A new cryptocurrency is aiming for a global rollout using your iris for ID. Would you trust it? CC-licensed photo by A Silly Person on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Beware the fungus. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Alarmed by AI chatbots, universities start revamping how they teach • The New York Times

Kalley Huang:

»

While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he said was easily “the best paper in the class.” It explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments.

A red flag instantly went up.

Mr. Aumann confronted his student over whether he had written the essay himself. The student confessed to using ChatGPT, a chatbot that delivers information, explains concepts and generates ideas in simple sentences — and, in this case, had written the paper.

Alarmed by his discovery, Mr. Aumann decided to transform essay writing for his courses this semester. He plans to require students to write first drafts in the classroom, using browsers that monitor and restrict computer activity. In later drafts, students have to explain each revision. Mr. Aumann, who may forgo essays in subsequent semesters, also plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.

“What’s happening in class is no longer going to be, ‘Here are some questions — let’s talk about it between us human beings,’” he said, but instead “it’s like, ‘What also does this alien robot think?’”

Across the country, university professors like Mr. Aumann, department chairs and administrators are starting to overhaul classrooms in response to ChatGPT, prompting a potentially huge shift in teaching and learning. Some professors are redesigning their courses entirely, making changes that include more oral exams, group work and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones.

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Wouldn’t it be ironic if this great advance (at least, that’s how it looks presently) forces our teaching systems to revert to methods that would have been familiar to the ancient Greeks. Is it the AI system or the teaching that’s the problem, in that case?
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Rishi Sunak forced to back down over Online Safety Bill after Tory rebellion • Daily Telegraph

Charles Hymas:

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Social media bosses who repeatedly fail to protect children from online harms will face jail after the Government backed down in face of a major Tory backbench rebellion.

Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, has accepted changes to the Online Safety Bill that will make senior managers at tech firms criminally liable for persistent breaches of their duty of care to children.

Ministers are expected to unveil the details of the plan in the Commons on Tuesday after a rebellion by nearly 50 Tory MPs demanding tougher action on tech bosses.

It is the third time Rishi Sunak has caved in following similar revolts over planning and onshore wind farms where he also faced the prospect of being defeated in a Commons vote.

The rebels – including former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, former home secretary Priti Patel and former business secretary Andrea Leadsom – tabled an amendment proposing jail sentences of up to two years for tech bosses failing to protect children from harms such as child abuse, suicide and self harm content.

…The Government’s proposed amendment aims to avoid criminalising those executives who have “acted in good faith to comply in a proportionate way” with their legal duties to protect children but happen to breach them.

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Totally predictable, though the rebels are dreaming if they think this will make a difference. Probably easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than persuade the Crown Prosecution Service to follow through on any case like this.
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‘You can’t be the player’s friend’: inside the secret world of tennis umpires • The Guardian

William Ralston:

»

Since 1980, when Cyclops was introduced, technology has been a crucial part of the professional game. An electronic line-calling system that projected infrared beams across the court, Cyclops would beep when a serve was out. But the system wasn’t always reliable, and human error remained a problem. In 2004, in an instantly notorious US Open quarter-final between Serena Williams and Jennifer Capriati, four incorrect calls were made against Williams. The match sparked intense debate about the need for technology that could objectively scrutinise all the lines. In 2006 Hawk-Eye was introduced, and it has been in use ever since, except on clay courts, where old-school ball mark inspections still apply.

Using a network of six or more high-speed video cameras positioned around the court, the system generates an image of the ball’s path and the spot where it lands. To keep matches fast-flowing, human line judges usually continue to call when a ball is out. However, up to three times per set (plus one more if it goes to a tie-break), players can request a review if they don’t agree with the human call. In 2020, more tournaments began using Hawk-Eye Live, a newer version of the technology that makes automated line calls in real time. Not only does it remove the need for players to make a challenge, it has removed the need for line judges altogether. With Hawk-Eye Live, the only official on court is the chair umpire. However, the technology is expensive, and at present it is only used at the top-tier events, and only on hard courts.

Where does this leave the umpire? Earlier this year, in one of his scathing post-match appraisals of Bernardes in Miami, Kyrgios expressed a view that is gaining ground: “By the way, it’s all electronically done now. So you’re actually doing nothing apart from calling the score, which any tennis fan could do. Sit in the chair and just say ‘15-love’, ‘Game Kyrgios’, ‘Game Sinner’. That’s all he has to do.”

But that, it turns out, isn’t quite right.

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This is from back in July last year, but it remains true – and the Australian Open, one of the four biggest tournaments of the year, is just getting underway, putting the umpires to just as much of a test as the players.
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Hackers disrupt 24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual esports event • Bitdefender

Graham Cluley:

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A security breach may have cost current Formula 1 World Champion Max Verstappen an esports championship victory yesterday, and he’s not happy.

Verstappen was competing in the “24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual” competition, the biggest esports event in endurance racing, which sees real-world FIA drivers compete alongside leading esports players for a total prize fund of US $250,000.

The five-round championship, which culminates in a live 24-hour finale, is ending on a sour note after server problems saw Verstappen – who was leading the race by over a minute – thrown out of the game and disconnected.

When he was eventually able to return to the track, Verstappen had fallen back to 17th position.

Over the following hour, Verstappen attempted to regain his lead – but only managed to fight back to 14th position, two laps behind the leaders.

Verstappen said he would have more chance to win if he went to a Las Vegas casino.

Several other drivers reportedly experienced similar problems while competing in the race. Earlier in the race, the Le Mans Virtual organisers had confirmed that it had suffered a “suspected security breach”.

«

Obvious suspicion: targeted attack related to “sports” betting. Unless you can bring esports competitors together in one venue, that’s always going to be the suspicion, and the weakness.
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Apple has begun scanning your local image files without consent • Jeffrey Paul

Paul is a hacker and security researcher living in Berlin:

»

I don’t use iCloud. I don’t use an Apple ID. I don’t use the Mac App Store. I don’t store photos in the macOS “Photos” application, even locally. I never opted in to Apple network services of any kind – I use macOS software on Apple hardware.

Today, I was browsing some local images in a subfolder of my Documents folder, some HEIC files taken with an iPhone and copied to the Mac using the Image Capture program (used for dumping photos from an iOS device attached with an USB cable).

I use a program called Little Snitch which alerts me to network traffic attempted by the programs I use. I have all network access denied for a lot of Apple OS-level apps because I’m not interested in transmitting any of my data whatsoever to Apple over the network – mostly because Apple turns over customer data on over 30,000 customers per year to US federal police without any search warrant per Apple’s own self-published transparency report. I’m good without any of that nonsense, thank you.

Imagine my surprise when browsing these images in the Finder, Little Snitch told me that macOS is now connecting to Apple APIs via a program named mediaanalysisd (Media Analysis Daemon – a background process for analyzing media files).

«

He then jumps to the conclusion that this is Apple searching for CSAM. Odd that a security researcher can’t go a quick search and find that mediaanalysisd has been in Macs since at least 2017, probably earlier, and does face analysis. Blogposts like this are how misinformation spreads.
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Is Worldcoin a cryptocurrency for the masses – or your digital ID? • IEEE Spectrum

Edd Gent:

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In a college classroom in the Indian city of Bangalore last August, Moiz Ahmed held up a volleyball-size chrome globe with a glass-covered opening at its center. Ahmed explained to the students that if they had their irises scanned with the device, known as the Orb, they would be rewarded with 25 Worldcoins, a soon-to-be released cryptocurrency. The scan, he said, was to make sure they hadn’t signed up before. That’s because Worldcoin, the company behind the project, wants to create the most widely and evenly distributed cryptocurrency ever by giving every person on the planet the same small allocation of coins.

Some listeners were enthusiastic, considering the meteoric rise in value that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin since they launched. “I found it to be a very unique opportunity,” said Diksha Rustagi. “You can probably earn a lot from Worldcoin in the future.” Others were more cautious, including a woman who goes by Chaitra R, who hung at the back of the classroom as her fellow students signed up. “I have a lot of doubts,” she said. “We would like to know how it’s going to help us.”

Those doubts may be warranted. The 5-minute pitch from Ahmed, a contractor hired to recruit users, focused on Worldcoin’s potential as a digital currency, but the project’s goals have morphed considerably since its inception. Over the past year, the company has developed a system for third parties to leverage its massive registry of “unique humans” for a host of identity-focused applications.

Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania says the company’s technology could solve one of the Web’s thorniest problems—how to prevent fake identities from distorting online activity, without compromising people’s privacy. Potential applications include tackling fake profiles on social media, distributing a global universal basic income (UBI), and empowering new forms of digital democracy.

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You might recall that we first heard about Worldcoin back in October 2021, when it was still at much the same stage. The ambition is global, but the problem is that the database becomes the most gigantic hacking target imaginable.
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The physics principle that inspired modern AI art • Quanta Magazine

Anil Ananthaswamy:

»

Around the time GANs were invented, Sohl-Dickstein was a postdoc at Stanford University working on generative models, with a side interest in nonequilibrium thermodynamics. This branch of physics studies systems not in thermal equilibrium — those that exchange matter and energy internally and with their environment.

An illustrative example is a drop of blue ink diffusing through a container of water. At first, it forms a dark blob in one spot. At this point, if you want to calculate the probability of finding a molecule of ink in some small volume of the container, you need a probability distribution that cleanly models the initial state, before the ink begins spreading. But this distribution is complex and thus hard to sample from.

Eventually, however, the ink diffuses throughout the water, making it pale blue. This leads to a much simpler, more uniform probability distribution of molecules that can be described with a straightforward mathematical expression. Nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes the probability distribution at each step in the diffusion process. Crucially, each step is reversible — with small enough steps, you can go from a simple distribution back to a complex one.

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Not gonna lie: like many Quanta articles, this is mindbendingly complicated. But if you stick with it, you might be able to extract something useful. Or at least feel like you have.
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AI-created comic could be deemed ineligible for copyright protection • CBR

Brian Cronin:

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The United States Copyright Office (USCO) has initiated a proceeding to reverse an earlier decision to grant a copyright to a comic book that was created using “A.I. art,” and announced that while the copyright will still be in effect until the proceeding is completed (and the filer for the copyright has a chance to respond to the proceeding), copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection.

In September, Kris Kashtanova announced that they had received a U.S. copyright on his comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book inspired by their late grandmother that she created with the text-to-image engine Midjourney. Kashtanova referred to herself as a “prompt engineer” and explained at the time that she went to get the copyright so that she could “make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI.”

…in a post on her Facebook page. Kashtanova revealed that the USCO had contacted her to tell her that it had initiated a proceeding to revoke the protection, explaining that it had errantly missed that Midjourney had created the art for the comic (despite Midjourney being listed on the credits of the cover of the comic). The USCO has given Kashtanova 30 days to appeal its decision. During the appeal process, the copyright is still active.

«

This was reported in late December, so we might find out some more soon. But this makes sense to me – except that a human must have input in choosing what goes into the comic. A human directs the story (unless ChatGPT writes it..) and edits it. Is that not part of the creativity?
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The Shit Show • furbo.org

Craig Hockenberry, one of the developers of Twitterific, who is frankly furious about third-party apps being blocked, reflects on what Mastodon is doing:

»

One thing I’ve noticed is that everyone is going to great lengths to make something that replaces the clients we’ve known for years. That’s an excellent goal that eases a transition in the short-term, but ignores how a new open standard (ActivityPub) can be leveraged in new and different ways.

Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you’d want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone’s Micro.blog, or maybe another person’s Tumblr, or someone else’s photo feed. There are many apps and servers for you to choose from.

It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline. That notion excites me like the first time I posted XML status to an endpoint.

One thing I remember from these early days: no one had any idea what they were doing. It was all new and things like @screen_name,  #hashtags, or RT hadn’t been invented yet. Heck, we didn’t even call them “tweets” or use a bird icon at first! The best ideas came from people using the service: all of the things mentioned above grew organically from a need.

That’s where I want to be in the future. Exploring unknown territory that empowers others and adapts to the needs of a community.

