Fans in Discord are buying what they think are real Harry Styles songs – but they’re more likely AI-generated. CC-licensed photo by Raph_PH on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Don’t worry, darling. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Earth “well outside safe operating space for humanity”, scientists find • The Guardian
Damian Carrington:
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Earth’s life support systems have been so damaged that the planet is “well outside the safe operating space for humanity”, scientists have warned.
Their assessment found that six out of nine “planetary boundaries” had been broken because of human-caused pollution and destruction of the natural world. The planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing.
The broken boundaries mean the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed from the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, to the start of the industrial revolution. The whole of modern civilisation arose in this time period, called the Holocene.
The assessment was the first of all nine planetary boundaries and represented the “first scientific health check for the entire planet”, the researchers said. Six boundaries have been passed and two are judged to be close to being broken: air pollution and ocean acidification. The one boundary that is not threatened is atmospheric ozone, after action to phase out destructive chemicals in recent decades led to the ozone hole shrinking.
The scientists said the “most worrying” finding was that all four of the biological boundaries, which cover the living world, were at, or close to, the highest risk level. The living world is particularly vital to the Earth as it provides resilience by compensating for some physical changes, for example, trees absorbing carbon dioxide pollution.
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The ozone boundary is notably one that was breached, and then recovered. It is feasible. But we need governments to pay attention.
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The spectre of AI-generated ‘leaked songs’ is tearing the Harry Styles fandom apart • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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Over the last few weeks, a flurry of Harry Styles and One Direction snippets—which are short samples of a track designed to prove legitimacy so people will pay of the full thing—have begun popping up on YouTube, TikTok, and, most importantly, Discord, where they are being sold. The problem is no one can tell which, if any, of the songs are real, including AI-analysis companies who listened to the tracks for 404 Media.
“400$ FOR TWO OUTTAKES,” Wxytiv posted in a Discord beneath two snippets called Part_of_Me_snip.mp3 and I_Just_Wanna_Love_You_snip.mp3. In another Discord, they posted multiple “Announcements” per day teasing the release of leaked tracks and repeatedly threatening to leave the Discord forever if people don’t show sufficient deference to them: “Would y’all like to proceed to a group-buy for Don’t Let It Break You Heart multitracks + 2 other version ? 125/$250.” In a separate but connected Discord called THEFINAL, users are directed to PayPal money to a few different accounts to buy the full songs: “I’m sending $1 but I’m sending more when I get paid sorry,” one user posted.
Meanwhile, Styles fans are readily sending money via PayPal to a series of middlemen who claim to have the full tracks. They are also dissecting copyright databases looking for any evidence of the songs’ existence, checking to see if the snippets are deleted from social media via copyright takedown from the rights holders as “proof” they are real, and reaching out to anyone associated with One Direction in an attempt to try to learn more information about the songs.
… To complicate matters even more, the same people who are selling leaks they insist are genuine are also posting tracks they disclose are AI-generated in an attempt to prove their leaks are real. Their argument is that the AI tracks sound bad in contrast to the “real” leaks, therefore proving they’re authentic.
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Clever. Sneaky. AI for sure.
How 9/11 affected the digital future • The Future, Now and Then
Dave Karpf:
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what’s striking today is how cavalier and dismissive Silicon Valley thinkers were. All of those early legislative and regulatory debates were happening at a time when the prospect of a sustained terrorist attack was simply unthinkable. It isn’t just that, post 9/11, we end up with the Patriot Act (which is 200x more intrusive than the Clipper Chip). It’s also that the idea that you could dismiss terrorist threats as just big-government paranoia went from totally reasonable to holy-shit-so-tone-deaf.
That all changes on 9/11, and that never really changes back. You can see it in a December 2001 essay by Adam Penenberg. Penenberg is writing as a critic of mass government surveillance. But even as a critic, he asserts: “Worrying is a waste of time. Surveillance is here. It was inevitable. But the surveillance state is not.”
The monthly Cyber-Rights Now column is gone by 2001. WIRED doesn’t try to galvanize opposition to the Patriot Act the way it tried to oppose the Clipper Chip, and the Communications Decency Act [in the mid-90s]. The ground has shifted at that point. There were, in the public imagination, real threats and real villains again.
The result was an era of bifurcated administrative capacity. There was, in the years that followed, a voluminous surveillance state. The NSA, FBI, and CIA had limitless funding, their own court system, bipartisan political consensus, and willing defenders in elite opinion circles. All other government agencies — the FCC, FTC, FEC, DOJ etc — were still red tape in need of cutting/meddlesome regulators/a beast that needed to be starved so that innovators could innovate.
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Tennis ball wasteland? Game grapples with a fuzzy yellow recycling problem • AP News
James Martinez:
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Tennis has a fuzzy yellow problem most players don’t think about when they open can after can of fresh balls, or when umpires at U.S. Open matches make their frequent requests for “new balls please.”
Because tennis balls are extremely hard to recycle and the industry has yet to develop a ball to make that easier, nearly all of the 330 million balls made worldwide each year eventually get chucked in the garbage, with most ending up in landfills, where they can take more than 400 years to decompose. It’s a situation highlighted by Grand Slam events like Flushing Meadows, which will go through nearly 100,000 balls over the course of the tournament.
That harsh reality in an age of heightened environmental awareness has sent ball makers, recyclers and the game’s worldwide governing body scrambling for solutions, and spurred sustainability activists to sound the alarm in online posts that pose the question: Are tennis balls a disaster for the planet?
“Tennis balls, like a lot of objects, are made to be indestructible, which means they’re very resistant to mechanical processing,” said Nickolas J. Themelis, director of Columbia University’s Earth Engineering Center. “But do you take a useful object that lasts forever and say people shouldn’t use it because it lasts forever? That’s nonsense.”
…The biggest barrier to recycling the rubber in the ball is the difficulty of removing the felt from the rubber core because of the tight glue designed to hold that cover on when it’s thwacked by a racket. And the felt is also a problem: a blended combination of wool and nylon that cannot be recycled.
What’s more, the core of most top-level tennis balls — such as the Wilson U.S. Open extra-duty model in play at Flushing Meadows — is only made from newly created, virgin rubber, which activists say leads to deforestation of rubber trees in the Amazon.
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Not enough dogs in the world, apparently.
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Coke’s latest mystery flavor is AI-generated • CNN Business
Danielle Wiener-Bronner:
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For about a year and a half, Coca-Cola has experimented with limited-edition beverages that have mystery tastes — most of them with vague, futuristic concepts and undisclosed flavors.
The latest one, Coca-Cola Y3000, fits the bill. The one distinction: It’s supposed to taste like the future. Fittingly, the soft-drink giant used artificial intelligence to help determine the flavor and packaging.
It’s important for Coca-Cola to keep customers — particularly younger ones — excited about Coke, its more-than-a-century-old signature product. In recent years, health-conscious consumers have shied away from sugary beverages, making it trickier for soda sellers to market their legacy brands. Coca-Cola has used its Creations platform, responsible for limited-edition flavors like Y3000, to try to make the brand resonate with younger consumers.
Like all Creations drinks, Coca-Cola Y3000 is designed to taste mostly like Coke, with a bit of something else. To come up with that extra note of flavor, and the packaging design, Coca-Cola turned to AI.
The company relied on regular old human insights by finding out what flavors people associate with the future. Then it used AI to help figure out flavor pairings and profiles, a spokesperson said. For the product’s packaging — which appears to allude to a Y2K aesthetic with funky bubbles, pink and blue coloring and a pixelated logo — Coca-Cola used AI-generated images to create a mood board for inspiration. The aluminum can even gives credit where it’s due, prominently noting it’s “Co-Created with AI.”
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That sweet, sweet taste of marketing. AI! It’s toasted!
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People keep swallowing AirPods • Android Authority
Ryan McNeal:
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Tanna Barker, a resident of Utah, is going viral after admitting she gulped down one of her AirPods. In the video, she explains that she ran into a friend while on a walk. During the conversation, she took one of the earbuds out of her ear to hear more clearly. Barker then decided to take her vitamins and popped the AirPod in her mouth, only to realize that the vitamins were still sitting in her hand.
