The Hunga-Tonga volcanic eruption was one of the biggest recorded – but the aftermath has had surprisingly little effect on the climate. CC-licensed photo by James St. John on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. A shower, you say? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Eight months pregnant and arrested after false facial recognition match • The New York Times
Kashmir Hill:
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Porcha Woodruff was getting her two daughters ready for school when six police officers showed up at her door in Detroit. They asked her to step outside because she was under arrest for robbery and carjacking.
“Are you kidding?” she recalled saying to the officers. Ms. Woodruff, 32, said she gestured at her stomach to indicate how ill-equipped she was to commit such a crime: She was eight months pregnant.
Handcuffed in front of her home on a Thursday morning last February, leaving her crying children with her fiancé, Ms. Woodruff was taken to the Detroit Detention Center. She said she was held for 11 hours, questioned about a crime she said she had no knowledge of, and had her iPhone seized to be searched for evidence.
“I was having contractions in the holding cell. My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms. I think I was probably having a panic attack,” said Ms. Woodruff, a licensed aesthetician and nursing school student. “I was hurting, sitting on those concrete benches.”
After being charged in court with robbery and carjacking, Ms. Woodruff was released that evening on a $100,000 personal bond. In an interview, she said she went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and given two bags of intravenous fluids. A month later, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her.
The ordeal started with an automated facial recognition search, according to an investigator’s report from the Detroit Police Department. Ms. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime as a result of facial recognition technology used by police to match an unknown offender’s face to a photo in a database. All six people have been Black; Ms. Woodruff is the first woman to report it happening to her.
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American police. Truly the example for us all: the example of how not to do it.
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The internet speech case that the US Supreme Court can’t dodge • WIRED
Jeff Kosseff:
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Despite their reluctance to decide lofty cyber issues, there is a good chance that another internet law dispute will come before the justices in the next year. And this time, it will be difficult for them to avoid directly deciding the issue and having a huge impact on how the internet looks for decades to come.
The disputes involve two similar Texas and Florida laws which both restrict platforms from moderating certain speech and require transparency about user content policies. The Texas law, for example, states that large social media platforms “may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person” based on viewpoints or the users’ location. NetChoice, a group representing tech companies, has challenged both laws.
Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit struck down Florida’s moderation restrictions. Judge Kevin Newsom wrote that platforms’ content moderation choices “constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment,” so the law likely violates the First Amendment. But later that year, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the Texas law. “Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote.
The Florida and Texas laws are not identical, but it is impossible to reconcile the courts’ opinions. In the Eleventh Circuit, tech companies have a First Amendment right to moderate user content as they see fit. In the Fifth Circuit, they do not. Lawyers refer to this problem—having different legal rules depending on what part of the country you’re in—as a “circuit split.” And a circuit split is particularly problematic for issues involving the internet, which reaches across state borders.
The Supreme Court receives more than 7,000 requests to review lower court decisions each year, and typically grants less than 1% of them. But the chances of the Supreme Court reviewing the NetChoice cases are greater than those of an average dispute.
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I’d love to think SCOTUS will robustly uphold Section 230, but I’d rather the opportunity didn’t come up. Clarence Thomas is definitely against it. And he’s not even the most bonkers of them.
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CNET deletes thousands of old articles to game Google search • Gizmodo
Thomas Germain:
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Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned.
Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET’s editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots.
…Many companies live or die by their performance on Google Search, but Google is tight-lipped about the workings of its algorithms. SEO [search engine optimisation, of both site and stories] is now one of the primary drivers of editorial strategy in the journalism and media business. News sites and media companies often base their entire editorial strategies on SEO best practices, some of which amount to trial and error and guessing games.
Google does not recommend deleting articles just because they’re considered “older,” said Danny Sullivan, the company’s Public Liaison for Google Search. In fact, the practice is something Google has advised against for years. After Gizmodo’s request for comment, Sullivan posted a series of tweets on the subject.
“Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn’t like ‘old’ content? That’s not a thing! Our guidance doesn’t encourage this,” Sullivan tweeted.
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It’s funny how our modern age still has its own version of astrology/ cargo cults (“we do this thing and pray that the good vibes follow”) for search, and is just developing another one, with AI prompts for illustrations.
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The two bets • The Future, Now and Then
Dave Karpf (who has been reading back issues of WIRED magazine so you don’t have to):
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what’s more important for the purpose of this essay is why WIRED, circa 1997, decided to reach back to a 1990 academic bet and canonize Julian Simon as one of their patron saints. Simon was a third-rate business administration professor, furious that the world never hailed him as a first-class economist. He also, ohbytheway, believed that there was an infinite supply of copper because, at the right price point, humankind would just figure out how to transmute copper from other metals. (Sabin, p. 132)
The guy was a crank and a malcontent. His relationship to the “digital generation” that WIRED typically elevated to hero-status was slim at best. But he had chosen the right enemies. Julian Simon’s bet [against doomster environmentalist Paul Ehrlich] was a useful shorthand for “see, things are getting better. Government regulations never solve anything. A new era of abundance is arriving now, and anyone who disagrees is a fool or a liar.”
