Floppy disks are still mandatory for some processes in Japan’s government – a fact that is going to change, finally. CC-licensed photo by frankieleonfrankieleon 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. Of limited capacity. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Tech tool offers police ‘mass surveillance on a budget’ • AP News

Garance Burke and Jason Dearen:

»

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.

Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.

Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used.

The company was developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials under former President George W. Bush. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. That information is then sold to companies like Fog.

“It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.

…Because of the secrecy surrounding Fog, however, there are scant details about its use and most law enforcement agencies won’t discuss it, raising concerns among privacy advocates that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

«

This is using advertising IDs – which in theory means that Apple’s ATT will stop it. More on Fog at the EFF’s site.
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Twitter unveils an Edit button, finally • The New York Times

Kate Conger:

»

On Thursday, after countless pleas from many of its more than 237 million users, some people will start being able to click a button on the social media service to edit a tweet after they have posted it. It has been only about 15 years, nine months and 22 days since they started asking for that ability.

Since Twitter was unveiled in 2006, the basics of using it have been simple and constant: You wrote a tweet, you posted it — and then you dealt with the consequences. There were no take-backs on the timeline.

That makes the edit button perhaps the biggest shift at the social media service since 2017, when Twitter increased the character limit for messages to 280 characters from 140.

Twitter’s commitment to first drafts made it a destination for online brawls and hot takes. But people have often regretted their choice of words, or noticed a misspelling just after posting a tweet.

As Twitter grew from a niche service to a global platform, more users began demanding a way to edit their posts. They complained. They begged. They raged. Some made typos in their tweets asking for an edit button to correct their typos.

Even Elon Musk, the billionaire who has been locked in a battle over whether to stick with a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, has seemed to favor an edit button.

Twitter didn’t budge.

The company argued that there was something noble in leaving mistakes on display. A nefarious user could change a tweet after it had already been shared widely, swapping a benign message for a misleading one. Someone who had retweeted a statement might miss the update, inadvertently broadcasting a tweet that the person no longer agreed with.

But more recently, Twitter began reconsidering an edit button as it tried to expand its service by attracting people who might be more careful with their words.

«

All sorts of questions about the implementation (which is only for Twitter Blue subscribers) – is each edit a new tweet (so the edit trail is like a thread)? Why isn’t the fact of the edit more prominent? How easy is it to read back through the edits?

And can I get an Edit button for my life? That’s the logical next step, I think.
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With NAFO, the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, Ukraine turns the trolls on Russia • The Washington Post

Adam Taylor:

»

More than six months in, the war in Ukraine has become a little surreal. This past weekend, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry shared a doctored photograph of a Shiba Inu dog wearing a military uniform, apparently gushing over the site of a missile launch.
“Today we want to give a shout-out to a unique entity,” the tweet read, before pointing to an unusually named group — the North Atlantic Fellas Organization.

If you are the sort of person who gets your news from, say, a newspaper website, you may have little idea what NAFO is. But if you’re the sort of person who has spent the last six months scouring Twitter for news about the war in Ukraine, signing up for obscure Telegram accounts and reading accounts of the latest Ukrainian strikes on Russia on blogs devoted to open-source intelligence (OSINT) … well, it’s quite likely you’re already a fella yourself.

For the former, let’s explain. Over recent months, Ukraine-sympathetic internet users have come together to support Kyiv’s war effort. The Shiba Inu is a distinctive dog breed from Japan, which for over a decade, has been a recurrent motif in internet culture. You may recognize it as a “doge,” beloved of Elon Musk and millions of other internet users.

Vice’s Motherboard dates the use of Shiba Inu as a “fella” fighting the war in Ukraine to May, when an artist named Kama began creating custom images of the “fellas” for those who donated money to the Georgian Legion — a volunteer military unit in Ukraine that took on board many foreigners. “Out of boredom, I started making other Fellas and imprinting them on random images from Ukraine,” Kama told Motherboard earlier this summer.

The movement went on to have a landmark moment in June, when Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov got into an argument with a “fella” over threats to civilians. Ulyanov, Russia’s ambassador to international organizations in Vienna and a vocal advocate for Russia’s position on social media, made the mistake of responding to a NAFO member.

