The time zone system in Windows 95 had a rather sizeable bug which would submerge Poland on demand. CC-licensed photo by 70023venus2009 on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Wetsuit? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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A dead friend seemed to contact me on Facebook. The truth was sadder • The Guardian

Akin Olla:

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I burst into tears when my friend tagged me in another Facebook post this morning. My friend died in 2021. The bot or scammer that had taken over his account was using it to promote weight-loss pills, which felt particularly egregious considering my friend had lost weight before his sudden death; it was as if the bot had scraped his profile for the most marketable details before taking his place.

This was not the first time I’d been contacted on social media from beyond the grave. Earlier this year, my best friend messaged me; that time, too, it was deeply unsettling, since the last time I’d seen him, he was smiling at me from his open casket. As terrible as these uncanny experiences were for me, what really broke my heart was thinking of how my friends’ mothers were likely experiencing the same thing.

I suspect that these “ghost” social media experiences are going to be increasingly common in the coming years. Our profit-driven economic system pushes social media companies to digitize and monopolize our social lives. This same engine drives scammers to seek out every means of exploiting our weaknesses for their benefit. A good password today may not be secure in two or three years, let alone the decades by which our social media accounts may outlive us.

Most social media companies make their money by collecting our information and pipelining their ads right in between wedding announcements and baby pictures. They seek normal social activities, like sharing images or starting clubs, and replicate them online, making them accessible enough that we become reliant on their platforms. This reliance is made worse by algorithms that keep us hooked and clicking.

…Scammers are obligated to be good at their game, and are likely to get better. There are already plenty of means to crack people’s passwords, and new AI-powered tools threaten to exacerbate that. According to the cybersecurity company Avast, 83% of Americans have weak passwords as it is. I am, I suppose, lucky to know that my friends are actually dead.

…The more likely, and already somewhat present scenario, will be a social media hellscape littered with dead people pushing weight-loss pills and cryptocurrency schemes. Facebook has options to preserve accounts as memorials, but one study estimates that there are likely tens of millions of dead people on Facebook and there will likely be hundreds of millions by 2060.

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OpenAI and Microsoft sued by nonfiction writers for alleged ‘rampant theft’ of authors’ works • Forbes

Rashi Shrivastava:

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The lead plaintiff of the lawsuit is Julian Sancton, the New York Times-bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey Into the Dark Antarctic. Sancton spent five years and tens of thousands of dollars traveling around the world to complete the research for the book, the lawsuit states. In response to a prompt, ChatGPT confirmed that Sancton’s book was a part of the dataset that was used to train the chatbot, according to the lawsuit filed by law firm Susman Godfrey LLP.

Sancton and thousands of other writers did not consent nor were compensated for the use of their intellectual property in the training of the AI, the lawsuit notes. Their complaint also highlights that Microsoft and OpenAI have commercialized their AI models, making billions of dollars in revenue through products like BingChat and ChatGPT Enterprise.

“Nonfiction authors often spend years conceiving, researching, and writing their creations. While OpenAI and Microsoft refuse to pay nonfiction authors, their AI platform is worth a fortune. The basis of the OpenAI platform is nothing less than the rampant theft of copyrighted works,” the lawsuit states.

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As with all these, I don’t set much store on their succeeding because even if you do it as a class action, on behalf of everyone whose work has been used, the ingestion is permissible (same as reading a book) and the use is transformative (you don’t get the book out at the prompt).

Also: the OpenAI/Altman soap opera is still dragging on, and we still don’t know precisely why Altman was fired, though the board itself may be about to get fired.
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CZ steps down as Binance CEO in $4bn settlement with DOJ • Semafor via Yahoo

Diego Mendoza:

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Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, the billionaire founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has stepped down as CEO and pleaded guilty to money laundering charges as part of $4.3bn settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Tuesday.

Zhao will be personally required to pay $50m as part of the fines.

“The message here should be clear: using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal,” Garland said at a press conference.

Prosecutors said that Binance enabled the financing of terrorist and militant groups like Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, ISIS, and Al Qaeda through its exchange.

“Binance prioritized its profits over the safety of the American people,” Garland said.

The development comes months after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against the crypto giant for artificially inflating its trade volume on its US platform. The company also faces allegations of offering US citizens crypto derivatives, such as futures or options contracts, without registering as a futures commodity merchant. Kraken, another trading firm, was sued by the SEC on Monday for similar alleged violations.

Zhao is based in Dubai, which means he is unlikely to face prison time as the United Arab Emirates does not have an extradition agreement with the US.

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Is this going to rattle confidence in crypto? Very much doubt it. CZ will swan around, and perhaps start up another crypto exchange which perhaps will ignore money laundering rules. The cycle continues.
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That one time Windows accidentally sent Poland under the sea • The Register

Richard Speed:

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Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen took to YouTube over the weekend to remind us of the time the Windows vendor accidentally sank Poland.

Speaking on the Dave’s Garage channel, run by former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, Chen added some flourishes to a story from decades ago regarding the neat time zone map that initially shipped with Windows 95.

Readers of a certain age might remember the original Windows 95 time zone map. It was a fun feature where a user could click on a region of a map to select a time zone or regional settings – something that engineers doubtless had a blast making before geopolitical realities hit home.

If you don’t remember the time zone map working that way, don’t worry. Microsoft had to pull the features after governments complained about where their borders were. In 2003, Chen explained: “In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador, and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.”

Talking to Plummer, Chen added some more detail: “There were even arguments from countries who were not engaged in a border conflict where a small European country would contact us and say, ‘Hey, our country is kind of small, can you give us one of our neighbor’s pixels to make it easier to click on?”

This triggered an angry response from another country demanding why one of their pixels had been given away, and so it went on.

Since making everyone happy was impossible, Chen said the solution was to rotate the map to put the selected zone in the center. All good? Not quite…

“There was a bug that we introduced when we did that though…”

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It’s quite a neat bug; essentially they got bitten by a version of the four-colour theorem.
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Meta, Microsoft, Amazon join Overture maps to vie with Apple, Google • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

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Google and Apple dominate the market for online maps, charging mobile app developers for access to their mapping services. The other mega-cap tech companies are joining together to help create another option.

A group formed by Meta, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, along with TomTom, is releasing data that could enable companies to build their own maps, without having to rely on Google or Apple.

The Overture Maps Foundation, which was established late last year, captured 59 million “points of interest,” such as restaurants, landmarks, streets and regional borders. The data has been cleaned and formatted so it can be used for free as the base layer for a new map application.

Meta and Microsoft collected and donated the data to Overture, according to Marc Prioleau, executive director of the OMF. Data on places is often difficult to collect and license, and building map data requires lots of time and staff to gather and clean it, he told CNBC in an interview.

“We have some companies that, if they wanted to invest to build the map data, they could,” Prioleau said. Rather than spending that kind of money, he said, companies were asking, “Can we just get collaboration around the open base map?”

Overture is aiming to establish a baseline for maps data so that companies can use it to build and operate their own maps.

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This appeared in July, perhaps while I was On A Break. It’s a bit puzzling: are they trying to create a commercial product, or just a rival? Because OpenStreetMap already exists. Why not contribute to that? An ex-Meta person says “Overture seeks to distinguish its data from OpenStreetMap’s by being more closely vetted and curated.”
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Musk files lawsuit claiming Media Matters manipulated X by scrolling down • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Musk’s complaint—bizarrely filed in a Texas court despite X Corp. being based in Nevada and Media Matters in the District of Columbia—accused Media Matters of interference with X Corp.’s contract with advertisers, business disparagement, and interference with a prospective economic advantage by allegedly disrupting X Corp.’s relationship with advertisers.

The lawsuit’s business disparagement claim marks the first time that Musk has sued a group monitoring hate speech on X for defaming the platform. Where individuals can sue for defamation, businesses can sue over disparagement. In this case, Musk must prove that Media Matters knowingly published false statements intended to harm X Corp.’s business to succeed in his lawsuit.

According to X, Media Matters “took screenshots of posts from IBM, Apple, Bravo, Xfinity, and Oracle that Media Matters engineered to appear adjacent to inflammatory, fringe content.” All of these advertisers except Oracle, X confirmed, stopped advertising on X, as well as other advertisers whose ads weren’t even included in Media Matters’ report.

If the lawsuit proceeds, Musk may have a hard time proving that Media Matters published any false statements, though. X’s complaint alleged that Media Matters “manipulated” the platform’s algorithm to generate inorganic ad placements to form a “blatant smear campaign,” but the complaint seemingly admitted that no statements that Media Matters published were false. Media Matters will likely argue that advertisers could interpret its reporting however they felt would be best for their business.

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Indeed, analysis by an independent lawyer on Twitter suggested that the lawsuit admits everything that Media Matters claims; it just insists that they’re not very common. That’s a problem for… Musk.
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Does AI lead police to ignore contradictory evidence? • The New Yorker

Eyal Press:

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Advocates of facial-recognition technology acknowledge that the quality of the algorithms varies greatly, but they contend that the best ones do not have such demographic imbalances. They also note that, among the millions of searches that have been conducted by police, only a few have been proved to lead to wrongful arrests. But how many people have been erroneously identified without the mistake being recognized?

Nobody can say, in part because the technology is poorly regulated and the police’s use of it is often not shared with either the public or the accused. Last fall, a man named Randal Quran Reid was arrested for two acts of credit-card fraud in Louisiana that he did not commit.

The warrant didn’t mention that a facial-recognition search had made him a suspect. Reid discovered this fact only after his lawyer heard an officer refer to him as a “positive match” for the thief. Reid was in jail for six days and his family spent thousands of dollars in legal fees before learning about the misidentification, which had resulted from a search done by a police department under contract with Clearview AI. So much for being “100% accurate.”

Law-enforcement officials argue that they aren’t obligated to disclose such information because, in theory at least, facial-recognition searches are being used only to generate leads for a fuller investigation, and do not alone serve as probable cause for making an arrest.

Yet, in a striking number of the wrongful arrests that have been documented, the searches represented virtually the entire investigation. No other evidence seemed to link Randal Reid, who lives in Georgia, to the thefts in Louisiana, a state he had never even visited.

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Naturally, this leans heavily on Kashmir Hill’s book “Your Face Belongs To Us”, about Clearview AI.
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“Make It Real” AI prototype wows devs by turning drawings into working software • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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[Last week] a collaborative whiteboard app maker called “tldraw” made waves online by releasing a prototype of a feature called “Make it Real” that lets users draw an image of software and bring it to life using AI. The feature uses OpenAI’s GPT-4V API to visually interpret a vector drawing into functioning Tailwind CSS and JavaScript web code that can replicate user interfaces or even create simple implementations of games like Breakout.

“I think I need to go lie down,” posted designer Kevin Cannon at the start of a viral X thread that featured the creation of functioning sliders that rotate objects on screen, an interface for changing object colors, and a working game of tic-tac-toe. Soon, others followed with demonstrations of drawing a clone of Breakout, creating a working dial clock that ticks, drawing the snake game, making a Pong game, interpreting a visual state chart, and much more.

Users can experiment with a live demo of Make It Real online. However, running it requires providing an API key from OpenAI, which is a security risk. If others intercept your API key, they could use it to rack up a very large bill in your name (OpenAI charges by the amount of data moving into and out of its API). Those technically inclined can run the code locally, but it will still require OpenAI API access.

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We don’t know how secure the underlying code might be, but this is definitely taking drudgery out of the design process. Which then means that humans are free to do the more important, subtle changes, so this must be a benefit, correct?
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US companies fight Biden’s efforts to crack down on junk fees • The Washington Post

Tony Romm:

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Frustrated with airlines that charge passengers steep fees to check bags and change flights, President Biden last fall embarked on a campaign to crack down on the practice — and force companies to show the full price of travel before people pay for their tickets.

Fliers rejoiced, flooding the Department of Transportation with letters urging it to adopt the policy. Airlines including American, Delta and United, however, did not seem so enthused.

It would be too difficult to disclose the charges more clearly, warned Doug Mullen, the deputy general counsel at Airlines for America, an industry lobbying group representing the three carriers. Testifying at a federal hearing in March, he said the new policy would only cause customers “confusion and frustration” — and, besides, the extra costs for bags and other services historically have resulted in “very few complaints.”

“The department should not regulate in this area,” Mullen added.

Since then, the Biden administration has broadened its efforts to expose or eliminate “junk fees” throughout the economy, touching off a groundswell of opposition from airlines, auto dealers, banks, credit card companies, cable giants, property owners and ticket sellers that hope to preserve their profits.

Behind the scenes, these corporations have fought vigorously to thwart even the most basic rules that would require them to be more transparent about hidden charges, according to a Washington Post review of federal lobbying records and hundreds of filings submitted to government agencies. The fees together may cost Americans at least $64bn annually, according to a rough White House estimate, underscoring its efforts to deliver financial relief to families grappling with high prices.

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What an absolutely colossal amount. “Very few complaints” about the extra costs? How would people complain, exactly? When? Is there an option in the drop-down menu for “pay for extra bag, and complain about it”? The irony is that the people who implement these things at the low level – the programmers and staff – are the ones who suffer from it when it’s done to them by every other company. War by different means. (A 2021 experiment showed that this method, applied to gig tickets, raises the price by 21%.)
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified