The UK’s National Air Traffic Control has explained how a peculiar flight plan lead to chaos in a new report. CC-licensed photo by Mark Hodson Photos on Flickr.
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On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 10 links for you. End to end. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Government denies U-turn on encrypted messaging row • BBC News
Zoe Kleinman, Tom Gerken and Chris Vallance:
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platforms like WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage say they cannot access or view anybody’s messages without destroying existing privacy protections for all users, and have threatened to leave the UK rather than compromise message security.
The debate has raged for several months and for some it has turned into an argument about privacy versus the protection of children. The government insists it is possible to have both.
The Online Safety Bill is due to become law in autumn and cleared its final stage in the House of Lords on Wednesday before returning to the commons.
The government has denied that its position has changed. In a statement in the House of Lords, the minister, Lord Parkinson, clarified that if the technology to access messages without breaking their security did not exist, then Ofcom would have the power to ask companies to develop the ability to identify and remove illegal child sexual abuse content on their platforms.
Indeed, the Bill already stated that the regulator Ofcom would only ask tech firms to access messages once “feasible technology” had been developed which would specifically only target child abuse content and not break encryption.
The government has tasked tech firms with inventing these tools.
“As has always been the case, as a last resort, on a case-by-case basis and only when stringent privacy safeguards have been met, [the Bill] will enable Ofcom to direct companies to either use, or make best efforts to develop or source, technology to identify and remove illegal child sexual abuse content – which we know can be developed,” said a government spokesperson.
Some security experts suggest such tech tools may never exist, and the tech firms themselves say it is not possible.
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Lovely solution: the government is telling the tech firms to invent a totally new mathematics. I suppose that quantum computing might, somehow, someday, make such decryption possible, but essentially it’s asking them to invent the mathematical equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
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Experts warn RAAC concrete affects thousands of UK buildings – BBC News
Pallab Ghosh:
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Tens of thousands of government and privately owned buildings should be safety checked because of crumbling RAAC concrete, experts say.
The team that alerted the government to the problems posed by the concrete said safety checks will need to be regular.
The Loughborough University team told BBC News about their research and their advice for dealing with the problem. Prof Chris Goodier said most affected buildings were probably not dangerous but should be inspected just in case. “We’ve suddenly found out that a certain proportion of our building stock is not as good as we thought it was,” he said. “It’s a small proportion but we have millions of buildings – even if its just one% of 10 million that’s 100,000,” he said.
Prof Goodier said that as well as government buildings such as hospitals, court houses and prisons, an unknown number in the private sector offices and warehouses were also potentially affected because they contained the concrete, also known as reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).
His team is advising the government to send surveyors to assess the affected buildings, most of which the researchers expect to be found not to have any dangerous flaws. But they will require regular inspections.
Others buildings may need areas reinforced or have certain areas closed and a small number may need to be rebuilt. But in the longer term, the team says a new approach will be needed of regular inspections and management of possibly tens of thousands of buildings, according to Prof Sergio Cavalaro from the Loughborough team.
“Buildings that were not inspected will now need to be inspected. We need to intensify these inspections. But that will be a challenge because there are so many buildings that need inspections. So we may lack the qualified people to do it in a timely fashion,” he said.
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You simply couldn’t get a better metaphor for the neglect of the country’s infrastructure. A neat, quick, cheap construction material whose lifespan ended during the Conservative administration. And what did that administration do about it? Nothing.
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Read-it-later app Matter can now transcribe your favorite podcasts • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
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Matter, a GV-backed read-it-later app that competes broadly with apps like Pocket and Instapaper, though with more of a focus on reading recommendations, is today launching a new way to use its app. The company this morning is debuting “Readable Podcasts,” a feature that will let you save favorite podcasts and transcribe their audio to text. By doing so, you can use Matter’s other tools to interact with the podcast content as you would a saved article, including by doing things like highlighting, taking notes and sharing quotes.
As you listen to the podcast, the audio transcript and text are kept in sync so you can seamlessly switch back and forth between listening and reading. This allows you to pause the podcast if you want to re-read a particular section or look up something the podcast hosts were discussing.
Or, if you’re trying to get through a dense podcast more quickly, the feature would allow you to skim the transcript so you could just jump to the key areas of interest, instead of having to fast-forward or listen to the audio at a faster speed.
According to Matter co-founder Ben Springwater, the new feature is powered by the combination of a third-party transcription service along with Matter’s own proprietary system to label speakers and ensure transcript quality.