«

I mean.. OK? Won’t change the direction of a single bullet, a single bomb, and yet some folk feel it’s worth doing. Better than not supporting Ukraine, I suppose.
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How one-time passcodes became a corporate liability • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

In mid-June 2022, a flood of SMS phishing messages began targeting employees at commercial staffing firms that provide customer support and outsourcing to thousands of companies. The missives asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Those who submitted credentials were then prompted to provide the one-time password needed for multi-factor authentication.

The phishers behind this scheme used newly-registered domains that often included the name of the target company, and sent text messages urging employees to click on links to these domains to view information about a pending change in their work schedule.

The phishing sites leveraged a Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website. But because of the way the bot was configured, it was possible for security researchers to capture the information being sent by victims to the public Telegram server.

This data trove was first reported by security researchers at Singapore-based Group-IB, which dubbed the campaign “0ktapus” for the attackers targeting organizations using identity management tools from Okta.com.

“This case is of interest because despite using low-skill methods it was able to compromise a large number of well-known organizations,” Group-IB wrote. “Furthermore, once the attackers compromised an organization they were quickly able to pivot and launch subsequent supply chain attacks, indicating that the attack was planned carefully in advance.”

It’s not clear how many of these phishing text messages were sent out, but the Telegram bot data reviewed by KrebsOnSecurity shows they generated nearly 10,000 replies over approximately two months of sporadic SMS phishing attacks targeting more than a hundred companies.

«

Yubikeys and/or on-phone authentication apps. How hard is it to tell people about this? Perhaps if there are thousands of them it’s a question of scale. (Thanks tbw for the link.)
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When kids yell “poop” at Alexa, these people profit • Buzzfeed News

Katie Notopoulos:

»

There are many topics that my 5-year-old and I don’t see eye to eye on: how many popsicles per day is reasonable or the virtues of sleeping past 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday. But there is one area where we are in philosophical lockstep: “Poop” is a funny word. So when my son commanded our Amazon Echo Dot, “Alexa…play poopy diaper,” I shot him a faux-stern look that indicated this isn’t appropriate, but I’ll allow it.

And when Alexa replied, “OK, playing ‘Poopy Diaper’ from Spotify,” I was intrigued. When the voice robot creation of one of the richest men on the planet started playing a thumping techno banger with a soaring chorus of a woman vocalist signing, “I’ve got a poopy diaper, a poopy diaper, that’s me,” I descended into hyperventilating eye-watering laughter.

As it turns out, there are quite a few songs that will fill Alexa requests for the whole gamut of things a kindergartener might dream up: poop, diapers, dog poop, stinky butt, farts.

It’s not surprising that there are songs about the most basic of human functions — what is the point of art if not to unite us through shared feeling? But connecting these songs with their ideal audience (children who can’t yet spell) took a technological leap: voice-enabled smart speakers like Alexa. Several of the songs’ creators told BuzzFeed News that their biggest source of revenue by a landslide is Amazon Music — the default music player for Alexa. When it comes to these novelty artists, the evidence is clear: The word “poop” translates to streaming gold.

«

There is really no end to peoples’ ingenuity. Millions of streams, tens of thousands of dollars in streaming revenue!
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Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

»

Japan’s digital minister Taro Kono has pledged to rip up laws that require floppy disks and CD-ROMs to be used when sending data to the nation’s government.

The news emerged on Tuesday at Japan’s 5th Digital Society Concept Conference, where a strategy for future digital government services was outlined. Japan appears set to go down the well-worn road of issuing a national ID – called MyNumber in this instance – to its people so that they can access various government services.

But because such services by their nature involve uploading data to government agencies, the minister initiated a review of laws governing that process of submitting information. That effort found more than 1,900 regulations that stipulate how data can be shared with government – and many require the use of floppy disks or CD-ROMs. Newfangled techniques such as uploading info via the internet are not described, so are technically not permitted.

Kono pledged to rewrite those regulations, ASAP, so that Japan’s digital plan can proceed unhindered.

He’s not the first to try give Japan a dose of digital transformation. In 2021 former prime minister Yoshihide Suga promised to reduce reliance on the use of seals and fax machines. But Suga’s time in the top job was short and his digital agenda was not delivered.

«

This is terrible news for the floppy disk manufacturers in the world (which I suspect are all Japanese).
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Mississippi crisis highlights climate threat to drinking water nationwide • The New York Times

Christopher Flavelle, Rick Rojas, Jim Tankersley and Jack Healy:

»

In cities like Jackson [in the state of Mississippi], those problems [of ageing infrastructure] are further compounded by demographic and economic changes. A shrinking population means the costs of maintenance are spread across fewer ratepayers, increasing the pressure on officials to delay upgrades. And those residents who remain may have lower incomes, making it even harder to raise rates, Dr. Stillwell said.

Then, on top of all that, comes climate change, bringing more intense storms — weather catastrophes on a scale that drinking water infrastructure, along with every other part of a city’s infrastructure, was never designed to cope with, even if those water systems had been properly maintained.

In eastern Kentucky, 5,000 customers are still being asked to boil their water a month after flash floods tore through their towns. While water connections have been almost fully restored, about 80 customers still do not have water turned back on.

One of those houses in the community of River Caney belongs to Justina Salyers’s parents, whose living room and kitchen were gutted when floodwaters swamped their first floor. Her parents and their neighbors are using 275-gallon portable tanks to store water, and some are even trying to revive moldering old wells that have sat untouched for decades.

“They can’t flush the toilets. They can’t bathe. They’re working in dirt and mud, and they have no water,” Ms. Salyers said.

In the 90-person city of Buckhorn, Ky., Mayor Thomas Burns Jr. is among the residents still under a boil-water advisory, but he said people are just glad to have the taps back on. He said the floods did an estimated $1 million in damage to the water systems — far more than Buckhorn could shoulder without state or federal help.

“We’ve ignored our infrastructure,” he said. “It’s scary. We take this thing about fresh water for granted.”

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I recreated famous album covers with DALL-E • Lucy Talks Data

»

With the newly acquired access I set out to scratch my own itch.
I wanted to know whether DALL-E would be able to recreate famous album covers.

Before we dive into the results, I’ll list the albums that I sought to recreate:

• The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico
• Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon
• Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
• Nirvana – Nevermind
• The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers (inside sleeve cover)
• The Beatles – Abbey Road

«

Quite an insight into the difficulty of finding just the right text prompt to generate a specific picture. But very often when you’re working with Dall-E you aren’t aiming to recreate, you’re aiming to create, so this is a slightly unusual approach.
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Wind farm contract delay diverts £1bn in savings from consumers • The Times

Emily Gosden:

»

Consumers could miss out on more than a billion pounds of energy bill savings from the world’s biggest offshore wind farm after its owner delayed a contract to provide cheap power from the project.

The Hornsea Two wind farm, capable of supplying 1.4 million homes, is fully operational, Orsted said yesterday. The Danish energy group said that the project 55 miles off the coast of Yorkshire would “provide low-cost, clean energy for millions of homes”.

However, households will not see any benefit from its promised low-cost power until April next year and will not get the full benefit until April 2024 because of Orsted’s decision to delay the contract.

Orsted said the delay was so that it could guarantee its revenues further into the future and that it would not benefit financially from high prices in the meantime because of its hedging arrangements. However, traders or other companies potentially could profit.

The company won its contract from the government in 2017 to provide power from the farm to households and businesses for 15 years at what was then a record low price, today worth £73.71 per megawatt-hour. Under the contract, when wholesale prices are higher than this, Orsted would pay the difference back to consumers. This would entail big savings at present wholesale power prices, which have increased to more than £400/MWh.

The contract was due to begin for the first phase of the project in April this year and for the remaining two phases in April next year. However, Orsted opted last summer to delay all the contract start dates by a year.

…Orsted does not know who bought its power. Experts say it is possible it was bought by big business consumers locking in cheap prices or by suppliers offering cheap fixed-price deals; it also may have been bought by traders or other energy companies that could now sell it on to consumers at much higher prices.

«

Seems that the government was sloppy in not having a more enforceable contract? The implication is that Orsted was sneaky or unfaithful. But business is business.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The men and women are using different types of tennis balls at the US Open – which has displeased some of the women. CC-licensed photo by Brandon LokeBrandon Loke 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. Fuzzier and fuzzier. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

An AI-generated artwork won first place at a state fair fine arts competition, and artists are pissed • Vice

Matthew Gault:

»

A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. “I won first place,” a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. 

Sincarnate’s name is Jason Allen, who is president of Colorado-based tabletop gaming company Incarnate Games. According to the state fair’s website, he won in the digital art category with a work called “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.

But Allen did not paint “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs. 

…“We’re watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes,” a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. “If creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?”

…According to Allen, his input was instrumental to the shaping of the award winning painting. “I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after unshackling with Gigapixel AI,” he wrote in a post before the winners were announced.

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Things are moving faster and faster. In future state fairs, how will the judges know? Will they ask? If someone lies to win, have they won? Will there be separate categories? So many questions.
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DALL·E: Introducing Outpainting

»

Today we’re introducing Outpainting, a new feature which helps users extend their creativity by continuing an image beyond its original borders — adding visual elements in the same style, or taking a story in new directions — simply by using a natural language description.

DALL·E’s Edit feature already enables changes within a generated or uploaded image — a capability known as Inpainting. Now, with Outpainting, users can extend the original image, creating large-scale images in any aspect ratio. Outpainting takes into account the image’s existing visual elements — including shadows, reflections, and textures — to maintain the context of the original image.

«

Here’s what that can look like. Itchy yet?

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Inside a million-dollar Instagram verification scheme • ProPublica

Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis:

»

Since at least 2021, at least hundreds of people — including jewellers, crypto entrepreneurs, OnlyFans models and reality show TV stars — were clients of a scheme to get improperly verified as musicians on Instagram, according to the investigation’s findings and information from Meta.

In response to information provided by ProPublica and the findings of its own investigation, Meta has so far removed fraudulently applied verification badges from more than 300 Instagram profiles, and continues to review accounts. That includes the accounts of Mike Vazquez and Lexie Salameh, two stars of the MTV reality show “Siesta Key.” Rather than get verified for their TV work, they were falsely branded online as musicians in order to receive verification. They lost their badges approximately two weeks ago and did not respond to requests for comment.

[Suspended plastic surgeon, but to Instagram “DJ Dr 6ix” Martin] Jugenburg did not respond to a phone message left at his Toronto practice or to emails detailing evidence that he had paid for his Instagram verification. He has told media outlets he intends to vigorously defend himself against the class-action suit.

The scheme, which likely generated millions in revenue for its operators, illustrates how easily major social, search and music platforms can be exploited to create fake personas with real-world consequences, such as monetizing a verified account. It also underscores how Instagram’s growth and cachet combines with poor customer support and lax oversight to create a thriving black market in verification services and account takedowns for hire.

«

Poor customer support? Of course, you’re talking about a billion users (or a billion accounts, it’s not a lot of difference). Imagine, for a moment, how many people you need to hire in order to provide good customer support, and have good oversight of scams like this. Remember, the network’s complexity (and thus the amount of customer support required) grows geometrically as the number using it grows arithmetically. Problems spiral.
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Twitter Circle is now available to everyone • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Twitter Circle, a feature that lets you limit your tweets to a smaller audience, is now available to everyone. The platform first started testing the feature among “select people” in May ahead of a wider rollout.

Twitter Circle is a lot like Instagram’s “close friends” feature, which lets you share your posts with a smaller group of people. On Twitter, you can add up to 150 people to your Circle, whether they follow you or not. When you want to send out a tweet that you might not want the entire Twitterverse to see, you can choose to share it with your Circle instead.

