Induction ovens can demand huge amounts of electricity in a burst – but what if you installed a big battery in the oven to meet the demand? CC-licensed photo by GilgongoGilgongo on Flickr.

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

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

It’s Mukesh Ambani’s world — and we’re just living in it • Rest of World

The Rest of World staff:

»

Imagine if everything in your home came from just one company. Or, to be more precise, from companies that are ultimately led by one individual: a single person whose brands sell you the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the fuel you fill your car with, and even the internet you’re reading this with.

That’s the reality for many Indians, who rely on products, food, and services from the vast array of companies controlled by or partnered with Mukesh Ambani. He’s not just among India’s richest men, according to Forbes; with a net worth of $90.7 billion, he’s also been in the top 10 of its Billionaires List for the past three years.

Ambani’s wealth comes from the enormous Reliance Industries conglomerate. Since taking over from his father, Ambani has turned Reliance — once known for textiles and petrochemicals — into a digital powerhouse. He’s grown the company’s reach through acquisitions and partnerships to reach retail, telecommunications, media, and so much more, creating an empire with unimaginable reach.

Don’t believe us? We’ll show you. Scroll down and join us for an illustrated journey through the lives of ordinary Indians — and the many, many ways in which Ambani touches their world.

«

Phones, financial news, search engine, delivery logistics, multiple video streaming services, an all-in-one app, an AI platform for business, a shopping platforms, translation software, AI-based edtech, cloud storage, polyester fibres, home furniture, cleaning products, shoes and shoe stores, online pharmacies, fibre broadband, music streaming, jewellery, lingerie, cosmetics, prayer products (?), grocery brands, fizzy drinks, OK I ran out of time. This makes the dystopian stories of the big company or big guy owning everything seem all too real.
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Twitter alternative: how Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral” • UX Collective

Clive Thompson:

»

Back in 2017 I wrote a short column for Wired about “antiviral” design.

I’d recently been using some fun, experimental web services, like Rob Beschizza’s txt.fyi. These sites all allowed you to post stuff online, much as Facebook or Twitter did. But they had no social mechanisms for promoting posts: No “like” buttons, no share buttons, no feed showing which posts were the most popular. Txt.fyi even had a no-robots tag on each post, telling search engines not to index them. The only way someone would see what you’d posted on txt.fyi is if you somehow actively shared the URL with them.

The reason for these curious, un-Twitter-like features?

As Beschizza told me, it was encourage people to communicate and be creative — without constantly thinking about “will I get a huge audience for this”? Beschizza (and the other folks making these similarly antiviral sites) all believed that the design of the big social sites had deformed people’s behavior. Twitter and Instagram and Facebook etc. had coaxed people to constantly try to hack the attentional marketplace. It created a world of people incessantly making posts designed to be operatically theatrical, or to enrage — or to elicit some sort of high-voltage reaction.

As Beschizza said: “I wanted something where people could publish their thoughts without any false game of social manipulation, one-upmanship, and favor-trading.” It was, as I called it, “antiviral design”.

I’ve been thinking more and more about how this applies to Mastodon. I’ve been using Mastodon on and off for several years now. But the influx of newcomers has me using it a lot recently, so I’m noticing more and more how people behave on that network — or, more importantly, how they’re encouraged to behave.

And I’ve realized that Mastodon is a superb example of antiviral design.

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Subtracting the various things that make virality easy on Twitter – single-press retweets, dunk-tweeting (OK quote tweets) – inevitably makes for a quieter network. (Still haven’t joined Mastodon.)
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How we geolocated a photo of a Russian missile programming team • Bellingcat

Aric Toler:

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While conducting research for his latest Bellingcat investigation, Christo Grozev received a group photograph of the missile guidance team that were purported to be behind programming many of the cruise missiles that have hit Ukraine in recent months. As detailed in the article:

“Another team member, whose identity is not known as they contacted reporters via a burner email account that was provided by Bellingcat and The Insider to all contacted members, shared two group photos of the GVC team and two photos of their commander, Lt. Col. Bagnyuk, wearing his many medals.”

The team member who provided this 2013 photograph said it was taken at the Main Computation Centre of the General Staff (GVC) in Moscow, but we needed to independently verify this ourselves. During the course of our investigation, we had already discovered the GVC was located at Znamenka 19 – the headquarters of the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD). This fact was gleaned by looking for the names of engineers we had identified as working for the GVC in leaked Russian databases (including those that contain information about addresses used to register cars or sign up to online delivery apps). Some had registered addresses at Znamenka 19.

As such, the next challenge was to use geolocation techniques to confirm conclusively where the image was taken so that we could include it in our findings about the missile team. 

This brief article provides a walkthrough on how we geolocated this photograph, eventually verifying that it was indeed taken at the Russian MoD’s Znamenka 19 facility, one of the locations that hosts the GVC.

«

You might remember the amazing example from May 2021 where Bellingcat geolocated a photo taken from an FBI child exploitation case, based on just a poolside picture.
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Meta Quest Pro review: get me out of here • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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While Meta has described the Quest as a VR Nintendo Switch, it’s tailoring the Quest Pro to an audience that can buy a more expensive headset, starting with its looks and fit. The Quest Pro is an intimidatingly polished-looking piece of black plastic. Instead of the Quest 2’s cloth straps, it features a black plastic halo, which sits around your head and tightens with a wheel at the back, a bit like the original PlayStation VR. The headset is heavier than the Quest 2 at 722 grams compared to 503 grams, but it’s redistributed its weight to be less front-heavy, shifting its battery to the back.

I loved this design after a Quest Pro demo session, and I think it’s still got strong points. The headset fits more securely than the default Quest 2 strap system, which sometimes felt on the verge of slipping off. There’s no velcro for my long hair to get caught in.

But since that first demo, using the Quest Pro has become uniquely tortuous. Its ring puts practically all its substantial weight on my upper forehead, sometimes leaving a numb and tingling strip along my hairline. It feels a little better if I keep the fit loose, but that makes the headset less stable during games and other high-intensity activities. It’s a worse experience than the Quest 2 with its optional Elite Strap, which includes an over-the-head strap for balance and still leaves the Quest 2 about 100 grams lighter than the Quest Pro.

The battery doesn’t last as long as the Quest 2, but I had trouble using the Quest Pro long enough to wear it out
Meta has made some other hardware tradeoffs. The headset’s face mask is shallower than the Quest 2’s, for instance, so it gives you a peripheral view of the real world outside your headset. If you want to block out more light, you can snap on a pair of included magnetic silicone wings that act like blinders or a separate $49 mask that shuts out practically all light. That’s a nice bit of flexibility, except that the headset in its default state made me consistently nauseated, likely thanks to the constant visual clash of real and virtual worlds. (My colleague and boss Nilay Patel, a frequent Quest 2 user, experienced the same problems.) I had no trouble once I put the blinders on, but I’m guessing some people won’t reach that point; they’ll simply feel motion-sick and conclude VR isn’t for them.

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Battery life of about two hours. But even that sounds like more than people want to spend wearing it.
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Induction cooking heats up with a $20m cash injection for Impulse • TechCrunch

Haje Jan Kamps:

»

All electric, everywhere, all of the time; that’s one of the many climate mantras. Induction stovetops take a lot of power, however — they can pull 40 amps at 240 volts. That’s the same as an at-home Level 2 EV charger. Needless to say, a lot of older houses aren’t wired to plug in a Tesla in your kitchen, which means it could get expensive to upgrade to an induction range. Impulse to the rescue — the company’s stoves include a battery solution, which means that it doesn’t pull the full 40 amps when it’s operating, and you could find yourself cooking with induction without having to upgrade your panel. Clever!

“I’d been thinking about how to supercharge home appliances for a while and the deeper I dug into the space, the clearer it became that there was a larger story bringing together whole-home electrification and added energy storage in alignment with new policy tailwinds and distributed energy resource incentives,” said Sam D’Amico, CEO at Impulse. “Integrating batteries not only unlocks really impressive performance improvements, it also removes a lot of common barriers around power or panel limitations with installing induction stoves while also adding energy storage to the grid.”

«

A neat enough idea – the battery can trickle charge while you’re not cooking. Your electricity bills are going to be fun, of course: gas is still cheaper, per kWh, than electricity.
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Protocol, the tech-news focused website, will shutter and lay off its entire staff • CNN Business

Oliver Darcy:

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Staffers were told at an all-hands meeting Tuesday that the news organization will cease publishing on its website Thursday. The outlet’s flagship newsletter, Source Code, will continue publishing for several more weeks, but all other newsletters will stop after Tuesday.

The shuttering of the news organization will impact approximately 60 staffers, people familiar with the matter said. They will remain active employees through Friday, December 16, and then be eligible for eight weeks of severance, the people added.

Allbritton announced the launch of Protocol in late 2019 to much buzz. The Washington media mogul told Vanity Fair at the time that he wanted to replicate Politico’s successful model for the technology industry.

“I would love for this to be as big as, if not larger than, Politico is right now,” Allbritton told Vanity Fair in 2019.

But Protocol never had much luck. Shortly after launching, the global pandemic unleashed brutal economic headwinds on the media industry, resulting in some cuts to staff. Finally, when it seemed that the outlet might catch its footing as the pandemic’s grip on the economy lifted, German publishing giant Axel Springer closed a deal to purchase Politico. That acquisition resulted in Protocol, which had operated independently, being folded into Politico Media Group.

Goli Sheikholeslami, the chief executive of Political Media Group, has for months been working with Axel Springer to conduct a long-term strategy planning process to best position the company. The plan, people familiar with the matter said, is to double the size of the company by 2027.

But it comes as Big Tech firms have faced particularly challenging economic conditions, making it especially challenging for Protocol to generate revenue from advertising sales to the sector, people familiar with the matter said.

«

This is a pity: Protocol did lots of good stories. Linked here beginning in February 2020 with “Tech’s strangest job listings: future edition“, and to another 39 of their stories. Hope the stories at least will survive. But ad-funded things aren’t looking too wonderful just now./
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CVC, Group Black partner on bid for Vox Media • Axios

Sara Fischer:

»

CVC Capital Partners and Group Black are pursuing a joint bid to buy Vox Media, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The bid comes as the media sector is grappling with a tough economic climate and as CVC, the European private equity giant, is eyeing a consolidation move into more media assets across the U.S.

Last week, CVC and Group Black, a media collective, sent Vox a term sheet outlining details for a potential deal, sources tell Axios.

Despite industry challenges, Vox remains a top digital media company, housing popular sites like Eater and SB Nation, plus Thrillist and Seeker which it owns after its Group Nine Media deal last year.
Vox was valued at around $1bn after a $200m funding round in 2015.

Vox is not looking to sell the business at the moment, according to one source who spoke with Axios. The company declined to comment.

«

Also worth noting that Vox Media owns The Verge. If private equity gets hold of that (and the other Vox properties), expect all sorts of things to be squeezed for money. Techcrunch has been through a gentler version of that loop a couple of times, and it’s never a good outcome.
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How North Korea became a mastermind of crypto cyber crime • Financial Times

Christian Davies and Schott Chipolina:

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Western security agencies and cyber security companies treat [North Korea] as one of the world’s four principal nation state-based cyber threats, alongside China, Russia, and Iran.

According to a UN panel of experts monitoring the implementation of international sanctions, money raised by North Korea’s criminal cyber operations are helping to fund the country’s illicit ballistic missile and nuclear programmes. Anne Neuberger, US deputy national security adviser for cyber security, said in July that North Korea “uses cyber to gain, we estimate, up to a third of their funds for their missile programme”.

Crypto analysis firm Chainalysis estimates that North Korea stole approximately $1bn in the first nine months of 2022 from decentralised crypto exchanges alone.

The rapid collapse last week of FTX, one of the biggest exchanges, has highlighted the opacity, erratic regulation and speculative frenzies that have been the central features of the market for digital assets. North Korea’s growing use of crypto heists has also served to demonstrate the absence of meaningful international regulation of the same markets.

Analysts say the scale and sophistication of the Axie Infinity hack [in which $620m of Ether was taken] exposed just how powerless the US and allied countries appear to be to prevent large-scale North Korean crypto theft.

Only about $30m of the crypto loot has since been recovered. That was after an alliance of law enforcement agencies and crypto analysis companies traced some of the stolen funds through a series of decentralised exchanges and so-called “crypto mixers”, software tools that can shuffle the crypto holdings of different users so as to obfuscate their origins.

«

As the article points out, it was Kim Jong Un who, on taking power leader in 2011, identified cyber capabilities as crucial to the country’s future success. How very right he was.
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Internal documents show how close the FBI came to deploying spyware • The New York Times

Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman:

»

During a closed-door session with lawmakers last December, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, was asked whether the bureau had ever purchased and used Pegasus, the hacking tool that penetrates mobile phones and extracts their contents.

Mr. Wray acknowledged that the FBI had bought a license for Pegasus, but only for research and development. “To be able to figure out how bad guys could use it, for example,” he told Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, according to a transcript of the hearing that was recently declassified.

But dozens of internal FBI documents and court records tell a different story. The documents, produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by The New York Times against the bureau, show that FBI officials made a push in late 2020 and the first half of 2021 to deploy the hacking tools — made by the Israeli spyware firm NSO — in its own criminal investigations. The officials developed advanced plans to brief the bureau’s leadership, and drew up guidelines for federal prosecutors about how the FBI’s use of hacking tools would need to be disclosed during criminal proceedings.

It is unclear how the bureau was contemplating using Pegasus, and whether it was considering hacking the phones of American citizens, foreigners or both. In January, The Times revealed that FBI officials had also tested the NSO tool Phantom, a version of Pegasus capable of hacking phones with US numbers.
The FBI eventually decided not to deploy Pegasus in criminal investigations in July 2021, amid a flurry of stories about how the hacking tool had been abused by governments across the globe. But the documents offer a glimpse at how the US government — over two presidential administrations — wrestled with the promise and peril of a powerful cyberweapon.

«

Pegasus is the subject of a fascinating forthcoming book (which I’m reviewing for The Guardian). It really is the neutron bomb of the smartphone age: almost too dangerous to deploy. But not quite.
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Twitter is Going Great!

Volunteers from the Today in Tabs Discord:

»

Twitter is Going Great!

… and definitely does not develop features primarily to stroke Elon Musk’s delicate ego

«

Inspired by Molly White’s “Web3 Is Going Great” (“…and is definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smouldering planet”), and doing much the same in showing howTwitter is gradually getting screwed up.

Web3IsGoingGreat is, by the way, keeping a tally of all the lenders and asset managers who are discovering that, whoopsie, they had lots of funds tied up in FTX which has of course gone insolvent/bankrupt/bad/south.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Attending the World Cup in Qatar might mean installing privacy-invading government apps. Would you? CC-licensed photo by Tsutomu Takasu 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.

Coming up Friday: another post, due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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

Going to the World Cup? Get ready to have your privacy invaded • TechRadar

Will McCurdy:

»

Several cybersecurity experts have highlighted potential data security issues ahead for attendees of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.

The Norwegian government’s Head of Security Øyvind Vasaasen told NRK (opens in new tab): “It’s not my job to give travel advice, but personally I would never bring my mobile phone on a visit to Qatar”, likening the scope of official apps to giving someone the keys to your house. 

Those wanting to make a trip to the Middle East to experience the tournament live will need to install a Covid-19 tracker dubbed “Ehteraz” on their smartphones, alongside “Hayya”, a compulsory ticketing and transport app.

Vasaasen alleged that Ehteraz claims access “to several rights on your mobile, like access to read, delete or change all content on the phone, as well as access to connect to WiFi and Bluetooth, override other apps, and prevent the phone from switching off to sleep mode”.

Naomi Lintvedt, a research fellow at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Law, opined that if she were an employer, she wouldn’t allow employees to work from their phones in Qatar.

In addition, France’s data protection authority CNIL suggested in Politico to “travel with a blank smartphone … or an old phone that has been reset” and that “special care should be taken with photos, videos, or digital works that could place you in difficulty with respect to the legislation of the country visited”.

«

Cop27 one day, Qatar’s World Cup the next.
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Exclusive: Russian software disguised as American finds its way into US Army, CDC apps • Reuters

James PEarson and Marisa Taylor:

»

Thousands of smartphone applications in Apple and Google’s online stores contain computer code developed by a technology company, Pushwoosh, that presents itself as based in the United States, but is actually Russian, Reuters has found.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States’ main agency for fighting major health threats, said it had been deceived into believing Pushwoosh was based in the US capital. After learning about its Russian roots from Reuters, it removed Pushwoosh software from seven public-facing apps, citing security concerns.

The US Army said it had removed an app containing Pushwoosh code in March because of the same concerns. That app was used by soldiers at one of the country’s main combat training bases.

According to company documents publicly filed in Russia and reviewed by Reuters, Pushwoosh is headquartered in the Siberian town of Novosibirsk, where it is registered as a software company that also carries out data processing. It employs around 40 people and reported revenue of 143,270,000 rubles ($2.4m) last year. Pushwoosh is registered with the Russian government to pay taxes in Russia.

On social media and in US regulatory filings, however, it presents itself as a US company, based at various times in California, Maryland and Washington DC, Reuters found.

Pushwoosh provides code and data processing support for software developers, enabling them to profile the online activity of smartphone app users and send tailor-made push notifications from Pushwoosh servers.

On its website, Pushwoosh says it does not collect sensitive information, and Reuters found no evidence Pushwoosh mishandled user data. Russian authorities, however, have compelled local companies to hand over user data to domestic security agencies.

Pushwoosh’s founder, Max Konev, told Reuters in a September email that the company had not tried to mask its Russian origins. “I am proud to be Russian and I would never hide this.”

…Pushwoosh code has been embedded into almost 8,000 apps in the Google and Apple app stores, according to Appfigures, an app intelligence website. Pushwoosh’s website says it has more than 2.3 billion devices listed in its database.

«

Never hide it, no, sure, not much. The classic problem of embedded frameworks.
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The big idea: stopping climate change isn’t enough – we need to reverse it • The Guardian

Zeke Hausfather is director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute:

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We have a saying in the climate science world – that CO2 is forever. It will take close to half a million years before a ton of CO2 emitted today from burning fossil fuels is completely removed from the atmosphere naturally. This means that when we try to neutralise or undo fossil fuel emissions – for example, with carbon offsets – those interventions should operate over a similar timeframe: a ton of emissions from cutting down trees can be neutralised by putting more carbon in trees or soils, but CO2 from fossil fuels needs to be balanced by more permanent carbon removal. This is the reason why the respected Science Based Targets initiative only allows measures that permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere to neutralise a company’s remaining fossil fuel emissions in their net-zero standard – and only alongside deep emissions reductions.

We should not oversell the role of carbon removal. The vast majority of the time it is cheaper to reduce emissions than to remove CO2 from the atmosphere after the fact. Models that limit warming to 1.5C show that we need to reduce global CO2 emissions by around 90%, while only using carbon removal for around 10%. But 10% of the solution to a problem as big as climate change is still something we cannot afford to ignore.

In 2021 the world spent a total of $755bn on reducing emissions. We should probably aim to spend about 1% of that money on carbon removal technologies.

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$7.5bn? If that amount was put in annually in venture capital, perhaps it would make some difference.
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Speed traps have no long-term effect on speeding • Strong Towns

Seairra Shepherd:

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No one likes to get a speeding ticket, but police hand out citations thousands of times a day throughout the United States. In El Paso, along Delta Drive, law enforcement issued 136 speeding citations to drivers in just six days, in an effort to stop speeding along Delta Drive, where many locals had complained about cars passing by at dangerous speeds. After the six-day citation spree, the police department claimed on their twitter to have successfully slowed down the cars.

A month after this, Strong Towns member and El Paso Community College civil engineering student Zachary Staggs wondered if the speed trap really did put a stop to speeding. 

Deciding to conduct a speed study, Staggs placed himself in an inconspicuous spot away from school zones or intersections that may have influenced the results. He spent two hours tracking oncoming traffic speed from both directions to collect the study data. 

“My takeaway is that whatever the police did, it didn’t work,” said Staggs. “At all.” 

On a sunny October day, eight out of ten drivers exceeded the posted speed limit of 35 mph. One out of four drivers sped 10 mph or more over the limit. Some vehicles were caught going as fast as 60 mph.

“It was insane,” said Staggs. “I felt I could count the people who were going under the speed limit on my fingers, and that didn’t feel right to me.”

Staggs’s results are a striking demonstration of a basic truth about driving: The typical driver does not select their speed based on the posted speed limit. Rather, they rely on visual and other physical cues that intuitively communicate to them how fast it feels safe to go on a given roadway.

This is what’s known as “design speed,” and it may be substantially higher than the legal speed limit. Engineers often use the 85th percentile speed (the speed that 85% of drivers are going at or under) as an indication of design speed. According to Staggs’s findings, on Delta Drive, the 85th percentile speed falls at 45 mph, a full ten miles per hour over the posted speed limit.

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If you look at the picture in the article, it’s obvious why vehicles don’t drive along it at 35mph: it’s a long, straight dual carriageway with wide pavements and no houses on either side. The question isn’t why people disobey the speed limit; it’s why anyone thought a speed limit of 35mph could make sense. The headline isn’t supported by finding. As Staggs says later in the story, the problem is the road design, if they really want to enforce that limit.
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FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to infamous online-poker cheating scandals • Poker.org

Haley Hintze:

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While many mainstream reports on FTX’s collapse have focused on the failed deals between the billionaire owner-founders of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Binance, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the story also includes the involvement of at least one dark figure in online poker history, Daniel S. Friedberg, who serves as FTX’s Chief Regulatory Officer. Friedberg is positioned in a central role in assuring that FTX remains in compliance with financial exchanges and licensing regimes around the globe.

Friedberg played a prominent and infamous role in the coverup of the insider-cheating scandal at UltimateBet in the mid-2000s, and he helped orchestrate some of the questionable legal moves that allowed the Portland, Oregon-based site evade US law enforcement efforts throughout its existence. Those business and legal moves included the creation of a false-front office in Canada which in turn allowed for an IPO on the London Stock Exchange, a faked sale of the company to Tokwiro Enterprises (an entity created by the former chief of the Kahnawake nation, Joseph Tokwiro Norton), licensing in various offshore “rubber stamp” jurisdictions, and ultimately, a shadowy merger with another online-poker company, Absolute Poker, which was also riddled with insider fraud and crippled by its own cheating scandal.

Friedberg, who served as FTX’s general counsel before taking on the company’s regulatory role, was recently described by Coingeek’s Steven Stradbrooke as being “almost comically inappropriate” for the job. The description appears apt, given Friedberg’s long history of not complying with various jurisdictions’ regulations, but rather, evading them.

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Oh now you tell us. Though actually this stuff was obvious for anyone who took the trouble to look at the backgrounds of people like Friedberg. But crypto boosters wouldn’t pay attention to that. FTX (or Alameda) though was essentially self-funded by Bankman-Fried’s real trading skills doing arbitrage on Korean crypto exchanges. After that, though, things went bad. Very bad.
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Google agrees to $392m privacy settlement with 40 states • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

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In the location privacy settlement, the state attorneys general claimed that Google gave the false impression that when users turned off location tracking services, the company no longer collected geolocation data about them. But through Google’s broad array of other services like search, maps and apps that connect to Wi-Fi and cellular phone towers, the company continued amassing and storing an intricate history of users’ movements, according to the states.

Until May 2018, Google even tracked the location of users who had logged out of Google apps, an action that could lead a consumer to believe location tracking had been disabled, the attorneys general said.

“For years, Google prioritized profit over the privacy of people who use Google products and services,” said Ellen Rosenblum, the Oregon attorney general, who led the case along with Nebraska. “Consumers thought they had turned ‘off’ their location tracking features on Google, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers.”

In addition to paying the monetary sum, which will go to state coffers, Google has promised to make clearer how it collects location data, including what kinds of data it can still accumulate when location tracking is disabled for one setting but not for others. The company must also notify users about how to disable location tracking, delete the data collected by the settings and set data retention limits. Users will be notified by pop-up boxes and more detailed information on Google’s informational page about location technologies.

The states’ investigation began after a 2018 Associated Press article on Google’s misleading location tracking practices.

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Note that little bit at the end. Journalism can actually make a difference to these behaviours. Recall that the whole issue about location tracking (and, later, address uploading) began with journalists writing about the topic, which then came to wider notice, and then to legislators’ notice.
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DeviantArt upsets artists with its new AI art generator, DreamUp • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Friday, the online art community DeviantArt announced DreamUp, an AI-powered text-to-image generator service powered by Stable Diffusion. Simultaneously, DeviantArt launched an initiative that ostensibly lets artists opt out of AI image training but also made everyone’s art opt-in by default, which angered many members.

DreamUp creates novel AI-generated art based on text prompts. Due to its Stable Diffusion roots, DreamUp learned how to generate images by analyzing hundreds of millions of images scraped off sites like DeviantArt and collected into LAION datasets without artists’ permission, a potential irony that some DeviantArt members find problematic.

As we’ve reported frequently on Ars in the past, Stable Diffusion’s web-scraping nature ignited a huge debate earlier this year among artists that challenge the ethics of AI-generated artwork. Some art communities have taken hard stances against any AI-generated images, banning them completely.

Perhaps anticipating a backlash, DeviantArt is making overtures to pacify artists who might be upset about their work being used to train AI image generators. The site is providing a special “noai” flag that artists can check in their image settings to opt out of third-party image datasets. (Whether third-party image scrapers will honor this flag, however, remains to be seen.)

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“NoAI” is reminiscent of the “nofollow” tag that emerged a couple of decades ago when spam in blog comments began to be a problem: it told Google (and other search engines took the scheme up too) essentially to ignore the linked site. Perhaps that’s going to be the next step in this debate.
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Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks • MIT Technology Review

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

“Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.

The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts—in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he says. 

Twitter’s remaining engineers have largely been tasked with keeping the site stable over the last few days, since the new CEO decided to get rid of a significant chunk of the staff maintaining its code base. As the company tries to return to some semblance of normalcy, more of their time will be spent addressing Musk’s (often taxing) whims for new products and features, rather than keeping what’s already there running.

This is particularly problematic, says [highly experienced SRE Ben] Krueger, for a site like Twitter, which can have unforeseen spikes in user traffic and interest. Krueger contrasts Twitter with online retail sites, where companies can prepare for big traffic events like Black Friday with some predictability. “When it comes to Twitter, they have the possibility of having a Black Friday on any given day at any time of the day,” he says. “At any given day, some news event can happen that can have significant impact on the conversation.” Responding to that is harder to do when you lay off up to 80% of your SREs—a figure Krueger says has been bandied about within the industry but which MIT Technology Review has been unable to confirm. The Twitter engineer agreed that the percentage sounded “plausible.”

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This article appeared a week ago, and things have just started to fray at the edges. The World Cup’s now starting: that’s going to load-test Twitter in multiple non-Western countries at once. Interesting times.
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Fake Eli Lilly account may cost Twitter millions • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

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Inside the real Eli Lilly, the fake sparked a panic, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded they kill the viral spoof, worried it could undermine their brand’s reputation or push false claims about people’s medicine. Twitter, its staffing cut in half, didn’t react for hours.

The aftermath of that $8 spoof offers a potentially costly lesson for Musk, who has long treated Twitter as a playground for bawdy jokes and trolls but now must find a way to operate as a business following his $44bn takeover.

By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns — a potentially serious blow, given that the $330bn company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy. They also paused their Twitter publishing plan for all corporate accounts around the world.

“For $8, they’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue,” said Amy O’Connor, a former senior communications official at Eli Lilly who now works at a trade association. “What’s the benefit to a company … of staying on Twitter? It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line.”

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Later in the day Musk tweeted that verification would be done…by Twitter.
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Dan O’Dowd is the rich tech CEO spending millions to stop Elon Musk • The Washington Post

Gerrit de Vynck:

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O’Dowd, who made his fortune selling software to military customers, has been using the [Tesla] Model 3 to test and film the [car’s] self-driving software. He’s documented what appear to be examples of the car swerving across the centerline toward oncoming traffic, failing to slow down in a school zone and missing stop signs. This summer, he triggered an uproar by releasing a video showing his Tesla — allegedly in Full Self-Driving mode — mowing down child-size mannequins.

“If Tesla gets away with this and ships this product and I can’t convince the public that a self-driving car that drives like a drunken, suicidal 13-year-old shouldn’t be on the road, I’m going to fail,” O’Dowd said in an interview from his Santa Barbara office, where glass cases display his collection of ancient coins and auction-bought mementos from NASA moon missions.

O’Dowd has run nationwide TV ads with the videos and even launched an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate as part of his one-man crusade to challenge what he sees as the cavalier development of dangerous technology. For O’Dowd and other skeptics, the program is a deadly experiment foisted on an unsuspecting public — a view underscored by a recently filed class-action lawsuit and a reported Department of Justice investigation into the tech.

Despite O’Dowd’s high-profile campaign, and the concern from some regulators and politicians, Tesla is charging ahead with what it claims is world-changing technology. The company and its supporters argue their approach will help usher in a future in which death from human errors on roadways is eliminated. At the end of September, during a four-hour event in which Tesla showed off its latest artificial intelligence tech, Musk said Full Self-Driving is already saving lives and keeping it off public roads would be “morally wrong.”

“At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people,” Musk said. Musk and Tesla, which does not typically answer media inquiries, did not respond to requests for comment.

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How nice – a Musk story that’s about screwups at a company that isn’t Twitter. Except.. if this is wrong, then people die.
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The story of FTX’s collapse – and Sam Bankman-Fried’s knowledge of it – will be told by “Big Short” author Michael Lewis. Can’t wait. CC-licensed photo by Bybit 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.

On Friday, there’ll be another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Well, rested. Another 20 weeks of this and we hit 2,000. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Everything Elon Musk told Twitter employees in his first company meeting • The Verge

Alex Heath:

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During a nearly one-hour Q&A session, which The Verge obtained a recording of — you can read a full transcript below — Musk was blunt about Twitter’s financial state, his ambition to turn Twitter into an app for payments, his love for “gizmos,” and that he now expects employees to work with a “maniacal sense of urgency.”

…Musk: do we have compelling shortform video as opposed to exactly what Vine was? It’s not “let’s copy Vine from whichever year with ancient code.” It’s really just, how do we have compelling shortform video, just compelling content in general? I was actually flipping through the Twitter video where, once you go into kind of a full-screen video mode, you can just start flipping through videos. It’s actually not bad. I was like, “Okay, well, it’s pretty good.” I think building on that makes a ton of sense.

I told a whole bunch of people this morning that I was on it for like maybe 15 minutes, and I could have easily been on it for half an hour. The videos that it showed me were interesting. It was some good videos. And when I told a roomful of people that this morning, they didn’t know it existed. So I think if we try to surface it and make it more obvious that it exists, that would be a good move.

[Inaudible exchange with an employee.]

You know, I’ve got no problem with battle, obviously [laughs]. Yeah, just email it to me. I’m pretty responsive on email. Every now and again, it’s a crisis, and if I didn’t respond within 24 hours, email me again. It rarely takes me longer than 24 hours to respond. Usually it’s within hours. And I’m also for like, “Hey, let’s have some fun and let’s have some adventure here.” Let’s just try some crazy stuff. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll stop it. And if it does work, we’ll amplify it. But I think that’s really fun and exciting.

Just try weird stuff. It’s nothing ventured, nothing gained. If we’re too cautious, then how do we make revolutionary improvements? Revolutions are not done with caution. So we want to try things, ideally things that don’t break the whole system, but I think as long as we’re agile and we react quickly to improve things and correct mistakes, I think it’ll be fine.

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The whole thing is worth reading, because it makes clear how Musk is just thrashing here. He has no pathway, no coherent idea of where he’s trying to get to. He’s fired half the employees, many of the content moderators, driven away advertisers, annoyed politicians, damaged brands.. what’s left to do? Musk is rapidly discovering that Twitter isn’t rocket science; it’s much harder than that, because at least rockets rigorously obey the laws of physics. Humans find ways around any laws or rules you put in front of them. The relentless trolling Musk has suffered is the perfect comeuppance: the guy who thought he was the best discovering he’s a rank amateur.
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Hollywood FTX frenzy as Michael Lewis reveals he spent six months with founder • The Ankler

Richard Rushfield:

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With the stunning collapse of crypto exchange FTX still rippling through the financial markets, the entertainment industry sprang into action over the weekend with a far more pressing concern: Who’s going to nab the rights to this story?

We now know at least one part of how this plays out. The town was abuzz Saturday after an email spread that revealed that Michael Lewis — the most talented and successful non-fiction writer working today — had embedded with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried for the past six months and was making the collapsing cryptocurrency exchange the centerpiece of his next book. The Ankler obtained the email from CAA agent Matthew Snyder, originally sent to potential buyers on Friday (CAA did not immediately return a request for comment). The email reveals that not a word of the book has been written yet but, well, things just can’t wait.

…In August, Lewis hinted about his new book in an interview with Financial News.

“I really don’t want to reveal exactly what I’m writing about,” he said “But I found a character through whom I can write about — it weirdly links up Flash Boys, The Big Short and Liar’s Poker.

“I guess it is possible it will be framed as a crypto book, but it won’t be a crypto book. It’ll be about this really unusual character. You’ll learn all about crypto and you’ll learn about what screwed up market structure in the United States and so on.”

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Lewis has an incredible knack for being in just the right place. And this will be the tale to end them all. Well, perhaps to end all crypto. (Bitcoin is bumping around $16,000, following hefty selloffs in the past few days, down from its 52-week high of $66,000.)
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Are you a parent of a toddler or an assistant to a male CEO of a tech startup? • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Justine Cotter nails it:

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1. A disproportionate amount of your time is spent cleaning up messes and bringing him snacks.

2. He summons you by screaming your name at the top of his lungs.

3. He won’t stop talking about how he’s going to build a rocket ship and blast off into outer space.

4. He uses a lot of words that sound entirely made up.

5. When you tell him you need a day off, he laughs in your face.

6. He refuses to wear shoes.

7. He routinely overestimates his abilities.

8. He offers unsolicited deep insights about subjects he knows nothing about.

9. When he says something that doesn’t make sense, you smile, nod, and tell him he’s a genius.

10. He never pays taxes.

11. He has a room filled with toys that he refers to as his “office.”

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The mysteries of the astronaut microbiome • Undark

Doug Johnson:

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Astronauts face numerous known health problems in space, including a loss in bone density, muscle atrophy, and psychological issues. And on Earth, researchers are increasingly discovering how the various bacteria and other microorganisms that live inside and outside of people — the human microbiome — affect physical and mental health.

Space, of course, is an entirely different environment from Earth, with high radiation levels and microgravity. Although the science is far from certain, these vast differences may cause unexpected changes in the microbiome of astronauts. In turn, this could result in a range of health problems, which may be more pronounced on long-haul stints in space, like traveling to another planet.

Still, the implications of a disrupted microbiome are poorly understood, even on Earth, said David Pearce, a bioscience researcher at Northumbria University and author of a 2022 paper exploring how a trip to Mars might affect microbes in the gut — which makes the range of related illnesses and diseases in space difficult to predict. And direct research is limited because only around 600 people have ever been to space. Those who have taken the trip don’t typically stay long, as the average length of a trip to the International Space Station is about six months. And some researchers aren’t yet convinced there’s enough evidence suggesting the human microbiome will change much in space at all.

All the same, many researchers, including Pearce, are trying to figure out whether or not astronauts will enter a state in which their microbiome changes in adverse ways, called dysbiosis. “Because they’re going to be away for a long time, will that dysbiosis become a significant problem,” he said, “or lead to them having health impacts that impair their ability to function?”

…As for studies conducted in space, there are a few. One 2019 study, for instance, compared the microbiomes of astronaut Scott Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, after the former went to the ISS for nearly a year starting in 2015. The study posited that Scott Kelly’s microbiome did indeed change in space. For him, this included a reduction in bacteria called Bacteroidetes, the dysregulation of which has been linked to neurological, immune system, and metabolic issues, as well as increase in Firmicutes, a type of bacteria that can help break down certain starches and fibers.

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Might be relevant if you were, say, planning a two-year trip to Mars.

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WhatsApp Business India revenue set to cross $1bn by next year; experts see ‘WeChat moment’ • Money Control India

Vikas Sn and Priyanka Iyer:

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India is the biggest market for the Meta-owned messaging app with over 400 million users in the country. The app, which makes money by enabling businesses and brands to engage with their customers, is set to hit revenue of $1bn in India by next year, people familiar with the matter told Moneycontrol. WhatsApp declined to comment on these numbers.

That said, the rising user complaints of promotional messages from brands on WhatsApp without robust controls to tackle them, could also potentially dampen this growth.

WhatsApp launched its first revenue-generating enterprise product called WhatsApp Business API in 2018. However, industry experts say business messaging has become strategically important for the company over the past 12-18 months due to which it has built several capabilities and features to the platform.

On October 26, during the company’s earnings conference call, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg mentioned business messaging as a “major monetisation opportunity” and one of the three primary areas where they will focus their investment in 2023.

A major chunk of the revenues is currently coming from “click to message”/ “click to WhatsApp” ads wherein businesses can enable consumers to directly send a message from an ad they see on platforms like Facebook or Instagram or provide a call to action to send a WhatsApp message and interact with them.

During the call, Zuckerberg said that Click-to-WhatsApp ads have crossed a $1.5bn run rate, growing more than 80% year over year.

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So not exactly money generated inside WhatsApp. Even so, by becoming the conduit for these messages, Meta gets metadata (ha) that could be useful.
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The lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI that could change the rules of AI copyright • The Verge

James Vincent:

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Microsoft, its subsidiary GitHub, and its business partner OpenAI have been targeted in a proposed class action lawsuit alleging that the companies’ creation of AI-powered coding assistant GitHub Copilot relies on “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” The case is only in its earliest stages but could have a huge effect on the broader world of AI, where companies are making fortunes training software on copyright-protected data.

Copilot, which was unveiled by Microsoft-owned GitHub in June 2021, is trained on public repositories of code scraped from the web, many of which are published with licenses that require anyone reusing the code to credit its creators. Copilot has been found to regurgitate long sections of licensed code without providing credit — prompting this lawsuit that accuses the companies of violating copyright law on a massive scale.

“We are chal leng ing the legal ity of GitHub Copi lot,” said programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick, who filed the lawsuit with the help of the San Francisco-based Joseph Saveri Law Firm, in a press statement. “This is the first step in what will be a long jour ney. As far as we know, this is the first class-action case in the US chal leng ing the train ing and out put of AI sys tems. It will not be the last. AI sys tems are not exempt from the law. Those who cre ate and oper ate these sys tems must remain account able.”

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The credit point is a narrow one, which will probably work. But that’ll just mean that Copilot will get a rejig in which it credits a ton of sources, but operates in exactly the same way.
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Egypt’s COP27 summit app is a cyber weapon, experts warn • POLITICO

Mark Scott and Vincent Manancourt:

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Policymakers from Germany, France and Canada were among those who had downloaded the app by November 8, according to two separate Western security officials briefed on discussions within these delegations at the U.N. climate summit.

Other Western governments have advised officials not to download the app, said another official from a European government. All of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss international government deliberations.

The potential vulnerability from the Android app, which has been downloaded thousands of times and provides a gateway for participants at COP27, was confirmed separately by four cybersecurity experts who reviewed the digital application for POLITICO.

The app is being promoted as a tool to help attendees navigate the event. But it risks giving the Egyptian government permission to read users’ emails and messages. Even messages shared via encrypted services like WhatsApp are vulnerable, according to POLITICO’s technical review of the application, and two of the outside experts.

The app also provides Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, which created it, with other so-called backdoor privileges, or the ability to scan people’s devices.

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Another four days of this. Plenty of time for more policymakers to download it and give their secrets away. Though I’d guess that it’s people from LDCs – less developed countries – who would have Android phones. At a guess, an iPhone wouldn’t give up so much.
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Stretch iPhone to its limit: a 2gib model that can draw everything, in your pocket • LiuLiu

Liu Liu:

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Every year, we have a new iPhone that claims to be faster and better in every way. And yes, these new computer vision models and new image sensors can exercise the phone as hard as they can. However, you could already take good pictures on an iPhone 10 years ago. These are incremental improvements.

These incremental asks only deserve incremental improvements. Once in a few years, there are programs where even on the best of our computing devices they can be barely usable. But these new programs with newly enabled scenarios are so great that people are willing to suffer through.

Last time this happened was the deep neural networks, and the time before that, was the 3D graphics. I believe this is the third time. In fact, I am so convinced that I built an app to prove the point.

In the past three weeks, I built an app that can summon images by casting a few spells, and then editing it to the way you liked. It took a minute to summon the picture on the latest and greatest iPhone 14 Pro, uses about 2GiB [gibibytes] in-app memory, and requires you to download about 2GiB data to get started. Even though the app itself is rock solid, given these requirements, I would probably call it barely usable.

Even if it took a minute to paint one image, now my Camera Roll is filled with drawings from this app. It is an addictive endeavor. More than that, I am getting better at it. If the face is cropped, now I know how to use the inpainting model to fill it in. If the inpainting model doesn’t do its job, you can always use a paint brush to paint it over and do an image-to-image generation again focused in that area.

Now the cat is out of the box, let’s talk about how.

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This is Stable Diffusion, as an app (called Draw Things) on the iPhone. If you want it. Consider that there are now tons of Stable Diffusion apps on the Apple App Store; how long before something like this comes by default with the phone?
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Meta is killing Portal and both its unreleased smartwatches • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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Meta is pulling the plug on its Portal video calling smart displays and its two remaining unreleased smartwatch projects, my colleague Alex Heath can confirm, as the company cuts 11,000 jobs including many in tech divisions. Reuters reported earlier today that the company planned to kill off both Portal and smartwatches, citing Meta execs who spoke at a town hall meeting; we heard the same thing from other sources, so we can independently corroborate the news.

Meta had already quietly decided to stop producing Portal devices for consumers in June, and had shelved the smartwatch that was furthest in development — codename “Milan,” which was reportedly set to arrive in spring 2023 for around $349 and feature two built-in cameras for video calls. The Verge was the first to report on then-Facebook’s plans for that smartwatch a year earlier in June 2021.

But now, Meta is killing off its plans to sell Portal video calling hardware to businesses, too, and the other two smartwatches that were in early-stage and middle-stage development are also being shelved, according to our sources.

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Smartwatches? Why would Facebook/Meta want smartwatches? It’s a difficult enough business if you’re capable at software (see: Google) but even then you need a hardware partner (see: Fitbit). Canning this sounds like a dose of sanity.
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