What’s more, users don’t have to give up their favorite podcast app in order to use the new functionality. That is, instead of subscribing to a podcast in Matter itself, you’ll instead share the podcast you want to transcribe from your existing podcast app using the Save extension from the iOS Share Sheet. At launch, Matter supports Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Castro and Pocket Casts.
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I wonder whether the transcription will remove all the little noises – the ums and ers. I can see the potential attraction (we read faster than we listen, though perhaps not with podcasts at 2x speed) but think it will show how rambling some people are.
There’s a neat circularity: a lot of podcasts now are people reading their newsletters.
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Khosla Ventures backs carbon removal company with lung-like material • CNBC
Catherine Clifford:
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The founders of the startup, named Spiritus after the Latin word for “breath,” began work in December 2021, and the company is officially coming out of stealth on Wednesday, with the announcement of an $11 million funding raise led by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, with other investors including Page One Ventures.
Spiritus has built a novel approach to direct air carbon capture that relies on a material that absorbs carbon dioxide passively. Critically, Spiritus has developed a particular architecture that mimics the alveoli in the lungs in order to maximize the surface area for carbon dioxide to make contact with the material.
This lung-like material, technically called a “sorbent,” will be shaped in round balls and laid out like artificial fruits in a carbon-capture orchard, CEO Charles Cadieu and CTO Matt Lee told CNBC in a phone interview on Tuesday.
When the lung-like “fruit” have been collected from the carbon “orchard,” they will be put in a container, where low heat will be applied to remove the carbon dioxide. The desorption process will be powered by clean energy to ensure the process is a not adding emissions to the atmosphere. Once the CO2 has been removed from the lung-like fruit, the sorbent can then be returned to the carbon orchard and reused.
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Or, you know, just plant a whole load of trees. But where’s the 100x return in trees?
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The gold jewellery made from old phones • BBC Future
Anna Turns:
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As I walk into her small demo laboratory, Hayley Messenger, a chemist specialising in sustainable precious metals, explains why nothing here is labelled: “Everything is a secret!” she says, pouring a ‘”magic green solution” into a one-litre-capacity (35oz) glass flask of fragmented circuit boards.
She and a team of chemists and chemical analysts, together with Canadian start-up Excir, have invented and patented a clean, energy-efficient way which they claim extracts 99% of gold from the printed circuit boards found inside discarded laptops and old mobile phones. Later this year, the Royal Mint is opening a new multi-million-pound factory which will be able to process 90 tonnes of circuit boards per week once fully operational, recovering hundreds of kilogrammes of gold every year.
When the luminous mixture starts to fizz, Messenger screws the lid on, then places the flask on a tumbling machine to shake the contents. In just four minutes, any gold dissolves and leaches out into the liquid.
“This all happens at room temperature and it’s very quick,” says Messenger who explains that this chemical solution gets reused up to 20 times, with the concentration of dissolved gold increasing each time.
When another mystery solution is added, the gold becomes solid metal again. This powder is filtered out and melted down in a furnace into thumbnail-sized nuggets.
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This story felt vaguely familiar, and for good reason: the press release trailing this came out in March 2022. Progress, of sorts.
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Upscale.media
PixelBin:
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Typically, if you wish to increase the resolution of a low-quality image, you’ll just end up with a bigger low-quality image. Instead, Upscale.media’s AI technology maintains natural image details without losing the quality – quite unbelievable, if you ask us
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Now you can get AI to upscale your photos – that is, fill in fine detail if you want to zoom in on something, or if you’ve got a pixellated photo from somewhere. Five free downloads, or quite cheap PAYG offerings otherwise.
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Ryanair boss calls air traffic chaos report rubbish • BBC News
Katy Austin and Lora Jones:
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[Ryanair boss Michael] O’Leary told the BBC that the disruption will cost the airline between £15m and £20m in refunds for hotels, food and alternative travel arrangements.
He said that “there won’t be any issues” for customers claiming costs, but demanded that Nats, which controls the UK’s air traffic services, “accepts responsibility for its incompetence”.
Marion Geoffroy, managing director at Wizz Air UK, said that it, along with its customers, had “suffered severe disruption” because of cancellations and accommodation costs.
Tim Alderslade, chief executive of Airlines UK, said: “Airlines cannot be the insurer of a last resort. We can’t have a situation whereby airlines carry the can every time we see disruption of this magnitude.”
The group represents the likes of British Airways, EasyJet, Jet2, Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic and Tui. EasyJet boss Johan Lundgren also said that “many questions are still left unanswered” after Nats published an initial report into what exactly caused the system failure.
“An incident on this scale should not have happened and must not happen again,” he added, saying that he was looking forward to a more “wide-ranging” review.
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The NATS report itself, into a calamitous failure of the air routing systems on August 28, explains how it happened (as does the BBC story): a route was entered which had two waypoints with the same designator. Even though they were 4,000 miles apart, the routing software became confused because of the way routing is done: you start from the beginning and search forwards to the end, and then you start from the end and search backwards. But the identical waypoint designators made it seem like the end and the start were the same, and yet not the same.
No word on how old the system is (though this subsystem has been in continuous operation since 2018, apparently) or what it runs on, or is written in; but a software fix was deployed by last Monday.
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IBM taps AI to translate COBOL code to Java • TechCrunch
Kyle Wiggers:
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COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959. It’s had surprising staying power; according to a 2022 survey, there’s over 800 billion lines of COBOL in use on production systems, up from an estimated 220 billion in 2017.
But COBOL has a reputation for being a tough-to-navigate, inefficient language. Why not migrate to a newer one? For large organizations, it tends to be a complex and costly proposition, given the small number of COBOL experts in the world. When the Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced its core COBOL platform in 2012, it took five years and cost over $700m.
Looking to present a new solution to the problem of modernizing COBOL apps, IBM today unveiled Code Assistant for IBM Z, which uses a code-generating AI model to translate COBOL code into Java. Set to become generally available in Q4 2023, Code Assistant for IBM Z will enter preview during IBM’s TechXchange conference in Las Vegas early this September.
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Hurrah for translating old COBOL code, but — into Java? Who’s going to check that? What’s the confidence level in what is output?
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LinkedIn is getting personal and deep beyond the job searches • The Washington Post
Danielle Abril:
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After the pandemic blurred the lines between work and home, many employees reprioritized their lives, giving more emphasis to well-being and family. As a result, workers have become comfortable getting personal on LinkedIn, sharing engagement announcements, their fertility journeys, cancer diagnoses, relationship statuses, funny pet moments, even what they cooked for dinner. Though many post this content sparingly, some say it humanizes themselves to their professional network. Others say their stories tie in with lessons that could be applied to business, while some find the content annoying.
LinkedIn may be benefiting from shifts in the social media landscape. X, formerly known as Twitter, has lost many of its power users as the app becomes less functional for free accounts under billionaire owner Elon Musk. Meanwhile, after an impressive debut, Threads, the latest app from Facebook owner Meta, has seen a slowdown in activity. Instagram and TikTok continue to thrive among younger users, especially with video content.
LinkedIn says its user engagement doubled during the beginning of the pandemic and experienced a 40% rise between 2021 and 2023. The number of users who visit the site at least once a month is forecast to increase by more than 8 million to 84.1 million by 2027, with Gen Z serving as a major driver or growth, data from market research company Insider Intelligence shows. In that same period, Facebook users are expected to decline by 600,000 to 177.3 million, and Instagram’s users are forecast to grow by 20.2 million to 155.4 million.
LinkedIn says it saw a jump in personal posts during the height of the pandemic, but that has since slowed. To ensure people’s feeds stay useful, the company made changes to its algorithm. It now surfaces more posts from people’s direct connections and followers as well as those from people outside their networks that are grounded in professional knowledge and advice. Still, LinkedIn content is mirroring a larger societal shift that is happening in the workplace.
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Still wonder about LinkedIn. What sort of social network is it really?
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Mozilla report finds that new cars give out lots of your info • Gizmodo
Thomas Germain:
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Bad news: your car is a spy. If your vehicle was made in the last few years, you’re probably driving around in a data-harvesting machine that may collect personal information as sensitive as your race, weight, and sexual activity. Volkswagen’s cars reportedly know if you’re fastening your seatbelt and how hard you hit the brakes.
That’s according to new findings from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project. The nonprofit found that every major car brand fails to adhere to the most basic privacy and security standards in new internet-connected models, and all 25 of the brands Mozilla examined flunked the organization’s test. Mozilla found brands including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, and Subaru collect data about drivers including race, facial expressions, weight, health information, and where you drive. Some of the cars tested collected data you wouldn’t expect your car to know about, including details about sexual activity, race, and immigration status, according to Mozilla.
“Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about,” said Jen Caltrider, program direction of the *Privacy Not Included project, in a press release. “But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information.”
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Cars have become computers, but their privacy policies haven’t kept up (at least in the US; in Europe they’d be held back by the GDPR). One does wonder quite how your car collects data about your sexual activity. Perhaps better not to ask.
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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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