.

In May, Peloton said it had ended its fiscal third quarter with just $879mn in unrestricted cash and cash equivalents, with McCarthy admitting that cash outflows had left it “thinly capitalised” for a business of its size.

It has since raised $750m in new debt from lenders including Blackstone and Apollo, as McCarthy tries to cut $800m from annual costs by 2024. But its stock has fallen below $9 per share, cutting its equity valuation to $3bn from a peak of almost $50bn in late 2020, when investors hoped that the pandemic-fuelled surge in appetite for exercising at home would continue.

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Bike production was paused by in January anyway. Back in April, I wrote: “I remain fascinated by how badly Peloton is working towards its obvious end state where it takes the high end to provide really good fitness workouts for any platform, not just its own hardware. Though it will find companies like Zwift already there, and happy to have a fight for user loyalty.”

Getting rid of the hardware is certainly a good step towards that high end. But now it has to figure out how to reach other stationary bike riders – where Zwift is well embedded.
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Designing arithmetic circuits with deep reinforcement learning • NVIDIA Technical Blog

Rajarshi Roy, Jonathan Raiman and Saad Godil:

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As Moore’s law slows down, it becomes increasingly important to develop other techniques that improve the performance of a chip at the same technology process node. Our approach uses AI to design smaller, faster, and more efficient circuits to deliver more performance with each chip generation.

Vast arrays of arithmetic circuits have powered NVIDIA GPUs to achieve unprecedented acceleration for AI, high-performance computing, and computer graphics. Thus, improving the design of these arithmetic circuits would be critical in improving the performance and efficiency of GPUs.

What if AI could learn to design these circuits? In PrefixRL: Optimization of Parallel Prefix Circuits using Deep Reinforcement Learning, we demonstrate that not only can AI learn to design these circuits from scratch, but AI-designed circuits are also smaller and faster than those designed by state-of-the-art electronic design automation (EDA) tools. The latest NVIDIA Hopper GPU architecture has nearly 13,000 instances of AI-designed circuits.

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Notable that Google had a blogpost about doing the same process for its own chips back in April 2020. Might wonder whether everyone doing chip design is now using these techniques. Which should include Apple?
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Turkey probably hasn’t found the rare earth metals it says it has • WIRED UK

Chris Baraniuk:

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Seventy-eight% of all rare earth materials imported to the United States between 2017 and 2020 originated in China, according to the US Geological Survey. China also produces more than 80% of the world’s total rare earth refined products—compounds of these metals that are easily processed further and have all sorts of uses. The rest of the world more or less relies on China for its supply of these materials, though the country is also the largest consumer of rare earth elements.

That Turkey’s deposits could potentially upend this situation makes for a good headline. But we should take it with a sizable pinch of salt, says Kathryn Goodenough, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey. “The idea that this is some massive new reserve that we didn’t know of before is just plain wrong,” she says, adding that without a formal estimation of these resources that meets the standards of the global mining industry, it’s impossible to know the full extent of the recoverable, high-grade rare earth elements present in Turkey—and that’s what really matters.

A story in the Global Times, a publication owned by the Chinese Community Party, included a statement from the state-backed Bao Gang United Steel Group that critiqued the Turkish energy minister’s claims. “If the reserves are in the form of rare earth oxides, such scale of reserve should rank number one in the world, ahead of China,” the comment read, referring to the refined compounds containing these metals that are readily consumed by various industries worldwide. The alleged 694 million tons likely refers instead to preprocessed minerals, the statement continued.

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If Turkey had been correct, and really had nearly 700 million tons of rare earths, it would totally upend the balance of power in this. Unfortunately, seems like it might just ameliorate it.
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DALL-E, make me another Picasso, please • The New Yorker

Laura Lane:

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Since humans invented art, sometime in the Paleolithic era, they’ve produced lots of pictures—“The Starry Night,” some memes, that photo of Donald Trump staring at the eclipse. What does it all add up to?

A few years ago, a company called OpenAI fed a good deal of those images, along with text descriptions, into the neural network of an artificial intelligence named dall-e. dall-e was being trained to create original art of its own, in any style, depicting in uncanny detail almost anything desired, based on written prompts. But a mastery of the entire universe of human imagery makes for difficult choices. How do you decide what dall-e should create?

After careful deliberation, one of the first images that OpenAI prompted was a doughnut made of porcupine quills.

“There was this belief that creativity is this deeply special, only-human thing,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., explained the other day. Maybe not so true anymore, he said. Altman, who wore a gray sweater and had tousled brown hair, was videoconferencing from the company’s headquarters, in San Francisco. dall-e is still in a testing phase.

So far, OpenAI has granted access to a select group of people—researchers, artists, developers—who have used it to produce a wide array of images: photorealistic animals, bizarre mashups, punny collages. Asked by a user to generate “a plate of various alien fruits from another planet, photograph,” dall-e returned something kind of like rambutans. “The rest of mona lisa” is, according to dall-e, mostly just one big cliff. Altman described dall-e as “an extension of your own creativity.”

«

One of the pictures is “a real hippopotamus sitting on a sofa smoking a cigarette, 70mm Nikon,” as prompted by the cartoonist Roz Chast. And, well, that’s what it is. As happened with chess and Go, we can all be artistic centaurs now – part human, part machine. Plus, what a brilliant name for the product.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The car company BMW is now offering paid subscriptions to turn on the seat warmers. If you can believe that. CC-licensed photo by Car leasing made simple 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. Like and subscribe. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Myanmar’s junta rolls out Chinese camera surveillance systems in more cities – sources • Reuters via MSN

Fanny Potkin:

»

Myanmar’s junta government is installing Chinese-built cameras with facial recognition capabilities in more cities across the country, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

In tenders to procure and install the security cameras and facial recognition technology, the plans are described as safe city projects aimed at maintaining security and, in some cases, preserving civil peace, said the people who are or have been involved in the projects.

Since the February 2021 coup, local authorities have started new camera surveillance projects for at least five cities including Mawlamyine – the country’s fourth-largest city – according to information from the three people who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals by the junta.

The new projects are in addition to five cities where camera systems touted as crime prevention measures were either installed or planned by the previous government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, according to the sources and local media.

A junta spokesman did not answer Reuters calls seeking comment. None of the 10 municipal governments, all of which are controlled by the junta, answered calls seeking comment. Reuters was not able to review the tenders or visit the cities to verify the installation of the cameras.

«

It’s so sad how brief Myanmar’s period of democracy was: from around 2010 to the November 2020 election. The military junta just couldn’t bear to give up power. Now it’s using China’s tactics to clamp down further on the population.
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The ad risk for Netflix • Midia Research

Tim Mulligan:

»

The rationale for diluting Netflix’s well-known ad-free SVOD model can be effectively made to professional investors. Further, the clearly favourable response of the global ad ecosystem to the opportunities opening up also allows high value digital subscribers to be reached and underlines the business opportunity for Netflix as it moves into this new phase of its business evolution.

However, Netflix subscribers are likely to view the pivot less favourably. According to MIDiA Research’s Q1 2022 consumer survey, just over a quarter of all international Netflix subscribers do not want ads on any type of video service that they are currently paying for. This number rises to just under a third in the US, and both data points are above the weighted consumer average.

Netflix thus finds itself at an inflection point. It is confronted with the classic business dilemma of seeking to impose a business model upon consumers, of whom a significant minority are antagonistic towards being asked to pay for subscribing to an ad-supported service.

Of course, Netflix has publicly stated that that it is planning an ad-supported service that may or may not require a reduced paid subscription to access upon launch. Industry expectations are that it will be a free at-the-point-of-access tier (such as offered by rival D2C service Peacock Free). As such, ostensibly, Netflix will not be at risk of alienating its core subscriber base. However, it will undoubtedly be signalling to its wider userbase that it no longer has a differentiated service in the streaming marketplace.

«

Then again, pretty much everyone knows that there are loads of choices in the streaming marketplace. Arguably, too many.
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He lived alone and died suddenly: a work-from-home tragedy • Los Angeles Times

Kiera Feldman:

»

Dominic, who was single and lived alone, had started his position as an epidemiologist in September, joining the 41% of white-collar workers who were fully remote, spending their days at home in jobs that were more disconnected and isolating than ever.

At the beginning and end of each shift, Dominic sent his bosses a mandatory email clocking in and out.

But the next day, a Thursday, Dominic didn’t send his 8 a.m. email. He missed the 4:30 p.m. sign-out too. Friday also came and went with no sign of Dominic.

Dominic’s parents, Joseph and Jeannine Green, who lived in Michigan, didn’t hear from him over the weekend, but that was not unexpected; they were used to waiting for texts from their busy son. But by Monday, which was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, they grew worried.

Joseph checked their family cellular plan and saw Dominic’s phone had been dark for five days. Jeannine checked their joint bank account and saw it too showed no activity.

By the time Dominic’s body was discovered in his apartment Monday night, he was unrecognizable and had to be identified by the few fingerprints still visible on his hands.

«

A carefully told story of an overlooked death that might never have happened if we were still using offices as we did three years ago.
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Hive to end support for variety of smart home gizmos in 2025 • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

Home automation platform Hive plans to terminate key products in its line, including the Hive View cameras, HomeShield, and Leak products.

A Hive spokesperson told The Register: “At Hive, we’ve got big plans to make… homes greener, so we’ve made the tough decision to discontinue our smart security and leak detection products. As a smart tech brand in the middle of a climate crisis, we know the focus needs to change and will instead be developing smart home tech that’ll help get us closer to achieving Net Zero.”

Users, some of whom have invested four figure sums in Hive products are less than impressed.

The indoor and outdoor cameras and HomeShield will be supported until August 1, 2025. The Leak sensors will work as normal until September 1, 2023, after which leak notifications and water usage graphs will dry up.

Once that August date is reached, the cameras will simply no longer function. Video playback subscriptions will last for “a minimum of two years.”

«

It’s basically giving up on everything apart from – I hope – its home temperature monitoring system, though who knows. The home security and similar products don’t seem related to its core mission – home energy supply – so maybe that’s where its focus will be. (Thanks Ken Tindell for this and the next link.)
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BMW starts selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

BMW has slowly been putting features behind subscriptions since 2020, and heated seats subs are now available in BMW’s digital stores in countries including the UK, Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa. It doesn’t, however, seem to be an option in the US — yet.

We’ve asked BMW for the exact details of this roll-out, but it was unable to say when the subscriptions had been launched in which countries. It’s no surprise that BMW isn’t trumpeting the news, though. Since the company announced in 2020 that its cars’ operating system would allow for microtransactions on features like automatic high beams and adaptive cruise control, customers have decried the move as greedy and exploitative.

Carmakers have always charged customers more money for high-end features, of course, but the dynamic is very different when software, rather than hardware, is the limiting factor.

In the case of heated seats, for example, BMW owners already have all the necessary components, but BMW has simply placed a software block on their functionality that buyers then have to pay to remove.

«

Just astonishing. I suspect this is going to be hugely unpopular and that BMW will discover reverse gear, or else people will figure out how to get around the software block. That’ll invalidate something in their guarantee, and then it’ll go to court, and then the European Union will probably rule in favour of consumers (let’s hope).
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How Elon Musk left Twitter worse off than he found it • The New York Times

Kate Conger and Mike Isaac:

»

Of all the wreckage Mr. Musk is leaving at Twitter, the most prominent may be how brutally he exposed the company’s waning financial and business prospects. Twitter has operated at a loss for seven of the nine years it has been a public company. During deliberations over Mr. Musk’s offer, the company received no serious interest from other suitors, people with knowledge of the situation have said. Twitter’s board determined that Mr. Musk’s offer of $54.20 a share was the best it could obtain, suggesting it saw no way to reach that price on its own.
“The board’s lack of conviction in the company’s long-term future will linger over employees, partners and shareholders regardless of the outcome with Elon,” Mr. Goldman said.

In recent months, Twitter’s business has deteriorated. Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, said in a memo to employees in May that the company had not lived up to its business and financial goals. To address the issues, he pushed out the heads of product and revenue, instituted a hiring slowdown and began an effort to attract new users and diversify into e-commerce. In April, the company stopped providing a forward-looking financial outlook to investors, pending the acquisition.

That trajectory is unlikely to change as uncertainty over the deal discomfits advertisers, the main source of Twitter’s revenue.

“Twitter will have trouble in the near future reassuring skittish advertisers and their users that they’re going to be stable,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of the watchdog group Media Matters for America.

«

Now Twitter is suing him. All fun and games until someone loses an eye.
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Boris Johnson’s climate push loses its champion as Tories eye new leader • POLITICO

Karl Mathiesen and Eleni Courea:

»

As it purges Britain’s greenest Tory leader in years, Boris Johnson’s party is toying with ditching Britain’s political consensus on climate change.

Johnson, who last week bowed to Conservative pressure and promised to resign once a new leader is elected, set tough climate goals, relentlessly talked up the economic opportunities of cleaner energy and, alongside his climate czar Alok Sharma, delivered the COP26 U.N. conference in Glasgow.

He achieved more on climate change than “any Conservative prime minister in the last 10 or so years,” said Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network. “So him going is a big moment.”

Johnson leaves behind a welter of unfinished climate business at home and abroad — and it’s not clear anyone else will pick up the baton. “There’s obviously still vastly more to do,” said Hall.

The stakes could hardly be higher. The next prime minister will be chosen through an internal Conservative Party election now underway amid a sweltering heat wave, which scientists say has been dialed up by climate change. Candidate Sajid Javid sweated profusely through his campaign launch event on Monday.