And that, more than advances in interconnected computing devices, was the story that WIRED wanted to tell.
…There’s an old saying from my activist days: “environmentalists are the only people predicting the future who want to be wrong.”
It would be so nice if the libertarian techno-optimism of the 90s been actually been right. What a wonderful world that would be. I would love for my kids to be growing up in the world they imagined we were building. But does anyone honestly believe that?
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Fabulously entertaining, as Karpf’s essays all are.
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It’s so over. Now what? • Macroscience
Tim Hwang:
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Consider LK-99 [the turns-out-not-to-be room temperature ambient pressure superconductor] as a global spasm of participatory science. ArXiv served as a launchpad for disseminating an exciting research opportunity beyond the strictures of traditional scientific publishing. Social media opened up the game, enabling seasoned experts, attention-seeking ignoramuses, weirdo basement tinkerers, and competing laboratories all to push, prod, attack, and defend the opportunity.
The result? More rapid and comprehensive scrutiny of a scientific claim than would have happened through traditional scholarly channels. We also got widespread experimental replication, an inarguably important but low-prestige and frequently underinvested-in part of the usual academic pipeline.
We can also praise LK-99 from the point of view of public pedagogy. It served to massively advance public awareness of the importance of materials science in everyday life. In the public mind, it affirmed replication as a fundamental building block of scientific validity. It highlighted the idea of science as accessible and belonging to the public, rather than the exclusive province of a scholarly high priesthood.
Despite these silver linings, it is easy to dismiss the fervor around LK-99 because it runs so against the grain of what we expect of science. We expect sober institutions run by established experts, carefully crafting experiments and publishing heavily reviewed results over a period of years. This is science as a slow-moving chess game, with a final, conclusive result of “true” or “false” being rendered to the public at the end of the process.
This was not LK-99. LK-99 was all about obsessively checking the prediction markets and a genuinely beautiful Wikipedia page every hour, gleefully and inanely shouting “we’re so back” and “it’s so over” as each new bit of data or speculation shifted the marginal epistemological balance. LK-99 was Gamestop Science, AMC Science, Meme Science.
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Some science moves slowly, some science – like this one – moves fast. Meme science, indeed.
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PayPal crypto chief Jose Fernandez da Ponte on battling Tether, USDC
MacKenzie Sigalos and Jordan Smith:
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PayPal has become the first major US fintech company to offer its own crypto token with a dollar-pegged stablecoin known as PayPal USD, making big promises of how it can move money between millions of crypto investors.
The company is entering an extremely crowded market already dominated by stablecoins like tether and USDC, at a time when the hype over cryptocurrency has largely fizzled and prices have been mostly stable with no big run-ups since 2022.
But the company’s chief crypto exec tells CNBC that the payment processor is confident in its timing – and its competitive advantage in the space.
“Stablecoins are the killer application for blockchains right now,” said Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s senior vice president and general manager of blockchain, crypto, and digital currencies.
“There are inherent advantages in cost, programmability, settlement time,” continued da Ponte, adding that the market is primed for new entrants that are fully backed – and unlike tether, fully regulated.
“Stablecoins are something that we cannot just sit out,” da Ponte added.
…But many of the people who deal in stablecoins don’t necessarily want safe. They want an easier way of doing business, especially internationally.
“It’s just an alternative payments network, built on top of the commercial bank system,” Nic Carter, founding partner at Castle Island Ventures, previously told CNBC. “It’s like open banking on steroids. It is very interoperable, it is relatively transparent, and in theory, you can get faster settlement and faster cross-border settlement, because it’s not encumbered [by making a claim on a central bank].”
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US special counsel obtained search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account • The Guardian
Kari Paul and agencies:
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The US special counsel who is investigating Donald Trump obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, and the social media platform delayed complying, a court filing on Wednesday showed.
The delay in compliance prompted a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.
The filing says the team of US special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter, which recently rebranded to X, to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant.
The filing says prosecutors got the search warrant after a court “found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses”. The court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump would “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior”, according to the filing.
It’s unclear what information Smith may have sought from Trump’s Twitter account. Possibilities include data about when and where the posts were written, their engagement and the identities of other accounts that reposted Trump’s content.
Twitter objected to the non-disclosure agreement, saying four days after the compliance deadline that it would not produce any of the account information, according to the ruling.
