The really important update on the iPhone 15 Pro is just above its volume buttons. CC-licensed photo by Ged Carroll on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Lights, camera, sorted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The end of privacy is a Taylor Swift fan TikTok account armed with facial recognition tech • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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A viral TikTok account is doxing ordinary and otherwise anonymous people on the internet using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology, creating content and growing a following by taking advantage of a fundamental new truth: privacy is now essentially dead in public spaces.
The 90,000 follower-strong account typically picks targets who appeared in other viral videos, or people suggested to the account in the comments. Many of the account’s videos show the process: screenshotting the video of the target, cropping images of the face, running those photos through facial recognition software, and then revealing the person’s full name, social media profile, and sometimes employer to millions of people who have liked the videos. There’s an entire branch of content on TikTok in which creators show off their OSINT doxing skills—OSINT being open source intelligence, or information that is openly available online. But the vast majority of them do it with the explicit consent of the target. This account is doing the same, without the consent of the people they choose to dox. As a bizarre aside, the account appears to be run by a Taylor Swift fan, with many of the doxing videos including Swift’s music, and including videos of people at the Eras Tour.
404 Media is not naming the account because TikTok has decided to not remove it from the platform. TikTok told me the account does not violate its policies; one social media policy expert I spoke to said TikTok should reevaluate that position.
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Related: I reviewed Kashmir Hill’s new book about Clearview AI, which also solved this challenge a few years ago and began selling it to US police departments – really cheaply.
It seems the cat is very much out of the bag on facial recognition for the masses.
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The Action Button is the most significant new iPhone feature in years • The Verge
Dan Seifert:
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Apple showcased the Action Button in its announcement of the iPhone 15 Pro, and it was highlighted in many reviews that followed (including our own). But it wasn’t until users got their hands on the iPhone 15 Pro late last week that the Action Button’s potential was fully realised.
By default, the button acts as a direct replacement for the old mute switch: you use it to change the ringer settings on your phone. In the iPhone’s Settings app, you can change it to do a handful of other things, like turning on the flashlight, launching the camera, or toggling Do Not Disturb. But the real power of the Action Button is unlocked when you pair it with Apple’s programmable Shortcuts app. From there, you can do just about anything you might imagine on your phone in a quicker, more convenient way.
The Settings app will suggest some simple shortcuts to bind to the Action Button, but things get a lot more interesting when you tap into custom shortcuts. You can program the Action Button to display a menu of other shortcuts that you can then run from a tap on the screen. You can make it do different things depending on your location, time of day, or even device orientation. The limit is really your imagination — and your tolerance for programming in the Shortcuts app, which can be frustrating and tedious. (Fortunately, I have some tips for this below.)
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Initially seems, as he says, like a very minimal thing: oh, a button that you can program. But it opens up a huge range of possibilities, and shows how we really are carrying around little computers. Yes, Samsung has had a programmable side button for a while, but it doesn’t have the power of Shortcuts to expand what it can do: it opens the camera, or an app, or its Bixby assistant.
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The bizarre cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates • WIRED
Kate Knibbs:
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People who lose somebody, whether it’s a dearly cherished family member or a long-lost acquaintance, must now navigate a slimy cottage industry of profiteers trying to hijack their attention. Instead of finding important funeral details or where to write a remembrance or send flowers, they are confronted by a flood of low-budget videos crudely summarizing the death notices of the person they’ve lost.
Obituary pirating, where people scrape and republish obituaries from funeral homes and websites like Legacy.com, has been an ethically dubious business for years. Piracy websites are often skilled enough at search engine optimization to rise to the top of search results, and they use the resulting traffic to charge a premium for digital ads that appear next to text lifted wholesale from funeral homes, local newspapers, and other authorized obituary publishers. Occasionally, these pirate sites go a step further, manipulating bereaved people into buying sympathy gifts like candles or flowers and pocketing the money.
The flood of YouTube obituary videos is a janky update on this practice. Some of these channels upload dozens of death notice summaries every hour, abandoning any pretense of looking like an official source of information in an effort to churn out as many videos as they can.
Although text-based obituary pirating has been a scourge on the industry for years, these videos are a more recent phenomenon. “This is a new one for me,” says Jessica Koth, director of public relations for the National Funeral Directors Association. “These videos are not sanctioned or authorized by the funeral home or family of the person who died. I would imagine they would be quite upsetting to the families involved.”
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There’s essentially nothing that isn’t seen as somehow monetisable through ads on YouTube.
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The Musk algorithm • Hey.com
David Heinemeier Hansson:
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The part of the business book [as he views the Musk biography] I’ve enjoyed the most is the countless illustrations of how Musk applies his “algorithm”. A methodology for shipping everything from electric cars to Mars rockets to flamethrowers to humanoid robots. Quoted in full:
1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.…You can absolutely learn from people you wouldn’t want to be. Extracting wisdom from Musk’s success does not oblige you to become his disciple or his mirror.
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Reasonable point, but there’s a lot of competition to apply that algorithm, and so it’s the ones who take it to the absolute beyond-reasonable-total-jerk who take the prize. Though plenty do the same and don’t take the prize.
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Nissan to go all-electric by 2030 despite petrol ban delay • BBC News
Simon Jack:
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Nissan will accelerate plans towards electrification by committing that all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030.
The announcement comes despite the UK postponing its 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. Nissan’s boss said the firm’s move was “the right thing to do”.
Car trade body the SMMT has voiced concerns that the postponement of the ban would see consumers delay the switch to electric vehicles.
Nissan will also introduce new battery technology by the end of the decade that it said will reduce both the charging time and cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
“Nissan will make the switch to full electric by 2030 in Europe. We believe it is the right thing to do for our business, our customers and for the planet,” said Nissan’s chief executive Makoto Uchida. In an interview with the BBC, Mr Uchida said the company was aiming to bring down the cost of electric vehicles for customers, so that they were no more expensive than petrol and diesel cars.
“It may take a bit of time, but we are looking at the next few years,” he said.
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Nissan is aiming for price parity with ICEs by 2030. What’s significant about this story is that Nissan chose the BBC’s Business Editor to tell it to: essentially, a rebuff to Rishi Sunak putting back the deadline last week, and encouraging the EU to move it forward.
Nissan is also probably a bit peeved with the UK government: it has an EV battery manufacturing plant in the UK, and is putting £1bn (plus £100m from, um, the UK government) into expanding its carmaking facility.
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Guidance on AI detection, and why we’re disabling Turnitin’s AI detector • Vanderbilt University
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In April of this year, Turnitin released an update to their product that reviewed submitted papers and presented their determination of how much of a paper was written by AI. As we outlined at that time, many people had important concerns and questions about this new tool, namely how the product exactly works and how reliable the results would be. After several months of using and testing this tool, meeting with Turnitin and other AI leaders, and talking to other universities who also have access, Vanderbilt has decided to disable Turnitin’s AI detection tool for the foreseeable future. This decision was not made lightly and was made in pursuit of the best interests of our students and faculty.
When Turnitin launched its AI-detection tool, there were many concerns that we had. This feature was enabled for Turnitin customers with less than 24-hour advance notice, no option at the time to disable the feature, and, most importantly, no insight into how it works. At the time of launch, Turnitin claimed that its detection tool had a 1% false positive rate (Chechitelli, 2023). To put that into context, Vanderbilt submitted 75,000 papers to Turnitin in 2022. If this AI detection tool was available then, around 750 student papers could have been incorrectly labeled as having some of it written by AI.
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That’s a pretty bad false positive rate in terms of sheer numbers. Nice of them to let students know. (Turnitin is still used to test against alleged plagiarism on other work by students.)
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Covid helped China secure the DNA of millions, spurring arms race fears • Washington Post
Joby Warrick and Cate Brown:
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The Fire-Eye [portable lab developed by China] excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors. [I think that means “sequence human genomes” – Overspill Ed.] In late 2021, with the pandemic still raging, Serbian officials announced they were working with a Chinese company to convert the lab into a permanent facility with plans to harvest and curate the entire genomes, or genetics blueprints, of Serbian citizens.
Serbia’s scientists were thrilled, and the country’s prime minister, Ana Brnabic, praised China for giving the Balkan country the “most advanced institute for precision medicine and genetics in the region.” Yet now, China’s Fire-Eye labs — scores of which were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic — are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China’s intentions. Some analysts perceive China’s largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world.
That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said.
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Hard to tell how much this is paranoia and how much is justified. It’s a deeply researched story, though again: how much is joining dots that are just dots?
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AlphaFold touted as next big thing for drug discovery — but is it? • Nature
Carrie Arnold:
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Last month, the biotechnology firm Recursion, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, announced that it had calculated how 36 billion potential drug compounds could bind to more than 15,000 human proteins whose structures were predicted by AlphaFold. To pull off the massive computation, Recursion used its own AI tool, MatchMaker, that ‘matched’ binding pockets on the predicted structures with suitably shaped small molecules, or ligands, from a database called Enamine Real Space.
“Lots of people have predicted how molecules would bind with proteins,” says Chris Gibson, Recursion’s co-founder and chief executive, “but this many predictions is pretty unprecedented”.
But not everyone is as bullish about AlphaFold revolutionizing drug discovery — at least, not yet. In a paper published in eLife the day before Recursion’s announcement, a team of scientists at Stanford University in California showed that AlphaFold’s prowess at predicting protein structures doesn’t yet translate into solid leads for ligand binding.
“Models like AlphaFold are really good with [protein] structures, but we need to put some thought into how we’re going to use them for drug discovery,” says Masha Karelina, a biophysicist at Stanford and co-author of the paper.
Others who spoke to Nature agree that this type of effort offers impressive amounts of data, but they aren’t yet sure about its quality. Biotech announcements such as the one from Recursion aren’t typically accompanied by validation data — confirmation from laboratory experiments that a model has accurately predicted binding.
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(Ligand: “an ion or molecule with a functional group that binds to a central metal atom to form a coordination complex”.)
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3 iOS 0-days, a cellular network compromise, and HTTP used to infect an iPhone • Ars Technica
Dan Goodin:
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Apple has patched a potent chain of iOS zero-days that were used to infect the iPhone of an Egyptian presidential candidate with sophisticated spyware developed by a commercial exploit seller, Google and researchers from Citizen Lab said Friday.
The previously unknown vulnerabilities, which Apple patched on Thursday, were exploited in clickless attacks, meaning they didn’t require a target to take any steps other than to visit a website that used the HTTP protocol rather than the safer HTTPS alternative. A packet inspection device sitting on a cellular network in Egypt kept an eye out for connections from the phone of the targeted candidate and, when spotted, redirected it to a site that delivered the exploit chain, according to Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School.
Citizen Lab said the attack was made possible by participation from the Egyptian government, spyware known as Predator sold by a company known as Cytrox, and hardware sold by Egypt-based Sandvine. The campaign targeted Ahmed Eltantawy, a former member of the Egyptian Parliament who announced he was running for president in March. Citizen Lab said the recent attacks were at least the third time Eltantawy’s iPhone has been attacked. One of them, in 2021, was successful and also installed Predator.
“The use of mercenary spyware to target a senior member of a country’s democratic opposition after they had announced their intention to run for president is a clear interference in free and fair elections and violates the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and privacy,” Citizen Lab researchers Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Daniel Roethlisberger, Bahr Abdul Razzak, Siena Anstis, and Ron Deibert wrote in a 4,200-word report. “It also directly contradicts how mercenary spyware firms publicly justify their sales.”
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Amazing how this thing we’re assured by the vendors doesn’t happen keeps happening.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 