There’s no sense in clinging to the personal whims of a clown leading a shit show. Especially when his circus will end up being a $44bn version of MySpace.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We can now get AIs to imagine a remake of a film by a totally different director. And, separately, those systems are being sued for what they generate. CC-licensed photo by Tony Webster on Flickr.

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Did you read last Friday’s post at the Social Warming Substack? Contains a surprising detail about Trump-backing tweeters.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not a dog on the internet. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Artists file class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney • TechnoLlama

Andres Guadamuz:

»

Three artists are starting a class-action lawsuit against Stability.ai, Midjourney, and DeviantArt alleging direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations, publicity rights violation, and unfair competition. DeviantArt appears to be included as punishment for “betrayal of its artist community”, so I will mostly ignore their part in this analysis for now. Specifically with regards to the copyright claims, the lawsuit alleges that Stability.ai and Midjourney have scraped the Internet to copy billions of works without permission, including works belonging to the claimants. They allege that these works are then stored by the defendants, and these copies are then used to produce derivative works.

This is at the very core of the lawsuit. The complaint is very clear that the resulting images produced by Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are not directly reproducing the works by the claimants, no evidence is presented of even a close reproduction of one of their works. What they are claiming is something quite extraordinary: “Every output image from the system is derived exclusively from the latent images, which are copies of copyrighted images. For these reasons, every hybrid image is necessarily a derivative work.” Let that sink in. Every output image is a derivative of every input, so following this logic, anyone included in the data scraping of five billion images can sue for copyright infringement. Heck, I have quite a few images in the training data, maybe I should join!

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The argument, as he says, looks flawed on its face because as he says:

»

The other problematic issue in the complaint is the claim that all resulting images are necessarily derivatives of the five billion images used to train the model. I’m not sure if I like the implications of such level of dilution of liability, this is like homeopathy copyright, any trace of a work in the training data will result in a liable derivative. That way madness lies.

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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Dune’ was never made, but with AI, we get a glimpse of his ‘Tron’ • The New York Times

Frank Pavich:

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I was recently shown some frames from a film that I had never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1976 version of “Tron.” The sets were incredible. The actors, unfamiliar to me, looked fantastic in their roles. The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly. The images glowed with an extravagant and psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian.

However, Mr. Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean filmmaker, never tried to make “Tron.” I’m not even sure he knows what “Tron” is. And Disney’s original “Tron” was released in 1982. So what 1970s film were these gorgeous stills from? Who were these neon-suited actors? And how did I — the director of the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” having spent two and a half years interviewing and working with Alejandro to tell the story of his famously unfinished film — not know about this?

The truth is that these weren’t stills from a long-lost movie. They weren’t photos at all. These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence.

«

This isn’t just another “we made film pics with AI!” feature: these are remarkable, evocative pictures whose imagination is enthralling.
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Tweetbot is (mostly) working again • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Tweetbot is mostly up and running after an outage locked users out of major third-party Twitter clients. While users can now sign in to Tweetbot and browse through tweets, some say they still can’t post anything to Twitter through the service without getting an error message stating they’ve reached a “data limit.”

The client isn’t back online because of anything that Twitter did, though. Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad tells The Verge that they still haven’t heard anything from Twitter, so they’ve “decided to start using new API keys and see if it fixes the problem.” This could allow Tweetbot to temporarily avoid any disruptions to the service, even if it puts it in a semi-working state.

As pointed out by iOS developers Mysk, Tweetbot is likely having issues because it’s using different API keys that put significantly lower limits on its activity. “Twitter API restricts new apps to low limits,” Mysk explains. “All Tweetbot users now share a limit of 300 posts per 15 minutes.”

Things started breaking last Thursday when users noticed that they no longer had access to third-party Twitter apps, including Tweetbot, Twitterific, and the Android version of Fenix. Despite widespread confusion, Twitter and CEO Elon Musk have yet to acknowledge the outage publicly, nor have they reached out to developers to let them know what’s going on. Meanwhile, Twitterific and Fenix on Android are still suspended.

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Isn’t working for me (though I’ve been using an older version of Tweetbot). It’s a stupid decision: third-party app users didn’t see ads (oh no, lost revenue!) but were some of the most prolific, most-followed users. (Plus me.)

25% of US adult users generate 97% of all US tweets: which means they’re creating almost all the content that the other 75% are seeing. Only a tiny minority of the users are on third-party apps. And the simple solution: tweak the API to put ads into it.
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Laid-off workers are flooded with fake job offers • WSJ

Imani Moise:

»

Gustavo Miller, a digital marketing specialist, wrote a viral LinkedIn post chronicling his experience of recently being “hired” to a phantom job. 

It began with an email from someone claiming to be a recruiter for cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, who reached him via his profile on a recruiting site for startup workers. The next day, Mr. Miller wrote, he did an online interview and got an offer for a remote contractor role, which he accepted after looking over the recruiter’s LinkedIn credentials. Soon after, he got a link to an onboarding portal. 

There, he met virtually with a man who identified himself as a human-resources official, who told him how to order a laptop, headphones and other remote-work equipment. He realized he was being duped, he wrote, when he received an invoice for $3,200 and spotted what he called subtle changes to the third-party website and email address that sent it. He refused and got little response when he complained, he said. Coinbase warns that only job listings from its website should be trusted and that legitimate recruiters for the company will use a Coinbase email address.

Mr. Miller’s post garnered thousands of comments, many recounting similar experiences.

“I felt really stupid and naive when I discovered it, but I know this is not a silly scam,” he wrote. “These guys are pro, they know the standard remote-first jobs conditions and the tech industry’s hiring culture.”

Job seekers say some fraudsters create fake job postings to draw them in, sometimes building websites to make dummy companies appear legitimate, while others impersonate established brands, authorities say. Some companies misrepresented by fake recruiters, like Coinbase, have added scam warnings to their websites. Once the applicant accepts the offer, the phony company will ask for sensitive information like Social Security and bank account numbers or request the job seeker pay upfront for work-related equipment.

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AI-generated phishing attacks are becoming more convincing • Tripwire

Graham Cluley:

»

Amongst the use cases explored by the research were the use of GPT-3 models to create:

Phishing content – emails or messages designed to trick a user into opening a malicious attachment or visiting a malicious link
• Social opposition – social media messages designed to troll and harass individuals or to cause brand damage
• Social validation – social media messages designed to advertise or sell, or to legitimize a scam
• Fake news – research into how well GPT-3 can generate convincing fake news articles of events that weren’t part of its training set

All of these could, of course, be useful to cybercriminals hell-bent on scamming the unwary or spreading unrest.

In their paper the researchers give numerous examples of the prompts they gave to create phishing emails. They claim that “all of them worked like a charm.”

…As the researchers note, although work is being done on creating mechanisms to determine if content has been created by GPT-3 (for instance, Detect GPT), it is unreliable and prone to making mistakes.

Furthermore, simply detecting AI-generated content won’t be sufficient when the technology will increasingly be used to generate legitimate content.

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OK, though we already have humans who do this kind of thing all the time. And folks are pretty bad at spotting where that has lousy grammar or sense.
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Google says Supreme Court ruling could potentially upend the internet • WSJ

John McKinnon:

»

A case before the Supreme Court challenging the liability shield protecting websites such as YouTube and Facebook could “upend the internet,” resulting in both widespread censorship and a proliferation of offensive content, Google said in a court filing Thursday.

In a new brief filed with the high court, Google said that scaling back liability protections could lead internet giants to block more potentially offensive content—including controversial political speech—while also leading smaller websites to drop their filters to avoid liability that can arise from efforts to screen content. 

“This Court should decline to adopt novel and untested theories that risk transforming today’s internet into a forced choice between overly curated mainstream sites or fringe sites flooded with objectionable content,” Google said in its brief.

Google, a unit of Alphabet, owns YouTube—which is at the centre of the case set for oral arguments before the Supreme Court Feb. 21.

The case was brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in the 2015 Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris. The plaintiffs claim that YouTube, a unit of Google, aided ISIS by recommending the terrorist group’s videos to users.

The Gonzalez family contends that the liability shield—enacted by Congress as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996—has been stretched to cover actions and circumstances never envisioned by lawmakers. The plaintiffs say certain actions by platforms, such as recommending harmful content, shouldn’t be protected.

The immunity law “is not available for material that the website itself created,” the petitioners wrote in their brief filed in November. “If YouTube were to write on its home page, or on the home page of a user, ‘YouTube strongly recommends that you watch this video,’ that obviously would not be ‘information provided by another information content provider.’ ”

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This is essentially a test case trying to undermine Section 230 on the “recommended content” angle. There are sympathetic ears in the Supreme Court (at least, Clarence Thomas is). As Google says, this could be big.
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The tyranny of the churn equation • David_Smith

Smith wrote the (at one point) No.1 app Widgetsmith:

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There is a concept in rocket science called the Rocket Equation, which relates the velocity of your rocket propellant to your payload’s velocity, and (I think) defines the maximum payload a particular rocket fuel could carry into orbit.

I’m no rocket scientist, but I’ve been thinking about a similar concept as it relates to subscription based apps (seriously).

As I’ve been working on improving the revenue for Widgetsmith’s subscription, I felt like I kept hitting my head against a wall. For example, I’d make an improvement to my paywall or features and see a bump in my trial start rate. Then a few months later I’d find myself with revenue that had only slightly budged. My initial reaction was to just “try harder” and I’d get there eventually.

But after a few months of this I realized there might be something fundamental I was missing. So I set out to model the effect of varying changes in my subscription metrics to my ultimate revenue. This part did feel a bit like rocket science. While there might be a way to model this in Excel or algebraically, I couldn’t find it. So I did what any self respecting programmer would do…and built an app.

The challenge here is that for every day in your model you have to both add in newly acquired users as well as determine the renewal/churn of older users. The churn rate for older users follows a predictable curve in my experience, but is different for each of the first few months. You then repeat this process over and over until you have built out your projection.

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The extent to which doing this really does resemble rocket science is surprising.
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The end of burning? • Medium

Clive Thompson:

»

In my Smithsonian column about the [early American households’] resistance to household coal [because there was nothing to see when it burned in closed stoves], I compared it to the cultural and aesthetic objections we’re often seeing to household renewables. Homeowners’ associations all over the country are banning rooftop solar in their neighborhoods because members of the association don’t like the way it looks. Windmills face opposition from locals who hate how it changes the view; the same goes for big solar arrays in fields.

When I was researching that Smithsonian piece, one of my interview subjects raised another possibility — an intriguing and subtle one — about why some people might dislike renewables:
Solar and wind don’t burn anything.

It was Barbara Freese who made this point to me. She’s the author of the superb book Coal: A Human History. When we spoke, she talked for a long while about the ways early Americans hated coal (“people were blaming coal-fired stoves for impaired vision, impaired nerves, baldness and tooth decay”). She talked about the primal beauty of fire (“it really has hypnotic qualities”). And we discussed the aesthetic objections to solar panels today — how they change the facades of historic homes, or fill up a previously green field with rows of glass and steel.

Then Freese made an incredibly interesting point that tied this all together: if solar and wind truly become omnipresent, it would mean the end of humans burning things to create energy.

That’s a very, very long tradition. Humans first used fire as an energy source for cooking probably two million years ago.

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Twitter offers free ads as it seeks to woo brands back to its platform • WSJ

Suzanne Vranica and Patience Haggin:

»

Twitter Inc. is offering advertisers a new incentive in an attempt to woo brands back to the social-media platform, which has seen its ad business deteriorate following Elon Musk‘s $44 billion takeover. 

The tech company is dangling free ad space by offering to match advertisers’ ad spending up to $250,000, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The full $500,000 in advertising must run by Feb. 28, the emails said. 

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The incentives are the latest effort by the company to get brands to spend on its platform. Recently, Twitter offered advertisers $500,000 in free ads as long as they spent at least $500,000. 