You’ll see the option to share to your Circle when you open the tweet composer. Choose the dropdown menu at the top of the composer, and then hit Circle. You can choose who you want in your Circle by hitting the Edit button that appears next to the option. Users won’t receive a notification when you add or remove them from your Circle. But those included in your Circle will see a highlighted badge that reads, “Only people in @[username]’s Twitter Circle can see this tweet” beneath posts sent to your Circle.

«

This is yet another one of those features that absolutely nobody has been asking for, though it’s nice to copy Instagram I suppose? Though this was first tried by Google with Google+ Circles, which was an absolute pain to use and quickly led to a sort of Circle exhaustion: trying to decide which Circles your various friends and contacts should belong in was tedious and, one soon realised, largely pointless.
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The growing evidence that Covid-19 is leaving people sicker • Financial Times

Sarah Neville:

»

When Dr David Strain encountered a 64-year-old patient on his ward round, the British geriatrician had a bleak epiphany.

Less than six months earlier he had treated the man for Covid-19. Now, his deterioration was painful to witness. “He came in with a stroke and really bad delirium, a precursor of dementia,” Strain says. “I saw the patient, recognised him [and] recognised the fact that his brain had dramatically aged.”

By unsettling coincidence, the same day Strain, who is based at the University of Exeter in England’s west country, had read a newly published study which identified significant brain shrinkage in a cohort of about 400 people aged between 51 and 81 who had recovered from coronavirus.

The encounter crystallised Strain’s belief that Covid generated a kind of epidemiological aftershock by leaving people susceptible to a huge range of other conditions, threatening global health systems already struggling with insufficient resources and ageing populations. “It made me realise that this is something that we’re going to be facing in a really big way in the near future,” he says.

As he started to see a rise in certain conditions in the first year of the pandemic, Strain assumed it was the result of people being unable or unwilling to access healthcare. Only as the pandemic entered its second year did he begin to suspect that Covid itself could be increasing vulnerability to other serious illnesses.

He now sees it as an inversion of the huge drop in respiratory illness doctors saw from the 1980s onwards, when millions either stopped or reduced smoking. “The level of damage that’s been done to population health [during Covid], it would be as if everybody suddenly decided to take up smoking in one go,” Strain says.

«

Perhaps you’d stopped thinking about Covid, but like rust, it never sleeps. (Thanks G for the link.)
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US Open tennis balls: Iga Swiatek among female players criticising ‘horrible’ balls • BBC Sport

»

The US Open is the only major where men and women use different balls and, in the build-up to this year’s tournament, a number of players have echoed [women’s world No.1 Iga] Swiatek’s comments.

…The women use Wilson US Open “regular duty” balls in New York, while the men use Wilson US Open “extra duty” balls. The “regular duty” balls are thinner and lighter than the “extra duty” ones. Wilson states that the regular balls are likely to fluff up more, meaning they play faster but are “less durable” than the extra duty.

Wilson also says that the regular duty balls are developed for softer surfaces, like clay or indoor courts, compared to the extra duty ones, which are for hard courts and “abrasive” surfaces.

Swiatek explained that the lighter balls can contribute to more unforced errors which, in turn, can make matches more unappealing to watch.

“Especially after three games of really hard playing, they are getting more and more light,” she said at the Cincinnati Open last week. “At the end, you can’t even serve at 170kmh [105mph] because you know it’s going to fly like crazy. They are pretty bad. Right now we play powerful, and we kind of can’t loosen up our hands with these balls. We make more mistakes, for sure, so I don’t think that’s really nice to watch visually.”

The US Tennis Association said “a number of factors” are considered in deciding which balls to use. “The USTA works closely with the WTA [Women’s Tennis Association] and [men’s] ATP Tour, their player councils and our brand partner on an annual basis to determine what type of balls they recommend,” a USTA spokesperson said. “The USTA will continue to follow the recommendations of the tours and their player councils to determine which balls are utilised during the US Open.”

«

Wilson says the “regular duty” balls “use a thinner felt woven more tightly around the core to resist this fluffing. These balls play faster, but are less durable than Extra Duty.. [which] have a thicker felt woven a bit looser around the core to withstand shearing. That means that the felt on these balls is less likely to fluff up as they are played.”

Fluffier balls = slower, take more spin. But: lighter balls = fly more, harder to control. It’s a very strange balance, given that women tend to have longer rallies, so the balls get fluffier: meaning they go from uncontrollable to slow. Why have different balls in the first place, though, given nowhere else does? (Of course it’s technology, why do you ask?)
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Ukraine tricks Russia into wasting bombs to destroy decoy ‘artillery’ • The Washington Post

John Hudson:

»

Ukraine may be outgunned, but in the latest sign it is not yet outfoxed, a fleet of decoys resembling advanced US rocket systems has tricked Russian forces into wasting expensive long-range cruise missiles on dummy targets, according to interviews with senior US and Ukrainian officials and photographs of the replicas reviewed by The Washington Post.

The Ukrainian decoys are made out of wood but can be indistinguishable from an artillery battery through the lens of Russian drones, which transmit their locations to naval cruise-missile carriers in the Black Sea.
“When the UAVs see the battery, it’s like a VIP target,” said a senior Ukrainian official, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, encountering long-range artillery replicas.

After a few weeks in the field, the decoys drew at least 10 Kalibr cruise missiles, an initial success that led Ukraine to expand the production of the replicas for broader use, said the senior Ukrainian official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters.

The use of rocket system decoys, which has not been reported previously, is one of many asymmetrical tactics Ukraine’s armed forces have adopted to fight back against a bigger and better-equipped invading enemy. In recent weeks, Kyiv’s operatives have blown up rail and electricity lines in occupied Russian territory, detonated explosives inside Russian arms depots and assassinated suspected collaborators.

«

Remarkable if true; you’d really want to see the before and after of one of these fakes, though there might not be much left after. If Russian drones are really unable to detect the difference (don’t they use heat-seeking systems? Are the fakes hot somehow?), it doesn’t say a lot about the quality of their weapons systems.
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UK: court permits service of process by NFT • Lexology

Haim Ravia and Dotan Hammer:

»

In an unprecedented decision, a High Court in England permitted the service of process of pleadings through a non-fungible token (NFT), to the digital wallets of the unnamed defendants.

The permission was granted as part of an application for interim relief filed by a British citizen allegedly conned by an American online trading website. The plaintiff transferred $2.1 million worth of Cryptocurrency to the website’s digital wallet. When the transfer was completed, he discovered that his access to the website was blocked. Since the identities of the website’s operators are unknown, the plaintiff asked to serve his court complaint via the blockchain. The court affirmed his request, holding that it meets the requirements under English law.

«

From the judge’s remarks, it looks as though Binance, a crypto exchange, is going to get caught up in this case (if it goes any further) because it was a go-between in the super-fraudulent transaction. Dropping an NFT (receipt) into a wallet as a means of identifying someone uniquely is rather neat, though.
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Hornsea 2: North Sea wind farm claims title of world’s largest • BBC News

Jonah Fisher:

»

Over the last decade the size of wind farms and turbines have both increased, helping to bring down the cost of the electricity they generate.

“The last time I checked it was roughly £450 per megawatt hour to buy electricity generated by gas,” says Simon Evans from Carbon Brief, a website that follows renewable energy issues. “That’s about 9 times more expensive than the current cost to build new renewable capacity.”

In the UK government’s latest auction round in July, 11 gigawatts of renewable energy was commissioned which is enough to power about 12m homes. As part of its Net Zero targets the government has committed to de-carbonising electricity generation by 2035, with offshore wind playing a crucial role.

The current worldwide energy crisis, triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has intensified the search for alternatives to gas fired power stations. There are no quick solutions.

Offshore wind projects take about five years from planning consent to full operation, and there are those who say that the scale of the current energy crisis means that building wind farms onshore needs to be looked at again.

“Onshore wind has traditionally been the cheapest form of energy and you can get that up and running in about a year,” Melanie Onn of Renewable UK told BBC News.

“We’re not doing that at the moment because the planning process allows for a single person to object to an onshore wind farm and that closes the whole thing down, so we really need the government to take action and put our country’s energy needs first.”

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“Allows for a single person to object” *screaming intensifies*
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified