The UK government intends to give energy rebates to homes near new pylons in a scheme being announced on Wednesday. CC-licensed photo by Ruben Holthuijsen on Flickr.
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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.
Sam Altman’s counter-rebellion leaves OpenAI leadership hanging in the balance • WSJ
Berber Jin, Deepa Seetharaman, Tom Dotan and Keach Hagey:
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Two days after Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI, he was back at the company’s office, trying to negotiate his return.
The former chief executive officer entered with a guest badge on Sunday and posted on X: “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”
The leadership of the company that created the hit AI chatbot ChatGPT remained unclear Sunday, as investors and many employees pushed over the weekend to restore Altman. He has been engineering a countercoup to retake control of one of Silicon Valley’s most valuable and high-profile startups.
The abrupt shake-up at OpenAI turns on one of the oldest tales in Silicon Valley: a breakup between a founder and his board.
But in this case it was a very particular kind of founder—the face of Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence revolution—and a very particular kind of board, which was tasked with making social good a priority over profit. The rupture threatens the future of the company and the billions of dollars investors had put into it.
Altman has also been considering starting his own venture, potentially with talent from OpenAI. He is pursuing both tracks: On Sunday morning, Chief Technology Officer and interim CEO Mira Murati sent a note to staff saying Altman would be returning to the San Francisco office later that day as discussions to reinstate him continued.
Over the weekend, Altman made clear to his allies that if he does return, he wants a new board and governance structure, people familiar with the matter said.
Two days after the board fired Altman, different explanations persisted for the initial firing. The board said Friday it pushed out the CEO after it concluded he hadn’t been candid with the company’s directors. It didn’t elaborate.
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At the time of compiling these links, the reason(s) for Altman’s ousting still hadn’t been made clear. Lots of people are spraying around ideas for why he was fired, hoping that their one will be true – hot take bingo – but no clear story has emerged.
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Who’s on the OpenAI board — the group behind Sam Altman’s ouster • CNBC
Hayden Field:
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On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the buzzy AI company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, suddenly and publicly ousted its CEO Sam Altman. The announcement came one day after he appeared publicly on behalf of his company at Thursday’s APEC CEO Summit.
OpenAI’s board said it conducted “a deliberative review process” and that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”
“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the board’s statement continued.
As of this week, OpenAI’s six-person board included OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman, who was also chairman of the board; Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist; Adam D’Angelo [Quora CEO]; Tasha McCauley [senior scientist at Rand Corporation]; Helen Toner [not an OpenAI employee]; and Altman himself. The company began publicly posting its board’s member list on its website in July, after the departures of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, director of Neuralink Shivon Zilis and former Texas congressman Will Hurd.
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Marissa Mayer – ex-Google, ex-CEO of Yahoo – tweeted that companies of OpenAI’s size would normally have 8-15 independent directors, rather than the four independent ones it does. Though of course OpenAI has grown really fast, which might have made it hard to staff up the board quickly enough.
Though board membership seems to have been something of a revolving door.
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Nothing Chats has already been pulled from Google Play over privacy issues • The Verge
Wes Davis:
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Nothing has pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store, saying it is “delaying the launch until further notice” while it fixes “several bugs.” The app promised to let Nothing Phone 2 users text with iMessage, but it required allowing Sunbird, who provides the platform, log into users’ iCloud accounts on its own Mac Mini servers, which… isn’t great? [It offers an enormous hole for hacking – Overspill Ed]
The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to compromise it. The app launched in beta yesterday after being announced earlier this week.
9to5Google pointed to a thread from site author Dylan Roussel, who found that part of Sunbird’s solution involves decrypting and transmitting messages using HTTP to a Firebase cloud-syncing server and storing them there in unencrypted plain text. Roussel posted that the company itself has access to messages because it logs them as errors using Sentry, a debugging service.
Sunbird claimed yesterday that HTTP is “only used as part of the one-off initial request from the app notifying back-end of the upcoming iMessage connection.”
That was in response to someone pointing to Texts.com’s blog examining the vulnerability. Texts.com wrote that “an attacker subscribed to the Firebase realtime database will always be able to access the messages before or at the moment they are read by the user.”
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That’s so woeful. Unsurprising that Sunbird hasn’t launched publicly yet, given such truck-sized holes. Almost any of Sunbird’s team could have God Mode to read peoples’ messages.
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Massive cryptomining rig discovered under Polish court’s floor, stealing power • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Police were called to dismantle a secret cryptomining rig winding throughout the floors and ventilation ducts of a Polish court in September, according to Polish news channel TVN24.
Several secured computers were discovered, potentially stealing thousands of Polish Zlotys worth of energy per month (the equivalent of roughly $250 per 1,000 Zlotys.) It’s currently unknown how long the rig was running because the illegal operation went undetected, partly because the computers used were connected to the Internet through their own modems rather than through the court’s network.
While no one has been charged yet with any crimes, the court seemingly has suspects. Within two weeks of finding the rig, the court terminated a contract with a company responsible for IT maintenance in the building, TVN24 reported. Before the contract ended, the company fired two employees that it said were responsible for maintenance in the parts of the building where the cryptomine was hidden.
Poland’s top law enforcement officials, the Internal Security Agency, have been called in to investigate. The Warsaw District Prosecutor’s Office has hired IT experts to help determine exactly how much electricity was stolen from Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court in Warsaw, TVN24 reported.
The Supreme Administrative Court is the last resort for sensitive business and tax disputes, but no records seem to have been compromised.
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Quite an enterprising bit of IT outsourcing there.
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US aims to triple global nuclear energy production • HuffPost UK Politics
Alexander Kaufman:
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The United States is preparing to announce a pledge to triple the world’s production of nuclear energy by 2050, with more than 10 countries on four continents already signed on to the first major international agreement in modern history to ramp up the use of atomic power.
Signatories to the pledge, set to be unveiled at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai later this month, include many of the largest current users of nuclear energy such as the United Kingdom, France, Romania, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Korea, a senior Biden administration official familiar with the efforts confirmed HuffPost. A handful of newcomers that have not yet built reactors, including Poland, Ghana and Morocco, are also said to have joined the pledge.
The plan will put pressure on the World Bank to end its long-standing ban on financing nuclear-energy projects, which the American Nuclear Society, a nonprofit of academics and industry professionals who advocate for atomic energy in the public interest, said was crucial to any buildout.
“Tripling the world’s nuclear energy supplies by 2050 is the catalyst required to halt rising temperatures and achieve a sustainable future,” the ANS said in a statement to HuffPost. “A large-scale build-out of new nuclear energy can only happen with the crafting of nuclear-inclusive lending policies by financial institutions like the World Bank.”
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I had no idea that the World Bank had such a ban in place. Utterly bonkers.
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Autumn Statement: Homes close to new pylons to get £1,000 off bills • BBC News
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Households living close to new pylons and electricity substations could receive up to £1,000 a year off energy bills for a decade under new plans.
It is hoped the plan would convince people to support upgrades in their area, which are needed in part for new electric vehicle charging points.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is expected to announce the policy in the Autumn Statement on Wednesday.
It is unclear at this stage how many households will get the full discount.Mr Hunt and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are currently finalising the content of the statement, which will set out the priorities for government spending in the final year before a general election has to be held.
It is known that they are considering announcing some tax cuts, and changes to income tax, national insurance, inheritance tax and business taxes are all being discussed.
But the Treasury has indicated the pounds-for-pylons plan will definitely form part of the chancellor’s statement.
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This might be useful, inasmuch as yes, we do need more pylons. But also what about discounts for being near new onshore wind turbines? Or new nuclear power stations? There’s such a paucity of imagination.
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MPs want UK national security law used to vet Barclay family’s Telegraph offer • The Guardian
Julia Kollewe:
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MPs, including Edward Leigh, John Hayes and the life peer Margaret Eaton, have written to the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, and the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, questioning the use of overseas sovereign wealth to buy Telegraph Media Group, the Financial Times reported.
The Barclays had owned the group, which includes the Daily and Sunday Telegraph as well as the Spectator, since 2004 but Lloyds Banking Group took control of it in June after the family failed to reach an agreement over more than £1bn in unpaid debt. It has since been put up for sale by the bank in an auction run by Goldman Sachs.
Last month, the Barclay family tabled an offer valuing the newspaper group at £1bn in an attempt to deter rival bidders from challenging them before the auction. The family has secured financing from investors based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, after talks that began in August.
The MPs said in the letter that they were concerned that investment vehicles with links to the UAE royal family “may soon gain control of or material influence over two of the most important media publications in Great Britain, the Telegraph and the Spectator”.
They argued that there “is a strong case for close scrutiny by the government under both the Enterprise Act 2002 and the National Security and Investment Act 2021”, especially if the offer involved taking the publications as security for the loan, “an amount which, by any sensible measure, the revenue of the publications will not be able to support”.
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So the MPs are saying they don’t think the titles are worth anything like that much, and that the loans will fall into default. Hard to argue: the Telegraph titles have been valued around £500m-£700m.
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Ad execs urge Twitter CEO to resign after Musk endorses antisemitic post • Forbes
John Paczkowski:
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Forbes has confirmed that Yaccarino has been contacted by a groundswell of leading advertising executives who questioned why she is risking her reputation to shield Musk’s behavior—and suggested that she could make a statement about racism and antisemitism by stepping down. She has so far resisted their entreaties, sources said.
Last week, Musk endorsed an explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theory, and a report from watchdog Media Matters found that ads from major companies including IBM and Amazon had been placed next to content promoting Nazis and white nationalism, prompting advertisers including Apple, Disney and IBM to pull ads from the platform. Even the White House has condemned Musk’s antisemitic and racist statement, in which Musk agreed with an X user who espoused a conspiracy theory that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
On November 16, Yaccarino responded to the firestorm in a post on X: “X’s point of view has always been very clear that discrimination by everyone should STOP across the board — I think that’s something we can and should all agree on. When it comes to this platform — X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There’s no place for it anywhere in the world — it’s ugly and wrong. Full stop.” Yaccarino did not immediately respond to a comment request made through X’s press team.
The personal outreach to Yaccarino by leading advertising executives comes as X, previously known as Twitter, struggles to right itself under its mercurial owner and to battle the advertiser-unfriendly content his behavior has emboldened.
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You have to wonder what she thinks she’s getting out of it. Every blowup like this shows how powerless she is to control Musk, and how pointless her position is.
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Ads watchdog files FTC complaint against X, formerly Twitter, over unlabeled ads • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
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X, formerly Twitter, was caught running unlabeled ads on its platform in September. Now that issue, which has been ongoing, has been brought to the FTC’s attention. An independent nonprofit Check My Ads has filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission urging an investigation over the advertising practices at X, including the lack of disclosure about which posts are ads, broken links that explain why ads are targeted and more.
The complaint cites X’s lack of disclosure around ads, saying it misleads consumers that the content and the information they’re consuming on the platform is not paid for.
“This misrepresentation tricks users into trusting content as organic and exacerbates the opportunity for scams to occur,” the complaint states. “Furthermore, by failing to adequately disclose advertisements, X Corp. misrepresents the methods employed to target users or facilitate third-party ad targeting.”
It also points out that X’s promotional materials for advertisers indicate that advertisements are distinguished from non-paid, organic content with a “Promoted” label, but no such label appears for consumers. As Mashable earlier reported, X appeared to be switching between the “Promoted” and “Ad” labeling format for some time. Most of the ads on X are now simply labeled “Ad” but some are surfacing in users’ feeds without any ad label attached at all.
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When things go bad, they go really bad.
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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 