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I’d imagine they were looking for direct messages from people connected to the attack on the Capitol. Seems an obvious avenue to investigate. And that’s $350k Twitter won’t get back.
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A woman was attacked by a snake that fell from the sky. Then a hawk dived in • The New York Times
Chang Che:
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One should never get in the way of a hawk and its prey.
Peggy Jones learned that lesson in a most unwitting way on July 25 as she and her husband were finishing a day of yard work on a six-acre property that they own in Silsbee, Texas, about 100 miles northeast of Houston.
First, in an improbable occurrence, a snake fell from the clear blue sky, wrapping itself tightly around Ms. Jones’s right forearm. “I immediately screamed and started swinging my arm to shake the snake off,” Ms. Jones, 64, said in an interview. “I was screaming, ‘Jesus, help me, please, Jesus, help me!’”
The snake wrapped itself around her arm more tightly. It hissed and lunged at her face, at times striking her glasses. But then, Ms. Jones realized, the snake, too, was an unwitting victim. A brown-and-white hawk flying overhead had fumbled and dropped the four-and-a-half-foot-long scaly creature. The hawk quickly joined the fracas, swooping down to wrench its serpentine dinner from Ms. Jones’ arm.
The hawk snatched, scratched and jabbed at her arm “three to four times,” to reclaim its meal, Ms. Jones recalled. Each time, its powerful talons slashed her forearm. At one point, the bird dragged Ms. Jones’s arm up into the air. On the fourth try, it successfully uncoiled the snake and flew away. The “horrific” ordeal, Ms. Jones said, lasted about 15 to 20 seconds, and left her arm scratched, bruised and punctured.
…Her nightmares vary. Some are a rehash of the encounter, Ms. Jones said, while others are stranger.
“Sometimes I’m in a room and there’s snakes on the wall and snakes on the ceiling and snakes all over the floor,” she said.
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All she needs is a son called Indiana to whom she tells the tale. Perfect origin story.
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The climate impact of the Hunga-Tonga volcanic eruption • The Climate Brink
Andrew Dessler:
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Volcanoes play a key role in the Earth’s climate. On geologic time scales, they are a key regulator of the carbon cycle that regulates atmospheric carbon dioxide. On shorter time scales, eruptions can also have profound, temporary impacts.
In January 2022, Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai (hereafter, HT) erupted in one of the most dramatic geologic events in recorded history. The eruption of HT sent sulfur and water vapour deep into the stratosphere. The spectacular nature of this event has led many climate deniers to proclaim that this is why it’s so hot this summer. Let’s dig into that claim.
…The eruption of the HT volcano was unusual in that it also injected a massive amount of water vapour into the stratosphere. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, so this injection of water will tend to warm the climate.
[After citing three papers which suggest there will be really minimal warming from HT] …You’re probably wondering why the huge amount of water injected into the stratosphere isn’t warming the climate much. The reason is where the water went: most of the water was sent really high into the stratosphere, above 25 km. At that height, water has a minimal effect on the climate.
…The impact of HT is something that we understand reasonably well and everything we know suggests that it will have a very small impact on the global climate — in fact, it’s as likely to be cooling the climate as it is to be warming it. If you’re sweating right now, don’t blame HT. Blame fossil fuels.
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Just so you know when you bump into someone talking nonsense about the climate.
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Culture vultures • ROUGH TYPE
Nick Carr:
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there is something ominous about a superbillionaire taking over what had become a sort of public square, a centre of discourse, for crying out loud, and doing with it what he pleases, including some pretty perverted acts. I mean, that X logo? Virginia Heffernan compares it to “the skull and crossbones on cartoon bottles of poison.” To me, it looks like something that a cop might spray-paint on a floor to mark the spot where a corpse lay before it was removed—the corpse in this case being the bird’s.
Musk’s toying dismemberment of Twitter feels even more unsettling in the wake of the announcement yesterday that private-equity giant KKR is buying Simon & Schuster, publisher of Catch-22 and Den of Thieves, among other worthy titles, for a measly billion and a half. Says S&S CEO Jon Karp: “They plan to invest in us and make us even greater than we already are. What more could a publishing company want?” That would have made a funny tweet.
Both gambits are asset plays, or, maybe a better term, asset undertakings. I don’t understand everything Musk’s doing—manic episodes have their own logic—but he does get an established social-media platform and a big pile of content to feed into the large language model he’s building at xAI. (Fun game: connect the Xs.) KKR gets its own pile of content to, uh, leverage. Its intentions probably aren’t entirely literary.
Well-turned sentences had a decent run, but after TikTok they’ve become depreciating assets. Traditional word-based culture—and, sure, I’ll stick Twitter into that category—is beginning to look like a feeding ground for vultures. Tell Colleen Hoover [S&S author of It Ends with Us] to turn out the lights when she leaves.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 