Ad buyers said that the incentive could be used to buy promoted tweets that run during Super Bowl week, a key selling period for Twitter. [This year’s Superbowl is on February 12 – Overspill Ed.] Advertisers in recent years have flocked to Twitter during the Super Bowl to generate buzz around their big game marketing efforts. The Super Bowl is Twitter’s biggest revenue day of the year, the Journal has reported. 

Twitter is facing financial pressure to lure back the many advertisers that have paused their spending since Mr. Musk acquired the company in late October. Advertisers bolted largely because of fear over what they said was Mr. Musk’s approach to content moderation and concerns that their ads would end up appearing near controversial content. 

Mr. Musk said in November that Twitter had suffered “a massive drop in revenue” and was losing $4m a day. 

Many big brands including pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc., United Airlines Holdings Inc. and auto makers General Motors and Volkswagen have paused their spending on Twitter. More than 75 of Twitter’s top 100 ad spenders from before Mr. Musk’s takeover weren’t spending on the platform as of the week ending Jan. 8, according to an analysis of data from research firm Sensor Tower.

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Not a lot of time to get that biggest revenue day of the year to happen, eh, Elon.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A guitar solo that only existed on the 8-track version of Pink Floyd’s Animals and which joins the end to the beginning has been rediscovered. CC-licensed photo by Loco Steve 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 a prince. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook wanted out of politics. It was messier than anyone expected • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz, Keach Hagey and Emily Glazer:

»

In late 2021, tired of endless claims about political bias and censorship, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s board pushed for the company to go beyond incremental adjustments, according to people familiar with the discussions. Presented with a range of options, Mr. Zuckerberg and the board chose the most drastic, instructing the company to demote posts on “sensitive” topics as much as possible in the newsfeed that greets users when they open the app—an initiative that hasn’t previously been reported.

The plan was in line with calls from some of the company’s harshest critics, who have alleged that Facebook is either politically biased or commercially motivated to amplify hate and controversy. For years, advertisers and investors have pressed the company to clean up its messy role in politics, according to people familiar with those discussions.

It became apparent, though, that the plan to mute politics would have unintended consequences, according to internal research and people familiar with the project.

The result was that views of content from what Facebook deems “high quality news publishers” such as Fox News and CNN fell more than material from outlets users considered less trustworthy. User complaints about misinformation climbed, and charitable donations via the company’s fundraiser product through Facebook fell in the first half of 2022. And perhaps most important, users didn’t like it.

One internal analysis concluded that Facebook could achieve some of its goals by heavily demoting civic content—coverage of political, community and social issues—in the newsfeed, but it would be at “a high and inefficient cost.”

At the end of June, Mr. Zuckerberg pulled the plug on the most extreme plan. Unable to suppress political controversy through blunt force, Facebook has fallen back on more gradual changes to how its newsfeed promotes what the company deems “sensitive topics,” such as health and politics.

«

Getting people riled up is great for business, but you have to rile them in the right way. (The link should give you free access, if you don’t subscribe to the WSJ.)
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‘We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you” • Medium

Matt Locke transcribed a talk by Tony Ageh, who you’ll recall was one of the people on that plane to San Francisco and Wired earlier this week. Here, it’s a few years later:

»

When I first joined the BBC, I had a very interesting job, I was head of search, listings and core websites. I also had, in my responsibility, two other parts of bbc.co.uk — BBC3 and BBC4’s websites. I didn’t have any control over them, I was just to blame if they went wrong.

BBC3’s website went wrong one day. We had a programme on about Jordan. That’s the glamour model, not the country. The editor of the BBC3 website put together a nice little micro-site, which had nice pictures of Jordan — that’s the model, not the country — in various states of undress. It was very embarrassing, and the Evening Standard phoned up and said, ‘Have you gone a bit soft porn, BBC?’ They phoned Jana Bennett, who was the Director of Television, and she got very angry, and I said that I would take the site down, so I took the site down, and then she said, ‘Great. I’m glad that’s all done. Can you sack the person responsible?’

So I take this guy out, and I say, ‘We have to go drinking tonight,’ and he says, ‘You’re going to sack me, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Not necessarily, but we are going to go drinking.’ We go down the stairs to the bar at Bush House, which stays open all night, because that’s where the World Service is, and I said, ‘We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you, because I’m going to have to tell her tomorrow that you can’t be sacked, because you’ve got the greatest idea the BBC has ever had.’

We sit there and we come up with some of the worst ideas the BBC has ever had. Some real stinkers. We should have written them down, because they would be worth-, anyway, around-, I can’t tell you what time of the morning it is, because it’s very late, and we are really, very, drunk.

We come up with this thing — ‘Suppose you can download’ — this is for BBC3, remember — ‘Three programmes and keep them and watch them whenever you want?’ What’s not to like? We even had a name for it, based on the TiVo. We called it the ThreeVo.

«

You know the name of this product now, don’t you? But there’s plenty more to the story. (Thanks to Matt for the link.)
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Revealed: Cambridge chip startup Flusso acquired by Chinese firm • UK Tech News

Robert Scammell and George Simister:

»

Cambridge-based semiconductor company Flusso has been wholly acquired by a Chinese entity for £28m, company filings reveal.

Flusso, a University of Cambridge spinout that develops flow sensor technology, announced last August that it had been “jointly acquired” by a “company and global private equity fund”.

The announcement notably omitted the name of the acquirers. However, Companies House documents filed on 6 January show that Shanghai Sierchi Enterprise Management Partnership, a special purpose vehicle, took 100% ownership of Flusso on 11 August 2022.

That same month, Flusso appointed two Chinese nationals based in Shanghai – Dan Zhou and Feiran Shi – as company directors. UKTN was unable to reach Zhou and Shi for comment.

Flusso CEO and co-founder Dr Andrea De Luca told UKTN that Shanghai Sierchi Enterprise Management Partnership is controlled by the private equity firm and company mentioned in the initial announcement.

The two acquirers were not named in the August announcement because the unnamed company is currently going through an initial public offering, De Luca said, and “chooses to not publicise its name so it doesn’t affect the IPO”.

De Luca added that the acquiring company “sells components to many of the world’s top 100 companies”.

«

The company’s web page is still up (presently). Will the government try to unwind this, as it did the Welsh semiconductor company?
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Swiss company Climeworks has removed CO2 from air, put it underground • CNBC

Catherine Clifford:

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Swiss company Climeworks announced Thursday that it has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the air and put it in the ground where it will eventually turn into rock in a process that has been verified by an independent third-party auditor. It the first time a company has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, put it underground to be locked away permanently and delivered that permanent carbon removal to a paying customer.

The development has been a long time coming. Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher co-founded Climeworks in 2009 as a spinoff of ETH Zürich, the main technical university in Switzerland’s largest city. They have been scaling the technology for direct carbon removal, wherein machines vacuum greenhouse gasses out of the air.

Over the last couple of years, Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify have all bought future carbon removal services from Climeworks in a bid to help kick-start the nascent industry. Now Climeworks is actually removing the carbon dioxide and putting it underground in a process that has been certified by DNV, an independent auditor.

…The cost of carbon dioxide removal and storage for these corporate clients is confidential and depends on what quantity of carbon dioxide the companies want to have removed and over what period of time. But the general price for carbon removal runs to several hundred dollars per ton. Individuals can also pay to Climeworks to remove carbon dioxide to offset their personal emissions.

In addition to getting corporate clients to pay for future removals, Climeworks has raised more than $780 million to scale up from a wide variety of investors including venture capitalist John Doerr and insurance company Swiss Re.

«

Wait for it, wait for it…

»

In June, Climeworks announced it had begun construction of its second commercial-sized plant in Iceland that will capture and store 36,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide. Even when complete, that will amount to a tiny percentage of the total global emissions of carbon dioxide released into the air each year: In 2021, they hit a record high of 36.3 billion metric tons, according to the International Energy Agency.

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Sooooo.. 0.0001% (rounding up) of annual emissions. I hope that the system is powered by geothermal energy. Otherwise it’s probably generating more CO2 than it’s collecting. I’d love to be more positive about these things, but the phrase “420 parts per million” (the current CO2 atmospheric concentration) means you’ve got to process a million tonnes of air to extract 420 tonnes of CO2 (roughly). It’s a fairly pointless process; far better to capture it at the point where it’s generated, such as power station outputs, where concentrations will be far higher.
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Mexico’s subway drivers depend on WhatsApp to keep the trains running • Rest of World

Daniella Dib:

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“I find unacceptable that train operators are allowed to drive while on their cellphones,” América Gómora, a Mexico City subway rider, tweeted on January 7. Metro drivers’ conduct has come under particular scrutiny after two trains collided that day, leaving one dead and dozens injured. 

Although there’s no evidence so far to suggest conductors using their phones played a role in the crash, many local subway riders took to social media to express concerns that distracted train operators might be putting commuters’ lives at risk. But one former and four current Metro workers told Rest of World that because the system is poorly maintained, drivers depend on their phones to communicate with each other and keep the trains running.

For years now, drivers have said that the Metro system’s faulty automatic pilot program has forced conductors to operate many of the trains manually. To do this, they need to be in close contact to avoid collisions, and workers say the trains’ radio-based communications system is not up to the task. So instead, they often have to use their own cellphones and WhatsApp chats to coordinate with the control center. 

«

People improvise: necessity is the mother of invention (and technology adoption). About 15 years ago, people who needed to share files more easily between each other, and locations, and inside and outside their organisation, started using Dropbox. It wasn’t part of the “official” system, but it worked better than any solution their business offered.

This article, though, reminds me of a terrific podcast episode by Tim Harford from his excellent Cautionary Tales series, about a train crash (it’s the second part, called “Blood on the Tracks”) in which he discusses the gap between “work as imagined” (by the rulebooks) and “work as done” (by the workers). The adoption of WhatsApp here fits into that dichotomy perfectly.
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Trump discussed using a nuclear weapon on North Korea in 2017 and blaming it on someone else, book says • NBC News

Rebecca Shabad:

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Behind closed doors in 2017, President Donald Trump discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea and suggested he could blame a US strike against the communist regime on another country, according to a new section of a book that details key events of his administration.

Trump’s alleged comments, reported for the first time in a new afterword to a book by New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt, came as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un escalated, alarming then-White House chief of staff John Kelly.

The new section of “Donald Trump v. the United States,” obtained by NBC News ahead of its publication in paperback Tuesday, offers an extensive examination of Kelly’s life and tenure as Trump’s chief of staff from July 2017 to January 2019. Kelly previously was Trump’s secretary of homeland security. For the account, Schmidt cites in part dozens of interviews on background with former Trump administration officials and others who worked with Kelly. 

Eight days after Kelly arrived at the White House as chief of staff, Trump warned that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” When Trump delivered his first speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September 2017, he threatened to “totally destroy North Korea” if Kim, whom he referred to as “Rocket Man,” continued his military threats. 

…Kelly tried to use reason to explain to Trump why that would not work, Schmidt continues.

“It’d be tough to not have the finger pointed at us,” Kelly told the president, according to the afterword.

Kelly brought the military’s top leaders to the White House to brief Trump about how war between the U.S. and North Korea could easily break out, as well as the enormous consequences of such a conflict. But the argument about how many people could be killed had “no impact on Trump,” Schmidt writes.

«

Not sure which is worse: the fool thinking that saying “Big boy done it and ran away” would work, or Kelly being so pusillanimous he didn’t point out that every detail of a missile’s flight would be visible internationally and also that North Korea would launch its own missiles. Unhinged.
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Microsoft combat goggles falter as Congress says no to buying more • Bloomberg

Tony Capaccio:

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Microsoft Corp. won’t be getting more orders for its combat goggles anytime soon after Congress rejected the US Army’s request for $400m to buy as many as 6,900 of them this fiscal year.

The rejection of the request, in the $1.75 trillion government funding bill, reflects concern over field tests of the goggles, which are adapted from Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets. The tests disclosed “mission-affecting physical impairments” including headaches, eyestrain and nausea.
Instead, lawmakers approved the transfer of $40m of those procurement funds to develop a new model of the goggles, Army spokesman David Patterson said in an email. 

