Bike theft, and its lack of solution or prevention, frustrates owners enormously yet the police seem uninterested when it happens. CC-licensed photo by Chetiya Sahabandu on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.
There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.
A selection of 10 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.
Backlash over fake female speakers shuts down developer conference • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
»
After an event organizer, Eduards Sizovs, was accused of making up fake female speakers to attract high-profile speakers to an online developer conference called DevTernity, several of the event’s top-billed speakers promptly withdrew.
“You are charging attendees money and they might be making their purchasing decision based on the list of speakers shown to them on the conference website,” wrote former Google developer advocate Kelsey Hightower in a post on the social media platform X confirming that he can no longer participate. “This is misleading at best.”
On Monday, Sizovs confirmed that the conference, DevTernity—which sold tickets for as much as $870 a pop and anticipated 1,300 attendees—was cancelled.
The controversy arose after Gergely Orosz, the author of a popular tech newsletter called Pragmatic Engineering, first posted the allegations on X on Friday. Orosz alleged that out of three women—Kristine Howard, Julia Krisina, and Anna Boyko—scheduled to speak at DevTernity, Krisina and Boyko were fake profiles created by the event organizers to make the event look diverse in order to “successfully attract some of the most heavy-hitter men speakers in tech.”
“To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers,” Orosz alleges, it was “because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns. Incredibly lazy.”
Howard—Amazon Web Services’ head of developer relations and the only woman still scheduled to speak at DevTernity—told Ars that the situation is “baffling,” confirming that she has not heard from Sizovs since he emailed her to verify that the event was cancelled.
Sizovs claimed that Boyko, “a demo persona from our test website version,” was added to DevTernity’s speaker list “by mistake” after two real women cancelled their conference appearances due to “reasons out of our control at the worst possible time.” He said that he “noticed the issue in October” but failed to fix it because “it was not a quick fix” and it was “better to have that demo persona while I am searching for the replacement speakers.”
«
Orosz did fantastic work in pinning all this down. The fallout is entirely to be expected, but noticing the anomalies in the first place is the properly important step. AI fakes strike again.
unique link to this extract
Ikea debuts a trio of affordable smart home sensors • The Verge
Thomas Ricker:
»
Ikea’s push to democratize the smart home continues with the introduction of three new Zigbee sensors that won’t break the bank. There’s Parasoll, the door and window sensor; Vallhorn, the motion sensor; and Badring, the water leakage sensor. They’ll all be priced less than $10 when they go on sale globally in the first half of next year.
Parasoll is a typical window and door sensor that can be discretely mounted to trigger an automation when an open / close event is detected. It can also be paired directly with an Ikea light bulb right out of the box without needing to buy and configure an Ikea Home smart hub. It’s priced at €9.99 in Europe, but exact US pricing is yet to be confirmed for it or any of Ikea’s three new sensors.
The Vallhorn motion sensor can be used both indoors and outdoors (with IP44 splash protection against rain) to activate lights or other automations when movement is detected. It’s powered by three AAA batteries and can be paired to directly control up to 10 Ikea smart bulbs right out of the box. It costs just €7.99 and can sense more of the room than Ikea’s existing $14.99 / €12.99 motion sensor that’s smaller but only useable indoors and needs its coin cell battery replaced more frequently.
The Badring water sensor includes a built-in siren (60dBA at 1m) that can alert you when it senses a leak. It can also trigger a mobile notification in the Ikea Home smart app for homes with an Ikea Dirigera hub ($69.99) installed. Sensors like these can save homeowners a ton of money before a water leak has the opportunity to create real damage. It will cost €9.99.
Of the three, the Parasoll and Badring sensors are not compatible with older Trådfri Home smart gateways from Ikea. All support the newer Dirigera hub, of course, which fully integrates the sensors into Ikea’s burgeoning lineup of smart home products and Home smart app. The hub also allows Ikea’s devices to interoperate with smart home ecosystems from Google, Amazon, and Apple when at home or away.
«
When I was researching my book on hacking, I spoke – naturally – to Mikko Hyppönen, then CTO of F-Secure. He told me that the smart home devices he was most impressed by were those from Ikea. And I am too, because they’re easy to use and they integrate with other platforms. If you can think of anything to do with these sensors, these would be a good buy. (Though the lack of compatibility with the old smart gateway is a bore.)
unique link to this extract
Hydrogen heating, village trials and explosion risk • LinkedIn
Michael Liebreich on the trial in Redcar to replace natural gas with hydrogen:
»
Throughout their promotion of the Hydrogen Village Trial in Redcar, Northern Gas Networks (NGN) has referred to the five years of work undertaken on safety. For instance, on its main Redcar Hydrogen Community information page, it says “The plan to provide communities with 100% hydrogen has only been made possible following exhaustive research over the last five years to ensure it can be supplied as safely and reliably as natural gas is today.”
What NGN has been less open about is the fact that it is not planning to follow the recommendations of those five years of work. The Safety Case that emerged from Hy4Heat Work Package 7 was based on passive, or “inherent” safety, with measures including two free-flow valves (which shut off the gas supply in the event of a large leak), and 10cm by 10cm non-closable vents in each room with a hydrogen appliance or substantial plumbing. The residents of Ellesmere Port, made aware of Cadent’s plan to knock in their walls at a public meeting with experts (of which I was one), gave that idea short shrift.
Verbally, NGN has told residents it is not planning to implement the measures laid out in the Hy4Heat Safety Case, but to switch to an “active” safety strategy based on the use of hydrogen sensors. Its problem is that although it is working with the HSE to develop the sensors, no Safety Case based on hydrogen sensors for space heating has yet been published – let alone approved by the HSE, let alone communicated by NGN as part of the trial, let alone discussed by residents, let alone accepted by them as adequate.
NGN has repeatedly accused me and the other experts who appeared at the public meetings in Ellesmere Port and Redcar of spreading misinformation. They say they would never do anything unsafe – but that is gaslighting: I never said they would, and in any case the HSE would not let them. What I did say, and continue to say, is that NGN are not planning to follow the published Safety Case, approved by the HSE for the hydrogen heating trials.
«
It’s quite difficult to make out, but reading through towards the end, Liebreich compares the new plans for hydrogen to the old “town gas”, which was 50% hydrogen and used up to the 1970s. And back then, there were eight times as many explosions as with modern gas. If you go to 100% hydrogen.. why would things be safer?
unique link to this extract
I have owned 11 bikes. This is how they were stolen • The Times
Tom Whipple:
»
Bike 8 was stolen from a station cycle rack, where I had parked it directly beneath a camera. This time, I thought, we have them. Triumphantly I went to the police. “Look!” I said. “You will be able to see them.” They refused to look at the footage unless I could narrow it down to a window shorter than a few hours. This is, I discovered, a common response.
Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police — he was a computer scientist, after all.
You don’t watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It’s very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn’t go down well.
I made a (slightly more diplomatic) nuisance of myself and they eventually looked at the footage. The policewoman I dealt with was lovely about it, but in the end the image wasn’t clear. Maybe they were right not to bother.
«
Bicycle theft – along with phone theft – is endemic and enormously annoying to victims, who feel that the police don’t care if nobody is hurt (and won’t do anything that might involve the faintest possibility of harm, such as confronting a potential criminal if, say, a phone is transmitting its location). The police, of course, aren’t going to stand up and say that they don’t care about property crime, but it’s quite close to it.
unique link to this extract
An idea-to-video platform that brings your creativity to motion • Pika
»
Video is at the heart of entertainment, yet the process of making high-quality videos to date is still complicated and resource-intensive. When we started Pika six months ago, we wanted to push the boundaries of technology and design a future interface of video making that is effortless and accessible to everyone. Since then, we’re proud to have grown the Pika community to half a million users, who are generating millions of videos per week.
Our vision for Pika is to enable everyone to be the director of their own stories and to bring out the creator in each of us. Today, we reached a milestone that brings us closer to our vision. We are thrilled to unveil Pika 1.0, a major product upgrade that includes a new AI model capable of generating and editing videos in diverse styles such as 3D animation, anime, cartoon and cinematic, and a new web experience that makes it easier to use. You can join the waitlist for Pika 1.0 at https://pika.art.
We are also excited to announce our fundraising milestones: we have raised $55m, initiated with pre-seed and seed rounds«
Prompt-to-video. There will soon be a ton of companies doing this; yet just as with Pixar, what will mark out the great creators will be their ability to tell stories, not to create animation. What makes Toy Story 1 wonderful is its story, not – viewed now – the quality of its videos.
Also: Stable Diffusion is now offering similar stuff.
unique link to this extract
Is Argentina the first AI election? • The New York Times
Jack Nicas and Lucía Cholakian Herrera, in an article written before the result of the election:
»
The posters dotting the streets of Buenos Aires had a certain Soviet flair to them.
There was one of Argentina’s presidential candidates, Sergio Massa, dressed in a shirt with what appeared to be military medals, pointing to a blue sky. He was surrounded by hundreds of older people — in drab clothing, with serious, and often disfigured, faces — looked toward him in hope.
The style was no mistake. The illustrator had been given clear instructions.
“Sovietic Political propaganda poster illustration by Gustav Klutsis featuring a leader, masssa, standing firmly,” said a prompt that Mr. Massa’s campaign fed into an artificial-intelligence program to produce the image. “Symbols of unity and power fill the environment,” the prompt continued. “The image exudes authority and determination.”
Javier Milei, the other candidate in Sunday’s runoff election, has struck back by sharing what appear to be AI images depicting Mr. Massa as a Chinese communist leader and himself as a cuddly cartoon lion. They have been viewed more than 30 million times.
Argentina’s election has quickly become a testing ground for AI in campaigns, with the two candidates and their supporters employing the technology to doctor existing images and videos and create others from scratch. AI has made candidates say things they did not, and put them in famous movies and memes. It has created campaign posters, and triggered debates over whether real videos are actually real.
AI’s prominent role in Argentina’s campaign and the political debate it has set off underscore the technology’s growing prevalence and show that, with its expanding power and falling cost, it is now likely to be a factor in many democratic elections around the globe.
Experts compare the moment to the early days of social media, a technology offering tantalizing new tools for politics — and unforeseen threats.
«
The irony is that the article implies that Milei has no chance because of all the AI content being aimed at him. Whereas we know the result was in fact completely the opposite. Sometimes you need to evaluate these things after the fact.
unique link to this extract
Why Apple is working hard to break into its own phones • The Independent
Andrew Griffin:
»
Unlike with software, where even significant security holes can be fixed relatively simply with a security update, hardware is out of Apple’s hands once a customer buys it. That means that it must be tested years in advance with every possible weakness probed and fixed up before the chip even makes it anywhere near production.
Apple’s chips have to be relied upon to encrypt secure data so that it cannot be read by anyone else, for instance; pictures need to be scrambled before they are sent up to be backed up on iCloud, for instance, to ensure that an attacker could not grab them as they are transferred. That requires using detailed and complicated mathematical work to make the pictures meaningless without the encryption key that will unlock them.
There are various ways that process might be broken, however. The actual chip doing the encryption can show signs of what it is doing: while processors might seem like abstract electronics, they throw out all sorts of heats and signals that could be useful to an attacker. If you asked someone to keep a secret number in their head and let you try and guess it, for instance, you might tell them to multiply the number by two and see how long it takes and how hard they are thinking; if it’s a long time, it suggests the number might be especially big. the same principle is true of a chip, it’s just that the signs are a little different.
And so Apple gets those chips and probes them, blasts them with precisely targeted lasers, heats them up and cools them down, and much more besides. The engineers in its Paris facilities doing this work are perhaps the most highly capable and well resourced hackers of Apple’s products in the world; they just happen to be doing it to stop everyone else doing the same. If they find something, that information will be distributed to colleagues who will then work to patch it up. Then the cycle starts all over again.
«
It’s not hugely detailed, but it does indicate that protecting against hacking is something they’re very serious about.
unique link to this extract
China’s Transsion, world’s fifth largest smartphone maker, keeps ascending • Nikkei Asia
Takashi Kawakami:
»
China’s Transsion Holdings, one of the world’s top five smartphone makers, continues to grow globally, with its market share approaching that of major Chinese manufacturer Oppo, on the back of a strong showing in Africa and South Asia.
Transsion’s shipments rose 35%, year-on-year, to 26 million units in the three months ended September, with its global market share reaching 8.6%, maintaining the No. 5 position it earned in the April to June period and narrowing the gap with Oppo, at 8.9%, according to U.S. research specialist IDC.
Transsion is benefiting from a sharp recovery in smartphone demand after declines in sales and profit for the year through December 2022, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the nine months through September this year, its sales rose 20%, year-on-year, to 43 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) and its net profit jumped 70% to 3.8 billion yuan.
At a Belt and Road Initiative event in Beijing last month, Transsion’s President and Chairman Zhu Zhaojiang, said the company will “uncover the driving force behind Africa’s economic growth.”
«
The biggest smartphone company you’ve never heard of (or whose products maybe you’ve never seen). Though it’s not just content in the low-end space: it’s going to launch a foldable later this year.
unique link to this extract
The renewable energy disaster far more deadly than Chernobyl • RealClearScience
Ross Pomeroy:
»
Decades ago, a single energy disaster left three million acres of land uninhabitable to humans and killed between 85,600 and 240,000 people. A casual student of history might assume these shocking statistics refer to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but that would be incorrect. No, this catastrophic specter was the fault of the Banqiao Dam collapse in Henan, China. By comparison, Chernobyl killed fifteen times fewer people and desolated an area of land one-sixth as large.
Though sharply different in magnitude, the Banqiao and Chernobyl disasters occurred under similar circumstances. Constructed by the Chinese Communist party during the Great Leap Forward, with guidance from the Soviet Union, the dam was poorly designed and hastily constructed – just like the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Moreover, party officials wanted it to retain as much water as possible because it would be “more revolutionary.” Hydrologist Chen Xing, Chief Engineer of dam projects, warned against that superficial goal and advocated for additional safety features. He was overruled and later reassigned.
Chen Xing’s warnings proved prescient in early August 1975 when Typhoon Nina battered Banqiao and dumped a meter of water in three days. The dam didn’t stand a chance. As it began to disintegrate under heavy strain, one of the workers struggling to save the dam reportedly shouted “Chu Jiaozi!” The river dragon has come…
Six hundred million cubic meters of water would eventually pour through the remains of the ruptured dam, forming a wall of water six meters high and twelve kilometers wide moving up to fifty kilometers per hour.
«
An inland, human-made tsunami. The 1970s feel like a time of hubris: errors in nuclear engineering, in dam building, and so on.
unique link to this extract
Brazil’s mysterious tunnels made by giant sloths • BBC Travel
Sarah Brown:
»
In 2009, a farmer was driving through his corn field in the south of Brazil when he suddenly felt his tractor sink and lurch to one side, making the vehicle shudder to a halt. He jumped out and saw the wheel had sunk deep into the dry soil.
Much to the farmer’s shock, the tractor had broken through what looked like top of an underground cavity. Hearing about this unusual find, researchers came to investigate and were surprised to find a tunnel nearly 2m high by almost 2m wide and about 15m long running across the field and right under the farmer’s house. Deep claw marks embedded into the walls indicated its past occupant was not human.
The farmer had stumbled upon a puzzling subject in palaeontology that is still unfolding today. He’d uncovered a megafauna paleoburrow, a prehistoric tunnel dug through rock by what Luiz Carlos Weinschutz, a geologist and one of the scientists who visited the farmer’s property, concluded was the work of a giant ground sloth or giant armadillo from at least 10,000 years ago.
These giant ground sloths, described in one paper as “a hamster the size of an elephant”, were far removed from today’s unhurried, tree-dwelling ones. They grew up to 4m long and walked on all fours, although research suggests some could stand and move bipedally. Almost 100 different species of sloths roamed the Americas between 15 million to 10,000 years ago alongside car-sized giant armadillos that also dug long tunnels through rocks in Brazil.
«
I think you need to see the picture of the Very Large Sloths. It’s there at the article if you click the link.
unique link to this extract
| • 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 