Is the explanation for men’s liking for pricey watch that they like fiddly things? Or collections? CC-licensed photo by Mohammad Fahmi Mohd Shah 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. Rewind. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk associates named in Twitter subpoena • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Faiz Siddiqui:

»

In a subpoena Twitter issued on Monday, its legal team asked for information about a who’s who of Silicon Valley elite, including investors Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Steve Jurvetson, Marc Andreessen, Jason Calacanis and Keith Rabois, among others. Some of the figures have not been previously named as having any involvement in the deal, suggesting the breadth of Twitter’s search for information to support its legal attempt to force Musk to go through with his deal to buy the company.

Twitter declined to comment. Palihapitiya, Sacks, Calacanis, Jurvetson and Rabois did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Musk and two of his attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A flood of document requests issued over the weekend and into Monday marks the latest twist in the contentious and fast-evolving court case between the social media service and Musk, who is trying to pull out of his bid to take over the company.

After Musk said he was exiting the deal last month — accusing Twitter of not being forthright about the amount of spam and bots on its service — Twitter sued Musk in a Delaware business court, known as a Chancery Court. Musk in turn countersued Twitter on Friday. Twitter also issued subpoenas over the weekend to a group of banks involved in the deal, including Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley.

The subpoena obtained by The Post includes extensive requests for communications, including “checklists, timelines, presentations, decks, organizational calls, meetings, notes, recordings” related to the deal’s financing.

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The discovery of Musk’s planning is going to be wonderful. He may not have quite realised what this was going to entail. (The trial isn’t until October, so lots of time for discovery.)
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A factory line of terrors: TikTok’s African content moderators review horrific videos • Business Insider

Rosie Bradbury and Majd Al-Waheidi :

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It was only a few hours into her shift when the horror streamed through her screen. Imani, 25, a content moderator for TikTok in Morocco, saw a young man throw a cat into the air before impaling it on a sword. The moderator, who worked out of a small one-bedroom house in Casablanca, was shocked.

“I love cats,” she said. “I’d never imagined I’d see such a scene in real life. It’s not a movie. It’s not a joke. It’s real,” she continued.

Two years later, the video is still etched in her mind, she said. Whenever she thinks of it, she tries to distance herself from the memory. “I created a wall between my job and my life. I didn’t think about my job outside my shift. I had a baby to take care of,” she said.

Imani worked for TikTok’s growing Middle East and North Africa division through Majorel, an outsourcing firm in Luxembourg, and was tasked with reviewing some of the most gruesome content on the platform, including suicides and child-abuse material.

Though she had a bachelor’s degree in English, she struggled to find work during the first months of the pandemic. Imani and her husband, a technician, could barely support their infant daughter. In September 2020, when she was offered the job at Majorel, despite the meager pay of $2 an hour, she thought it was a godsend. The ability to work remotely also meant she could take care of her child.

Imani didn’t know then that the work would be so psychologically damaging, she said, and she still feels the effects of the job today.

But she isn’t alone. Nine current and former content moderators in Morocco who worked on Majorel’s TikTok contract described experiences of severe psychological distress as a result of their jobs.

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The whole job of human content moderation will surely be seen in the near future as a form of paid abuse. If ever there was a job that cried out to be automated all the way, it’s this one.
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Nomad crypto bridge loses $200 million in ‘chaotic’ hack • The Verge

Corin Faire:

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After a few quiet months, it’s happened again: another blockchain bridge hack with losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nomad, a cryptocurrency bridge that lets users swap tokens between blockchains, is the latest to be hit after a frenzied attack on Monday, which left almost $200 million of its funds drained.

The hack was acknowledged by the Nomad project’s official Twitter account on Monday, August 1st, initially as an “incident” that was being investigated. In a further statement released early Tuesday morning, Nomad said that the team was “working around the clock to address the situation” and had also notified law enforcement.

In another Twitter thread, samczsun — a researcher at the crypto and Web3 investment firm Paradigm — explained that the exploit was made possible by a misconfiguration of the project’s main smart contract that allowed anyone with a basic understanding of the code to authorise withdrawals to themselves.

“This is why the hack was so chaotic,” samczsun wrote. “[Y]ou didn’t need to know about Solidity or Merkle Trees or anything like that. All you had to do was find a transaction that worked, find/replace the other person’s address with yours, and then re-broadcast it.”

A further post-mortem from blockchain security auditing firm CertiK noted that this dynamic created its own momentum, where people who saw funds being stolen using the above method were able to substitute their own addresses to replicate the attack. This led to what one Twitter user described as “the first decentralized crowd-looting of a 9-figure bridge in history.”

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Why does this keep happening, ask people in only industry where this keeps happening.
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Why are men obsessed with watches? • The Guardian

Jeremy Langmead, in 2009:

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It wasn’t so long ago that your father would hand you a gold-plated watch on your 21st birthday and that would be that. It never crossed a man’s mind that he might need to add another two or three by the time he hit 30. And it certainly never crossed his mind that when he reached 40 he might be grateful to receive a smart wooden box with different felt-lined compartments in which to keep his “collection” of watches.

The fact that men are still buying and cherishing quality timepieces is of great comfort to an industry that, in the early 1970s, thought its time, if you will excuse the pun, had come. The invention of the quartz watch (in analog or digital form) in 1967 might initially have been hailed a great technological achievement, but it wasn’t long before it was also seen as the biggest challenge the traditional timepiece had faced since the wristwatch first became popular at the end of the first world war. The fact that a cheap Casio with a flashing LED time display was what every young hipster soon craved, coupled with the economic doldrums in which the world found itself in the 1970s, spelled disaster.