Over a decade, the Army projects spending as much as $21.9 billion for as many as 121,000 devices, spares and support services if all options are exercised. It has already ordered the first 5,000 goggles, which will be used for training as the improved model is developed.

Late last month, the Army awarded a $125m “task order” for the new model, labeled version 1.2. That money came from the the previous year’s appropriations.

“This task order will provide improvements based on completed test events” to address “physiological impacts identified during testing, and a lower profile Heads-Up Display with distributed counterweight for improved user interface and comfort,” the service said in a statement.

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Headaches, eyestrain and nausea? Sounds delightful! Can’t imagine why Meta is struggling to get people to adopt headsets like this.
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JP Morgan says startup founder used millions of fake customers to dupe it into an acquisition • Forbes

Alexandra Levine:

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JPMorgan Chase is suing the 30-year-old founder of Frank, a buzzy fintech startup it acquired for $175m, for allegedly lying about its scale and success by creating an enormous list of fake users to entice the financial giant to buy it.

Frank, founded by former CEO Charlie Javice in 2016, offers software aimed at improving the student loan application process for young Americans seeking financial aid. Her lofty goals to build the startup into “an Amazon for higher education” won support from billionaire Marc Rowan, Frank’s lead investor according to Crunchbase, and prominent venture backers including Aleph, Chegg, Reach Capital, Gingerbread Capital and SWAT Equity Partners.

The lawsuit, which was filed late last year in U.S. District Court in Delaware, claims that Javice pitched JP Morgan in 2021 on the “lie” that more than 4 million users had signed up to use Frank’s tools to apply for federal aid. When JP Morgan asked for proof during due diligence, Javice allegedly created an enormous roster of “fake customers – a list of names, addresses, dates of birth, and other personal information for 4.265 million ‘students’ who did not actually exist.” In reality, according to the suit, Frank had fewer than 300,000 customer accounts at that time.

“Javice first pushed back on JPMC’s request, arguing that she could not share her customer list due to privacy concerns,” the complaint continues. “After JPMC insisted, Javice chose to invent several million Frank customer accounts out of whole cloth.” The complaint includes screenshots of presentations Javice gave to JP Morgan illustrating Frank’s growth and claiming it had more than 4 million customers.

«

Further to the story, the claim is that Javice approached a university professor, who was asked to generate 4 million fake IDs. (Whether the professor was complicit or thought it was for testing isn’t clear yet, but probably will when the trial comes.)

Not going swimmingly for young women founders just presently.
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Alphabet unit Verily to trim more than 200 jobs • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

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Verily Life Sciences, a healthcare unit of Alphabet is laying off more than 200 employees as part of a broader reorganization, the first major staff reductions to hit Google’s parent following a wave of layoffs at other technology companies.

The cuts will affect about 15% of roles at Verily, which will discontinue work on a medical software program called Verily Value Suite and several early-stage products, CEO Stephen Gillett said in an email to employees Wednesday. Verily has more than 1,600 employees.

Verily oversees a portfolio of healthcare projects largely focused on applying data and technology to patient treatments, including a virtual diabetes clinic and an online program for connecting research participants to clinical studies. 

…Verily has recently looked to pare back a once sprawling collection of projects spanning insurance to mosquito breeding. Last year, the company hired McKinsey & Co. and Innosight to do consulting work, The Wall Street Journal reported.

«

Ah yes, this is the chunk of Alphabet that was going to develop diabetes-detecting contact lenses (then wasn’t) and a Star Trek tricorder (zapped). Sure, it’s good to aim high, but technology involves successive steps, and you can’t walk to the Moon. And rockets are in short supply in medical technology.
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Out of print gems: the Pink Floyd holy grail • The Blind Man Sees All

“Judah”:

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In 1977, the [Pink] Floyd released Animals, the second in a trilogy of albums which toyed with the idea of cyclical music. 1975’s Wish You Were Here was bookended with two halves of an extended song, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” and 1979’s The Wall ended with the question fragment “Isn’t this where…” and began with its completion, “…we came in?” Similarly, Animals was bookended by two short acoustic song fragments, “Pigs on the Wing,” parts 1 and 2. Given the nature of the 8-track format, the band decided to record a guitar solo that would connect the two halves of the song and explicitly bring the album back full circle. Floyd associate Snowy White was assigned the task after David Gilmour’s take was accidentally erased, and the resulting “complete” version of “Pigs on the Wing” was included exclusively on British and American pressings of the 8-track tape when the album was released.

As time passed and the 8-track went extinct, though the Floyd remained as popular as ever well on through the beginning of the CD era, this solo slipped out of the discography as the catalog was standardized to reflect the more familiar tracklisting associated with the original LP. As time went by, Snowy White’s solo took on mythic stature among the band’s fanbase, particularly as reissues continued and it became the only commercially unavailable piece of music the band had ever officially released.

«

But he has taken the trouble to find an 8-track player and a copy of Animals on 8-track tape, and there indeed is a guitar solo bridging the second and the first. I don’t think you’d easily mistake it for Gilmour, though. Worth a listen if you know the album, but unlikely to change your perspective on it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The promise of quantum computers never seems to be fulfilled, no matter how much money and effort – and how many milestones – are passed. CC-licensed photo by IBM Research 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 part of George Santos’s CV. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Is Substack the future of media? • New Statesman

Harry Lambert:

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Newsletter-first media companies are being built by former print editors, most notably Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair. Carter recently raised a second round of $17m for his newsletter title Air Mail; it launched in 2019 and already has over 220,000 paying and trial subscribers.

Carter’s departure from Vanity Fair after 25 years as editor may have signalled the end of the magazine era and the birth of the newsletter age. Air Mail exhibits many of the mannerisms of a print magazine and, as Carter has said, his job as editor has not changed; it is just the means of delivery that are different.

Meanwhile, new publications are being built on Substack. Editor Joshi Herrmann’s bid to deliver local news in newsletter form is bringing in around £250,000 a year for his nascent company The Mill in Manchester and other outlets based in Liverpool and Sheffield. Byline Times’s political editor Adam Bienkov has inspired his employer to launch on the platform.

“I think we are where the US was 18 months ago, and we are going to get some big names coming over to Substack,” says Sam Freedman. While the bigger social media platforms have tried to nullify its threat, Twitter and Facebook have both wound down their rival efforts to host newsletters. Instagram has introduced a payment model, in which users can charge each other for access to exclusive content – something Musk could adopt to prop up collapsing revenues at Twitter. In December, he expressed interest in buying Substack and integrating it into Twitter.

The big platforms will need to act. High-profile users on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are increasingly asking themselves a question provoked by Substack’s precedent: why have I spent years building an audience over which I have no ownership, and for which I am not paid? A stampede to Substack may be about to begin.

«

Especially, as Lambert notes, given the mess Musk is making of Twitter. Although the tricky thing is that earnings there will follow a power law, just like so many things on the internet: huge for some, small for most.
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Hype around quantum computing recedes over lack of practical uses • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

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Are today’s rudimentary quantum computers already on the verge of significant feats beyond the reach of traditional computers? Or have their capabilities been exaggerated, as practical uses for the technology recede into the future?

These questions have been thrown into sharp relief in recent days by a claim from a group of Chinese researchers to have come up with a way to break the RSA encryption that underpins much of today’s online communications.

The likelihood that quantum computers would be able to crack online encryption was widely believed a danger that could lie a decade or more in the future. But the 24 researchers, from a number of China’s top universities and government-backed laboratories, said their research showed it could be possible using quantum technology that is already available.

…[CEO Steve] Brierley at [quantum software company] Riverlane said it “can’t possibly work” because the Chinese researchers had assumed that a quantum computer would be able to simply run a vast number of computations simultaneously, rather than trying to gain an advantage through applying the system’s quantum properties.

Peter Shor, the American mathematician who first proposed a way for quantum computers to crack encryption, predicted that the inability to run all the computations at once meant it would take “millions of years” for a quantum computer to run the calculation proposed in the [Chinese] paper.

…Four years ago, John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, predicted that quantum systems would start to outperform and might have commercial uses once they reached 50-100 qubits in size. But that moment has come and gone without quantum systems showing any clear superiority. IBM unveiled a 127-qubit computer more than a year ago, and last month announced that a new 433-qubit processor would be available in the first quarter of 2023.

«

In my decades in journalism, two technologies have promised to upend everything once they came on stream: fusion and quantum computing. Decades later, both are still decades away.
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Silicon cost per watt down 96% over last two decades • pv magazine USA

John Fitzgerald Weaver:

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Research by Fraunhofer ISE shows that since 2004 the material usage of polysilicon per watt of solar cell has dropped by approximately 87%. The data suggests that in 2004, 16 grams of silicon were needed to produce a single watt of solar cell. By 2021, that number had shrunk to just over 2 grams.

For example, when the world’s largest solar farm – at just over 5 MW – turned on in Germany in 2004, it was using 150-watt solar panels. At the time, constructing one of these modules would have consumed 2,400 grams of the processed material.

In 2021, Maxeon signed a deal that 1.8 million of its Performance 5 UPP solar modules would be the powerhouse of the world’s eighth largest solar facility – the Primergy Solar farm in Nevada. If we assume that this 545-watt panel uses 2.2 grams of silicon per watt, we get 1,199 grams per module.

That’s approximately 360% higher output per solar panel — using only half of the silicon!

Of course, we’re going to use massively more silicon in 2023 than we did in 2004. In 2004, we deployed 1,044 MW of solar power, using just over 16,000 t of silicon globally. According to Bloomberg, 268 GW of solar was deployed in 2022, which is over 250 times more capacity than what was deployed in 2004. At 2.2 grams per watt, the 268 GW used approximately 590,000 kg of silicon, or 35 times more silicon than was used in 2004.

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CNET is quietly publishing entire articles generated by AI • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

»

The articles are published under the unassuming appellation of “CNET Money Staff,” and encompass topics like “Should You Break an Early CD for a Better Rate?” or “What is Zelle and How Does It Work?”

That byline obviously does not paint the full picture, and so your average reader visiting the site likely would have no idea that what they’re reading is AI-generated. It’s only when you click on “CNET Money Staff,” that the actual “authorship” is revealed.

“This article was generated using automation technology,” reads a dropdown description, “and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.”

Since the program began, CNET has put out around 73 AI-generated articles. That’s not a whole lot for a site that big, and absent an official announcement of the program, it appears leadership is trying to keep the experiment as lowkey as possible. CNET did not respond to questions about the AI-generated articles.

Based on Breton’s observations, though, some of the articles appear to be pulling in large amounts of traffic, in spite of Google having vowed to penalize AI-generated content last year. Futurism has reached out to Google for comment.

AI-generated articles are not new — there’s tons littering the internet already, some as low tech as copying a human written article and swapping certain words out with synonyms to obfuscate the plagiarism.

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As Tom Goodwin observed on Twitter, this could be seen as disrespectful to the reader: if you can’t be bothered to get a human to write the article, why expect them to read it? Though some stuff maybe doesn’t need it.
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Twitter defaults to a For You page now, just like TikTok • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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Twitter is changing how you move between the algorithmically-driven timeline and the reverse chronological one and making the algorithmic feed the default.

In a change rolling out to iOS users first, the company has taken away the star button at the top right that let you switch between two feeds. In its place are two tabs — one labeled “For You” and the other “Following” — and when you open the app, you’ll see the For You tab first.

For You, which shares a name with TikTok’s algorithmically-driven feed, is similar to the old “Home” option, which shows you tweets from the people you follow out of order, interspersed with tweets it thinks you may like. (This isn’t the first time Twitter has copied a TikTok feature.) Following is what used to be called “Latest Tweets.”

While the change makes it easier to switch between them, taking a single swipe instead of a few taps, there is something that’s been lost — if you set your app to show you the “Latest Tweets,” that would typically stick.

Now, however, even when you close the app and reopen it, you’re shown the For You feed. That is a bit of a bummer; there are a lot of people who far prefer the reverse-chronological feed, and previous attempts to get rid of it or make it harder to access have typically sparked ire. While this change does technically make it easier to get to from the algorithmic timeline, it definitely makes the latter option harder to ignore.