“Halfway through my walk, I decided to take my vitamins, so I put my vitamins in, took a drink, and I was like, man, those are stuck,” Barker says. “So I guzzled my water, kept on going, said bye to Kathleen, and went to go get my AirPod. And my pills were in my hand. I swallowed my AirPod.”
Thankfully, it appears that she is okay and is taking the whole situation in stride, even taking moments to laugh at herself. Baker says she immediately called doctors and friends for advice. They reportedly all told her the same thing — to let it pass naturally.
Among other things, you may be wondering if that AirPod still works. Well, as it turns out, the answer is probably yes. Back in 2021, a woman from Massachusetts also swallowed an AirPod, thinking it was a vitamin. She was surprised to learn it still worked when she tried to record a voice note, and it captured the sound of her stomach.
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“No, I’m not worried about stereo any more, just one is fine thanks.” (This also harks back to the chewing gum-sized iPod shuffle, which in 2005 carried the warning “do not eat iPod shuffle”.)
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Arrested development: “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson • The Guardian
Gary Shteyngart:
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There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the “his eyes lit up” school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter. It feels as though, for instance, there are hundreds of pages from start to finish relaying the same scene: Musk trying to reduce the cost of various mundane objects so that he can make more money and fulfil his dream of moving himself (and possibly the lot of us) to Mars, where one or two examples would have been enough. To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best.
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The idea of Isaacson as a sort of Dan Brown of biographers is both funny and alarming. Shteyngart’s review is so good it could have been written by Marina Hyde. Read it, particularly for his insight about the meaning of “X”. (Thanks wendyg for the link.)
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Facebook Messenger phishing wave targets 100K business accounts per week • Bleeping Computer
Bill Toulas:
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The hackers start by sending [Facebook] Messenger phishing messages to Facebook business accounts pretending to be copyright violation complaints or requests for product information.
…The malware collects all the cookies and login data stored on the victim’s web browser into a ZIP archive named ‘Document.zip’. It then sends the stolen information to the attackers via Telegram or Discord bot API.
Finally, the stealer wipes all cookies from the victim’s device to log them out of their accounts, giving the scammers enough time to hijack the newly compromised account by changing the passwords.
As it can take a while for social media companies to respond to emails about hijacked accounts, it gives the threat actors time to conduct fraudulent activities with the hacked accounts.
Although the attack chain isn’t novel, the scale of the campaign observed by Guardio Labs is alarming. The researchers report roughly 100,000 phishing messages per week, sent mainly to Facebook users in North America, Europe, Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia.
Guardio Labs reports that the scale of the campaign is such that approximately 7% of all of Facebook’s business accounts have been targeted, with 0.4% having downloaded the malicious archive.To be infected by the malware, the users still have to execute the batch file, so the number of hijacked accounts is unknown, but it could be significant.
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Doing the maths, that’s 400 downloading the malware each week; unknown number actually running it. A threat, sure, but not quite the end of the world.
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Execs flee The Messenger mess and its ‘mad dog’ boss • Daily Beast
Lachlan Cartwright:
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The honeymoon is well and truly over at [media site] The Messenger, where just four months since launching two key business executives have quit and others are looking to leave, Confider has learned.
Mia Libby, who joined The Messenger as chief revenue officer in November last year, resigned earlier this month, and Stephanie Parker, who was head of marketing since December, has also exited the troubled startup. Three people familiar with the situation say both women resigned following clashes with Richard Beckman, The Messenger’s president, who earned the nickname “Mad Dog” for his hard-charging ways at Condé Nast, where he once broke an employee’s nose.
“Beckman is at the center of the problems—the two women left because of him. More are looking to leave,” one well-placed Messenger mole told Confider. Beckman wildly claimed in an interview before the launch that The Messenger planned to turn a profit and generate an eye-watering $100m in revenue in 2024, but thus far the only prominent advertiser the site has consistently drawn has been Interactive Brokers LLC, a firm that buys and sells stocks, bonds, and some crypto.
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I’ve never seen a link from The Messenger being shared on any platform, nor visited its website. All I hear is about how badly it’s going. Place your bets on how long before it hits the iceberg.
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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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