It took a few years of navel-gazing and re-evaluating what a watch was truly for before, in the mid-1980s, a few forceful and inventive characters in the industry came back with a design philosophy and marketing programme that brought the sector back from the brink. These horological pioneers decided that watches would not merely be timekeepers, they would be mini-masterpieces that showcased extreme craftsmanship, represented tradition, incorporated technology and embraced innovation. They would effectively be a Savile Row suit, Ferrari sports car, Mayfair member’s club and Nasa spaceship rolled into one package that could sit neatly on your wrist.

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Langmead also comments that “A watch is a Porsche that you can take to meetings – and it doesn’t harm the planet either.” Readers offered lots of commentary to my question yesterday about why the hell it is that (some) men will spend wild amounts of money. It seems to be a combination of completionist nerdery, jewellery (this piece was categorised under “Men’s jewellery” in The Guardian’s system).

There’s also sentimental value, as this Hodinkee piece suggests. Particular thanks to Serge, JFC and Chris for their input.
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What should a nine-thousand-pound electric vehicle sound like? • The New Yorker

John Seabrook:

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for pedestrians distracted by their phones, [vehicle] engine sounds are everyday lifesavers, as the tiger’s distant roar was for napping early humans. Except that the predators are motor vehicles—and the new ones are virtually silent.

In response to this threat, Congress passed the 2010 Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, a law that few Americans paid attention to at the time, and that took almost 10 years to implement. As a result of the legislation, every electric vehicle (EV) and hybrid manufactured since 2020 and sold in the US must come equipped with a pedestrian-warning system, also known as an acoustic vehicle alerting system (AVAS), which emits noises from external speakers when the car is travelling below 18.5mph. (Similar regulations apply in Europe and Asia.)

Automakers have enlisted musicians and composers to assist in crafting pleasing and proprietary alert systems, as well as in-cabin chimes and tones. Hans Zimmer, the film composer, was involved in scoring branded sounds for BMW’s Vision M Next car. The Volkswagen ID.3’s sound was created by Leslie Mándoki, a German-Hungarian prog-rock/jazz-adjacent producer. The Atlanta-based electronic musician Richard Devine was brought in to help in making the Jaguar I-Pace’s voltaic purr.

Some automakers cooked up sounds entirely in-house. The Porsche Taycan Turbo S has one of the boldest alerts: you’re in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab as he flips the switch to animate the monster. Engineers in the Audi Sound Lab made the lower frequencies of the Audi E-Tron GT Quattro’s alert by algorithmically mixing different tones produced by recording an electric fan through a long metal pipe; the full alert references the sumptuous soundscapes of the film “Tron” and its sequel.

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I think the sounds must explain the quiet, eerie whooshing and wheezing that I sometimes hear from (the surprisingly large number of) EV/hybrids in the town where I live as they tootle along.

The (long) article doesn’t mention how loud AVAS have to be, so I checked: between 56 and 75 decibels, which is between “moderate rainfall” and “a dishwasher in operation”.
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Open data in the water industry • Ofwat

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Open data means making data freely available to everyone to access, use and share, unless there’s a really strong justification for not doing that. Data and the people, processes and technology that support it – are important assets – like  water pipes and treatment works.  

Data is essential for developing insight, making informed decisions and improving services. The use of open data could transform water and wastewater service delivery by increasing transparency, increasing efficiency, enhancing customer experience, and stimulating innovation. 

Working alongside the water industry, consumer groups and the Open Data Institute, Ofwat has sought to understand the benefits of open data and how it could be used to help address some of the challenges the water sector faces: climate change, the need to protect the environment, responding to changing customer demands and protecting the most vulnerable.  

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Ofwat is the UK’s regulator for the privatised water industry. It’s calling this scheme, seeking more open data from the water industry, H2Open. Full marks for the naming, though the fact that it began this initiative 15 years after Michael Cross and I began the Free Our Data campaign at Guardian Technology, which sought to get exactly this sort of scheme everywhere, is a teeny bit dispiriting. (Lots of other public bodies got on board within a few years.) But better late than never.
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Why there are no nuclear airplanes • The Atlantic

Christian Ruhl:

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The Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi had introduced the idea of nuclear flight as early as 1942, while serving on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. As World War II drew to a close, the United States began work to realize Fermi’s dream of nuclear-powered flight. From 1946 until 1961, vast teams of engineers, strategists, and administrators toiled in a whirl of blueprints, white papers, and green bills in an attempt to get the idea off the ground.

The advantages of nuclear-powered airplanes mirrored those of nuclear submarines. Nuclear submarines did not need to surface for fuel, and nuclear airplanes would not need to land. A 1945 proposal at the Department of War (now the Department of Defense) promised, “With nuclear propulsion, supersonic flight around the world becomes an immediate possibility.” A secret Atomic Energy Commission memorandum now held in the Eisenhower Presidential Library explained the promise of nuclear flight in a more measured tone. Nuclear energy “should make possible ranges of one or more times around the world with a single loading of the reactor.” The idea of a nuclear-powered bomber became a strategic dream for the military; it could stay aloft for days to cover any number of targets throughout the world, before returning to the United States without refueling.

…But nuclear power came with its own problems. The reactor would have to be small enough to fit onto an aircraft, which meant it would release far more heat than a standard one. The heat could risk melting the reactor—and the plane along with it, sending a radioactive hunk of liquid metal careening toward Earth.

The problem of shielding pilots from the reactor’s radiation proved even more difficult. What good would a plane be that killed its own pilots?

To protect the crew from radioactivity, the reactor needed thick and heavy layers of shielding. But to take off, the plane needed to be as light as possible. Adequate shielding seemed incompatible with flight.

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Assume they solved the heat problem, but not the shielding/weight one. What smart solution did the USAF come up with in the late 1950s (before advanced autopilots) that could have made the Flying Nuke reality?
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Should Apple snoop on your iPhone? • The Spectator

Sam Leith on the backing that Apple’s “CSAM scanning before photos get uploaded to iCloud” proposal:

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here’s where the practical, or instrumental, argument comes in. Would using AI to scan every iPhone photo album for illegal images not, at a minimal cost to privacy in principle, potentially achieve the tremendous good of catching some of the cruellest and most depraved users of child abuse images? Well, yes, it might. That’s not a trivial case.

But reluctant as I am to deploy a thin-end-of-the-wedge argument: this is the thin end of a wedge. First they came for the nonces, as Pastor Niemoller did not say. You could by the same token argue that any number of different crimes could be prevented by the simple expedient of giving the government (or, God help us, private companies) unlimited powers of surveillance. Most of us, at some point along this continuum, accept that the fact privacy can protect the guilty is a price we pay for its value in giving us freedom. I seem to remember God took roughly that view when he gave us all the capacity to choose between good and evil for ourselves.   

In his latest novel The Every, Dave Eggers imagines a tech company that programs its Alexa-type devices to listen to every domestic conversation – and if its AI detects phrases or tones of voice that are associated with domestic violence, to send the police round. Eggers, who is by bent against that sort of soft totalitarianism, is honest enough to admit that that case is the one ‘that keeps me up at night’: ‘The justification will be: there’s 10 million cases of domestic violence in the US each year,’ he said when I interviewed him about it. ‘Surveillance cameras would put a dent in that. How do you justify not having it? You could make an argument, well, OK, sure, domestic violence is catastrophic but privacy is more important. I don’t think it’s a powerful argument for most people.

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Eggers excels at finding the reductio ad absurdum (or expansio ad absurdum?) scenario that makes you pause. Leith’s piece is neatly balanced; why, you might finish it thinking that technology can’t actually solve social questions on its own.
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Craig Wright wins ‘only nominal damages’ of £1 in bitcoin libel case • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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For years Craig Wright has claimed that he is the mythical figure who created bitcoin. But a legal bid by the Australian computer scientist to defend his assertion that he is Satoshi Nakamoto resulted in a pyrrhic victory and a tarnished reputation on Monday.

A high court judge ruled Wright had given “deliberately false evidence” in a libel case and awarded him £1 in damages after he sued a blogger for alleging that his claim to be the elusive Nakamoto was fraudulent.

“Because he [Wright] advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial, he will recover only nominal damages,” wrote Justice Chamberlain.

Wright had sued blogger Peter McCormack over a series of tweets in 2019, and a video discussion broadcast on YouTube, in which McCormack said Wright was a “fraud” and is not Satoshi. The issue of Nakamoto’s identity was not covered by the judge’s ruling because McCormack had earlier abandoned a defence of truth in his case.

Wright claimed that his reputation within the cryptocurrency industry had been “seriously harmed” by McCormack’s claims. He said he had been invited to speak at numerous conferences after the successful submission of academic papers for blind peer review, but 10 invites had been withdrawn following McCormack’s tweets. This included alleged potential appearances at events in France, Vietnam, the US, Canada and Portugal.

…The judge noted that there was “no documentary evidence” that Wright had a paper accepted at any of the conferences identified in the earlier version of his libel claim, nor that he received an invitation to speak at them except possibly at one, and that any invitation was withdrawn.

…He concluded: “Dr Wright’s original case on serious harm, and the evidence supporting it, both of which were maintained until days before trial, were deliberately false.”

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After Rebekah Vardy v Coleen Rooney last week, this is the bitcoin version. Two judges, one in the US and now this one in the UK, have decided they’re deeply unimpressed by Wright’s testimony. The judgment is hilarious, especially in its nitpicking precision about how Wright tried to slalom around the facts about the academic papers.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The supply of secondhand pricey watches has suddenly boomed following the crypto crash. Coincidence? Vendors think not. CC-licensed photo by Seko Fotografía 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. Tickety-boo. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘The entire protein universe’: AI predicts shape of nearly every known protein • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

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From now, determining the 3D shape of almost any protein known to science will be as simple as typing in a Google search.

Researchers have used AlphaFold — the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) network — to predict the structures of more than 200 million proteins from some 1 million species, covering almost every known protein on the planet.

The data dump is freely available on a database set up by DeepMind, the London-based AI company, owned by Google, that developed AlphaFold, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL–EBI), an intergovernmental organization near Cambridge, UK.

“Essentially you can think of it covering the entire protein universe,” DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis said at a press briefing. “We’re at the beginning of new era of digital biology.”

The 3D shape, or structure, of a protein is what determines its function in cells. Most drugs are designed using structural information, and the creation of accurate maps of proteins’ amino-acid arrangement is often the first step to making discoveries about how proteins work.

DeepMind developed the AlphaFold network using an AI technique called deep learning, and the AlphaFold database was launched a year ago with more than 350,000 structure predictions covering nearly every protein made by humans, mice and 19 other widely studied organisms. The catalogue has since swelled to around 1 million entries.

“We’re bracing ourselves for the release of this huge trove,” says Christine Orengo, a computational biologist at University College London, who has used the AlphaFold database to identify new families of proteins. “Having all the data predicted for us is just fantastic.”

This really is one of the great breakthroughs by AI, but it could take years for its effect to be felt in the outside world. Also, it’s 23TB for the entire database, which is going to mean lots of local storage (plus updates) or lots of pricey cloud storage.

Even so, in some ways this is as crucial as the first genome sequencing. Another British (DeepMind) success.
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Debt-ridden water giants at risk from rate rises • The Sunday Times

Jon Yeomans:

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Net debt in the water sector topped £56bn last year, according to Ofwat. One of the most indebted firms, Thames Water, took steps to shore up its finances last month with the injection of £1.5bn of fresh equity from shareholders.

Last year, Southern Water was taken over by Australian bank Macquarie after coming close to bankruptcy. Last week, it became the first big water company to implement a hosepipe ban because of the dry conditions across England.

Scrutiny of [the UK’s 25] water companies has grown after a damning report by the Environment Agency earlier this month recommended that company directors be jailed if they fail to meet their responsibilities to clean up rivers. Emma Boyd, the agency’s chairwoman, said performance on pollution had “hit a new low”, adding: “Company directors let this happen. We plan to make it too painful for them to continue like this.”

The warning on rates comes as the Bank is this week expected to raise rates from 1.25% by as much as half a percentage point, as it seeks to tame inflation that is running at 9.4%.

Ofwat was granted new powers last year to enforce greater financial resilience in the water sector. It said its proposals on curbing payouts to water company owners “will reinforce the link between performance and dividends”. The proposals will remain open for consultation until September 29.

The regulator has already attracted strong resistance from water utilities after floating its ideas at the end of last year. In one response to the proposals, Thames Water warned that tighter rules on dividends could have “unintended consequences — by making it more challenging to attract equity” from investors.

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Ofwat’s page on the (privatised in 1989) water companies financial resilience has a spreadsheet which is faintly worrying: gearing (the debt/equity ratio) averages 72%. For a monopoly that could be OK, except the rate they can charge is fixed, so rising interest rates mean a squeeze where they can’t raise costs: investment or dividends must slow.
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Housing development in England under threat as electricity capacity nears limits • Financial Times

George Hammond:

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New housing development in London and the south-east of England is at risk as electricity networks near capacity and upgrades are stalled, according to experts, despite the UK government forecasting increased demand for power almost a decade ago.

Electricity demand has fallen in recent years as homes have become more efficient, but it is forecast to rise as drivers adopt electric vehicles and homeowners install heat pumps, placing additional demands on local networks.

Three boroughs in west London have paused development because there is no spare capacity for new connections to the electricity grid until 2035, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

Experts on Friday warned the problem could spread as national efforts to hit net zero carbon emissions boost electricity consumption, unless networks are quickly upgraded to withstand extra demand.

“The truth is, the overall electricity system is creaking a bit,” said Guy Newey, formerly energy adviser to two Conservative business secretaries and now boss of Energy Systems Catapult, an independent research centre.

Warning that power outages were likely without upgrades, he added: “If we’re serious about net zero targets we have to build ahead of need, otherwise you’ll keep getting stories like west London.”

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But how could it be that west London, which has all sorts of space to its west, could be struggling?

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In Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow, the network has come under strain far faster than expected because a series of data centres, which can consume as much energy as thousands of homes, have been connected.

According to the Energy Networks Association, which represents network operators, the volume of new requests for connections from data centres in the past two years alone has equalled the entire area’s electricity demand.

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Axie Infinity has left Filipino gamers despondent and in debt • TIME

Andrew Chow and Chad De Guzman:

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amerson Orias was working as a line cook last year in the rural Philippines when his friend told him he could make way more money playing a new video game.

Orias was earning about 4,000 pesos a month (about $80, a little less than half the national minimum wage) making takoyaki—Japanese octopus balls. His friend told him he and others were pocketing up to $600 a month playing Axie Infinity, a game fueled by cryptocurrency and NFTs.

Orias, now 26, desperately needed an escape hatch from his financial woes: his mother had had a stroke and required medication, and electricity and grocery bills were stacking up. So he plunged into Axie, doing battle with cartoon monsters for hours deep into the night. He soon began earning cryptocurrency, which he converted into pesos, allowing him to take better care of his mother and his home. At the same time, thousands of young people in the Philippines were jumping headlong into the game. For a brief moment at the peak of crypto’s astonishing 2021 boom, these young Filipino players were fulfilling a longtime dream of crypto’s most ardent evangelists: that “play-to-earn” blockchain games like Axie could lead the way to a more equitable, opportunity-rich global economy.

Fourteen months later, most Filipino players, including Orias, have exited the game nursing anger and anxiety—and, in some cases, thousands of dollars down. Orias grew to hate playing the game. It was boring and stressful, he says, a common refrain among the dozen players TIME interviewed for this story. “I felt fatigued all the time. I became more aggressive in every aspect of my life,” he says.

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Data point:

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The game initially made a huge impact in the Philippines. At one point, players there made up 40% of the game’s user base.

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An indenturing scheme developed inside the Philippines, which is what created the indebtedness. Same as so many schemes for earning money or whatever in games.
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It may be too late to stop monkeypox becoming endemic in the US and Europe • Daily Beast

David Axe:

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Monkeypox is spreading fast all over the world, especially in the United States and Europe. With cases doubling every two weeks or so, there’s a growing risk that monkeypox will become a permanent problem in countries where, before, outbreaks were rare and small.

The pox is, in other words, close to becoming endemic in a lot of new places. If that happens, it might become very difficult to eradicate. Monkeypox, which causes a fever and rash and is fatal in a very small number of cases, will become yet another disease that people have to worry about all the time.

For the pox, there are two paths to endemicity. If the virus infects enough people fast enough to outpace authorities’ efforts to trace transmission and vaccinate at-risk individuals, it might become endemic in people. “We are getting close to this already,” James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast.

The good news with this kind of endemicity is that it doesn’t have to be permanent. Reversing human endemicity is hard, yes—but it’s possible. “If it’s just spreading in humans it can be controlled—eventually—through vaccination and natural immunity,” Amesh Adalja, a public health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast.

But monkeypox was originally a “zoonotic” animal virus. It circulates in rodent and monkey species in West and Central Africa, where outbreaks in the human population are frequent.

If the pox finds a home in some animal species in North America or Europe—say, squirrels, rats, or prairie dogs—it’ll be all but impossible to eradicate regionally.

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This other article says it has 50 mutations, far more than you’d expect for its type. Possibly it’s an example of immune escape from immunocompromised hosts, as we’ve seen with SARS-Cov-2. (Thank G for the links.)
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The crypto market collapse has flooded the luxury watches from brands like Rolex • Bloomberg

Andy Hoffman:

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The collapse in cryptocurrencies is easing supply of the most sought after watches on the second-hand market, depressing prices for hard-to get-Patek Philippe and Rolex models.

The supply of trophy watches such as the Rolex Daytona or Patek Nautilus 5711A “is now much larger,” online-watch trading platform Chrono24 said in an emailed statement. 

The recent swoon in cryptocurrency valuations “has directly impacted pricing of luxury watches from brands like Rolex and Patek Philippe,” said the company, which is based in Karlsruhe, Germany, and has more than half a million watches listed for sale on its website.

The price decline for the most sought after models is the latest indication that the once soaring second-hand luxury watch market is starting to lose pace. Surging valuations for crypto currencies had minted a new class of luxury buyers, leading to an unprecedented price increase for models particularly from brands like Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek. Now that many digital tokens have been hammered, these consumers are going into reverse.

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Never have understood the desire to have a super-pricey watch. They’re not just premium, as in well-made; they’re super-expensive but without any further functionality than others. And of course less functionality than a smartwatch, which you could upgrade multiple times for the price of one of those. Feel free to point me to someone explaining this.
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Meta officially cuts funding for US news publishers • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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Meta on Tuesday began telling its news partners in the US that the company no longer plans to pay publishers for their content to run on Facebook’s News Tab, sources tell Axios.

As the company moves forward with sweeping changes to the Facebook experience, news has become less of a priority.

Meta’s VP of media partnerships, Campbell Brown, told staffers the company was shifting resources away from its news products to support more creative initiatives, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Facebook brokered a slew of three-year deals with publishers in 2019. At the time, the company was ramping up its investment in news and hired journalists to help direct publisher traffic to its new tab for news.

The deals were worth roughly $105m in the US, sources told Axios. In addition to that, the company spent around $90m on news videos for the company’s video tab called “Watch.”

“A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the US. Most people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn’t make sense to over-invest in areas that don’t align with user preferences,” a Facebook spokesperson told Axios.

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Back and forth it goes: Facebook does like news, it doesn’t like news, although it loves video more and more (until it pauses and doesn’t because friends and family users don’t make much video). It’s like a slow-motion abusive relationship.
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The dirty carbon secret behind solid state memory drives • Discover Magazine

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Swamit Tannu at University of Wisconsin in Madison and Prashant Nair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver have measured the carbon footprint per gigabyte of these devices across their entire lifetimes and, unexpectedly, it turns out that SSDs are significantly dirtier. “Compared to SSDs, the embodied [carbon] cost of HDDs is at least an order of magnitude lower,” say the researchers.

Tannu and Nair come to their conclusion by adding up the amount of carbon emitted throughout the estimated 10-year lifespans of these devices. This includes the carbon emitted during manufacture, during operation, for transportation and for disposal.

The carbon emitted during operation is straightforward to calculate. To read and write data, HDDs consume 4.2 Watts versus 1.3W for SSDs. The researchers calculate that a 1 terabyte HDD emits the equivalent of 159 kilograms of carbon dioxide during a 10-year operating lifespan. By comparison, a 1 terabyte SSD emits just 49.2 kg over 10 years.

But SSDs are significantly more carbon intensive to manufacture. That’s because the chip fabrication facilities for SSDs operate at extreme temperatures and pressures that are energy intensive to maintain. And bigger memories require more chips, which increases the footprint accordingly.

All this adds up to a significant carbon footprint for SSD manufacture. Tannu and Nair calculate that manufacturing a 1 terabyte SSD emits the equivalent of 320 kg of carbon dioxide. By comparison, a similar HDD emits just 40 kg.

So the lifetime footprint for a 1 terabyte SSD is 369.2 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent versus 199 kg for an HDD. So HDDs are much cleaner.

That’s a counterintuitive result with important implications. At the very least, it suggests that computer manufacturers and cloud data storage operators should reconsider the way they use SSDs and HDDs.

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I suspect the cloud companies (at the least) won’t, because the operation output is so low. Manufacturing output is, as so often, someone else’s problem – the manufacturer’s?
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Astrobiologists suggest the Earth itself may be an intelligent entity • Futurism

Tony Ho Tran:

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A group of researchers have posed a fascinating — and downright mind bending — thought experiment: If a planet like Earth can be “alive,” can it also have a mind of its own?

The team published a paper exploring this question in the International Journal of Astrobiology. In it, they present the idea of “planetary intelligence,” which describes the collective knowledge and cognition of an entire planet.

…The researchers point to evidence that underground networks of fungi can communicate to suggest that large-scale networks of life could form a vast invisible intelligence that profoundly alters the condition of the entire planet.

One of the primary species driving that change at the moment, they point out, are humans — and currently, from the climate to the plastic crisis, we may well be irrevocably changing the environmental balance.

“We don’t yet have the ability to communally respond in the best interests of the planet,” Adam Frank, professor of physics at the University of Rochester and coauthor of the paper, said in a press release about the paper. 

The researchers believe that such thought experiments can help humans to understand their impact on the Earth and serve as a guide on how to better it. Interestingly, they also believe that it could aid in the search for aliens too.

“We’re saying the only technological civilizations we may ever see — the ones we should expect to see — are the ones that didn’t kill themselves, meaning they must have reached the stage of a true planetary intelligence,” Frank said. 

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So it’s “may” as in “could be”. All very Solaris, isn’t it?
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The “Wagatha Christie” libel trial hinged on a set of WhatsApp messages – or more precisely, their absence. CC-licensed photo by Christoph ScholzChristoph Scholz 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. They’re… not Rebekah Vardy’s links. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The two-week scramble that saved Democrats’ climate agenda • The Washington Post

Tony Romm and Jeff Stein:

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For Schumer, the party’s chief negotiator, a key to assuaging Manchin’s concerns were policy sweeteners that boosted fossil fuels and coal-heavy West Virginia. But Manchin also spoke with a wide array of others — fellow Democrats, economists including Larry Summers, even executives like Bill Gates. They each delivered some version of the same message: If Democrats did not seize on a rare opportunity to combat climate change, the US may never have another chance at it again.

Republicans, who opposed spending to address global warming, initially thought they had scored a political victory: Last weekend, a group that included conservatives, industry officials and a top outside adviser to President Donald Trump even held a call with Manchin, during which several praised him for scuttling the package.

Ultimately, though, Manchin came to agree with his own party, satisfied that Democrats’ plans would not harm the economy. Explaining his decision, Manchin maintained at a news conference Thursday he never actually wavered in his engagement, even once “the dogs came after me.” Schumer, for his part, seized on the magnitude of the moment, having finalized an agreement that had eluded Democrats for about a year.

“You’re going to change the country for the better,” he told Manchin in the hours before they released the bill late Wednesday afternoon. “This is going to be historic for the country.”

…If it is adopted, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 would see nearly $370bn in new climate and energy-related investments, aiming to foster new technology, cut back on emissions and satisfy Manchin’s demand that the U.S. maintain support for fossil fuels.

It includes new and extended tax credits for solar, wind and other renewable energy, and more than $80bn in rebates for home improvements and electric vehicles. It also sets aside $1.5bn to curtail harmful methane emissions. And at Manchin’s insistence, it mandates new oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska.

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Sooooo Manchin wasn’t the bad guy, just negotiating? This messes up all sorts of narratives. However…
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“Soon it will be unrecognisable”: total climate meltdown cannot be stopped, says expert • The Guardian

Robin McKie:

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The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.

And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacence in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.

The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50ºC (120ºF) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.

In this respect, the volcanologist, who was also a member of the UK government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, takes an extreme position. Most other climate experts still maintain we have time left, although not very much, to bring about meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A rapid drive to net zero and the halting of global warming is still within our grasp, they say.

Such claims are dismissed by McGuire.

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Even if you think he’s wrong, why not act as if he’s right? All that happens is you ameliorate the situation sooner and have more time to reflect. Whereas going to “wait and see” is gambling in every way. Truly, Don’t Look Up was a documentary from the future, not a satire.
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Why we should want Shell and Centrica to keep making money • Sky News

Ian King is a business presenter at Sky:

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Centrica’s half-year operating profits rose to £1.3bn from £262mn in the same period last year, largely due to higher wholesale gas and electricity prices. Centrica’s assets include the Morecambe Bay gas field and a 20% stake in the UK’s remaining nuclear power stations.

But operating profits at British Gas itself actually fell by 43% during the period and there are good reasons for that.

Responsible suppliers try to buy in advance as much of the gas that they expect households to demand, whereas the myriad of suppliers to have collapsed during the two years were buying it on the ‘spot’ market. That worked well when wholesale energy prices were falling – and meant they were cheaper than the likes of British Gas, EON and EDF Energy – but meant that, when prices rose, they were caught out.

Yet those wholesale price rises have also caught out British Gas. One reason its profits fell was because the energy price cap changes only twice a year – so any sudden increases in wholesale costs could not be passed on to households. The second factor is that, as unprofitable rivals collapsed, remaining household suppliers like British Gas were obliged by the regulator to take on those customers. In the case of British Gas, it took on 150,000 such customers in the first six months of the year, mainly former customers of the collapsed Together Energy. That was on top of 550,000 taken on during 2021.

Because it is obliged to take on these customers at short notice, it is unable to hedge the cost of supplying them in advance, which effectively leaves it doing so at a loss in some cases. That is why profits at British Gas fell during the first six months of the year. Chris O’Shea, the Centrica chief executive, noted today that the average profit per household customer at British Gas is around £6. Put in the context of the current household energy price cap of £1,971 and it is clear that British Gas is hardly making merry at the expense of household customers.

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It’s certainly an argument for allowing Centrica (which owns British Gas, the biggest supplier) to keep making profit. Though not quite an argument against renationalising it (British Gas was privatised in 1986, into the teeth of a stock market crash).

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Case No: QB-2020-002028: Rebekah Vardy v Coleen Rooney • Judiciary UK

This is the full judgment by the Hon Mrs Justice Steyn on the libel case brought by Rebekah Vardy (wife of England footballer* Jamie Vardy), who accused Coleen Rooney (wife of more successful England footballer Wayne Rooney) of libelling her by implying she had sold stories to The Sun newspaper based on posts on Rooney’s private Instagram account. Rooney had carefully limited who could see posts there, until only Vardy’s account could, and noted that stories based on those posts still appeared in The Sun.

In a Twitter thread, she explained this, leading her to be dubbed “Wagatha Christie” (WAGs = Wives And Girlfriends of the England footballers at the Euro 2016 event. Never claim that we aren’t moving the language on.)

For a successful defence, Rooney had to prove she was telling the truth and that it was Vardy, nobody else, who had leaked the stories. The case hinged on WhatsApp conversations between Vardy and her publicist/agent Caroline Watt, which could prove or disprove whether they’d shared details of Rooney’s posts and talked about selling them to Sun journalists. (Rooney, as a Liverpudlian, hates The Sun.)

Incredibly unfortunately Watt dropped her phone in the North Sea just after she’d been told to preserve it for the trial. But Vardy’s phone was fine: she was told to upload her WhatsApp data to Intralinks, used for such legal investigation. She said that while doing this it crashed and incredibly unfortunately wiped the relevant chats.

Over to one of the expert witnesses:

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Mr [Matthew] Blackband explained that the export of WhatsApp data to Intralinks occurs in two stages. The first stage involves opening WhatsApp, choosing the chat to be exported, pressing “Export Chat” and then choosing from the options “Attach Media” or “Without Media”. This results in a single zip file being downloaded which will contain all the messages, either including or excluding the media files, depending on which option was chosen. This first stage involves interaction with the WhatsApp program. It is that program which packages the messages (including media, if selected) into an archive which is locally stored as a zip file on the laptop (or other device) on which it was created. The WhatsApp program “is easily capable of creating a large archive”. The second stage involves uploading the zip file from the laptop (or other device) on which it is stored, via the internet, to the Intralinks workspace. Uploading the zip file does not involve any interaction with the WhatsApp application.

Mr Blackband’s opinion was that what Ms Vardy described was impossible. In his view, the loss was “indicative of a manual deletion” by an individual. That was because what Ms Vardy described was the computer crashing at the second stage of the process. Such a crash could have no impact on the data available on WhatsApp because there was no engagement with WhatsApp during the second stage of the process. If there had been a malfunction at the first stage (albeit he did not consider that was what Ms Vardy had described), no zip file would have been created. For there to be data loss he considered that there would “have to be a corruption of the database which would mean WhatsApp wouldn’t work”. In those circumstances, the WhatsApp account would not work at all because there is a single ChatStorage.sqlite database file which holds the messages. Corruption of the database could not lead to loss of specific chats from within a single file.

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The Hon Mrs Justice Steyn essentially concluded that Vardy was lying, and dismissed her case, vindicating Rooney. I think it’s the first big trial that has hinged on WhatsApp messages (or their peculiar absence.) The whole judgment is worth reading for the sheer entertainment value.

* American readers: soccer
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Why Twitter still has those terrible Trends • MIT Technology Review

Abby Ohlheiser:

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Trends is central to the story that Twitter would like to tell about itself, says Shireen Mitchell, a technology analyst and founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women—a story about how it captures and serves the public conversation. But manipulated trends (even innocuous ones) and amplified extremism on the algorithmically generated trending list undermine that story. 

“Twitter keeps trying to make it seem like ‘trending’ is somehow authentic, trending hot topics that people care about. But in most instances it’s gamification,” she says. 

Besides Twitter’s claims that Trends serves an important public function, there’s another reason the feature sticks around. It’s a revenue source for the platform: Twitter started selling promoted spaces on Trends in 2010. Currently Twitter sells what it calls Trend Takeover spots and displays ads in the search results for trending topics. 

On July 28, for instance, a sponsored trending topic for a new Christopher Nolan film was promoted at the top of Twitter’s US trending list, and in the “For You” column of customized trends. 

“I don’t think they actually think through the actual benefit to their users versus the benefit to their bottom line,” Mitchell says. Twitter declined to comment on its ad program for Trends. 

…Twitter’s argument is that it’s better to work to improve Trends than to retire the feature, emphasizing the role of human curators in providing context and sources for a subset of trending topics.

But despite repeated attempts to address its potential for harm, Trends has remained essentially the same. A feature that was meant to reflect the topics of the day on Twitter by automatically monitoring for rapid swells of post frequency became an opportunity to manipulate the conversation and generate news coverage.

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The headline’s implied question is very neatly answered: it’s the ads. A huge proportion of people must look at Trends, so ads there will be more valuable than those shown in individual feeds.
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The age of algorithmic anxiety • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

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Just last week, Facebook implemented a new default Home tab on its app that prioritizes recommended content in the vein of TikTok, its main competitor.

Almost every other major Internet platform makes use of some form of algorithmic recommendation. Google Maps calculates driving routes using unspecified variables, including predicted traffic patterns and fuel efficiency, rerouting us mid-journey in ways that may be more convenient or may lead us astray. The food-delivery app Seamless front-loads menu items that it predicts you might like based on your recent ordering habits, the time of day, and what is “popular near you.” E-mail and text-message systems supply predictions for what you’re about to type. (“Got it!”)

It can feel as though every app is trying to guess what you want before your brain has time to come up with its own answer, like an obnoxious party guest who finishes your sentences as you speak them. We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious.

In a recent essay for Pitchfork, Jeremy D. Larson described a nagging feeling that Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations and automated playlists were draining the joy from listening to music by short-circuiting the process of organic discovery: “Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal.”

…I recently sent out a survey about algorithms to my online friends and followers; the responses I received, from more than a hundred people, formed a catalogue of algorithmic anxieties. Answering a question about “odd run-ins” with automated recommendations, one user reported that, after he became single, Instagram began recommending the accounts of models, and another had been mystified to see the Soundgarden song “Black Hole Sun” pop up on every platform at once. Many complained that algorithmic recommendations seemed to crudely simplify their tastes, offering “worse versions of things I like that have certain superficial similarities,” as one person put it.

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Spotify exits short-lived Car Thing hardware play, reports Q2 MAUs of 433 million, offsetting Russia exit and service outage • TechCrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

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[Spotify] announced [April-June] quarterly earnings in which its monthly active users grew by 19%, or 19 million, to 433 million — 5 million above its own guidance. The company originally had projected that its exit from Russia and the service outage it had in the quarter would mean only 14 million new users this quarter. Paid users now stand at 188 million, up 14%.

But it missed on its gross margins, which it said were “negatively impacted by our decision to stop manufacturing Car Thing,” the company’s in-vehicle device for controlling music. Spotify’s taking a €31m charge ($31.4m) on that business line as it discontinues it.

“The goal of Spotify’s Car Thing exploration was to better understand in-car listening, and bring audio to a wider range of users and vehicles,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Based on several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues, we have decided to stop further production of Car Thing units. Existing devices will perform as intended. This initiative has unlocked helpful learnings, and we remain focused on the car as an important place for audio.”

The device was only really launched earlier this year [in February], and it is still being sold as of this story going out, but with big discounts [from $90 to $50]. Spotify will support those that have been sold, but it seems that this will be the end of the line for Spotify’s much-discussed move into hardware.

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As I’ve said in the past: the hardest thing to make in hardware is a profit.
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China property sales could plunge by one-third, analysts say, as crisis deepens • The Guardian

Martin Farrer and agencies:

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Property sales in China could fall by one-third this year, spelling more trouble for the country’s giant housing sector as people lose faith in the market and pressure increases on struggling developers to complete presold apartments.

Amid reports that the government is preparing a bailout of the sector that could cost 300bn yuan ($44bn), experts at the rating agency S&P have concluded that the fall in sales will be twice as bad as they had originally forecast for this year.

“S&P Global Ratings now expects national property sales will fall 28%-33% this year,” the note said on Tuesday, “almost double the drop of our prior forecast.”

Last week’s news that disgruntled buyers of apartments at housing projects in more than 100 cities had banded together to withhold payments on unfinished homes has focused attention on the unfolding crisis.

The strike has ratcheted up the pressure on developers, who are already facing acute liquidity problems and who depend on customers paying upfront for homes off the plan to keep cash flowing through the business. The proceeds can be used to pay debts as well so the loss of this income will hit hard.

Some high-profile developers have already fallen into default, causing waves of panic in the global financial system – most notably Evergrande, the country’s second-biggest property firm which admitted last year that it could not pay part of its $300bn debt mountain.

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From a week ago, but this is one to keep an eye on. If China slumps into a housing-driven recession, or debt crisis, the effects could be very unpredictable. (It will need lots of foreign exchange? Exports will be prioritised? It won’t buy as many US Treasuries, forcing US interest rates up? I don’t know which if any would happen.)

Background: “Mortgage strikes threaten China’s economic and political stability“. You’ll recall that the Covid monitoring system was used to block some people from protesting. Key line in the article: ““Why do I have to pay mortgage when the property I bought has yet to be finished?” said one angry social media user”.
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Facebook faces suspension in Kenya after approving genocide ads • Gizmodo

Dell Cameron:

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The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a Kenyan agency founded to mitigate ethnic violence and promote national healing in the wake of the 2007-08 post-election crisis, told reporters on Friday that Facebook was “in violation of the laws of our country.”

“They have allowed themselves to be a vector of hate speech and incitement, misinformation and disinformation,” Danvas Makori, an NCIC commissioner said during a briefing.

Facebook claimed last week to have cracked down on harmful content in the country, issuing a press release praising itself for the many ways it was tackling problematic content. But immediately after, the company approved ads run in both English and Swahili crafted specifically to instigate ethnic violence in Kenya, human rights groups said.

Nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove revealed Thursday that a third independent test had proven Facebook incapable of detecting language designed to incite violence around the August elections. Specifically, the groups said, Meta approved ads on Facebook in both Swahili and English that included calls to rape and behead Kenyan citizens along ethnic lines.

The NCIC said Friday that that the results of the Global Witness/Foxglove tests had corroborated its own internal findings.

“Suspending ads and rolling out ‘break glass’ measures are steps Facebook can take to reduce the risk to the Kenyan election today. That’s what we’re calling for,” Crider said, pointing to steps taken by the platform following the US insurrection on Jan 6, 2021. “Facebook is in violation of the laws of our country.”

Global Witness said in a statement that it chose deliberately not to publish the exact language used in the tests conducted on Facebook, but described the ads as “dehumanising, comparing specific tribal groups to animals and calling for rape, slaughter, and beheading.”

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Going to be fun watching how Facebook deals with this. What, accidentally inspire genocide? Whoever would suggest such a thing?
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Web3 network Helium claims rideshare company Lime is one of its biggest clients. Lime says that’s not true • Mashable

Matt Binder:

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Since 2019, the decentralized wireless network service, which bills itself as a peer-to-peer network for the Internet of Things, has touted rideshare company Lime as one of its marquee clients, claiming the company uses its service to geolocate rentable escooters. There are numerous mentions of this partnership on its website, along with the presence of Lime’s company logo, and in press coverage with various news outlets.

There’s just one problem: That partnership never really existed.

“Beyond an initial test of its product in 2019, Lime has not had, and does not currently have, a relationship with Helium.” Lime senior director for corporate communications Russell Murphy said to Mashable.

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Not only Lime: also Salesforce, whose logo was also prominently displayed on its page. Besides this nonsense, the whole idea behind Helium is bonkers: in an age of abundant data via 4G, 5G and Wi-Fi, it offers a “crypto-powered mesh network” where you buy a router that works as a hotspot ($400-$800 – for a router??) and hope like crazy that random people log onto it, because you get paid according to how much data they use. Why would they, though? Informed estimates reckon it’s generating a total of about $6,500 per month.

Naturally because it’s “crypto”, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has put pots of money – $365m – into it. Seems unlikely that’s coming back.
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