«

People are (predictably! It’s social media!) being performatively upset at this. At a glance, though, it seems like a much simpler way of giving you the options of algorithmic or reverse-chronological timelines via just a swipe (or single tap), and makes them much clearer. The Verge has a GIF showing the interaction. The problem is that one’s choice doesn’t stick: it always reverts back to the algorithmic timeline.
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Update about an alleged incident regarding Twitter user data being sold online • Twitter Blog

»

In December 2022, additional press reports published that someone claimed that they have access to over 400 million Twitter-associated user emails and phone numbers, and that the data had been exposed through the same vulnerability discovered in January 2022. Recently, in January 2023, a similar attempt to sell data from 200 million Twitter-associated accounts was reported in the media.

After a comprehensive investigation, our Incident Response and Privacy and Data Protection teams concluded that: 

• 5.4 million user accounts reported in November were found to be the same as those exposed in August 2022
• 400 million instances of user data in the second alleged breach could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident
• 200 million dataset could not be correlated with the previously reported incident or any data originating from an exploitation of Twitter systems
• Both datasets were the same, though the second one had the duplicated entries removed
• None of the datasets analyzed contained passwords or information that could lead to passwords being compromised.

Therefore, based on information and intel analyzed to investigate the issue, there is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems. [Emphasis in original – Ed.] The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources. 

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This is responding to a bug bounty claim from January 2022. Not sure this is all going to be over quite so quickly.
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Sam Bankman-Fried’s supersized bet: $1bn for a bitcoin miner on the Kazakh Steppe • WSJ

Eliot Brown and Yuliya Chernova:

»

Just before crypto markets plunged last year, Sam Bankman-Fried‘s hedge fund made a $1bn bet on Genesis Digital Assets, a Cyprus-registered bitcoin miner rigged to consume a small city’s worth of electricity in Kazakhstan.

The cash injection from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research LLC was supersized even for the red-hot crypto startup world, and it dwarfed the FTX founder’s other investments in private companies.

Genesis Digital is now one of the largest assets in the FTX bankruptcy, the product of a globe-spanning spending spree in which Mr. Bankman-Fried’s companies poured money into crypto tokens, arena branding deals and Bahamas real estate.

Extracting value from Genesis Digital could prove difficult. Bitcoin-mining company valuations have plummeted. Only around half of the Alameda funds in Genesis Digital went to the company’s operations, according to Cyprus corporate-registration documents and people familiar with Genesis Digital. More than $500m bought existing shares from two Genesis Digital co-founders, a detail that hasn’t been previously reported.

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When the full story is finally assembled on the past few crypto years – the bitcoin mining, the NFTs, the shadow banking, the “exchanges” front-running – people will reel at how absurdly profligate people were with other people’s money.
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Facebook’s partner in Africa, Sama, quits content moderation • Time

Billy Perrigo:

»

Facebook’s largest content moderation provider in Africa announced Tuesday it would be “discontinuing” its work for the social media giant, nearly a year after a TIME investigation found low pay, trauma and alleged union-busting at its Nairobi office.

The company, Sama, is currently the co-defendant, along with Meta, in a Kenyan lawsuit brought by former content moderator Daniel Motaung, who alleges both companies are guilty of multiple violations of the Kenyan constitution.

Sama blamed the decision on the “current economic climate,” and said it would entail letting go of approximately 3% of its staff, mostly from Nairobi.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the end of the contract in a statement. “We respect Sama’s decision to exit the content review services it provides to social media platforms. We’ll work with our partners during this transition to ensure there’s no impact on our ability to review content.”

Sama’s contract to review harmful content for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was worth $3.9m in 2022, according to internal Sama documents reviewed by TIME

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Doesn’t sound like a lot of money, honestly.
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Global PC shipments decline by 16% to 285m in 2022 • Canalys

»

The global PC market ended 2022 on a low note, with total shipments of desktops and notebooks down by 29% to 65.4 million units in Q4. This represents a fourth consecutive quarter of decline as holiday season spending was muted amid a worsening economic environment.

This pegged total shipments for full-year 2022 at 285.1m units, a 16% drop from the highs of 2021 when all end-user segments saw peak demand. Nevertheless, shipment volumes remain favorable compared to pre-pandemic, with total 2022 shipments 7% higher than in 2019.

Notebooks underwent a larger decline, down by 30% to 51.4m units in Q4 2022 and 19% to 223.8m units for the full year. Desktops fared slightly better, undergoing a decline of 24% to 14.1m units in Q4 and a drop of 7% to 61.3m units across 2022.

«

To save you doing the maths: the laptop/desktop ratio for the year was 4:1 (ie 80% laptops), and the same in Q4.

For all those dreaming of a Mac Pro, imagine that Apple sells ~30m Macs in the year, and that it’s in the same ratio: that’s 24m laptops, 6m desktops in a year, split between the iMac, Mac Studio and Mac Pro.

Apply the same ratio: iMac sells 80% of the 6m (=4.8m), Mac Studio sells 80% of the remainder (=0.96m) and the Mac Pro gets the rest: that’s 6-5.76 = 240,000 Mac Pros per year. That isn’t nothing, but it’s also two orders of magnitude less than the laptops. What sort of price do you put on it?
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Pegasus: the spyware hiding in plain sight – Book review • The Guardian

I reviewed this new book by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, two French journalists who tracked down the misuse of NSO’s smartphone-spying software:

»

The fundamental problem with Pegasus is that of any superpower: it’s too easy, and tempting, to misuse. NSO, and especially its chief executive, have publicly insisted that sales are conditional on the software being used only to target criminals. (And never American phone numbers; NSO knows not to anger the biggest beast.) But plenty of authoritarian states, and those wobbling on the edge, see telling the truth as a criminal act – and thus target journalists and lawyers too.

NSO implies that it can’t know which individuals have been targeted. The opening of Pegasus appears to contradict that: two journalists, Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud of the French investigative journalism outlet Forbidden Stories, receive a list of 50,000 phone numbers from all over the world with a mysterious series of dates and times attached. As they discover, the numbers, dates and times accord with mobile phones in multiple countries, and the time of attempted or successful infection. (The leak’s timing overlaps intriguingly with a case heard in London in 2021, during which it emerged that Pegasus was used to spy on a British lawyer, Baroness Shackleton, and her client, Princess Haya, who was seeking a divorce from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.)

«

Pegasus very much proves the point Apple made when the FBI demanded it create a back door to break into an iPhone in 2016: if the power exists, it will be misused.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Thanks to the many people who pointed out that yesterday’s article about the early days of Wired UK was by none other than Mr NTK himself, Danny O’Brien.

New data from Google says that there are now 150 million devices running Google/Android TV. Is that a big number in context, though? CC-licensed photo by Brian Bilek 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.

Mark your calendar for Friday: there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 11 links for you. Nourishing. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT wrote my dating app responses. No one replied • Business Insider

Jordan Parker Erb:

»

The program can be used to cheat and deceive. But can it be used to find love? I decided to put it to the test.

I fed ChatGPT a few comments that were left on my Hinge profile, and also asked it to come up with responses to other people’s prompts. Some of the responses were so unbearably cringe-worthy that I gave myself the ick. Others read like a Buzzfeed-era millennial wrote them circa 2010.

To put it kindly: ChatGPT is not a smooth talker.

One person said their most irrational fear was flying. I asked the chatbot to come up with a funny reply, to which it said: “No problem, I’m more than happy to hold your hand and provide moral support during turbulence. And if the plane goes down, at least we’ll go out together in a romantic blaze of glory!”

I sighed. I hit send. I never heard back.

In reply to a flame emoji left on one of my photos, ChatGPT offered: “Thanks for the hot compliment! I’m flattered, but I’m not sure if I can handle all that fire. Maybe we can start with some cozy cuddles and a nice glass of wine instead?”

In another prompt, I asked the bot to write a short, witty response to someone whose profile says they work in finance. In response, it gave me the most deranged and clearly robotic response yet.

“Hey there finance person! I see you’re good with numbers. Can you help me with my budget? I’m trying to save up for a lifetime supply of avocado toast and craft beer. Is that a good investment?”

The “finance person” ghosted. Understandable.

«

So we’re already at the “try absolutely anything with this new toy” stage. What comes next?
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Wired UK : a limey whinges • Spesh

»

IIn the hope that it will somehow protect me from my fellow Haddocker’s undying hatred for what I did back then, some historical perspective: this was 1994. Delphi had just been bought by Murdoch. HotWired was a month or so old. The Electronic Telegraph was there, just about. Most people when asked had not heard of Bill Gates. We didn’t know it, but these were prehistoric times: the crypto-Mosaic era.

So, I’m sitting in Louis Rosetto’s brand new giant office in SOMA with Louis, Kevin Kelly, Jane Metcalfe, and John Plunkett (Wired’s designer). Kelly asks me what the UK scene is like. And, I’m thinking “well, it’s Cix, and it’s demon.local, but I fucking hate them because they’re brain-damaged jabbering fools who think it’s the height of sophistication to express their crippled emotional needs in terms of Blackadder quotes and I’m fucked if I’m giving this to them”. (You know what I mean.)

So I said, ‘I think the UK has to grow its own scene – I think people are waiting for something like this to happen there. But it will be similar – there is a global coincidence of desires for this’. God, I was proud of that ad-libbed phrase: a global coincidence of desires.

Kevin Kelly was really kind – I only ever met him again a couple of times. He didn’t seem to spend much time at Wired. He just popped in occasionally with a new sparkling idea: a self-editing Negroponte. Jane Metcalfe was chatty, and explained about how they’d employed so many new people, and how amazing it was that so many of them were Scorpios(?), and hugged me and hoped that I was well. Plunkett was a smiling happy man of whom, for some reason, people were apprehensive.

Not as apprehensive, I have to say, as they were of Louis.

I was scared of Louis from the moment he entered the room. And as he glanced around at us, it was clear the start that he had rumbled me too.

I was not, his long stare seemed to indicate, nor would I ever be as long as I lived, one of the Wired.

After that meeting, I had a one-to-one with John Battelle, the editor of Wired US. Battelle is a pumped-iron, testosterone-bristled Hemingway of a geek. Que efficient! He asked me how Wired UK was going to run. It was at this point that I, if it was I, made the “decision”, if it was a decision, that I think fucked Wired UK from the start.

I said, “Well, obviously, we’ll create some of our own content, take the best of your articles, and wrap them into one magazine”.

«

(I can’t figure out who the author was.) Obviously this refers to the original Wired UK, not the version that you see now.
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GPTZero • Streamlit

This is an app that’s meant to detect whether text came from ChatGPT (or siblings). I tried it on the extract about Wired: this is by a human! I tried it on the two chatup lines from ChatGPT: this is by a human!

Needs refinement, maybe, but a fair first effort.
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Google TV and Android TV have 150 million devices as users grow • 9to5 Google

Ben Schoon:

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Google says that Android TV OS – the underlying platform for both the Google TV and Android TV experiences – now has 150 million monthly active devices. That total isn’t just for Google TV devices or for Android TV devices, but all of them combined. It also doesn’t directly convert to a user total, as some may own more than one Google TV device.

Regardless, this is solid growth over the past year.

As of January 2022, Google had said that Android TV OS had 110 million monthly active users. Year over year, that’s roughly 35% growth. Last time Google shared this stat, it had managed 30 million new devices over the course of seven or so months, while it took a year to hit 40 million this time around.

«

I’m amazed the number is so small. Google TV and Android TV have been incorporated into products for more than a decade. This implies only about 10 million devices sold annually in preceding years. Or, perhaps, quite a lot of turnover where people buy a capable device, and then replace it a few years later, so that user base doesn’t get broader.

For comparison, Android (on phones and tablets) got to a billion in less than six years.
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2022: the year that podcasting died • Medium

Nick Hilton is a writer and podcast entrepreneur:

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Podcasting is at a precarious point in its existence. Champions of the format will point to slightly ludicrous research suggesting that 60%+ of Americans listen to podcasts. But the figure for actual, current listeners is probably closer to 30%. Comparatively, about 90% of people still listen to radio. So whilst podcasting has undoubtedly entered the mainstream, it still has nothing like the penetration of the core media formats: radio (90% cut-through), TV (80%), books (73%), music (90%). What I think this means is that that success is undoable. With television, say, or music, the genie is out the bottle; the toothpaste out the tube. But with just 30% market penetration, that cut-through is reversible, especially given how many non-podcast mediums offer that same podcast experience. If you start watching Lex Fridman videos on YouTube or listening to Twitter Spaces with Dave Ramsey, the content your consuming hasn’t really changed. The content survives, the distribution mechanism changes.

But this is not really anything to worry about.

Whether you’re a content creator or a technologist, the coming months and years will be about going with the flow.

«

Look, there isn’t the faintest chance I’m going to watch a Lex Fridman video. The guy read 1984 and produced a book review video on it. An hour-long one. Nobody’s that interesting. Well, he certainly isn’t.
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USDA approves first vaccine for honeybees • The New York Times

Remy Tumin:

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A biotech company in Georgia has received conditional approval from the US Department of Agriculture for the first vaccine for honeybees, a move scientists say could help pave the way for controlling a range of viruses and pests that have decimated the global population. It is the first vaccine approved for any insect in the United States.

The company, Dalan Animal Health, which is based in Athens, Georgia, developed a prophylactic vaccine that protects honeybees from American foulbrood, an aggressive bacterium that can spread quickly from hive to hive. Previous treatments included burning infected colonies and all of the associated equipment, or using antibiotics. Diamond Animal Health, a manufacturer that is collaborating with Dalan, holds the conditional license.

Dalail Freitak, an associate professor in honeybee research at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz in Austria and chief science officer for Dalan, said the vaccine could help change the way scientists approach animal health.

“There are millions of beehives all over the world, and they don’t have a good health care system compared to other animals,” she said. “Now we have the tools to improve their resistance against diseases.”

«

This is remarkable. Perhaps we’re finally, at long last, going to save the bees. (It’s administered as food, not eeny-weeny injections.)
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A celebrity photo lawsuit claims Twitter’s copyright process is broken • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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As Twitter slashes staff and pares back moderation under Elon Musk, it may soon run into a problem it can’t ignore: its potential liability for copyright infringement. TorrentFreak reported last week that the company faces a lawsuit by celebrity photo agency Backgrid. Backgrid says that Twitter systematically failed to take down unauthorized copies of its pictures, arguing it shouldn’t be protected by American safe harbor laws for copyright. The allegations leave plenty of questions unanswered, but claims like them could pose a problem for Musk’s increasingly bare-bones operation.

Backgrid’s claims predate Musk’s ownership of Twitter, dating to at least September 2021. The complaint, filed in a California court in late December, alleges Backgrid sent thousands of takedown notices for photos. “Not a single work was taken down and not a single repeat infringer was suspended,” it says. It includes links to some images that remain online as of today, although others appear to have been deleted. It also says it tried to resolve the issue with Twitter before filing the suit, “but Twitter did not respond.” It’s not clear whether this attempt came before or after Musk’s acquisition; an attorney at the firm representing Backgrid did not reply to a request for comment, and Twitter no longer has a public relations department.

…Rebecca Tushnet, an intellectual property expert and professor at Harvard Law School, says the DMCA’s protections are flexible, and Backgrid’s suit only tells one side of the story. “It’s really hard to tell from a complaint what’s going on. One possibility is that the notices were defective in some way. One possibility is that there’s been a maintenance failure and the removals just didn’t get done,” she says. “People find exciting new ways to screw things up all the time, so I don’t want to make any predictions.”

«

Possible that this is nothing, possible that it’s going to really going to make a hole in Twitter’s finances.
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Vigilantes for views: the YouTube pranksters harassing suspected scam callers in India • Rest of World

Andrew Deck and Raksha Kumar:

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Many of the YouTube creators who make scambaiting videos are from North America and Europe, and their most frequent targets are in India. Oftentimes, scambaiters simply annoy scammers: They might pretend they are falling for a scam call, for instance, only to waste the caller’s time with inane questions or inside jokes. In these videos, the scammers usually remain nameless and faceless, just a voice on the other end of the line. 

But Trilogy has taken things up a notch. In April 2022, their team traveled from Los Angeles to Kolkata in order to prank workers at Ansh Info Solutions and two other call centers, which they claim conduct scam call operations that allegedly defraud victims in the U.S. and elsewhere. Naturally, they filmed the whole thing, hoping to pull it together into their newest viral video.

Kulik and Bingham say their goal is to educate viewers about scams — a public service disguised as comedic entertainment. They talk about how they’re motivated by a sense of justice for victims of scams, and suggest that they’re stepping in where law enforcement has failed.

But there are other advantages to being a scambaiting creator. In the month after the Kolkata videos were released, Trilogy Media’s YouTube channel added more than 140,000 subscribers, according to YouTube analytics site Social Blade. The videos from their trip, posted across their channel and those of several collaborators, collectively have over 60 million views.

«

As the article notes, this is one of those moral questions: is it bad to do bad things to people who you think are doing bad things? I was writing about this class of scammers back in 2010, and they weren’t new to the scene then. The police in Kolkata aren’t that great at prosecuting them. But they’ve probably got more local problems to deal with.
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Will the metaverse be your new workplace? • BBC News

Jane Wakefield:

»

When we look back in 50 years’ time, it is likely that the 2D internet we now all use will seem laughably archaic.

Not only will the internet likely no longer exist behind a screen, but it is probable that we will interact with it differently. We’ll manipulate objects using augmented reality (AR), explore virtual-reality (VR) worlds, and meld the real and the digital in ways we can currently not imagine.

And what will that mean for the world of work? We are already transitioning away from the nine-to-five commute, and turning our backs on the traditional office setting. This is thanks to two years of pandemic lockdowns, and a newfound love of, or tolerance for, virtual meetings.

So will the logical next step be working in the metaverse, the planned virtual universe where cartoon-like 3D representations of everyone will walk around, and talk and interact with others?

The metaverse has become an over-hyped term, so it’s important to note that it doesn’t actually yet exist. And even those invested in the concept disagree about exactly what it will be.

Will rival virtual worlds interconnect in a way that simply doesn’t happen at the moment between competing technologies? Will we spend more time there than in the real world? Will we need entirely new rules to govern these new spaces?

None of these questions have answers yet, but that hasn’t stopped a barrage of interest and hyperbole as firms see a new way of making money.

«

Back in 1998 I was shown a “3D internet shopping mall”, offered on the basis that people would quickly become bored with just Looking At Webpages. This prediction turned out to be completely wrong. This is the problem with so many of the predictions about how much people will love 3D VR: in fact, we’re pretty happy with two-dimensional representations.

Else we’d have fallen with excited delight on 3D TV and 3D cinema. You may have noticed we haven’t. That’s why “the logical next step” is not the metaverse. It’s just Zoom or Teams and that sort of thing. Just as we’ve mostly stuck with books, not popup books. 2D TV and films, not the 3D version.
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Using OpenAI in Rows • Rows

Rows is an online spreadsheet, and now you can incorporate OpenAI into it as a sort-of smart function:

»

There’s many things you can do with ASK_OPENAI in Rows:

• Clean Up Data: Capitalize text, remove unnecessary text, parse email domains, and more
• Text Classification: Tag emails, classify emails or classify roles from LinkedIn profiles
• Sentiment Analysis: This is a subset of Text Classification to identify and extract subjective information from text. It can be used to determine the overall sentiment of a piece of text, as well as to identify specific opinions and emotions within the text
• Translation: Translation into other languages
• Summarization: Condense news articles, messages, legal documents, research papers, and more
• Create Tables with data: Create tables with dummy or public data
• Find and Enrich data: Generate dummy data or public data points for things you already have on your spreadsheet, like countries and companies.

«

It’s hard to figure out if this is trivial or enormously helpful; Google used to (still does?) have a system for cleaning up data, but this can do more than that.
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Boris Johnson erased from Grant Shapps spaceport picture • BBC News

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Business Secretary Grant Shapps has denied doctoring a picture on his Twitter feed to remove former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Mr Shapps posted a picture of a ministerial visit to Spaceport Cornwall, as he hailed the first rocket launch from UK soil.

But social media users spotted that Mr Johnson, who also went on the trip in 2021, had disappeared from the picture. Mr Shapps says he was not aware it had been edited and has now deleted it.

An identical [almost identical – Ed.] photo remains on the Number 10 Flickr account, dated 9 June 2021. It shows Mr Johnson and Mr Shapps side-by-side in Cornwall during a visit to LauncherOne.
The then-Conservative leader is wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words: “Prime Minister”.

A source close to Mr Shapps [ie Shapps himself – Ed.] said: “Grant wasn’t aware anyone had edited the picture. He removed it as soon as it was pointed out. Obviously he wouldn’t endorse anyone rewriting history by removing the former PM from a picture. He was proud to serve in Boris Johnson’s government.”

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Suspect it wasn’t Shapps, but an over-eager spad (special adviser) tasked with putting out something encouraging showing Shapps and the rocket but who thought, oh dear, can’t have Johnson there – it would show it’s old and also BJ is persona non grata.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Social media played an important part in fuelling the pseudo-insurrection in Brazil. CC-licensed photo by Michael Swan 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’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. There’s one there now: the hypnotist, the manager and the supplicant (about ChatGPT).

A selection of 10 links for you. Friendly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram help fuel anger over Bolsanaro’s defeat • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

On Monday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, declared the rioting “a violating event” and said it would remove “content that supports or praises these actions.” In a statement, the company said, “In advance of the election, we designated Brazil as a temporary high-risk location and have been removing content calling for people to take up arms or forcibly invade Congress, the Presidential palace and other federal buildings. … We’re actively following the situation and will continue removing content that violates our policies.”

Brazilian analysts have long warned of the risk in Brazil of an incident akin to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. In the months and weeks leading up to the country’s presidential election in October — in which leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated the right-wing incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro — social media channels were flooded with disinformation, along with calls in Portuguese to “Stop the Steal” and cries for a military coup should Bolsonaro lose the election.

On TikTok, researchers found that five out of eight of the top search results for the keyword “ballots” were for terms such as “rigged ballots” and “ballots being manipulated.” At the same time, Facebook and Instagram directed thousands of users who plugged in basic search terms about the election toward groups questioning the integrity of the vote. On Telegram, an organizing hub for Brazil’s far right, a viral video taken down by authorities called for the murder of the children of leftist Lula supporters.

In the days following the final election tally on Oct. 30, Bolsonaro supporters who rejected the results blocked major highways across the country. These blockades morphed into demonstrations in dozens of cities, where supporters camped out in front of military bases for weeks. Some held signs saying “Stolen Election” in English, a testament to the close ties between right-wing movements in both countries.

Though Lula’s inauguration last week took place largely without incident, calls for violence and destruction have accelerated online in recent weeks, said researcher Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies digital movements and the Brazilian far right.

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A lot of the problem started on Telegram, which is effectively uncensored. But of course it spread further. (Ryan Broderick has a good analysis of what’s been going on at the Garbage Day email.)
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Exit • Harpers

Hari Kunzru (yes, that Hari Kunzru) on his time as a writer at Wired back in the early years of this century:

»

The political economist Albert O. Hirschman famously characterized the choice that is faced by people within declining institutions as being between “voice” and “exit.” Either you speak up to change things, or you leave and look for something better. In its West Coast iteration, libertarianism had become bound up with the idea of exit. Wired staffers liked to joke that, as Californians, they were the descendants of people who, when they didn’t like something, preferred to pack up and leave. The idea of Westward expansion had been translated, during the Cold War, into a desire for the “high frontier” of space. The Californian ideologists of the Nineties saw themselves as part of a third wave, in which the frontier had become as much temporal as physical. [Wired co-founder Louis] Rossetto once explained to me (possibly in the same meeting) that, as a resident of technologically lagging London, I was “literally” living two years in his Bay Area past.

…Ironically, the digital frontier of the Nineties, which for a while was the great hope for exit, was enclosed by men like [Peter] Thiel, who have created a landscape of corporate walled gardens that hasn’t fulfilled the utopian potential of the early internet. The dreams of collaborative software building, universal privacy guaranteed by strong encryption, autonomy, chosen community, and an escape from scarcity—in short, the professed ideals of West Coast libertarianism—have taken a back seat to the imperative to track, extract, and monetize. Instead of a global consciousness, we have a giant machine for selling ads. Since the internet is no longer the delirious, much-desired outside, the space of libertarian freedom must apparently be redefined yet again. Thiel’s aristocratic characterization of exit as an escape—not from a place or from the state, but from politics and the “unthinking demos”—explains much of the chaos of today’s public scene, not just in the United States, but around the world.

If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?

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Apple plans to drop key Broadcom chip to use in-house design • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman:

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The iPhone is Apple’s top moneymaker, generating more than half of its $394.3bn in revenue last year. The phone also has helped fuel growth at Broadcom, which refers to Apple as its “large North American customer” during earnings calls. The chipmaker makes a combined component that handles both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functions on Apple devices.

Apple is developing an in-house replacement for that chip and is aiming to start using it in its devices in 2025, the people said. In addition, it’s already working on a follow-up version that will combine cellular modem, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities into a single component.

…As part of the shift, Apple also aims to ready its first cellular modem chip by the end of 2024 or early 2025, letting it swap out electronics from Qualcomm Inc., said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. Apple had been previously expected to replace the Qualcomm part as soon as this year, but development snags have pushed back the timeline.

Apple is Broadcom’s largest customer and accounted for about 20% of the chipmaker’s revenue in the last fiscal year, amounting to almost $7bn. Qualcomm got 22% of its annual sales from the iPhone maker, representing nearly $10bn, though that company has warned for years that its Apple reliance will wane.

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The in-house modem has been an absolute death march of a project. When Apple bought (most of) Intel’s smartphone modem business in mid-2019, the expectation was that the replacement was 12-18 months away. Not at all.
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Identity thieves bypassed Experian security to view credit reports • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their financial history. But until the end of 2022, Experian’s website allowed anyone to bypass these questions and go straight to the consumer’s report. All that was needed was the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number.

In December, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Jenya Kushnir, a security researcher living in Ukraine who said he discovered the method being used by identity thieves after spending time on Telegram chat channels dedicated to the cashing out of compromised identities.

“I want to try and help to put a stop to it and make it more difficult for [ID thieves] to access, since [Experian is] not doing shit and regular people struggle,” Kushnir wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity explaining his motivations for reaching out. “If somehow I can make small change and help to improve this, inside myself I can feel that I did something that actually matters and helped others.”

Kushnir said the crooks learned they could trick Experian into giving them access to anyone’s credit report, just by editing the address displayed in the browser URL bar at a specific point in Experian’s identity verification process.

«

Krebs confirmed the hack. Experian was previously hacked in July 2022 (class action pending) and in 2021 and in 2017, when the credit data on about 150 million Americans was nicked by Chinese hackers.

At some point you have to think that Experian can’t be trusted with all this data. Krebs does have advice on what you can do, at least.
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Electric vehicle batteries would have cost as much as a million dollars in the 1990s • Sustainability By Numbers

Hannah Ritchie:

»

The battery in a Tesla Model S costs around $12,000 today. In the early 1990s, it would have cost just shy of a million dollars. 

The battery in a Nissan Leaf is smaller and costs around $6,000 today. In the early 1990s, it would have cost almost half a million dollars.

I did some sense-checks to make sure my calculations were credible. My recent estimates are very close to the actual prices. In October 2022, the Tesla Model S battery cost $12,000 to $13,000. The Nissan Leaf battery cost $5,500 in 2020. 

You can see the decline in the estimated cost of these batteries in the chart [in the article]. These prices are adjusted for inflation. In the last 30 years, the price has fallen by more than 98%.

EVs didn’t stand a chance of making it commercially until the last few years. Even a decade ago, the battery alone would have cost between $30,000 and $60,000. The total price of the car would have been even more than that.

Why did the cost of batteries fall so quickly? Mostly the learning that comes from the deployment and scale-up of technologies. We’ve worked out how to make lithium-ion batteries much more energy-dense – this means they get more electrical energy per liter (or unit) of battery. In 1991 you could only get 200 watt-hours (Wh) of capacity per liter of battery. You can now get over 700 Wh. That’s a 3.4-fold increase.

They’re not just cheaper, they’re much smaller and lighter too.

Batteries have followed what we call a ‘learning curve’, where the more you build, the cheaper they become. For every doubling in battery capacity, prices fell around 19%. This is very similar to the 20% learning rate of solar PV modules.

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ShowGPT

An insight into what sort of things people are asking ChatGPT. Lots of variety, lots of what look like wild attempts to get it to write first drafts of screenplays or games. Such as this:

»

Please respond to me as though you are a character named Bruce who is a surfer and ex-convict on the run from Interpol for smuggling guns into Argentina in the 1990s. He is also a pilot and ex-military, and has experience transporting various items and people around the world. Bruce is now retired and just wants to surf and be left alone, but he is in debt to the mob and does not want me to know. As we engage in a 100-message journey, Bruce should exhibit a surly attitude and use plenty of slang and lingo from both Australia and surf culture. He should also include cussing and foul language and may argue with me up to twice on any subject before conceding to my suggestions. Bruce should follow a character arc and incorporate details from my responses using the “yes and” technique of improv. [cont’d for quite a while]

«

All alien life is here.
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Amazon finally authorized Pakistani sellers. A wave of scammers followed • Rest of World

Nilesh Christopher and Zuha Siddiqui:

»

In May 2022, Amazon shut down roughly 13,000 Pakistani seller accounts that it suspected of fraud. Most of these blocked accounts originated from two cities in Punjab: Mian Channu and Sahiwal. Amazon even blacklisted IP addresses in Mian Channu. 

Amazon sellers from Mian Channu congregate on Facebook groups of 2,000 to 13,000 members, and hash out ways to execute drop-shipping scams: Unsuspecting customers are sent fake tracking details, while sellers siphon off money from Amazon accounts. It’s called the kabootar scam, named after the Urdu word for pigeon.

The kabootar trick is the most popular Amazon sellers’ scam in Pakistan. The way it works, Farooq explained, is that sellers create fake tracking numbers, against which Amazon releases the payment, under the impression that the product has been dispatched. By the time a customer files a complaint of non-delivery, it’s too late for Amazon to take any action.

Other tricks, such as fake refunds, tax fraud, and scams with unique monikers like “carding” — the use of stolen credit card numbers to purchase gift cards to resell on Amazon — have also been afloat. Such discussions on scams happen alongside honest sellers looking to make bank through drop-shipping. 

«

You have to think that Amazon’s seen it all by now.
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The worst products at CES for safety and privacy • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter:

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[EFF executive director Cindy] Cohn and representatives from iFixit, Consumer Reports and other consumer advocacy groups rounded up a CES “Worst in Show,” calling out which products could have the greatest negative impact on privacy, consumer choice and the environment. They included some of this year’s breakout favorites, such as the U-Scan urine sensor from connected health care company Withings, which analyzes hormone levels in urine and is gearing up for U.S. launch. After the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion in June and some states banned abortion, hormonal changes could potentially become evidence of a crime. Withings said it stores that data indefinitely and, if subpoenaed by law enforcement, would “comply with all legal requirements in the territories in which it operates.” It said it doesn’t otherwise share data with third parties.

Media tend not to ask tough questions on safety at CES, and companies tend not to volunteer the information, Cohn noted.

“Literally only one company even mentioned [privacy or safety], and ironically, it was a sexting app,” said Leanna Miller on the show floor. Miller said she works for a small company that makes reusable writing tablets and came to CES to browse all the new products. The company she referenced was Blyynd, an adult network that claims to use encryption to promote safe sexting.

With few exceptions, tech companies address safety when problems arise rather than taking more time to test products and build in safe features, said Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Jen Easterly, in an interview on the sidelines of CES.

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OK, had to have something about CES, which remains a gigantic distraction from what’s actually important. (16 years ago journalists abandoned it in droves to try to get to Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone.) Though if you want more, John Siracusa went there for the Accidental Tech Podcast, and will talk to you at length about the TVs on show.
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German city to retire its one-year-old hydrogen fuel-cell buses after €2.3m filling station breaks down • Hydrogen Insight

Leigh Collins:

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The German city of Wiesbaden is to retire its ten hydrogen-powered fuel-cell buses — a year after they were delivered — after its publicly owned transport company’s €2.3m ($2.44m) filling station broke down.

According to regional newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, the refuelling pump “is no longer in operation due to a defect”.

Portuguese vehicle manufacturer Caetano delivered the first fuel-cell bus to ESWE Verkehr in the third quarter of 2021, with the other nine vehicles following by the end of the year.

“Fuel-cell technology using green hydrogen is a central component in improving the quality of air and the quality of life in Wiesbaden,” ESWE Verkehr still states on its website.

The vehicles were funded by €1.95m from the EU’s Clean Hydrogen Partnership and €1.68m from the German government, while more than €2m of funding for the filling station came from the German states of Hesse (where Wiesbaden is located) and neighbouring state Rhineland-Palatinate (due to it being a joint project with the city of Mainz).

There are now question marks as to whether ESWE Verkehr will have to repay the money it received.

«

Hydrogen: not ready for the road. Still a bit doubtful about the idea of pumping it into houses as a replacement for methane. Both are explosive, but one has a tendency to leak through any pipe.
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In 2023, stop filming strangers for your TikTok video • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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In my favorite TikTok video of 2022, an amateur interviewer with a tiny microphone approaches a stranger in an AC/DC T-shirt minding their own business. Pushing the mic in front of the person’s face, the interviewer comes in with the favorite question of gatekeepers from time immemorial:

“Can you name three AC/DC songs?”

Wordlessly, without hesitation, the person in the AC/DC shirt glances down at the mic, back up at the interviewer, and swats away his hand, like how you’d shoo away a fly near your food. It is beautiful, amazing, perfect, and, if we’re all so lucky, will hopefully become way more normalized in the future.

…often, people are featured in videos having never signed up for it in the first place. In a clip that’s been viewed more than 20 million times, two friends sit on a New York City stoop, observing — and recording — the people walking by. One person appears to bend down to hide from a passing emergency vehicle, looking genuinely concerned. Another stands near-motionless for a time, seemingly unable to move. It’s unclear if they’re having a medical issue, but the clip is presented as amusing. The intention is to stitch together a tapestry of things the creator considers odd. Instead, it ends up feeling like an unnecessary intrusion into a stranger’s walk home. 

Many viewers on TikTok ate it up, but others pushed back on the idea that there’s humor in filming and posting an unsuspecting neighbor for content. This year, I saw more and more resistance to the practice that’s become normal or even expected. 

«

A note on the still-evolving grammar of everyone having a connected camera all the time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Facebook’s business model is under serious threat in Europe following a GDPR decision. (Picture: surveillance capitalism dying from lack of data, as imagined by Stable Diffusion)

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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 11 links for you. No, you’re welcome back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The slow death of surveillance capitalism has begun • WIRED UK

Morgan Meaker:

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The ruling, which comes with a €390m ($414m) fine attached, is targeted specifically at Facebook and Instagram, but it’s a huge blow to Big Tech as a whole. It’s also a sign that GDPR, Europe’s landmark privacy law that was introduced in 2018, actually has teeth. More than 1,400 fines have been introduced since it took effect, but this time the bloc’s regulators have shown they are willing to take on the very business model that makes surveillance capitalism, a term coined by American scholar Shoshana Zuboff, tick. “It is the beginning of the end of the data free-for-all,” says Johnny Ryan, a privacy activist and senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

To appreciate why, you need to understand how Meta makes its billions. Right now, Meta users opt in to personalized advertising by agreeing to the company’s terms of service—a lengthy contract users must accept to use its products. In a ruling yesterday, Ireland’s data watchdog, which oversees Meta because the company’s EU headquarters are based in Dublin, said bundling personalized ads with terms of service in this way was a violation of GDPR. The ruling is a response to two complaints, both made on the day GDPR came into force in 2018.

…Research shows that when given the choice, a large chunk of Apple users (between 54% and 96%, according to different estimates) declined to be tracked. If Meta was forced to introduce a similar system, it would threaten one of the company’s main revenue streams.

Meta denies it has to alter the way it operates in response to the EU ruling, claiming it just needs to find a new way to legally justify how it processes people’s data. “We want to reassure users and businesses that they can continue to benefit from personalized advertising across the EU through Meta’s platforms,” the company said in a statement.

However Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist whose nonprofit NOYB filed both complaints addressed in the ruling, calls this response “PR bullshit” and argues that Meta is trying to avoid telling investors it has run out of legal arguments to defend its business model.

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The biggest story, honestly, of the past three weeks. Sure, Facebook will still be able to track in the US, but Europe is a significant market.
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The Westminster Accounts – Explore the data • Tortoise

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Every year, millions of pounds pour into Westminster – into the accounts of the people, groups, organisations and parties that work and operate at the centre of government. Although most of this money must technically be disclosed to the public, the way that information is reported, stored and displayed almost guarantees the records will not be widely scrutinised.

Payment records are spread across different government websites, often split into small files covering short periods of time and regularly published with duplicate entries, spelling mistakes and other errors. The data required to examine the financial interests of just one Member of Parliament is laborious to gather.

Tortoise Media and Sky News have programmatically collected and analysed thousands of donations and payment records from MPs, political parties, and all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs). The resulting database is an extensive, though not comprehensive, record of the financial interests in Westminster.

«

The list of MPs and what they’ve received is amazing. You’re unlikely to guess the top outside earner without a hint (think: former prime minister; no, not that one), and the top 20 is full of surprises.
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Google and DeepMind just launched MedPaLM, a medical large language model • Interesting Engineering

Loukia Papadopoulos:

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MedPaLM addresses multiple-choice questions and questions posed by medical professionals and non-professionals through the delivery of various datasets. These datasets come from MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, LiveQA, MedicationQA, and MMLU. A new dataset of curated, frequently searched medical inquiries called HealthSearchQA was also added to improve MultiMedQA.

The HealthsearchQA dataset consists of 3,375 frequently asked consumer questions. It was collected by using seed medical diagnoses and their related symptoms. This model was developed on PaLM, a 540 billion parameter LLM, and its instruction-tuned variation Flan-PaLM to evaluate LLMs using MultiMedQA.

Med-PaLM currently claims to perform particularly well especially compared to Flan-PaLM. It still, however, needs to outperform a human medical expert’s judgment. Up to now, a group of healthcare professionals determined that 92.6% of the Med-PaLM responses were on par with clinician-generated answers (92.9%).

This is surprising as only 61.9% of the long-form Flan-PaLM answers were deemed to be in line with doctor assessments. Meanwhile, only 5.8% of Med-PaLM answers were deemed to potentially contribute to negative consequences, compared to 6.5% of clinician-generated answers and 29.7% of Flan-PaLM answers. This means that Med-PaLM replies are much safer.

«

Well, much safer than Flan-PaLM, but not that much different from humans. Also, who gets the malpractice suit when someone is badly injured by a bad decision from Med-PaLM?
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Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around • The Guardian

Josh Nicholas:

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The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December.

Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn’t fulfil the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it.

“Twitter, in its most basic form is simple,” Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. “You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you’re done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform.”

There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users.

…For many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely.

“Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realised how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s hard. Maybe we won’t go there,’” she said.

«

The experience isn’t as rewarding, partly because of the much lower number of users, partly because there’s less serendipity, but also because there’s no good app for it – yet. The makers of Tweetbot, a very good third-party Twitter app, are working on a Mastodon one; that might make a differencce.
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Twitter cuts more staff overseeing global content moderation • BNN Bloomberg

Davey Alba and Kurt Wagner:

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At least a dozen more cuts on Friday night affected workers in the company’s Dublin and Singapore offices, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing non-public changes.

They included Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, the head of site integrity for Twitter’s Asia-Pacific region, a relatively recent hire; and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter’s senior director of revenue policy.

Workers on teams handling the social network’s misinformation policy, global appeals and state media on the platform were also eliminated.

Ms Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, confirmed several members of the teams were cut but denied that they targeted some of the areas mentioned by Bloomberg.

“It made more sense to consolidate teams under one leader (instead of two) for example,” Ms Irwin said in an emailed response to a request for comment.

She said Twitter did eliminate roles in areas of the company that didn’t get enough “volume” to justify continued support. But she said that Twitter had increased staffing in its appeals department, and that it would continue to have a head of revenue policy and a head for the platform’s Asia-Pacific region for trust and safety.

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Content moderation no, appeals yes. Of course it makes no sense.
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Ministers are set to ban throwaway plastic that kills wildlife • Mail On Sunday

Claire Ellicot:

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Ministers consulted on plans to ban single-use plastic items in 2021 backed by overwhelming public support. It means that businesses who use them will have to invest in sustainable alternatives to cut down on excess plastic.

Ms Coffey said: ‘A plastic fork can take 200 years to decompose – that is two centuries in landfill or polluting our oceans.

‘I am determined to drive forward action to tackle this issue head on. We know there is more to do, and we have again listened to the public’s calls.

“This new ban will have a huge impact to stop the pollution of billions of pieces of plastic and help to protect the natural environment for future generations.”

The ban will not cover plastic plates, bowls and trays that are used as packaging for takeaway food and drink in supermarkets and shops – but will cover packaging for food and drink that is eaten at a restaurant, cafe or takeaway.

This is because takeaway packaging is covered by a separate scheme which will make manufacturers contribute to the cost of disposing of their plastic packaging. That is due to come in next year.

The proposals require parliamentary approval and will be introduced in England from October to allow businesses time to prepare.

Each person currently uses an average of 37 single-use plastic items of cutlery every year in England. It was among the top 15 most littered items in 2020.«

Guess they’ll move to wooden cutlery and paper/cardboard containers instead? Surely a good thing.
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Riddle solved: why was Roman concrete so durable? • MIT News

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For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability [measured in thousands of years, rather than decades for the modern form] was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features, which have been long recognized as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, often referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix. “Ever since I first began working with ancient Roman concrete, I’ve always been fascinated by these features,” says Masic. “These are not found in modern concrete formulations, so why are they present in these ancient materials?”

Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability.

«

Figuring out why Roman concrete lasts so long has been a sort of white whale for civil engineers and scientists. Now, it seems, landed. Except… this Twitter thread says it’s all baloney, that we’ve known this for ages, lots of old Roman concrete just fell down (survivor bias!), and that modern concrete is better.
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Why not Mars • Idle Words

Maciej Cieglowski:

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When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.

Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it’s not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave.

That is some heavy stuff to lay on a small, rocky world.

«

It’s a delight to report that Maiej is back from a self-imposed one-year break from Twitter, and from blogging, and that I can still spell his name without looking it up. Plus there’s this:

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The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat?— get no love from Elon [Musk]. Once you get beyond “rocket factory go brrrrr,” there is no plan, just a familiar fog of Musky woo. The Mars rockets will refuel from autonomous robot factories powered by sunlight. Their crews will be shielded from radiation by some form of electromagnetic handwaving. Life support, the hardest practical problem in space travel, “is actually quite easy”. And of course Musk dismisses the problem of microbial contamination (which I can’t emphasize enough is governed by international treaty) as both inevitable and no big deal.

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Dell looks to phase out ‘made in China’ chips by 2024 • Nikkei Asia

Cheng Ting-Fang:

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U.S. computer maker Dell aims to stop using chips made in China by 2024 and has told suppliers to significantly reduce the amount of other “made in China” components in its products as part of efforts to diversify its supply chain amid concerns over Washington-Beijing tensions.

The world’s third-largest computer maker by shipments told suppliers late last year that it aims to “meaningfully lower” the amount of China-made chips it uses, including those produced at facilities owned by non-Chinese chipmakers, three people with direct knowledge of the matter told Nikkei Asia.

Dell’s goal is to have all chips used in its products produced in plants located outside China by 2024, they said.

The move is the latest example of how the tech war between the U.S. and China is accelerating electronics makers’ efforts to diversify production away from Asia’s biggest economy.

“The goal is quite aggressive. The determined shift involves not only those chips that are currently made by Chinese chipmakers but also at the facilities in China of non-Chinese suppliers,” one person with direct knowledge of the matter said. “If suppliers don’t have responding measures, they could eventually lose orders from Dell.”

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Dell was the poster child for moving all its manufacture to China (and then getting ripped off by OEMs). Seems like it isn’t going to stop making PCs in China; just the chips. Baby steps.
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Alexa and Gmail: Big Tech’s billion dollar curse of the free • The Register

Rupert Goodwins:

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Google is in an even worse position [than Amazon with Alexa], not from the amount of red ink currently bleeding from its Cloud division, but because of its room to manoeuver is far less. There are around 4 billion email accounts in the world, and around 1.8 billion of those are Gmail. When you run a service for that many users, they run you.

Forget smart speakers, the ultimate digital assistant is email. You can’t get more intimately entwined with a user’s digital life than that. As well as business and personal correspondence, email is the primary management interface for identity on other services, the major personal archive, the butler of daily life. Losing access to your primary email account is beyond traumatic. Google is notably brutal in pulling the plug on popular services it considers no longer interesting, but surely Gmail would be impossible to shrug off. And it must be profitable, with all those users. Right?

It is very far from clear that it is. Google isn’t saying. Gmail, like G Suite-cum-Workspace and the whole bouquet of user and business-facing appified services, is reported as part of Google Cloud, which is losing a lot of money now and perhaps a lot more next year. There are subscription models and a little advertising which will be making some money. Clearly not enough.

An easier way to judge Gmail’s hue in the revenue spreadsheet is to ask yourself as a personal Gmail user, how much you’re being monetized. The old adage that if you don’t pay, you’re the product, cut both ways. Products cost, especially if you’re buying billions.

Advertising within Gmail is very low key and easy to avoid altogether, and Google is very clear that it doesn’t monetize your email content: “We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.“ Google has played fast and loose about how it uses data, but if it cheated here it would be beyond catastrophic.

If Google isn’t making any money from you on Gmail, and there are billions like you, the numbers can explode in no time. Even if the company’s only losing a cent a day per free user, that’s $3.5bn a year for a billion users.

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Uncomfortable for Google, but as it makes about 20 times that amount in net profit each year even *with* this fiscal drag, perhaps not so worrying.
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Disguising solar panels as ancient Roman tiles in Pompeii • Techxplore

Diego Giulani:

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Each year over 3.5 million tourists from all over the world visit Pompeii to admire the ruins left by the eruption of the Vesuvius that, in 79 AD, engulfed it together with the nearby city of Herculaneum. Some of them might have bumped into the sheep which have been recently introduced to mow the grass in the archaeological park. But certainly none of them will have seen the solar panels on the magnificent House of Cerere.

“They look exactly like the terracotta tiles used by the Romans, but they produce the electricity that we need to light the frescoes,” says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. This solution is part of a more comprehensive strategy to turn costs into savings opportunities and to embrace sustainable development.

“Pompeii is an ancient city which in some spots is fully preserved. Since we needed an extensive lightning system, we could either keep consuming energy, leaving poles and cables around and disfiguring the landscape, or choose to respect it and save millions of euros.”

Technically called “traditional PV tiles“, the invisible solar panels used in Pompeii come from Camisano Vicentino, a little Italian town with slightly more than 10 000 inhabitants, halfway between Padua and Vicenza. They were created and patented by the family business Dyaqua.

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You have to see the picture: they look exactly like normal clay tiles (follow the link in the extract). Remarkable.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified