Analysis suggests it was a tweet, not TikTok, which made Osama bin Laden’s manifesto go viral. CC-licensed photo by justgrimes on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about David Cameron, and the past following you around.
A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Apple announces RCS support for iMessage • Ars Technica
Ron Amadeo:
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Apple shocked the mobile world on Thursday by saying it will adopt the RCS messaging standard. When iMessage users are talking to people off the service, iMessage will soon be able to fall back to the RCS carrier messaging standard instead of SMS, which comes with the advantages of read receipts, higher-quality media sending, and typing indicators. Your chats with your green bubble friends will be slightly less awful.
Apple sent several media outlets a statement:
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Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.
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iMessage is currently besieged on all sides by various parties. Google has been waging a “get the message” campaign against Apple for the past year or two, imploring the company to adopt RCS.
Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked on stage if the company would make messaging with Android better, and he responded, “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point” and told the audience member to “just buy your mom an iPhone” if he wanted easier communication with his mother. Regulators in the European Union have yet to decide the fate of iMessage, but if it meets the qualifications for being a big tech “Gatekeeper,” the iMessage protocol will be forced to open up in the EU. [Thursday was the last day before the EU might have forced Apple to offer iMessage interoperability – Overspill Ed]
The Wall Street Journal ran an article last year subtitled “Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble,” detailing the bullying that Android users were subject to due to SMS fallback dragging down the capabilities of iMessage group chats (87% of US teenagers have iPhones).
On the Android side of things, companies have been desperate to work better with iMessage, with Google hacking together an emoji response solution for Google Messages and Android manufacturer Nothing planning a wild “hack into iMessage” scheme to run messages through Mac computers hosted in a data center.
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RCS was devised in 2008, and Google started pushing it harder in 2017. But to actually bang heads together, you need a trade bloc, just as with GSM decades ago.
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Apple’s in-house 5G modem work faces further delays • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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Apple is continuing to run into troubles in its attempt to develop a 5G modem to replace Qualcomm’s 5G modems in the iPhone and other products, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Apple in 2019 acquired the majority of Intel’s smartphone business and started in on a serious effort to develop its own modem hardware, but the project has suffered multiple setbacks. Apple is still “years away” from creating a chip that is able to perform as well as or better than chips from rival Qualcomm.
The Cupertino company initially wanted to have an in-house modem chip ready to go by 2024, a goal that could not be met, and now Gurman says that Apple is also going to miss an extended spring 2025 launch timeline. As of now, the modem chip launch has been postponed until the end of 2025 or early 2026, and Apple is still planning to introduce the technology in a version of the low-cost iPhone SE.
Development on a modem chip is said to be in the early stages, and it “may lag behind the competition by years.” One version in development does not support faster mmWave technology, and Apple has also run into issues with the Intel code that it has been working with. Rewrites have been required, and adding new features has been causing existing features to break, plus Apple has to be careful not to infringe on Qualcomm patents while developing the chip.
…[Apple and Qualcomm] signed a new contract [for Apple to use Qualcomm’s modems], which was extended in September 2023. The latest deal with Qualcomm covers smartphone launches in 2024, 2025, and 2026, and will last through Apple’s delayed modem chip development.
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Zeno’s modem? It seems like it’s always two, maybe three years away.
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Russian troops deployed on a motorbike. A drone chased them down • Forbes
David Axe:
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On Oct. 19, Ukrainian marines in small boats motored across the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, landed in the Russian-occupied settlement of Krynky and, in a series of infantry actions, seized a bridgehead across the river.
Provided Russian motor-rifle regiments don’t soon push the marines back into the river, the Krynky lodgment could serve as a base for a wider Ukrainian offensive in Kherson.
In the meantime, it’s an object-lesson in local air-superiority. A lesson a pair of motorbike-riding Russian air-defense troops learned the hard way, as an explosives-laden Ukrainian first-person-view drone chased them down and killed them in dramatic fashion in Krynky recently. Warning: the video of the strike is extremely graphic.
The Krynky river-crossing was the culmination of a long preparatory campaign by Ukrainian pilots, gunners, drone-operators and electronic-warfare specialists who struck Russian supply lines and air-defenses, suppressed Russian artillery, harried Russian strongpoints and—perhaps most critically—jammed Russian drones and struck electronic-warfare systems in order to keep the Russians from jamming Ukrainian drones.
And now the air over Krynky belongs to Ukrainian drone-operators and daring Ukrainian army helicopter pilots flying low-level rocket-attack sorties. Russian troops cannot venture out into the open in and around Krynky without drawing the attention of Ukrainian aircraft.
As early as June, there were reports the Ukrainians were positioning powerful radio-jammers on the Dnipro’s right bank in order to create a 12-mile-deep zone where Russia’s explosive FPV drones cannot reliably operate, but Ukrainian drones can operate.
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Black Mirror’s “Hated in the Nation“, written by Charlie Brooker: fiction in 2016, a grim reality seven years later.
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Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas • The Atlantic
Charlie Warzel:
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It is the architectural embodiment of ridiculousness, a monument to spectacle and to the exceedingly human condition of erecting bewildering edifices simply because we can. It cost $2.3bn; it’s blanketed in 580,000 square feet of LED lights; it can transform its 366-foot-tall exterior into a gargantuan emoji that astronauts can supposedly see from space. This is no half dome and certainly not a rotunda. This is Sphere.
When I approached the Sphere on the ground, around dusk, the building awoke from its screen saver (an unpleasant advertisement for a Spider-Man video game) and began to emit a strange burbling noise. A semi-realistic animation of a womb-bound fetus appeared and spoke the words “This is not a rehearsal” before bursting into flames, flickering violently, and shape-shifting into the following series of images: a blinking eyeball, a thunderstorm, the ocean, some plants, the moon, more flames, all to the pounding drums and metallic guitar clanking of U2’s “Zoo Station.” Even in the context of the pulsing neon goat rodeo of the Vegas Strip, this was a sensory assault.
The kaleidoscopic display made a certain kind of sense, because the Sphere is itself many different things. It’s an arena, conceived by the Madison Square Garden Company in 2018, and home to an ongoing U2 residency. It’s a movie theater, too, like 42 and a half IMAX screens bolted together. (The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has been screening Postcard From Earth, a documentary he made specifically for this curved megatron.) The Sphere is a new form of architecture, a billboard, a digital canvas for art, and it is a weenie—which, my colleague Ian Bogost informed me, is a term invented by Walt Disney to describe landmarks inside his theme parks that help orient visitors. Las Vegas is a city of weenies, and the Sphere is its most glamorous.
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A great piece of writing by Warzel, but that headline has subeditors all over the internet grinding their teeth in envy at not having written it.
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AI chatbots just showed scientists how to make social media less toxic • Business Insider
Adam Rogers:
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On a simulated day in July of a 2020 that didn’t happen, 500 chatbots read the news — real news, our news, from the real July 1, 2020. ABC News reported that Alabama students were throwing “COVID parties.” On CNN, President Donald Trump called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate.” The New York Times had a story about the baseball season being canceled because of the pandemic.
Then the 500 robots logged into something very much (but not totally) like Twitter, and discussed what they had read. Meanwhile, in our world, the not-simulated world, a bunch of scientists were watching.
The scientists had used ChatGPT 3.5 to build the bots for a very specific purpose: to study how to create a better social network — a less polarized, less caustic bath of assholery than our current platforms. They had created a model of a social network in a lab — a Twitter in a bottle, as it were — in the hopes of learning how to create a better Twitter in the real world. “Is there a way to promote interaction across the partisan divide without driving toxicity and incivility?” wondered Petter Törnberg, the computer scientist who led the experiment.
It’s difficult to model something like Twitter — or to do any kind of science, really — using actual humans. People are hard to wrangle, and the setup costs for human experimentation are considerable. AI bots, on the other hand, will do whatever you tell them to, practically for free. And their whole deal is that they are designed to act like people. So researchers are starting to use chatbots as fake people from whom they can extract data about real people.
“If you want to model public discourse or interaction, you need more sophisticated models of human behavior,” says Törnberg, an assistant professor at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. “And then large language models come along, and they’re precisely that — a model of a person having a conversation.” By replacing people as the subjects in scientific experiments, AI could conceivably turbocharge our understanding of human behavior in a wide range of fields, from public health and epidemiology to economics and sociology. Artificial intelligence, it turns out, might offer us real intelligence about ourselves.
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They used three models: “Echo chamber” full of people who agree with you, “Discover” (sort of “For You”) offering views from all over, and “Bridge”, showing what was most popular with political opposites. Have a guess at which caused the least rancour, and then read it.
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Trade with Europe ‘harder than ever’ for UK businesses • The London Economic
Jack Peat:
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A comprehensive new survey of UK businesses has exposed the reality of trade with Europe post-Brexit, pointing to ongoing damage to the UK economy caused by the split.
A whopping 94% of respondents to the European Movement poll said leaving the single market and customs union has had a negative effect, while hundreds reported having to reduce their workforce hours, make staff redundant, or even close entirely.
Companies across sectors including engineering, agriculture, hospitality and finance reported they had lost business in the EU, and been made uncompetitive by new red-tape.
More than half of respondents said new red tape had made trading with the EU increasingly difficult, calling it ‘the single biggest obstacle’ to doing business with our largest trading partner.
A further 40% highlighted problems with finding staff since the loss of Freedom of Movement.
Sir Nick Harvey, CEO of European Movement UK, said: “This research shows just how difficult trading with the EU has become for British businesses. Many we have talked to have either cut down their exports into the bloc, or stopped them entirely, citing new costs, increased red tape, and diminishing confidence from EU businesses in UK suppliers. The voices of our small and medium businesses are not being heard, and times are harder than ever.
“Their stories are the ugly truth of trading for UK business after exiting the EU.”
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Predictable. In case you haven’t heard of The London Economic: here’s the About page.
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Users can’t speak to viral AI girlfriend CarynAI because CEO is in jail for arson • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler:
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People who paid to speak to an AI girlfriend modelled after real life 23-year-old influencer Caryn Marjorie are distraught because the service they paid for, Forever Companions, no longer works. It appears that the service stopped working shortly after Forever Companion CEO and founder John Meyer was arrested for trying to set his own apartment on fire.
…“I terminated my relationship with Forever Voices due to unforeseen circumstances,” Marjorie told 404 Media in an email. “I wish the best for John Meyer and his family as he recovers from his mental health crisis. We didn’t see this coming but I vow to push CarynAI forward for my fans and supporters.”
…CarynAI became a viral sensation in May, getting coverage at NBC News, Fortune, Washington Post, and many other publications. While the service was not explicitly promoted for providing adult content, that is what it turned to immediately after users get their hands on it.
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But of course it did.
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TikTok is removing videos praising Osama bin Laden letter • Semafor
J.D. Capelouto and Louise Matsakis:
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TikTok says it’s “aggressively removing” videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” which explained why he orchestrated the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The platform has also blocked the hashtag #LettertoAmerica, meaning users won’t be able to search for it, a TikTok spokesperson told Semafor.
Several videos from creators encouraging others to read the letter or sympathizing with bin Laden’s views on Israel and the U.S. racked up tens of thousands of views on TikTok and other platforms in recent days. Google Trends data indicates that searches for the document began spiking around a week ago.
Critics argued the videos showed that TikTok was spreading harmful information to young people, who make up a large bulk of its user base. But the platform said in a statement on X that the number of videos about the letter “is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.” The statement added: “This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
In its statement, TikTok said that content “promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” adding that it is “investigating how it got onto our platform.” TikTok has been at the center of the conversation about how the Israel-Hamas war is playing out on social media, in part because of a narrative that the app, which is Chinese-owned, leans pro-Palestine.
…Many TikTok users originally read the letter on the website of The Guardian, where it amassed over 100,000 views in recent days before the newspaper took it down, according to a person familiar with the matter. Another person at The Guardian told Semafor that almost all of the traffic came from people searching for the letter on Google, starting on Nov. 9.
The Guardian said it deleted bin Laden’s letter from its website because it was being shared on social media without its original context.
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Lot of side eye at TikTok’s apparent boosting of this, but analysis by Ryan Broderick suggests that what made it “go viral” was a tweet.
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Apple should share its knowledge of Indian politicians’ iPhone hacks • Rest of World
Barkha Dutt:
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India’s opposition has accused the government of spying on them after multiple iPhone users in the country received an alert from Apple. “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone,” the automated text message read. So far, all the members of Parliament who have come forward about receiving the alert are those who oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
An inevitable political row has followed.
But amid the outrage, Apple’s muted public response has been perplexing, obfuscatory, and contradictory. So far, the iPhone manufacturer has not released a formal public statement. Attributions have been made to sources, government officials, or what Apple has purportedly said when contacted for a response. The absence of any clear or constituent articulation from the American technology giant has left the space wide open for random mudslinging and unverifiable claims and counterclaims.
The Narendra Modi government, while announcing an inquiry, has also described the protesting political figures to be “compulsive critics.” Officials say the alert is “vague,” generic, and no more than an automated advisory sent out in 150 countries.
“If it’s an algorithm tripping up, how can you explain why only one side of the political aisle has been warned?” argued Priyanka Chaturvedi, an opposition leader who received Apple’s alert, in an interview with me.
…In 2021, there was a national furore when a global investigative project reported that Pegasus spyware, developed by Israel’s NSO Group, had been used to target the devices of at least 50,000 individuals globally, including serving ministers, journalists, and opposition members in India. Two years later, a panel of experts failed to reach any clarity. The inquiry panel informed the Indian Supreme Court that the government had failed to cooperate. Malware was found on some devices but could not conclusively be linked to Pegasus. The government refused to confirm or deny whether it owned or used Pegasus.
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The complaint in this article is that Apple isn’t telling the targeted people who is targeting them, but it seems very likely that Apple doesn’t know; it can just detect something from the logfiles of the devices that say things are awry. It’s always been difficult to know who’s controlling Pegasus; if this is the same or a different piece of spyware, you’d expect the same.
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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 