Whoever wins will need to deal with a huge gap between ambition and action if the country is to meet its goal of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In a progress report a fortnight ago, the U.K.’s Committee on Climate Change said the government only had credible plans to achieve two-fifths of its 2035 climate target — a legally binding staging post on the way to zeroing out emissions. Manufacturing, agriculture and buildings are the areas that have been most neglected.

«

This, honestly, is the (only) bad thing about Johnson going. His wife pushed the green agenda hard, and he didn’t disagree. None of the extremists going for the job shows any indication of understanding the gravity of the problem.
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Texas Bitcoin miners get paid to shut down, return power to grid in heat wave • Fortune

Eamon Barrett:

»

According to Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain Council, “nearly all industrial-scale bitcoin mining” operations in Texas have shut down their rigs as of Monday, Bloomberg reports, freeing up 1,000 megawatts of electricity to be redistributed by the grid. Bratcher says that’s equal to 1% of Texas’s total grid capacity.

Texan bitcoin miners have powered down during previous crises, such as when a winter storm gripped the state in February. Reducing demand from power-hungry bitcoin mines freed up power supply for more life-giving services, like heating.

“We are proud to help stabilize the grid and help our fellow Texans stay warm,” Nathan Nichols, CEO of mining firm Rhodium, wrote on Twitter at the time.

But miners aren’t switching off their rigs just to be altruistic; economic incentives are driving that decision.

Grid operator the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) brokers “demand response” agreements that pay industries, including some bitcoin miners, to downsize operations during times of peak demand to provide more energy to the grid. For bitcoin miners, which can power operations on and off with the flip of a switch, taking ERCOT’s payout rather than continuing to mine bitcoin during times of tight power supply makes a lot of sense.

Bitcoin mines are only profitable so long as the cost of the energy they use remains below the value of bitcoin gained. That calculus is why miners seek out jurisdictions like Texas, where electricity prices are relatively low. But a weather-induced spike in demand across the grid inflates the cost of electricity and reduces profitability for miners.

«

Texas power prices spike absolutely enormously. It hasn’t of course figured out how to join the rest of the US grid, so people may have to suffer rolling blackouts. Bitcoin clearly isn’t a huge user (relatively) of the grid’s power. But 1% can be the difference between working and not working.
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Global PC shipments down 15% in Q2 2022 due to Chinese production crunch • Canalys

»

The second quarter of 2022 brought major disruption to the PC market, as COVID lockdowns in China stymied manufacturing. The latest Canalys data shows total shipments of desktops and notebooks fell 15.0% annually to 70.2 million units, the lowest level since a similar disruption occurred in Q1 2020. Demand headwinds, especially from consumers, have also ramped up as inflation remains unchecked in many of the world’s largest PC markets.

Notebook shipments fell 18.6% in Q2 2022 at 54.5 million units, down for a third consecutive quarter as education procurement remained muted compared with the same quarter a year ago. Desktops fared much better, posting modest growth of 0.6% to 15.6m units as the strength of commercial demand amid the further opening of economies helped spur investment in desktop refreshes and upgrades. The premium commercial segment will remain a bright spot for the overall PC market this year, despite mounting challenges in the global macroeconomic outlook. 

«

Perhaps surprisingly, Apple isn’t in the top five (Asus is fifth with 4.7m units shipped). That might be because it didn’t have any new models during the quarter, and everyone who know about these things was waiting for the M2 chip. Which is now shipping.

Tough times again for the PC market, though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Reinfections make up a bit less than a third of Covid cases in the UK – but the BA.5 subvariant is not able to escape vaccine immunity better than its parent. CC-licensed photo by Mike Finn on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. So infectious you’ll pass them on. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Is BA.5 the ‘reinfection wave’? • The Atlantic

Ed Yong:

»

the consequences of reinfections are still unclear. It’s unlikely that each subsequent bout of COVID is worse for an individual than the previous one; this idea has proliferated because of a recent preprint, which really only showed that getting reinfected is worse than not being reinfected. Nor should people worry that, as one viral news article recently suggested, “it is now possible to be reinfected with one of Omicron’s variants every two to three weeks.” [The newly rising Omicron subvariant] BA.5 is different from its forebears but not from itself; although someone could catch the new variant despite having recently had COVID, they’d be very unlikely to get infected again in the near future.

Though previous immunity has been dialed down a few notches, since BA.5 showed up, it hasn’t disappeared entirely. “We’re seeing that new infections are disproportionately people who haven’t been infected before,” Meaghan Kall, an epidemiologist at the U.K. Health Security Agency, told me. About 70% of those who currently have COVID in England are first-timers, even though they account for just 15% of the country’s population. This clearly shows that although reinfections are a serious problem, the population still has some protection against catching even BA.5.

The degree to which the new variant escapes immunity is also a shadow of what we saw last winter, when Omicron first arrived. For comparison, antibodies in vaccinated people were 20 to 40 times worse at neutralizing BA.1 than the original coronavirus. BA.5 reduces their efficiency threefold again—a small gain of sneakiness on top of its predecessor’s dramatic flair for infiltration.

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So BA.5 is essentially carrying out a mopping-up operation – infecting the people who until now have evaded infection. This isn’t over, by any means. And 30% of infections being reinfections is a lot of reinfections in the grand scheme of people getting ill with Covid. Anecdotal reports say it takes a long time to clear, and leaves people feeling wiped.
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iPadOS 16 preview: jack of all trades, master of some • The Verge

David Pierce, now that the public beta of iOS 16 and Mac OS Ventura has come out:

»

If you’re the kind of person who uses an iPad as your main workhorse, iPadOS 16 is for you. Just the ability to plug in an external monitor and use it as a second screen is a game-changer for anyone who spends hours a day doing work on their iPad. The process is pretty seamless: you can buy a specific USB-C to HDMI cable, but my USB-C hub worked well, too, and as soon as I plugged it in, it popped up a second screen with its own dock ready to go.

The iPad assumes the second screen is above it by default, so you drag windows up from your iPad onto your second screen. (You can tweak this in Settings.) Most apps just treat the monitor as a really big iPad with no touchscreen, which works well enough, but a few get crazy with it: Netflix played everything turned 90 degrees to the right, for instance, and YouTube expanded into some deeply broken layout I’ve never seen before. These are all solvable problems, and are why betas exist, but this actually isn’t an easy fix for everyone. Should apps actually treat it like a big iPad and give you 30-plus inches of a 10-inch app? Some apps are already built to be responsive and resize nimbly as you move them around, but no iPad developer has had to reckon with screens this size — or this many different sizes, period — before.

Stage Manager is the other thing that’s going to cause developers headaches. It’s also likely to be the most controversial thing about iPadOS 16: a new tool for multitasking designed to make it easier to quickly switch between a lot of apps. Once you turn on Stage Manager — it’s actually off by default, so you have to actively decide to use it before it appears — it puts four “piles” of apps onto the left side of your screen, like a dock of your various screen configurations.

…We’ll reserve full judgment for our review this fall, but so far, I hate Stage Manager. The piles take up too much room on the screen, and it takes way too much work to place the app windows just so.

«

Bit of an asterisk on this: you need an M1 iPad. Otherwise you just get mirroring on the second screen. Meanwhile, another Apple windowing manager added to the pile. Should have just stuck with Exposé.
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Energy bills to rise more than predicted, says Ofgem boss • BBC News

Kevin Peachey:

»

Domestic energy bills will rise faster this winter than previously forecast by the energy regulator Ofgem, its chief executive has admitted to MPs.

Jonathan Brearley said in late May that a typical household would pay £800 a year more from October. But, while giving evidence to MPs, he said it was “clear” that estimate for winter bills now looked too low.

The original figure was used by ministers when deciding how much to pay in direct assistance this winter. One industry analyst has predicted a rise of more than £1,200 a year in October. Cornwall Insight said that the typical domestic customer was likely to pay £3,244 a year from October, then £3,363 a year from January.

The typical bill at present is about £2,000 a year. In itself, this was a rise of £700 a year in April, compared with the previous six months.

About 23 million households in England, Wales and Scotland have their bills governed by the energy price cap. That limits the amount suppliers can charge per unit of energy, and the standing charge, and is set every six months. From this winter, it is expected that this will change to a three-month period.

Mr Brearley said in May that a typical household gas and electricity bill on the price cap would increase to £2,800 a year, owing to continued volatility in gas prices. But on Monday, he told MPs on the Public Accounts Committee that it was “clear”, given the current “pricing dynamics” and the ongoing war in Ukraine, that “prices are looking higher than they did when we made that estimate”.

However, he would not be drawn on exactly how much higher bills would be ahead of the official announcement in the coming weeks.

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The next Prime Minister is in for a world of hurt.
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A G7 energy tariff on Russia would be better than a price cap • Centre for European Reform

Elisabetta Cornago:

»

A tariff on Russian oil imports would be preferable to a complex price cap in multiple ways. First, a tariff raises [government] revenues, while a price cap does not. Forcing the exporter to sell at a maximum price set by the cartel of buyers, the price cap destroys part of Russia’s fossil fuel revenues. But with a tariff, the EU would extract at least some of those revenues, and could use them in the short term for income support for poorer households facing high energy bills, and in the long term for reconstruction efforts in Ukraine.

Second, enforcing a price cap would be difficult: importers willing to pay more than the price cap could try to offer a higher price ‘behind doors’ to obtain priority access to Russian oil. Third, if many countries applied a price cap, demand for Russian oil would spike. Because refiners of Russian oil would compete with refiners of higher-priced oil from elsewhere, retail prices of fuel at the pump would follow the higher global oil price instead of the capped purchase price of Russian oil. This means that consumers would not see any benefits in terms of lower prices at the pump.

What about the spike in gas prices? While the EU aims to cut imports of Russian oil into the EU by 90% by the end of the year, Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas is still the elephant in the room: following the lengthy, difficult negotiations leading to the partial oil embargo, no EU leader is particularly keen to embark on gas sanctions. Further, given Russia is increasingly cutting its exports to Europe, some may wonder whether it is worth the EU attempting any sanctions on gas at all.

But redirecting gas supplies away from Europe and towards other markets is even harder for Russia, and it would not be as profitable. For this reason, Russia would bear the brunt of a tariff on gas: European gas demand is more flexible than Russian gas supply. The EU should use this as an advantage.

«

Seems like a sensible idea, well-argued, which of course means that it won’t happen. All the momentum is towards the less good idea, of a price cap, and nobody’s going to want to be the person – or country’s leader – who admits they’re heading in the wrong direction. Maybe the euro falling to parity with the dollar over European recession fears will concentrate some minds.
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The Uber whistleblower: I’m exposing a system that sold people a lie • The Guardian

Paul Lewis, Harry Davies, Lisa O’Carroll, Simon Goodley and Felicity Lawrence:

»

Mark MacGann, a career lobbyist who led Uber’s efforts to win over governments across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has come forward to identify himself as the source who leaked more than 124,000 company files to the Guardian.

MacGann decided to speak out, he says, because he believes Uber knowingly flouted laws in dozens of countries and misled people about the benefits to drivers of the company’s gig-economy model.

The 52-year-old acknowledges he was part of Uber’s top team at the time – and is not without blame for the conduct he describes. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, he said he was partly motivated by remorse.

“I am partly responsible,” he said. “I was the one talking to governments, I was the one pushing this with the media, I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity.

“When that turned out not to be the case – we had actually sold people a lie – how can you have a clear conscience if you don’t stand up and own your contribution to how people are being treated today?”

The senior role MacGann held at Uber between 2014 and 2016 put him at the heart of decisions taken at the highest levels of the company during the period in which it was forcing its way into markets in violation of taxi-licensing laws. He oversaw Uber’s attempts to persuade governments to change taxi regulations and create a more favourable business environment in more than 40 countries.

«

Pretty strong story for day 2. And a remarkable thing to do by MacGann.
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North Korean operatives are trying to infiltrate US crypto firms • CNNPolitics

Sean Lyngaas:

»

Devin, the founder of a cryptocurrency startup based in San Francisco, woke up one day in February to the most bizarre phone call of his life.

The man on the other end, an FBI agent, told Devin that the seemingly legitimate software developer he’d hired the previous summer was a North Korean operative who’d sent tens of thousands of dollars of his salary to the country’s authoritarian regime.

Stunned, Devin hung up and immediately cut the employee off from company accounts, he said.
“He was a good contributor,” Devin lamented, puzzled by the man who had claimed to be Chinese and passed multiple rounds of interviews to get hired. (CNN is using a pseudonym for Devin to protect the identity of his company).

Devin’s encounter is just one example of what US officials say is a relentless, evolving effort by the North Korean government to infiltrate and steal from cryptocurrency and other tech firms around the world to help fund Kim Jong Un’s illicit nuclear and ballistic weapons program.

…The FBI, Treasury and State departments issued a rare public advisory in May about thousands of “highly skilled” IT personnel who provide Pyongyang with “a critical stream of revenue” that helps bankroll the regime’s “highest economic and security priorities.”

It’s an elaborate money-making scheme that relies on front companies, contractors and deception to prey on a volatile industry that is always on the hunt for top talent. North Korean tech workers can earn more than $300,000 annually — hundreds of times the average income of a North Korean citizen — and up to 90% of their wages go to the regime, according to the US advisory.

“(The North Koreans) take this very seriously,” said Soo Kim, a former North Korea analyst at the CIA. “It’s not just some rando in his basement trying to mine cryptocurrency,” she added, referring to the process of generating digital money. “It’s a way of life.”

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Here’s how the right is spinning Elon Musk’s Twitter withdrawal as a victory • Motherboard

David Gilbert:

»

For the right-wing media, lawmakers, and talking heads who were banned or had abandoned the platform—and who had spent weeks celebrating a deal they believed would herald their triumphant return to tweeting—Musk’s withdrawal was a devastating blow.

But rather than going into mourning, they’ve managed to twist logic to the point where they now claim that Musk planned to scupper the deal all along—and it’s actually a really good thing.

And what better way to show their contempt for Twitter than by sharing their views on Twitter.

“Holy shit. The party is really over here. The purge is coming,” Dave Rubin, a conservative political commentator tweeted after news of Musk’s withdrawal was announced.

The main gist of the argument from the right is that Musk was correct to pull out because he had successfully exposed the level of spam accounts on the platform.

“Elon musk is terminating his agreement to buy Twitter: So basically Twitter has a huge amount of spam accounts—way more than they let on—and has gotten busted for it,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. “As I said weeks ago spam accounts are probably 50% not 5% of Twitter users.”

«

Except, as Matt Levine points out in his newsletter, if spam accounts (and how exactly do you define that? Show your working), then that means that Twitter is monetising fantastically well on its humans, who actually look at ads, so Twitter is fabulously valuable and Musk should buy it after all. It’s a self-defeating argument to claim there are too many bots.

Also: thread about how Musk is likely to lose if he lets it all get to court.
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Passenger deployed slide to exit moving plane at LAX! • Mentour Pilot

Spyros Georgilidakis:

»

A passenger on a United Express flight deployed an evacuation slide on a moving aircraft at LAX! The individual was the only one to suffer some injuries.

The airline operating the flight was SkyWest. This was flight UA5365, operating last Friday (25th of June). The aircraft would fly from Los Angeles (KLAX) to Salt Lake City (KSLC). The crew pushed back from gate 82 in Los Angeles at 6:55pm local time. Five-six minutes later, a passenger started behaving erratically, standing up in the cabin. Eventually, he would deploy an evacuation slide.

«

Well now. Seems that we have an empirical test of “can you open the aircraft door while the aircraft is taxiing?” Hope you’re all satisfied. (Please don’t attempt to submit this data to replication.)
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Why business is booming for military AI startups • MIT Technology Review

Melissa Heikkiläarchive:

»

Companies that sell military AI make expansive claims for what their technology can do. They say it can help with everything from the mundane to the lethal, from screening résumés to processing data from satellites or recognizing patterns in data to help soldiers make quicker decisions on the battlefield. Image recognition software can help with identifying targets. Autonomous drones can be used for surveillance or attacks on land, air, or water, or to help soldiers deliver supplies more safely than is possible by land. 

These technologies are still in their infancy on the battlefield, and militaries are going through a period of experimentation, says Payne, sometimes without much success. There are countless examples of AI companies’ tendency to make grand promises about technologies that turn out not to work as advertised, and combat zones are perhaps among the most technically challenging areas in which to deploy AI because there is little relevant training data. This could cause autonomous systems to fail in a “complex and unpredictable manner,” argued Arthur Holland Michel, an expert on drones and other surveillance technologies, in a paper for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research

Nevertheless, many militaries are pressing forward. In a vaguely worded press release in 2021, the British army proudly announced it had used AI in a military operation for the first time, to provide information on the surrounding environment and terrain. The US is working with startups to develop autonomous military vehicles. In the future, swarms of hundreds or even thousands of autonomous drones that the US and British militaries are developing could prove to be powerful and lethal weapons.

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It was 2006 when I commissioned a piece about uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs, aka drones) and how keen the US Army had been to use them since 2004. Now they’re commonplace in the Ukraine war. These systems can take a while to feed through, but once they’re ready, they’re used. AI is going to be exactly the same. One more war? Two?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A misguided attempt to turn Sri Lanka’s agriculture over to organic methods was a major contributor to last week’s riots which displaced the president. CC-licensed photo by Dennis Sylvester Hurd 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. Getting warmer. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

There’s also the Social Warming Substack: weekly posts on the topic. Most recently about the torture of recording an audiobook. Sign up!

Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals • The Guardian

Harry Davies, Simon Goodley, Felicity Lawrence, Paul Lewis and Lisa O’Carroll:

»

A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech giant Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion.

The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports.

The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, even if that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations.

During the fierce global backlash, the data shows how Uber tried to shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons.

Leaked messages suggest Uber executives were at the same time under no illusions about the company’s law-breaking, with one executive joking they had become “pirates” and another conceding: “We’re just fucking illegal.”

The cache of files, which span 2013 to 2017, includes more than 83,000 emails, iMessages and WhatsApp messages, including often frank and unvarnished communications between Kalanick and his top team of executives.

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It’s a colossal piece of work. If you ever had any doubts about Uber, well, that’s the end of those.
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Sri Lanka’s organic farming experiment went catastrophically wrong • Foreign Policy

Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah of the Breakthrough Institute:

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Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter [2021-2022]. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s two million farmers to go organic.

The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20% in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450m worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50%. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.

By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others.

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This was one of the dominoes that led to Sri Lanka’s foreign currency crisis (the other being a collapse in its tourist trade, following a number of terrorist bombings), which meant it couldn’t buy fuel, which meant people on the streets and, over the weekend, the invasion of the president’s office, who seems to have fled the country. Also written up by Michael Shellenberger, who doesn’t hold back in his condemnation of the people who pushed the scheme.
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Bad UI is causing people to get scammed • Ashlan’s blog

“Ashlan” shows how you can think you’re selling a computer to someone, but bad UI lets you get scammed:

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The usual scam I’ve encountered involves Zelle (I’ll blog about this in another article) but this one in particular involves Venmo. After a few back and forwards, he agrees to send the full amount with a shipping fee via Venmo if I send it next day USPS.

He sends the “payment” and asks me to check my email. I receive as an email from “Venmo.” This is where bad UI design is causing people to get scammed. The email appears to be legit with the Venmo colors and wording. If you aren’t tech savvy, you will only see it coming from “Venmo.” You have to click and expand it to show the email address is onlinevenmoforwarderserver@gmail.com. Gmail by default hides the sender email address (but conveniently shows the recipient email address??). I’m sure many people mostly use their phones to email and don’t know how to expand to display the full email address.

If I was an unsuspecting victim and followed through with the email, I may have sent my laptop to this person thinking Venmo will fund my account once I produced a tracking number. Once I realized my account isn’t funded, I would probably contact Venmo who will tell me that they never sent any email to me. Then I would become another statistic.

This Gmail “feature” is one example of what I consider bad UI (either via discovery problems or plain bad UI). When the iPhone first came out, it was very user friendly and non-techies in my friend had no problem using it. As iOS added more and more “features”, all these came more hidden or had to find.

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It’s certainly the case that people can get scammed more easily by emails that don’t actually show the sender address. And he picks up some subtle points about how you can tell it’s a scam, which is in the initial language that is used.
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My rural Kentucky county is awash in guns. Where does that leave me? • The Washington Post

Teri Carter:

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I live in rural Kentucky, in a county with a population of 23,000 people, and I have been told half a dozen times lately that I should be carrying a gun when I jog at the local park. What kind of gun? I wonder, as I lie there in the soft, predawn dark. What size gun? How often would I need to practice to remember how to use it? Where, in my spandex running clothes, would I carry a gun? I tripped on a tree root back in December and fell flat on my face. Would the gun go off if I fell? What if I shot myself? What if I shot someone else? Could I shoot someone?

I think about guns because guns are what I talked about most for the last several months as I ran in our local Republican primary for county magistrate. Not gas prices. Not the “stolen” election. Not caravans at the southern border. Not abortion. Not the mundane, budget-related duties of the seat I was running for. I talked about guns.

I am a Democrat who ran for local office as a Republican because in Anderson County, Kentucky, right down the road from the state capitol, Democrats no longer have a prayer of winning a partisan election, even if it is to serve in a nonpartisan job. This is die-hard Trump country now. Donald Trump won the county in both 2016 and 2020 with more than 70% of the vote. I figured that running on the Republican ticket, talking neighbor to neighbor with Republicans in a sensible manner about issues like guns would give me a fair shot.

I was wrong. I not only lost, I lost spectacularly. No matter how I tried, I could not convince voters that I was not going to show up at their door one day with a checklist, authorized by either our Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, or Democratic president, Joe Biden, and seize their guns. And when I was honest in telling them I believe AR-15-style guns are weapons of war and should be banned altogether? Voters laughed.
The term “gun culture” gets tossed around. But what does it mean to live in a place rooted in Trumpian (angry, unabashed, aggrieved, armed-to-the-teeth) 2022 gun culture?

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In short, it’s weird, but you should read it. (Thanks G for the link.)
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The dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari • Current Affairs

Darshana Narayanan is an evolutionary biologist :

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Harari’s speculations are consistently based on a poor understanding of science. His predictions of our biological future, for instance, are based on a gene-centric view of evolution—a way of thinking that has (unfortunately) dominated public discourse due to public figures like him. Such reductionism advances a simplistic view of reality, and worse yet, veers dangerously into eugenics territory.

In the final chapter of Sapiens, Harari writes:

»

“Why not go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens? The abilities, needs and desires of Homo sapiens have a genetic basis. And the sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice. (The mouse genome contains about 2.5 billion nucleobases, the sapiens genome about 2.9 billion bases, meaning that the latter is only 14% larger.) … If genetic engineering can create genius mice, why not genius humans? If it can create monogamous voles, why not humans hard-wired to remain faithful to their partners?”

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It would be convenient indeed if genetic engineering were a magic wand—quick flicks of which could turn philanderers into faithful partners, and everyone into Einstein. This is sadly not the case.

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I haven’t read Sapiens, but this (long piece) is a pretty comprehensive demolition. That little extract is very off-key if you know anything about how genetics functions, and the complex dance of nature and nurture in gene activation.
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Michael Lewis: ‘The thing that really works for Trump is: the system’s rigged’ • Financial Times

Henry Mance has a wide-ranging lunch with the marvellous Michael Lewis, in which these two parts stood out to me:

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Lewis studied art history at Princeton. Can he see any value in NFTs, which some see as akin to fine art? “I don’t trust myself on this subject. I can see myself saying something really stupid that five years later I regret. But the answer’s no.”

His eldest child wants him to write about climate change, but Lewis is searching for the right character: “Someone who has made billions of dollars already, operating largely in secret, who is making bets that have paid off because of this catastrophe . . . I did a casting search, and I don’t think that person exists.” Does that frustrate him? “That I can’t write about the most important thing going on? Not too much. A little bit.”

He is now 61. Does he not worry that his best days are behind him? “No, no, I think they’re ahead of me, actually. I think I’m getting better.” In this confidence, I glimpse the charlatan 25-year-old bond salesman that Lewis once was. Yet I leave breakfast feeling that, if I were a renegade investor cynically making billions from climate catastrophe, I would tell him everything.

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I, too, would like to write about climate change, and I find I’m stymied in similar fashion: where do you begin? Where do you stop? Writing about a hyperobject is extraordinarily difficult.
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Police sweep Google searches to find suspects; now the tactic is facing its first legal challenge • NBC News

Jon Schuppe:

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A teen charged with setting a fire that killed five members of a Senegalese immigrant family in Denver, Colorado, has become the first person to challenge police use of Google search histories to find someone who might have committed a crime, according to his lawyers.

…In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.

That search of Google’s records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea.

The 17-year-old’s lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users’ queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.

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Tricky: the point of principle – against unreasonable searches – is what protects you from overreach. Equally, a family is dead.
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Twitter faces ‘worst case scenario’ as Elon Musk terminates purchase • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski, Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn:

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Elon Musk’s attempt to terminate his Twitter acquisition will likely force the social network into a protracted legal battle and send its stock price diving — thrusting a new level of chaos upon the firm after months of public disputes have battered its reputation and employee morale.

In short? “This was worst case scenario for Twitter, and now it’s happened,” said Dan Ives, the managing director and senior equity research analyst covering the tech sector at Wedbush Securities.

Ives warned that Musk’s bid to walk away may make the company appear to be “damaged goods” in the eyes of other investors or potential acquirers. Twitter shares were down nearly 6% in after hours trading on Friday. Wedbush Securities projects the stock could sink to between $25 and $30 when the market reopens Monday, down more than 30% from where it closed Friday afternoon before Musk’s filing.

In a Friday evening news release, Twitter’s board threatened to “pursue legal action” to enforce the terms of the $44bn deal Musk struck in April to buy the social network and take it private. He is required to go through with the purchase, barring a major change to the business, which legal experts say is difficult to prove.

Twitter’s board said that it was confident the company would prevail in court, but analysts warn — and employees fear — that Musk’s letter sets the stage for a turbulent period, which could carry new financial risks for the company and its workers.

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Matt Levine at Bloomberg hasn’t believed that Musk is serious pretty much from the start, and his analysis on Saturday was to some extent a victory lap. He doesn’t think Musk has much hope in court. I’d expect Musk will end up paying somewhere between $1bn and $5bn to make the hassle stop. A nice payday for Twitter, if it can now steady the ship.
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How Conti ransomware group crippled Costa Rica — then fell apart • Financial Times

Christine Murray and Mehul Srivastava:

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Usually, hackers manage to gain access to single systems but Costa Rica’s case highlights the risk posed by weak cyber security to a nation’s entire IT infrastructure. In Costa Rica, Conti had spent weeks, if not months, of tunnelling around in its government systems, leaping from one ministry to the other.

Conti offered to return the data: at a price of up to $20mn. But Costa Rica’s government refused to pay the ransom. Instead, newly installed President Rodrigo Chaves declared a national emergency, launched a hunt for alleged “traitors” and leaned on tech savvier allies such as the US and Spain to come to its aid.

“We are at war, and that is not an exaggeration,” Chaves said in the days after his inauguration in mid-May, blaming the prior administration for hiding the true extent of the disruption, which he compared to terrorism.

The stand-off left parts of Costa Rica’s digital infrastructure crippled for months, paralysing online tax collection, disrupting public healthcare and the pay of some public sector workers.

In the meantime, Costa Rica’s shadowy tormentors were themselves a spent force, victims of geopolitical rivalries in the hacking world that had been inflamed by the war in Ukraine. After declaring its support for the Russian invasion on Feb 24, the group was betrayed by one of its insiders, purportedly a Ukrainian hacker-for-hire, who leaked their toolkits, internal chats and other secrets online in retaliation.

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Still an ongoing problem; its novelty might have worn off but it’s as troublesome as ever, if not more so.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The innocent-looking trolley tram has given rise to a whole range of mindbending ethics problems. What if it’s a choice between killing five lobsters… or one cat? CC-licensed photo by Alex W on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Freely given. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

There’s another Social Warming Substack post going live today at 0845 BST. Today: what it’s like recording an audiobook that some idio–that you wrote.

Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in peril • The Washington Post

Faiz Siddiqui and Gerrit De Vynck:

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Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in serious jeopardy, three people familiar with the matter say, as Musk’s camp concluded that Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable.

Musk’s team has stopped engaging in certain discussions around funding for the $44bn deal, including with a party named as a likely backer, one of the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing discussions.

Talks with investors have cooled in recent weeks as Musk’s camp has raised doubts about the recent data “fire hose” — a trove of data sold to corporate customers — they received from Twitter. Musk’s team’s doubts about the spam figures signal they believe they do not have enough information to evaluate Twitter’s prospects as a business, the people said.

Now that Musk’s team has concluded Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable, one of the people said, it is expected to take potentially drastic action.

The person said it was likely a change in direction from Musk’s team would come soon, though they did not say exactly what they thought that change would be.

If Musk pulls out of the deal, it will potentially trigger a massive legal battle.

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I think the first sentence should say “Musk’s camp concluded that Tesla’s shares have fallen too far to fund the deal easily.” Also, perhaps a period of reflection has given him time to realise that running a social network isn’t a bed of roses, and that it would probably be better left to people who’ve been doing it for years. The spam account stuff is pure chaff; when he signed the agreement in April he skipped the due diligence that he’s now pretending to do.

Anyhow, it looks like this deal is now too expensive and too troublesome and time-consuming for him. Expect it to collapse, and Twitter to gradually demand the $1bn default payment, and Musk to tweet things like “Eat my shorts!”
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China: MI5 and FBI heads warn of ‘immense’ threat • BBC News

Gordon Corera:

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The heads of UK and US security services have made an unprecedented joint appearance to warn of the threat from China.

FBI director Christopher Wray said China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security” and had interfered in politics, including recent elections.

MI5 head Ken McCallum said his service had more than doubled its work against Chinese activity in the last three years and would be doubling it again.

MI5 is now running seven times as many investigations related to activities of the Chinese Communist Party compared to 2018, he added.

The FBI’s Wray warned that if China was to forcibly take Taiwan it would “represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the world has ever seen”.

…McCallum also said the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party was “game-changing”, while Wray called it “immense” and “breath-taking”.

Wray warned the audience – which included chief executives of businesses and senior figures from universities – that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology” using a range of tools.

He said it posed “an even more serious threat to western businesses than even many sophisticated businesspeople realised”. He cited cases in which people linked to Chinese companies out in rural America had been digging up genetically modified seeds which would have cost them billions of dollars and nearly a decade to develop themselves.

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Not sure GM seeds is the best example in the universe; couldn’t they just order that from the seed supplier?
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Things fall apart • The Debatable Land

Alex Massie, with what I thought was the best take on the events of Thursday:

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among the first things Johnson did as prime minister was recast the Tory party in his image. One Nation sceptics were not so much eased out as brutally jettisoned. It was Boris’s way or no way at all. You could build a better cabinet from those Johnson effectively expelled – Clarke, Grieve, Hammond, Stewart et al – than from those he kept. Like many superficially strong moves this one actually revealed an essential weakness – and a smallness – at the core of Johnson’s government. It was a purge and these are rarely conducted without malice. No amount of smiling or joshing or buffoonery may disguise that.

Johnson didn’t throw it all away because he didn’t have it in the first place.

What was the point?

This is a gloomy question but Johnson’s government did not end with a melancholy sense of squandered promise. It was, typically, all style and no substance. No surprise, really, since this has been Johnson’s operational default his entire career. The heavy lifting has been done by other people. At The Spectator, for instance, almost all the work of actually editing the magazine was done by Johnson’s long-suffering deputy, Stuart Reid. Johnson was a figurehead editor and while a weekly magazine may cope with that, running the country needs just a little more commitment.

(As a columnist, meanwhile, it would be ungenerous to deny that Johnson had talent in a show-boating sense but his copy, colourful as it might be and entertaining to some, nonetheless had a curiously weightless quality to it. Yes, fine, but what’s the real point of it? And for all that folk liked to use the term “Wodehousian” in connection with Boris the journalist, there was one vital difference: Wodehouse would throw out a joke if it interrupted or got in the way of the plot. Johnson, by contrast, could never resist the gag, even at the cost of undermining all else. The gag, in fact, was the point. I do not mean this unkindly: newspapers are by their nature ephemeral, but it is wise to at least be aware of their limitations. One other small, but revealing, note: Johnson was notorious for filing his copy late, no matter how much this might inconvenience other, rather less well-paid, people. Just Boris being Boris, of course, but other people had to cope with or clear up the mess.)

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Lazy and late. Incredible it took so long to catch up with him.
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Boris Johnson steps down as PM with tech legacy in tatters • The Register

Lindsay Clark:

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Surprising no one who witnessed the politician back cable cars as a revolution in river crossing or a garden bridge as an innovation in inner-city expansion, the outgoing Prime Minister leaves behind a set of science and technology projects which are either yet to be completed or completely off the wall.

Dangling plans include his ambition to accelerate the arrival of productive nuclear fusion – a technical breakthrough which always promises to be 20 years off.

In 2019, Johnson praised the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxford, only for others to reveal the organization benefited from large chunks of funding from the European Union, the powerful political and economic bloc Johnson so passionately persuaded the UK to leave.

Fission is also a favorite. Johnson has been vocal in backing small modular reactors, a technology from jet engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce. A study has claimed some miniaturized fission units produce as much as 35 times more waste to generate the same amount of power as a regular plant.

The UK is also in the throes of an attempt to mimic the US’s success with DARPA – the defence-led science unit which played a role in the development of the internet.

As of last year, Aria – the Advanced Research and Invention Agency – hadn’t even begun to happen despite five years passing since the UK decided to leave the EU. Now reports suggest the launch of the agency will be delayed until at least the end of this year.

Meanwhile, UK scientists are being cut off from European funding, post-Brexit.

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Promises, empty promises.
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Meta plans to call new virtual reality headset the ‘Quest Pro’ • BNN Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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Meta Platforms’s upcoming high-end headset for virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR) will be called the Meta Quest Pro, according to code findings inside the company’s iPhone app for setting up headsets. 

Meta has been touting its new device since last year, using the codename Project Cambria. The company is likely to introduce the official name later this year along with details about the headset’s availability. It will cost more than $1,000, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t yet public.

The device is a major priority for Meta, which has recently scaled back other hardware projects such as a smartwatch, and will be a prime competitor to Apple’s upcoming mixed-reality headset when it goes on sale next year. 

The new Meta headset will have far better graphics processing and power compared with the regular Meta Quest headset. It will also include external high-resolution cameras to simulate AR in color, eye tracking, more storage, new controllers and high-resolution displays for virtual reality.

A Meta spokeswoman declined to comment. Meta typically announces new headsets and related features in October. 

The code string indicating the name of the product, which was found by developer Steve Moser and shared with Bloomberg News, references the pairing of the device to a controller. The code reads: “Pair Meta Quest Pro right controller.”

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That price really is quite wild. Who has a thousand dollars (or pounds) to spare and wants to tie themselves to Facebook? Unless it really is a corporate metaverse play. Which is possible, but still seems very early.
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Absurd Trolley Problems

Neal Agarwal:

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Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, killing 1 person instead. What do you do?

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You start off with two options (this one), but the problems get weirder and weirder. I stopped at

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Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 lobsters. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, running over a cat instead. What do you do?

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because I don’t know what the exchange rate between lobsters and cats is. (Thanks Gregory for the link.)
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The danger of licence plate readers in post-Roe America • WIRED

Thor Benson:

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Since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, America’s extensive surveillance state could soon be turned against those seeking abortions or providing abortion care.

Currently, nine states have almost entirely banned abortion, and more are expected to follow suit. Many Republican lawmakers in these states are discussing the possibility of preventing people from traveling across state lines to obtain an abortion. If such plans are enacted and withstand legal scrutiny, one of the key technologies that could be deployed to track people trying to cross state lines is automated licence plate readers (ALPRs). They’re employed heavily by police forces across the US, but they’re also used by private actors.

ALPRs are cameras that are mounted on street poles, overpasses, and elsewhere that can identify and capture licence plate numbers on passing cars for the purpose of issuing speeding tickets and tolls, locating stolen cars, and more. State and local police maintain databases of captured licence plates and frequently use those databases in criminal investigations.

The police have access to not only licence plate data collected by their own ALPRs but also data gathered by private companies. Firms like Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions have their own networks of ALPRs that are mounted to the vehicles of private companies and organizations they work with, such as car repossession outfits. Flock, for instance, claims it’s collecting licence plate data in roughly 1,500 cities and can capture data from over a billion vehicles every month.

“They have fleets of cars that have ALPRs on them that just suck up data. They sell that to various clients, including repo firms and government agencies. They also sell them to police departments,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “It’s a giant, nationwide mass surveillance system. That obviously has serious implications should interstate travel become part of forced-birth enforcement.”

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“Forced-birth enforcement” is quite a phrase; its Gilead-style echoes are surely intentional, but, equally, not wrong. Perhaps you do need something as pivotal as Roe v Wade being overturned to expose how extensive the US surveillance state is, and how little protection its citizens have from it.
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Asymptomatic monkeypox virus infections among male sexual health clinic attendees in Belgium • medRxiv

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Monkeypox is transmitted by close contact with symptomatic cases, and those infected are assumed to be uniformly symptomatic. Evidence of subclinical monkeypox infection is limited to a few immunological studies which found evidence of immunity against orthopoxviruses in asymptomatic individuals who were exposed to monkeypox cases. We aimed to assess whether asymptomatic infections occurred among individuals who underwent sexually transmitted infection (STI) screening in a large Belgian STI clinic around the start of the 2022 monkeypox epidemic in Belgium.

…In stored samples from 224 men, we identified three cases with a positive anorectal monkeypox PCR. All three men denied having had any symptoms in the weeks before and after the sample was taken. None of them reported exposure to a diagnosed monkeypox case, nor did any of their contacts develop clinical monkeypox. Follow-up samples were taken 21 to 37 days after the initial sample, by which time the monkeypox-specific PCR was negative, likely as a consequence of spontaneous clearance of the infection.

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Asymptomatic monkeypox? This is concerning. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Twitter, challenging orders to remove content, sues India’s government • The New York Times

Karan Deep Singh and Kate Conger:

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Twitter said on Tuesday that it had sued the Indian government, escalating the social media company’s fight in the country as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks more control over critical online posts.

Twitter’s suit, filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, challenges a recent order from the Indian government for the company to remove content and block dozens of accounts. Twitter complied with the order, which had a Monday deadline, but then sought judicial relief. A date has not been set for a judge to review Twitter’s suit.

The suit is the first legal challenge that the company has issued to push back against laws passed in 2021 that extended the Indian government’s censorship powers. The rules gave the government oversight of Twitter and other social media companies, allowing the authorities to demand that posts or accounts critical of them be hidden from Indian users. Executives at the companies can face criminal penalties if they do not comply with the demands.

The laws have been met with an outcry from Twitter and other social media platforms, which view India as an essential part of their plans for long-term growth. The companies have argued that India’s rules allow the government to broadly censor its critics, and that they erode security measures like encryption. But Indian officials have said the law is necessary to combat online misinformation.

Twitter is not seeking to overturn the laws, but it argues in its suit that the government interpreted those laws too broadly, said a person with knowledge of the filing who was not authorized to speak publicly.

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India’s government really has been pushing censorship, out of sight of much of the rest of the world. In its way, it’s like China, but we assume that because it’s a democracy that it must be beneficent. Not so, with Modi.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sand is plentiful, but not infinite, and supplies are – perhaps surprisingly – coming under strain. CC-licensed photo by Joaquin Moreno 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. How do you remove barnacles? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Could fake news provoke violence in Kenya’s elections? • Coda Story

Rebekah Robinson:

»

Kenya’s general elections to elect a new President and members of the National Assembly will take place on August 9 and the race is close and tense. Much of the tension is the result of the outgoing president, Uhuru Kenyatta, throwing his support behind opposition leader Raila Odinga rather than William Ruto, the current deputy president.  

Waves of disinformation pushed by paid social media influencers have been a growing concern in the run-up to elections that some experts worry could lead to violent eruptions. The country is still haunted by clashes during the 2007 elections that left over 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), set up in the wake of the violence 15 years ago, rates the likelihood of electoral violence as just about “medium high risk,” while in Nairobi County, home to the capital city, the risk of violence is considered to be “very high.” 

While access to digital resources has grown exponentially, studies suggest that the political conversation online in Kenya is often toxic, particularly on TikTok. Research by Mozilla Foundation fellow Odanga Madung shows that “hate speech, incitement against communities, and synthetic and manipulated content…is both present and spreading on the platform.” TikTok, the report argues, needs to do more to implement its own rules on objectionable and inflammatory content. Kenya is one of the few countries in the region that has not deliberately shut down the internet.

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The riots in 2007 make the US January 6 insurrection look like the mildest of tea parties. The potential for social media to really make things bad continues to grow in countries where democracy comes most under siege.
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Apple unveils new security setting to block Pegasus attacks on iPhones • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

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Apple said Wednesday that it will introduce an innovative security feature to give potential targets of government hacking an easy way to make their iPhones safer.

The company said it would be releasing the new “Lockdown Mode” in test versions of its operating systems shortly, with full distribution in the fall as part of iOS 16 for iPhones as well as the operating systems for iPads and Mac computers.

The action follows waves of attacks documented by The Washington Post and others showing that iPhones were being hacked by Pegasus spyware distributed by the Israeli company NSO Group and then used to capture contact information and live audio. But while Pegasus prompted Apple to act, it is not the only spyware that would be hobbled by the new feature.

Once engaged, Lockdown Mode will block most types of attachments on messages and prevent the phone from previewing Web links, which are frequently used to transmit spyware. Locking a phone will disable wired connections to computers and accessories that are used to take control of devices that have been seized by police or stolen by spies.

Apple’s lockdown tactic resolves a long-standing tension in its design approach between security concerns and the pursuit of easy-to-use, highly functional capabilities. The extra usability made the phones more vulnerable to attack through iMessage, FaceTime and other software. Lockdown Mode gives users the choice of whether to maintain those features. When activated, it limits what the phone can do.

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Or just buy a Nokia 3310?
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Confidence in US institutions down; average at new low • Gallup

Jeffrey Jones:

»

Americans are less confident in major U.S. institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The largest declines in confidence are 11 percentage points for the Supreme Court — as reported in late June before the court issued controversial rulings on gun laws and abortion — and 15 points for the presidency, matching the 15-point drop in President Joe Biden’s job approval rating since the last confidence survey in June 2021.

Gallup first measured confidence in institutions in 1973 and has done so annually since 1993. This year’s survey was conducted June 1-20.

Confidence currently ranges from a high of 68% for small business to a low of 7% for Congress. The military is the only institution besides small business for which a majority of Americans express confidence (64%). Confidence in the police, at 45%, has fallen below the majority level for only the second time, with the other instance occurring in 2020 in the weeks after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

This year’s poll marks new lows in confidence for all three branches of the federal government — the Supreme Court (25%), the presidency (23%) and Congress.

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Arguably because two of the three branches don’t represent the majority – both the Supreme Court and Senate are terribly unrepresentative of the population.
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March 2021: the clown king: how Boris Johnson made it by playing the fool • The Guardian

Edward Docx, in March 2021:

»

Would-be biographers of Johnson might do worse than to read Paul Bouissac, the leading scholar on the semiotics of clowning. Clowns are “transgressors”, he writes, cultural subversives who enact rituals and dramatic tableaux that “ignore the tacit rules of social games to indulge in symbolic actions that … toy with these norms as if they were arbitrary, dispensable convention.” Clowns “undermine the ground upon which our language and our society rest by revealing their fragility”. They “foreground the tension” between “instinct” and “constraint”. Bouissac could be writing directly of Johnson when he adds: “Their performing identities transcend the rules of propriety.” They are, he says, “improper by essence”.

Observe classic Johnson closely as he arrives at an event. See how his entire being and bearing is bent towards satire, subversion, mockery. The hair is his clown’s disguise. Just as the makeup and the red nose bestow upon the circus clown a form of anonymity and thus freedom to overturn conventions, so Johnson’s candy-floss mop announces his licence. His clothes are often baggy – ill-fitting; a reminder of the clothes of the clown. He walks towards us quizzically, as if to mock the affected “power walking” of other leaders. Absurdity seems to be wrestling with solemnity in every expression and limb. Notice how he sometimes feigns to lose his way as if to suggest the ridiculousness of the event, the ridiculousness of his presence there, the ridiculousness of any human being going in any direction at all.

His weight, meanwhile, invites us to consider that the trouble with the world (if only we’d admit it) is that it’s really all about appetite and greed. (His convoluted affairs and uncountable children whisper the same about sex.) Before he says a word, he has transmitted his core message – that the human conventions of styling hair, fitting clothes and curbing desires are all … ludicrous. And we are encouraged – laughingly – to agree. And, of course, we do. Because, in a sense, they are ludicrous.

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Last chance, while he’s still relevant.
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How a fake job offer took down the world’s most popular crypto game • The Block

Ryan Weeks:

»

Ronin, the Ethereum-linked sidechain that underpins play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, lost $540 million in crypto to an exploit in March. While the US government later tied the incident to North Korean hacking group Lazarus, full details of how the exploit was carried out have not been disclosed. 

The Block can now reveal that a fake job ad was Ronin’s undoing. 

According to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who were granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the incident, a senior engineer at Axie Infinity was duped into applying for a job at a company that, in reality, did not exist.  

Axie Infinity was huge. At its peak, workers in Southeast Asia were even able to earn a living through the play-to-earn game. It boasted 2.7 million daily active users and $214m in weekly trading volume for its in-game NFTs in November last year — although both numbers have since plummeted.

Earlier this year, staff at Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis were approached by people purporting to represent the fake company and encouraged to apply for jobs, according to the people familiar with the matter. One source added that the approaches were made through the professional networking site LinkedIn. 

After what one source described as multiple rounds of interviews, a Sky Mavis engineer was offered a job with an extremely generous compensation package. 

The fake “offer” was delivered in the form of a PDF document, which the engineer downloaded — allowing spyware to infiltrate Ronin’s systems. From there, hackers were able to attack and take over four out of nine validators on the Ronin network — leaving them just one validator short of total control. 

In a post-mortem blog post on the hack, published April 27, Sky Mavis said: “Employees are under constant advanced spear-phishing attacks on various social channels and one employee was compromised. This employee no longer works at Sky Mavis. The attacker managed to leverage that access to penetrate Sky Mavis IT infrastructure and gain access to the validator nodes.”

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Certainly has all the hallmarks of a state hacking gang looking for cash. North Korea has discovered that crypto in particular is an easy target.
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Google-backed Glance to launch in US within two months • TechCrunch

Manish Singh:

»

Glance, a subsidiary of adtech giant InMobi Group, is planning to launch its lockscreen platform on Android smartphones in the US within two months, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The startup is engaging with wireless carriers in the US for partnerships and is gearing up to launch on several smartphone models by next month, the source said, requesting anonymity as the deliberations are ongoing and private.

Glance, valued at around $2bn, serves media and current affairs content and casual games on Android handsets’ lockscreens. The service, which has amassed presence on about 400 million smartphones in Asian markets, is building a “premium offering” for the U.S., where individuals have higher propensity to pay for digital services, the source said.

A spokesperson for Glance declined to comment Tuesday. The startup said in February that it planned to expand globally in the coming years.

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Lockscreen ads. Boke. Expanding globally. Double boke.
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The cost of sand has spiked 150% in Texas • Bloomberg via Yahoo

David Wethe:

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Frack sand, which gets blasted through shale rocks to unlock oil and natural gas, is at about $55 a ton, up from $22 at the end of 2021, data on spot prices from energy-research firm Lium show. Demand is climbing as oil explorers turn the taps back on after Covid-driven cutbacks. But like in so many pockets of the economy, the recovery is sparking a mismatch. Sand suppliers have seen disruptions, labor shortages and trucking bottlenecks. The chief executive officer of US Silica Holdings Inc., the largest publicly traded frack-sand miner, has dubbed the tight market “sandemonium” and said his company is sold out.

That’s where Steve Brock and his upstart sand-mining operation, Nomad Proppant LLC, come in. Since the early days of the shale revolution more than a decade ago, fracking operators have relied on mined sand that’s delivered to their sites by truck — across distances as long as 100 miles. Brock, Nomad’s chief commercial officer, wants to turn that model on its head.

His idea: Why not just use the sand that’s right under your feet?

Nomad has developed machinery that can go directly to the frack wells (give or take 10 to 20 miles), vastly reducing the burden of freight costs and the time-consuming process of trucking.

«

Related: “Earth is running out of sand … which is, you know, pretty concerning” (Popular Mechanics), which says that

»

The most-extracted solid material in the world, and second-most used global resource behind water, sand is an unregulated material used extensively in nearly every construction project on Earth. And with 50 billion metric tons consumed annually—enough to build an 88-foot-tall, 88-foot-wide wall around the world—our sand depletion is on the rise, and a completely unregulated rise at that.

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(Thanks G for the link.)
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French state plans to take full control of EDF • Financial Times

Sarah White:

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France plans to take full control of power group EDF, a nuclear energy specialist that has been grappling with high debt, production outages and conflicting demands from its state shareholder as it gears up to try to process its biggest orders for new reactors in decades.

The takeover, announced by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne on Wednesday, would close a rollercoaster chapter for the former monopoly, which has included a shelved government attempt last year to restructure the sprawling company, still 84% controlled by the state.

“I confirm to you today that the state intends to control 100% of EDF’s capital,” Borne told lawmakers as she set out priorities for the new government following Emmanuel Macron’s re-election as president in April and legislative elections in June. She did not detail how the operation would take place, or when.

Shares in the company, which was listed in 2005, soared 14.3% after Borne’s speech. The stock held by minority shareholders is worth roughly €5bn at current market prices.

Known as EDF when the utility was created just after the second world war, EDF’s capital was opened up to private investors with the argument it would bring more financial discipline and transparency to a group with a history of internal quarrels and that is sometimes described as a quasi state-within-a-state.

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Nationalising essential public services? Damn radical centrists.
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Is Apple failing at modems? • Digits to Dollars

Jonathan Greenberg:

»

The phone in question is the 2023 iPhone, which is still 15 months away. Typically, supply decisions for the iPhone get locked down around 12 months in advance, so maybe there is some time for change. On the other hand, the modem is an important part of the phone, more on that in a moment, so the rest of the iPhone team can probably only make a host of other decisions after the modem is fixed. So we are in the ball park. In some future post, we will deconstruct sell-side data sourcing a bit, but for our purposes here, we would give at least even odds that Kuo is correct.

Apple’s chip team, Apple Silicon, is an incredibly proficient organization. We regularly describe them as the best-run semiconductor company in the world. They have scored all kinds of impressive achievements like the M Series CPU and the industry-beating A Series application processor for phones. How could they fail at a modem? Put simply, modems are hard.

Modems, also called basebands, are the chip that connect a device to the cellular network. Without a modem an iPhone is just an iPod (which do not exist anymore). As we noted above, modems are usually the first design decision made when building a phone, everything else depends on that choice, they are the ultimate strategic high-ground in phones. But what do they do?

[Explanation of what they do – see original post]

…To put it mildly, modems are very different from CPUs or GPUs, let alone task-specific AI ASICs. As such, developing them requires a very different skill set from designing those other chips. If you look at an uncapped CPU, there are clear patterns, like looking at industrial farm plots from 30,000 feet. Uncap a modem and it looks much less tidy, more akin to the plots of a village of Middle Age serf-bound farmers. (And for what it’s worth, it is very hard to find a photo of these online, in part because they are so unappealing to look at.)

So it is very possible that Apple just did not have sufficient design experience to build the chip. If we had to guess, maybe they completed a design but found that its power performance did not meet expectations. It is important to remember that Apple has failed at building networking chips before. Ten years ago they acquired a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth team from Texas Instruments, but today Apple is still buying those chips from Broadcom.

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This, possibly, is despite having Intel’s 5G team on board. Quite dispiriting for them both if so, but some tasks require small super-competent teams – see Apple Silicon, ARM and Qualcomm.
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Man from Chile paid 300 times his salary by his employer takes the money and runs • Metro News

Jasper King:

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one employee who discovered he had been paid nearly £150,000 for a month’s work instead of the usual £450 decided to duck and run.

The unnamed staff member at Consorcio Industrial de Alimentos in Chile did initially raise the eye-watering overpayment for May with his manager who then flagged it to HR.

He agreed to return the cash and promised to go to the bank the following day. But instead of giving it back, the man withdrew it and hasn’t been seen since.

His employer Consorcio tried to make contact with the man over the next three days but to no avail, according to local media outlet Diario Financiero.

They later received contact from the unnamed man’s lawyers who informed Consorcio that the man had resigned from his position with the company.

After no sign of contact, bosses at the company decided to file a complaint with law officials charging the man with misappropriation of fund.

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That’s going to be a fun, extremely slow, chase. They paid him 25 years’ salary. (Standard take-home pay is £750 per month, nearly 50% more than he was getting.)

Odd how there isn’t the usual “the mistake was blamed on a computer”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Large Hadron Collider has been up to its tricks again, and found more quarks. They matter in ways nobody’s quite explained sufficiently. CC-licensed photo by Mark Hillary on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Resigned to it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Crypto collapse reverberates widely among black American investors • Financial Times

Taylor Nicole Rogers:

»

The widespread losses caused by the cryptocurrency crash are even broader among black investors.

A quarter of black American investors owned cryptocurrencies at the start of the year, compared with only 15% of white investors, according to a survey by Ariel Investments and Charles Schwab. Black Americans were more than twice as likely to purchase cryptocurrency as their first investment.

The value of those investments has imploded. The total market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies has plunged below $1tn from more than $3.2tn last year. The fall in digital assets comes alongside a bear market in US stocks.

Black Americans’ higher exposure to cryptocurrencies has left them more vulnerable to the financial downturn, even as their households on average hold less wealth.

The attraction of building wealth, amplified by marketing, drew many black investors into cryptocurrencies. The dollar price of bitcoin rose 9,300% in the five years to its peak in November.

Jefferson Noel, 27, said he gained his first exposure to crypto in January 2019 when he accidentally invested $5 in bitcoin while using Cash App, a payment service.

“I had no idea what it was, and I don’t even remember doing it,” he said.

By last May his unintentional investment was worth $70. The astronomical gain inspired him to take a friend’s advice to plough $20,000 of his savings into other cryptocurrencies, such as dogecoin, over more traditional investments such as index funds.

“[Black Americans] do not want to be left behind again,” Noel said. “As far as I can tell, the black community sees crypto as a way to even the playing field and get in the game before the gatekeepers prevent others from participating.”

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‘Sand battery’ could solve green energy’s big problem • BBC News

Matt McGrath:

»

Right now, most batteries are made with lithium and are expensive with a large, physical footprint, and can only cope with a limited amount of excess power.

But in the town of Kankaanpää, a team of young Finnish engineers have completed the first commercial installation of a battery made from sand that they believe can solve the storage problem in a low-cost, low impact way.

“Whenever there’s like this high surge of available green electricity, we want to be able to get it into the storage really quickly,” said Markku Ylönen, one of the two founders of Polar Night Energy who have developed the product.

The device has been installed in the Vatajankoski power plant which runs the district heating system for the area. Low-cost electricity warms the sand up to 500C by resistive heating (the same process that makes electric fires work). This generates hot air which is circulated in the sand by means of a heat exchanger.

Sand is a very effective medium for storing heat and loses little over time. The developers say that their device could keep sand at 500C for several months. So when energy prices are higher, the battery discharges the hot air which warms water for the district heating system which is then pumped around homes, offices and even the local swimming pool.

The idea for the sand battery was first developed at a former pulp mill in the city of Tampere, with the council donating the work space and providing funding to get it off the ground. “If we have some power stations that are just working for a few hours in the wintertime, when it’s the coldest, it’s going to be extremely expensive,” said Elina Seppänen, an energy and climate specialist for the city. But if we have this sort of solution that provides flexibility for the use, and storage of heat, that would help a lot in terms of expense, I think.”

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Things of which there are a lot: sand.
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Vast cache of Chinese police files offered for sale in alleged hack • WSJ

Karen Hao and Rachel Liang:

»

The cache allegedly includes billions of records stolen from police in Shanghai, containing data on one billion Chinese citizens, according to a post advertising its availability that was published on Thursday by the hacker on a popular online cybercrime forum. The post, which began circulating on social media over the weekend, put the price for the leak at 10 Bitcoin, or roughly $200,000.

Cybersecurity experts say the claimed hack is alarming not just for its alleged size—which would rank among the biggest ever recorded and the largest known for China—but also because of the sensitivity of the information contained in the government database.

A sample of the data posted by the hacker, who claimed it included 750,000 records, contained individuals’ personal names, national ID numbers, phone numbers, birthdays and birthplaces, as well as detailed summaries of crimes and incidents reported to the police. The cases ranged from incidents of petty theft and cyber fraud to reports of domestic violence, dating as far back as 1995 to as recently as 2019.

While the scope of the data leak remains unconfirmed, The Wall Street Journal verified several of the records in the leak by calling people whose numbers were listed. Five people confirmed all of the data, including case details that would be difficult to obtain from any source other than the police. Four more people confirmed basic information such as their names before hanging up.

One woman, alarmed at the accuracy of the leaked details, asked whether the information about her had come from the iPhone that she had reported stolen in her case file in 2016.

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The flip side of surveillance.
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‘Algospeak’ is changing our language in real time • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz:

»

Algospeak refers to code words or turns of phrase users have adopted in an effort to create a brand-safe lexicon that will avoid getting their posts removed or down-ranked by content moderation systems. For instance, in many online videos, it’s common to say “unalive” rather than “dead,” “SA” instead of “sexual assault,” or “spicy eggplant” instead of “vibrator.”

As the pandemic pushed more people to communicate and express themselves online, algorithmic content moderation systems have had an unprecedented impact on the words we choose, particularly on TikTok, and given rise to a new form of internet-driven Aesopian language.

Unlike other mainstream social platforms, the primary way content is distributed on TikTok is through an algorithmically curated “For You” page; having followers doesn’t guarantee people will see your content. This shift has led average users to tailor their videos primarily toward the algorithm, rather than a following, which means abiding by content moderation rules is more crucial than ever.

When the pandemic broke out, people on TikTok and other apps began referring to it as the “Backstreet Boys reunion tour” or calling it the “panini” or “panda express” as platforms down-ranked videos mentioning the pandemic by name in an effort to combat misinformation. When young people began to discuss struggling with mental health, they talked about “becoming unalive” in order to have frank conversations about suicide without algorithmic punishment. Sex workers, who have long been censored by moderation systems, refer to themselves on TikTok as “accountants” and use the corn emoji as a substitute for the word “porn.”

As discussions of major events are filtered through algorithmic content delivery systems, more users are bending their language. Recently, in discussing the invasion of Ukraine, people on YouTube and TikTok have used the sunflower emoji to signify the country. When encouraging fans to follow them elsewhere, users will say “blink in lio” for “link in bio.”

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As she notes, this predates the internet, and was used early on in the internet’s life similarly to bypass word filters in chatrooms.
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From aardvark to woke: inside the Oxford English Dictionary • New Statesman

Pippa Bailey:

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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has served as a lexical record of the world’s most widely spoken language – and its culture – since it was founded in the mid-19th century. “Post-truth”, for example, was the dictionary’s word of 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump, while in 2020 it elected not to choose one – because no single word could sum up the pandemic experience. Last year, “police brutality”, “deadname”, “cancel culture” and “anti-vaxxer” entered the dictionary for the first time; previous years gave us “fake news” (2019), “Silent Generation” (2018) and “woke” (2017).

The June 2022 update includes several terms that reflect our changing understanding of sexuality and gender: “multisexual”, “pangender”, “gender expression”, “gender presentation” and “enby” (derived from “NB”, meaning “non-binary”), as well as Terf. But this wasn’t, McPherson says, a conscious decision; rather, these additions organically came together as their usage grew. The team decided against labelling Terf “offensive”, instead explaining in a usage note that it might be considered so; it was felt that this “was a bit more nuanced than just slapping on ‘derogatory’ or ‘chiefly derogatory’”.

[50-year-old lexicographer Fiona] McPherson, who has an easy laugh and a melodic Scottish lilt, is part of a team that has been revising the OED since 1993, their progress published quarterly. Outdated entries are revised, new words are added and those that pass from use will be marked “rare” or “obsolete”; changing sensibilities mean that others will be labelled “offensive” or “derogatory”. It is an enormous task, and one in which I have a professional as well as a personal interest: part of my role at the New Statesman involves maintaining our style guide, enforcing the rules of grammar and excising cliché. The decisions McPherson and her colleagues make filter into these pages; on questions of spelling and meaning, the team of sub-editors I lead defers to Oxford dictionaries.

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LHCb discovers three new exotic particles • CERN

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Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”. These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists at the same time as conventional hadrons, about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb and other experiments.

Most of the exotic hadrons discovered in the past two decades are tetraquarks or pentaquarks containing a charm quark and a charm antiquark, with the remaining two or three quarks being an up, down or strange quark or their antiquarks. But in the past two years, LHCb has discovered different kinds of exotic hadrons. Two years ago, the collaboration discovered a tetraquark made up of two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks, and two “open-charm” tetraquarks consisting of a charm antiquark, an up quark, a down quark and a strange antiquark. And last year it found the first-ever instance of a “double open-charm” tetraquark with two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Open charm means that the particle contains a charm quark without an equivalent antiquark.

The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration include new kinds of exotic hadrons. The first kind, observed in an analysis of “decays” of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark.

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Got that? I did hunt around for an article that would put this into better context, but came up blank. It does matter, though, because the new quark formations may help to explain the “strong force” that holds nuclei together. At present, the theory is that when quarks come closer together the force between them becomes weaker. So where’s the strong force? Maybe from these.
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Smart contact lens prototype puts a Micro LED display on top of the eye • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

In a blog post this week, Drew Perkins, the CEO of Mojo Vision, said he was the first to have an “on-eye demonstration of a feature-complete augmented reality smart contact lens.” In an interview with CNET, he said he’s been wearing only one contact at a time for hour-long durations. Eventually, Mojo Vision would like users to be able to wear two Mojo Lens simultaneously and create 3D visual overlays, the publication said.

According to his blog, the CEO could see a compass through the contact and an on-screen teleprompter with a quote written on it. He also recalled viewing a green, monochromatic image of Albert Einstein to CNET.

At the heart of the lens is an Arm M0 processor and a Micro LED display with 14,000 pixels per inch. It’s just 0.02 inches (0.5 mm) in diameter with a 1.8-micron pixel pitch. Perkins claimed it’s the “smallest and densest display ever created for dynamic content.”

Developing the contact overall included a focus on physics and electronics miniaturization, Perkins wrote. Mojo Lens developed its power management system with “medical-grade micro-batteries” and a proprietary power management integrated circuit.

The Mojo Lens also uses a custom-configured magnetometer (CNET noted this drives the compass Perkins saw), accelerometer, and gyroscope for tracking. The goal is that AR remains visible even as you move your eyes around, Perkins wrote. Eye movement is essential as there’s no gesture control, like some smart glasses, such as Ray-Ban Stories, have. There is voice control, a Mojo Vision rep told Ars Technica, but the user interface’s primary method of control is eye-tracking.

One of the biggest obstacles facing smart glasses is how cumbersome and odd they can look. Some devices, like Stories and Nreal Air, use a sunglass-like appearance to combat this.

A contact lens sounds like it has the potential to be even more discreet than AR headgear posing as regular Ray-Bans. But the current prototype uses a “relay accessory,” as Mojo Vision’s rep put it, worn around the neck. It includes a processor, GPU, and 5 GHz radio for sending and receiving data to and from the lens. According to CNET, the accessory also sends information “back to computers that track the eye movement data for research.” Perkins’ blog said this tech required custom ASIC designs.

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Having a neck-worn extra isn’t actually that much of a hardship, after all. Remember though when people with diabetes were going to have contact lenses that would monitor their blood sugar – first from Microsoft (2011), then from Google (2014), then actually er no (2018)? Fun times.
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The hilarious Polium One is a web3 console that will never, ever get released • Kotaku

John Walker:

»

The Polium One is the answer to a question no one has ever, nor will ever, ask. It is a “next-gen console for web3 gaming.” Which is to say, a render on a website for a fictional machine that I believe will absolutely will never get made. I dare them to prove me wrong.

To be clear from the start “web3”or “web 3.0” is the umbrella term for a series of transparently obvious scams, from the delusions of cryptocurrency to the embarrassment of NFTs. It doesn’t really mean anything, and if you see anyone using it, you know to steer very wide. So yes, the Polium One!

Polium, a company of such renown that it wasn’t even able to get the Twitter handle with just one underscore after the brand name, has announced its intention to create the first console designed for…for…the thingy. You know. The web3 stuff. Um, like, payments! Yes, the payments! You can pay for things on it using all sorts of crypto!

Seriously, that’s all it has. The hilarious website, suggesting a 2024 launch for backers, 2025 for the hoi polloi, has an FAQ that offers absolutely no answers, other than which bullshit payment networks it’ll accept. You, a nocoiner, might want to ask, “What games will be available at launch?” but you’ll only be told, “We are currently in talks with multiple game developers.” Meanwhile, a true believer will want to know that you can spend your pretend money via Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, BNB, Imm…

My favorite question in the FAQ is “What will be the specs?” And not just for that tortuous effort not to split the infinitive. Here’s the answer, in full: “We aim to build a high-performance console. The specs you see on the site are not confirmed until we have a functional prototype.”

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I’d be worried about how the name makes me think of polonium. (Americans start here.) One lovely tweet about the not-a-product says “I’ve always wanted a console that can play Jack Dorsey’s first tweet.”
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I watched hundreds of flat-Earth videos to learn how conspiracy theories spread • The Conversation

Carlos Diaz Ruiz is an assistant professor at the Hanken School of Economics:

»

By studying how flat Earthers talk about their beliefs, we can learn how they make their arguments engaging to their audience, and in turn, learn what makes disinformation spread online.

In a recent study, my colleague Tomas Nilsson at Linnaeus University and I analysed hundreds of YouTube videos in which people argue that the Earth is flat. We paid attention to their debating techniques to understand the structure of their arguments and how they make them appear rational.

One strategy they use is to take sides in existing debates. People who are deeply attached to one side of a culture war are likely to wield any and all arguments (including truths, half-truths and opinions), if it helps them win. People invest their identity into the group and are more willing to believe fellow allies rather than perceived opponents – a phenomenon that sociologists call neo-tribalism.

The problem arises when people internalise disinformation as part of their identity. While news articles can be fact-checked, personal beliefs cannot. When conspiracy theories are part of someone’s value system or worldview, it is difficult to challenge them.

In analysing these videos, we observed that flat Earthers take advantage of ongoing culture wars by inserting their own arguments into the logic of, primarily, three main debates. These debates are longstanding and can be very personal for participants on either side.

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We are starting to form coherent theories about how disinformation spreads. Good on them for watching the videos. Saves the rest of us doing it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Giuseppe, a reader, posed a question following yesterday’s link about how you can’t open an aircraft cabin door in the air because of the pressure differential: “One thing I’ve never managed to determine conclusively is if the door can be opened between taxing and pressurisation – in other words, if a passenger could open the door while taking off, when the pressure balance is still favourable, as pressurisation starts gradually as soon as the aircraft leaves the ground.”

In the interests of Finding Stuff Out, we asked a cabin crew member we know, who replied, after some discussion with colleagues: “We think yes.” You’re requested not to test this empirically.

You may have wondered how easy it is to open an aircraft door while it’s in flight. A pilot can tell you. CC-licensed photo by Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Don’t touch that dial! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Japanese court ruling poised to make Big Tech open up on algorithms • Financial Times

Shotaro Tani and Eri Sugiura:

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Japanese legal experts have said an antitrust case related to a local restaurant website could change how large internet platforms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon operate in the country, forcing them to reveal the inner workings of their secret algorithms.

Last month, a Tokyo court ruled in favour of Hanryumura, a Korean-style BBQ restaurant chain operator in an antitrust case brought against Kakaku.com, operator of Tabelog, Japan’s largest restaurant review platform.

Hanryumura successfully argued that Kakaku.com had altered the way user scores were tallied in ways that hurt sales at its restaurant outlets. While Kakaku.com has been ordered to pay Hanryumura ¥38.4mn ($284,000) in damages for “abuse of superior bargaining position”, the internet company has appealed against the decision.

Japanese legal experts said the outcome may have far-reaching implications, as the court requested Kakaku.com to disclose part of its algorithms.

While the restaurant group is constrained from publicly revealing what information was shown to it, the court’s request set a rare precedent. Big Tech groups have long argued that their algorithms should be considered trade secrets in all circumstances.

Courts and regulators across the world have begun to challenge that position, with many businesses having complained about the negative impact caused by even small changes to search and recommendations services.

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Where Japan leads, will others follow? Even if it’s just restricted to Japan, that’s a big country in terms of impact.
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What if somebody opens a door during flight? • Ask The Pilot

Patrick Smith:

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It seems that a week can’t go by without hearing the latest story about a passenger who went cuckoo and tried to yank open an emergency exit, only to be tackled and restrained by those around him, who thought they were on the verge of being ejected into the troposphere.

While the news never fails to report these events, it seldom mentions the most important fact: you cannot –- repeat, cannot — open the doors or emergency hatches of an airplane in flight.  You can’t open them for the simple reason that cabin pressure won’t allow it. Think of an aircraft door as a drain plug, fixed in place by the interior pressure.  Almost all aircraft exits open inward. Some retract upward into the ceiling; others swing outward; but they open inward first, and not even the most musclebound human will overcome the force holding them shut. At a typical cruising altitude, up to eight pounds of pressure are pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage. That’s over eleven hundred pounds against each square foot of door. Even at low altitudes, where cabin pressure levels are much less, a meager 2 p.s.i. differential is still more than anyone can displace — even after six cups of coffee and the aggravation that comes with sitting behind a shrieking baby.  The doors are further held secure by a series of electrical and/or mechanical latches.

So, while I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you enjoy being pummeled and placed in a choke-hold by panicked passengers, a person could, conceivably, sit there all day tugging on a door handle to his or her heart’s content. The door is not going to open (though you might get a red light flashing in the cockpit, causing me to spill my Coke Zero). You would need a hydraulic jack, and the TSA doesn’t allow those.

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Raises the question of why cabin crew get so excited and indulge in a struggle when someone tries to do this. The cool thing would be to watch the passenger wrestle until they were tired out and then take them aside, exhausted, for restraint. (Via John Naughton.)
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Why this crypto crash is different • Coindesk

Frances Coppola:

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The crypto ecosystem has tethered itself firmly to the traditional financial system, and the dollar dominates crypto markets just as it does traditional financial markets. And as crypto markets have grown, so has the dollar value of the cryptocurrency industry.

But these dollars aren’t real. They exist only in the virtual space. They are not, and never were, guaranteed by the only institution in the world that can create real dollars, namely the Fed[eral Reserve in the US]. The Fed has no obligation whatsoever to ensure that those who have made life-changing amounts of these “virtual dollars” can actually exchange them for real dollars. So when the crypto bubble bursts, the “virtual dollars” simply disappear. If you can’t exchange your virtual dollars for real dollars, your wealth is an illusion.

The only real dollars in the cryptocurrency industry are those paid by new entrants when they make their first cryptocurrency purchases. The rest of the dollar liquidity on crypto markets is provided by dollar-pegged stablecoins. These fall into two groups: those that have actual dollars and/or dollar-denominated safe liquid assets backing them, and those that don’t. There aren’t enough of the former to enable everyone to cash out into real dollars, and there’s no guarantee that the latter can be cashed out into real dollars at all. So, in effect, the entire crypto industry is fractionally reserved.

There’s now a race on to exchange cryptocurrencies for the few real dollars still available. As is always the case in unregulated markets, the law of the jungle applies. Those with the biggest teeth get the dollars. Perhaps “whales” is the wrong name for them. Crocodiles might be more like it.

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The number of crypto lenders and exchanges which are suddenly “restructuring” and “restricting withdrawals” is growing by the day. Bitcoin’s price (which I’ve given up trying to understand) is still bumping along under $20k. As people try to cash out, it’ll probably go lower.
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Army’s YouTube and Twitter accounts hacked • BBC News

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The British Army says it is investigating after its Twitter and YouTube accounts were hacked.

Videos on cryptocurrency using images of billionaire businessman Elon Musk appeared on the YouTube channel.
The Twitter feed appeared to retweet several posts related to NFTs – a type of electronic artwork for investment.
The Army confirmed the “breach”, saying it took information security “extremely seriously” and was resolving the issue. Both accounts have now been restored.

An Army spokesperson added: “Whilst we have now resolved the issue an investigation is ongoing and it would be inappropriate to comment further.” It is not clear who is behind the hacking incidents, which also saw the accounts renamed.

At one stage, the Twitter account name was changed to Bapesclan, accompanied by a profile picture featuring an ape-like cartoon figure with make-up mimicking a clown.

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You’d tend to guess it was people pushing crypto, wouldn’t you? If it had been Russia or China you’d have thought they’d be either more circumspect, or more aggressive; not that they’d use it to push digital junk.

Does that make it worse or better though that a bunch of money-chasers were able to do this, and that the Army’s social accounts had such terrible security?
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Delta is trying personalized flight information boards called Parallel Reality • Quartz

Anne Quito:

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Forget puzzling over flight information display boards. Nevermind fumbling with your phone to access another app. Imagine a future where every directional sign at the airport pointed you to your gate.

This week, Delta passengers at the Detroit Metro Airport saw a glimpse of this ideal with a technology called Parallel Reality. At the McNamara terminal is a new 21 ft. x 6 ft digital board that’s capable of simultaneously displaying the unique travel itinerary for up 100 passengers. This means that a hundred people can look at the same sign and see something different.

Developed by the California-based start-up Misapplied Sciences, a Parallel Reality display is comprised of pixels that can project millions of light rays in different directions. Digital ID systems such as facial recognition technology then pairs those rays to a specific person. 

Greg Forbes, who oversees airport experience at Delta, tells Quartz that Parallel Reality is a pinnacle moment in the company’s quest to improve flight information boards.

With more and more commercial flights each day—over 1,000 in Detroit alone and around 115,000 globally—the information on those schedule boards tends to get really dense, says Forbes. Delta has tried to improve them over the years by installing higher-definition screens, adjusting font sizes and colors to improve legibility, and stripping away unnecessary details on the boards. But better graphic design can only do so much, says Forbes.

“All of it was meant to cut down on the clutter but I would say that we have hit the limits of what we can do to make flight information displays more user-friendly,” he explains.

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The GIF showing how the same board can be showing different people different content is remarkable. Of course, to each person the board remains the same. That’s quite remarkable.
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‘Eventually it will just be a barcode, won’t it?’ Why Britain’s new stamps are causing outrage and upset • The Guardian

Simon Usborne:

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In February, Royal Mail introduced a new design for its standard stamps, which have changed so little since the launch of the Penny Black in 1840 that they are officially known as “definitives”. The new stamps – “plum purple” for first class, “holly green” for second – still feature the same regal profile introduced more than 50 years ago. But what is most bothering purists – and leading [philatelist Dinah] Johnson to the brink of direct action – is the addition next to the Queen of a digital barcode.

…David Gold, the head of public affairs and policy at Royal Mail Group, knew the coded stamps would create a stir. “Collectors, traditionalists and royalists feel a sense of ownership over stamps,” he says. It’s why the new stamps, the designs for which had to be approved by Buckingham Palace, include a fake perforation as a kind of dignity screen between code and Queen (who is also, notably, facing the other way).

Gold says the codes mean Royal Mail can track all letters, allowing it to better monitor, predict and respond to regional changes in demand, for example. He is also confident the unique codes will stop the fraudulent washing of postmark ink and resale of used stamps – a crime that he claims costs Royal Mail “tens of millions” of pounds a year.

Royal Mail says the codes contain only the identity of that stamp, and cannot include personal data. Gold also rejects the notion that the stamp is endangered. “Clearly the direction of travel is a reduction in the number of letters, but I think people are still fascinated and motivated by stamps,” he says.

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But it turns out, via Twitter, that other countries are a long way ahead of this. In Holland, for example, you can buy a nine-digit code which works as a stamp once written on the envelope. Germany has similar. Perhaps inventing the stamp has held us back.
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Boris Johnson can’t (or won’t) do discipline • POLITICO

Emilio Casalicchio and Esther Webber:

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The examples of Johnson’s leniency stretch back almost to the day he entered No. 10. The prime minister refused to sack Home Secretary Priti Patel after she was found to have bullied civil servants; tried to keep Health Secretary Matt Hancock in the Cabinet after he broke COVID rules by conducting an extramarital affair in his government office; and didn’t flinch when Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick was found to have broken the law when he approved a Conservative donor’s bid to build a lucrative housing estate.

In one memorable case, Johnson fought to keep his then-top political adviser Dominic Cummings after an infamous lockdown jaunt to a medieval castle to test — he claimed — whether his vision was good enough to drive.

On that occasion — as with most of the others — Johnson’s loyalty caused him enormous political damage, for little obvious gain. Cummings departed under a cloud, eight months later.

Johnson’s allies insist the PM was reluctant to dump [deputy whip Chris] Pincher because he wanted to see due process followed, and argues people should be innocent until proved otherwise.

“Often we hear that Boris Johnson will throw anyone under a bus to advance his own career or save his own skin,” one Cabinet minister said. “But when there are people in trouble and a proper process has to be followed, he does not rush to judgment.” The same person added: “You can’t have a kangaroo court and give people sanctions or punishments before the facts are known.”

A spokesman for the prime minister said he had not been aware of any specific allegations against Pincher and that he takes all allegations of wrongdoing seriously.

It doesn’t help the prime minister, however, that allegations about Pincher have circulated in Westminster for some time. The MP was investigated over another assault allegation in 2017, although cleared.

…The sense Johnson is a rule-breaker has followed him around throughout his career. He has felt the wrath of standards watchdogs numerous times, for example over Conservative donations to refurbish his flat; a gifted retreat on a private Caribbean island; and over the lockdown parties, for which he was slapped with a police fine.

His approach to standards in public life have won him a reputation for running a rogue administration. “There is more rigorous checking of the fire alarm system in No. 10 than there is of anything else,” said one government official.

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The situation is positively Augean now; a cleansing is very, very overdue.
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Climate protection: CO2 turned into methanol • Vienna University of Technology [TU Wien]

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where carbon dioxide occurs in maximum concentration – for example directly in the exhaust gas stream of large industrial plants – it can be used most efficiently. The idea of converting carbon dioxide into valuable products is not new. However, it is a difficult and complex task. Sometimes CO2 has to be enriched and separated beforehand, which causes additional costs and energy input.

“To convert carbon dioxide, catalysts based on copper have often been used so far,” says Prof. Karin Föttinger from the Institute of Materials Chemistry at TU Wien. “However, they have the major disadvantage that they are not robust. If there are certain other substances in the exhaust gas stream besides carbon dioxide, for example sulphur, the catalyst quickly loses its activity. It is said that the catalyst is poisoned.”

Karin Föttinger and her research group therefore set out to find a better material. “If you want to use such methods not only in the laboratory but also on a large scale in industry, then you need a catalyst that is perhaps a little less active, but robust, durable and reliable,” Föttinger explains. “You want to be able to process quite ordinary industrial waste gases without pre-treatment.”

The TU Wien research team was able to show that catalysts based on sulphur and molybdenum fulfil these requirements. Special additional elements, such as manganese, ensure that carbon dioxide, which is actually very unreactive, is activated and converted. By choosing such additional elements, the properties of the catalysts can be precisely adapted to the desired area of application. In this way, methanol can now be produced from waste gas containing CO2.

“Methanol is an attractive product. It is liquid at room temperature, so it can be stored without any problems. It is needed in industry; up to now it has normally been produced from fossil raw materials,” says Karin Föttinger. “But it is also possible to use our catalysts to produce other molecules, such as higher alcohols. We are currently still working on figuring out exactly how best to choose parameters like pressure and temperature to produce different products.”

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Strange how sulphur poisons catalysts and/but then works as a catalyst.
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India’s green future, built on hydrogen • Fortune India

PB Jayakumar:

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The ball was set rolling by Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he unveiled the 25-year roadmap for hydrogen development in his address on India’s 75th Independence Day and announced the National Hydrogen Mission to meet the larger goal of self-reliance in energy production by the 100th Independence Day in 2047. “The thing that is going to help India with a quantum leap in terms of climate is green hydrogen. We have to make India a global hub for green hydrogen production and export,” he said.

Some years ago, government had launched a similar mission for solar power under which India is chasing 500 gigawatt (GW) capacity by 2030 and has achieved much success —100 GW, from less than 30 GW six years ago. Will hydrogen see a similar takeoff? It will, but with time. “Hydrogen will drive economies not now but in near future. Today’s electrolysers (used to separate hydrogen from water using cathode, anode and membrane) consume 40-50 units of electricity to split water and generate 30-35 units. Energy consumed is more than energy produced,” says M.V.S Seshagiri Rao, joint MD & group CFO of JSW Group.

For energy-starved India, which is aiming for carbon neutrality by 2070, the path to energy security goes through a mix of oil, coal, blended fuels, natural gas, renewables and electricity. At present India’s $3.12 trillion economy needs 1,650 billion units (BU) of power, made from nearly 400 GW of capacity. Of this, green electricity is only 17%. When the economy touches $5-7 trillion in the next decade, it will need at least 3,000-4,000 GW. Further, at current rate, the energy import bill will triple by 2040. The only way out of these massive challenges is tapping as many green and locally available energy sources as possible.

New Delhi-based climate and energy research firm, Council for Energy, Environment and Water Research (CEEWR) has estimated that net zero emissions by 2070 will require 5,630 GW solar capacity, 99% reduction in coal use between 2040 and 2060 and 90% fall in crude oil consumption between 2050 and 2070.

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Ambitious. But at least it’s happening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Though humans struggle to understand what baby chickens are expressing, machine learning systems can figure it out. CC-licensed photo by Nenad Stojkovic 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

What’s the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts? • Substack

Max Read:

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This [strange “misdirected” text/WhatsApp/message] is the first step in what is, at its core, an old-fashioned “romance scam,” in which the scammer exploits a lonely and/or horny person by faking a long-distance, usually romantic relationship. After the scammer has gained the trust of their victim, they convince them to transfer money, often for an investment; in some cases, the victim can be enticed into several successive transfers before they realize they’re being played.

This kind of con has proliferated over the last few years in China, where it’s called sha zhu pan, or “pig-butchering,” because the victim is strung along for weeks or months before the actual swindle, like a pig being fattened for slaughter. Originating in sophisticated online-fraud networks first developed to take advantage of Chinese offshore gamblers, the sha zhu pan scams end with targets depositing money into forex or gold trading — or, seemingly most commonly, into fake cryptocurrency platforms. (Interestingly, they’re often not “romantic” at all, and instead rely on cultivating a trusting friendship that culminates with a little bit of friendly investing advice.)

While sha zhu pan scams are common enough in and around China that there are Chinese-language YouTubers whose stock in trade is identifying and publicizing scams, the same scam networks seem to have expanded outward over the past year or so, joining America’s (and Europe’s) own homegrown romance and crypto-scam industries on dating sites and, yes, via “accidental” wrong number texts.

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The selection of “oops misdirected” scam opener texts is amazing. I think “Andy, will my custom mahogany furniture arrive next week?” is my favourite. It’s a terrific read.
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Where’s the herd immunity? Our research shows why Covid is still wreaking havoc • The Guardian

Danny Altmann is a professor of immunology at Imperial College London:

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During May and June two new variants, BA.4 and BA.5, progressively displaced the previous Omicron subvariant, BA.2. They are even more transmissible and more immune-evasive. Last week a group of collaborators, including me and a professor of immunology and respiratory medicine, Rosemary Boyton, published a paper in Science, looking comprehensively at immunity to the Omicron family, both in triple-vaccinated people and also in those who then suffered breakthrough infections during the Omicron wave. This lets us examine whether Omicron was, as some hoped, a benign natural booster of our Covid immunity. It turns out that isn’t the case.

We considered many facets of immunity, including the antibodies most implicated in protection (“neutralising antibodies”), as well as protective “immune memory” in white blood cells. The results tell us it is unsurprising that breakthrough infections were so common. Most people – even when triple-vaccinated – had 20 times less neutralising antibody response against Omicron than against the initial “Wuhan” strain. Importantly, Omicron infection was a poor booster of immunity to further Omicron infections. It is a kind of stealth virus that gets in under the radar without doing too much to alert immune defences. Even having had Omicron, we’re not well protected from further infections.

Also, to be added to the now complex mix is “immune imprinting”. This is the finding that our immune response to Covid is shaped very differently, depending on our prior exposures – infection in one wave relative to another, plus vaccination. In our study, those who’d been infected in the first wave and then again with Omicron had particularly poor T-cell responses and no boosting of antibodies. That is, some combinations of exposures may leave us poorly protected relative to others.

Contrary to the myth that we are sliding into a comfortable evolutionary relationship with a common-cold-like, friendly virus, this is more like being trapped on a rollercoaster in a horror film. There’s nothing cold-like or friendly about a large part of the workforce needing significant absences from work, feeling awful and sometimes getting reinfected over and over again, just weeks apart. And that’s before the risk of long Covid.

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Artificial intelligence could spot baby chickens in distress • Science

Virginia Morell:

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Early in life, chicks utter distress calls—high-pitched, repetitive chirps—to attract the attention of their mother hen, whom they rely on for warmth and food. She responds with food calls, showing the chicks where to forage. But in a commercial chicken barn, chicks call out when they’re uncomfortable, socially isolated, or hungry. Answering these calls can be the difference between life and death: Ignored chickens are more likely to lose weight and die prematurely. Animal welfare scientists have been trying to develop automatic methods to help farmers better spot these situations.

To improve these efforts, researchers at the City University of Hong Kong recorded the vocalizations of chickens housed at Lingfeng Poultry Ltd., a major poultry producer in China’s Guangxi province. The birds are kept in stacked cages (three cages per stack, and 13 to 20 individuals per cage), with about 2000 to 2500 chickens in each barn.

Over the course of a year, the researchers recorded the environment, picking up everything from natural farm sounds such as workers hosing down barn floors to the chick distress calls. They then transformed all of these noises into sound pictures known as spectrograms and used the images to train a type of AI program called deep learning. Similar programs have been developed to recognize the emotional states of cows on dairy farms.

Using the recorded sounds from the barns as well as sounds made in real time in a live demonstration, the algorithm rapidly and successfully identified 97% of distress calls as the chickens were making them, distinguishing these from other chicken sounds and from general barn noise, the team reports today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

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Cor blimey guvnor it’s a right old Doctor Dolittle. What a strange possibility that machines might be able to understand animal communications better than us and infer their thoughts and desires. (Think we’ll be ahead with dogs for a while though.)
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Google will delete location history data for abortion clinic visits • Reuters via The Guardian

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Google will delete location data showing when users visit an abortion clinic, the online search company said on Friday, after concern that a digital trail could inform law enforcement if an individual terminates a pregnancy illegally.

As state laws limiting abortions set in after the US supreme court decided last month that they are no longer guaranteed by the constitution, the technology industry has fretted police could obtain warrants for customers’ search history, geolocation and other information revealing pregnancy plans.

Google on Friday said it would continue to push back against improper or overly broad demands for data by the government, without reference to abortion.

The company said the location history of a Google account was off by default.

Effective in the coming weeks, for those who do use location history, entries showing sensitive places including fertility centers, abortion clinics and addiction treatment facilities will be deleted soon after a visit.

A Google spokesperson did not immediately answer how the company would identify such visits or whether all related data would be wiped from its servers.

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That last part is the tricky one. How will it identify the visits? And the bit about the location history being “off by default” doesn’t really fit with the way that Android hassles you for access to your location.
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New York denies air permit to bitcoin mining power plant • The Verge

Justine Calma:

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Bitcoin miners in New York state faced a regulatory blow last week as the state denied air permits for a gas-fired power plant used to mine bitcoin. It’s the latest step that New York has taken to crack down on crypto mining as it tries to meet its goals on climate change.

The decision was made for the Greenidge Generating Station in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Bitcoin mining brought new life and renewed controversy to the embattled plant in 2020. That drew outrage from some local residents worried about how the plant could affect fish and tourism by discharging hot water into nearby Seneca Lake. At the state level, Greenidge’s revival has sparked fears that pollution from the energy-intensive process of mining Bitcoin could revive other zombie power plants and derail New York’s climate goals.

New York state set a goal in 2019 of slashing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 85% over the next few decades. The fight over Greenidge has been billed up as a test of how serious the state is about meeting that goal. Is it willing to get tough on the lucrative bitcoin industry that’s boomed in New York ever since China kicked out miners last year?

…Greenidge operated as a coal-fired power plant for decades. But as coal struggled to compete with cheap natural gas across the country, the plant temporarily shuttered before retrofitting itself to run on gas in 2017. Then, in 2020, the plant’s operators spotted a more lucrative venture and started mining Bitcoin, which now makes up the vast majority [over 95%] of the company’s revenues.

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With the price cratering, hard to see the permits and the hassle being worth it.
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Former top Apple lawyer pleads guilty to insider trading • Reuters via CNBC

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The former top corporate lawyer at Apple pleaded guilty on Thursday to insider trading charges, for what prosecutors called a five-year scheme to trade ahead of the iPhone maker’s quarterly earnings announcements.

Gene Levoff, 48, of San Carlos, California, pleaded guilty to six securities fraud charges at a hearing before US District Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey. [Apple fired Levoff in September 2018, five months before he was criminally charged.]

Levoff allegedly exploited his roles as corporate secretary, head of corporate law and co-chair of a committee that reviewed drafts of Apple’s results to generate $604,000 of illegal gains on more than $14m of trades from 2011 to 2016.

Prosecutors said Levoff ignored the quarterly “blackout periods” that barred trading before Apple’s results were released, as well as the company’s broader insider trading policy — which he was responsible for enforcing.

“Gene Levoff betrayed the trust of one of the world’s largest tech companies for his own financial gain,” First Assistant US Attorney Vikas Khanna in New Jersey said in a statement.

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Could get up to 20 years and $5m fine per count, though probably won’t. You can see why he wasn’t worried about the person watching out for insider trading spotting him.
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Patatap

Fun game: press keys on the keyboard to get a different sound from each of a-z. Press the spacebar to get a different set of sounds. Not clear that you can record them, but a fun way to pass the time. Also available as an iOS app.
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Brown Bear Cam – Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park • Explore.org

You wanted webcams showing animals in natural and not-so-natural settings? Here’s a page full of them. (Includes sleeping dogs, cats, fish, etc.) Beats the days when all you could see was a pot of coffee.
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Meta’s shutting down its digital wallet, Novi • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Meta’s ending the pilot for Novi, the company’s digital wallet and the last remaining piece of its troubled cryptocurrency project, as first reported by Bloomberg. On Novi’s website, Meta says the wallet is shutting down on September 1st, 2022, and asks users to withdraw their funds “as soon as possible.”

Users will lose access to their accounts come September, and will no longer be able to add money to Novi starting July 21st. If someone forgets to withdraw their remaining balance, Meta says it will “attempt to transfer” their funds to the bank account or debit card added to the service.

Meta rolled out the “small pilot” of Novi to users in the US and Guatemala last October. Novi was originally built to support fast and free transactions using the Meta-backed cryptocurrency, Diem, but regulatory challenges forced the company to partner with Coinbase to use the Paxos stablecoin (USDP) instead. While Meta made it clear that it still planned on adding support for Diem at a later date, things started to fall apart (more than they already were) at the end of 2021 and into 2022.

Before Facebook’s parent company was known as Meta, Diem was also known by another name: Libra. The cryptocurrency project faced scrutiny over its ties to Facebook, so much so that the independent group behind Libra rebranded the project to Diem in an attempt to distance itself from the social network.

Members of the US Senate called on Meta to shut down its Novi project shortly after its October 2021 launch, citing that the company “cannot be trusted to manage cryptocurrency.”

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My concern about Facebook and Libra (as it was) was the idea that it could become a de facto global currency, overseen by Mark Zuckerberg. You only have to reflect on that idea – of transactions happening within Facebook because they’re more convenient, and all the arbitrage between currencies being handled at the back end, until Facebook is the one dictating exchange rates – to think the outcomes aren’t good.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified