The singer Bing Crosby revolutionised recording technology because he was exhausted from making so many shows. Silicon Valley was the winner. CC-licensed photo by Ryan on Flickr.

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It’s the last post of the year! Happy Christmas and New Year! Thanks for all the support and feedback and links. Back on Monday January 8.

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

The year the Millennials aged out of the internet • The New York Times

Max Read, in an opinion piece:

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Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed. Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning: Amazon is “making itself worse” (as New York magazine moaned); Google Search is a “bloated and overmonetized” tragedy (as The Atlantic lamented); “social media is doomed to die,” (as the tech news website The Verge proclaimed); even TikTok is becoming “enjunkified” (to bowdlerize an inventive coinage of the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, republished in Wired). But the main complaint I have heard is was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”

It’s indisputable that we are living through a transitional period in the short history of the internet. The end of the low interest-rate era has shaken up the economics of startups, ending rapid-growth practices like “blitzscaling” and reducing the number of new internet businesses vying for our attention; companies like Alphabet and Facebook are now mature and dominant businesses instead of disruptive upstarts. But I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.

For more than a decade now, millennials like myself have effectively (and, in the case of our cohort’s richest member, Mark Zuckerberg, quite literally) run the internet. We were the earliest adopters of smartphones and we once consistently (not that I’d brag about it) led the generational pack in screen time. Over that period we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and molded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.

This now seems to be changing. There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.

…We’ve been used to wielding an innate understanding of the web’s capabilities and culture to our advantage; our knowledge of “how to search Google” and “how to use emoji” and “how to deploy the ‘Sarcastic Wonka’ meme,” which may once have given us an edge in multigenerational workplaces and social settings, is simply irrelevant to people younger than us.

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Happy Christmas! And new year!
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Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

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An 18-year-old hacker who leaked clips of a forthcoming Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order.

Arion Kurtaj from Oxford, who is autistic, was a key member of international gang Lapsus$. The gang’s attacks on tech giants including Uber, Nvidia and Rockstar Games cost the firms nearly $10m.

The judge said Kurtaj’s skills and desire to commit cyber-crime meant he remained a high risk to the public. He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger.

The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage. Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his acute autism so the jury was asked to determine whether or not he committed the alleged acts – not if he did so with criminal intent.

A mental health assessment used as part of the sentencing hearing said he “continued to express the intent to return to cyber-crime as soon as possible. He is highly motivated.”

The jury was told that while he was on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and in police protection at a Travelodge hotel, he continued hacking and carried out his most infamous hack.

Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Fire stick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.

Kurtaj stole 90 clips of the unreleased and hugely anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6.

He broke into the company’s internal Slack messaging system to declare “if Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code”.

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Surely this guy will get a visit in the next few weeks from a recruiter at GCHQ. Not that we’ll ever find out. That’s the most amazing bit of improvisatory hacking I’ve ever heard of.
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How pro-Russian ‘yacht’ propaganda influenced US debate over Ukraine aid – BBC News

Olga Robinson, Shayan Sardarizadeh and Mike Wendling:

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A website founded by a former US Marine who now lives in Russia has fuelled a rumour that Volodymyr Zelensky purchased two luxury yachts with American aid money.

Despite the false claim, the disinformation plot was successful. It took off online and was echoed by members of the US Congress making crucial decisions about military spending.

It was an incredible assertion – using two advisers as proxies, Mr Zelensky paid $75m (£59m) for two yachts.

But not only has the Ukrainian government flatly denied the story, the two ships in question have not even been sold. Despite being false, the story reached members of the US Congress, where leaders say any decision on further aid to Ukraine will be delayed until next year.

…The story first emerged in late November on an obscure YouTube channel – one with only a handful of followers and just a single video in its feed.

The next day, it was picked up by a site called DC Weekly, alongside pictures of the two yachts – called Lucky Me and My Legacy – and documents purportedly confirming the sale of the boats to Zelensky’s associates.

But the luxury yacht brokers where both vessels are listed for sale said that the allegations are false. The sales documents appear to be forgeries. And instead of having been purchased by Zelensky or his close advisers, both Lucky Me and My Legacy are still up for sale.

The DC Weekly story touched off a blaze of online speculation, with multiple sources linking to the story and content citing the story across multiple platforms.

However, the site is not, as the name implies, a weekly publication – nor is it based in the US capital.
Research by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, disinformation researchers at Clemson University, shows that DC Weekly was started by John Mark Dougan, a former US Marine and Florida police officer who moved to Russia in 2016.

Mr Dougan spent three years as a deputy with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office. After he left in 2009 he started a website spreading rumours about his former employers.

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America elects idiots as legislators, part 945. (Plenty of examples available in the UK too.)
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Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount CEOs hold exploratory merger talks • FT

Anna Nicolaou, James Fontanella-Khan and Christopher Grimes :

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Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount Global are in early talks to merge, in a media deal that would combine the owner of HBO and CNN with the studio behind the Mission Impossible films and CBS News. 

Warner chief executive David Zaslav and Paramount chief Bob Bakish discussed a possible deal over lunch at Paramount’s offices in New York this week, according to three people familiar with the matter. The talks were at an early stage and a deal might not materialise, these people cautioned.

The conversation was more of an expression of interest by Zaslav than an offer, according to one of the people familiar with the meeting between the two executives. Billionaire Shari Redstone, who controls Paramount, has also held preliminary talks with Skydance, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick, run by David Ellison.

The discussions with Warner Bros, first reported by Axios, come as US media groups are struggling to improve their profitability after waging a costly “streaming war” against Netflix. Big entertainment groups including Warner, Paramount and Disney have been on a cost-cutting mission as they try to shrink losses running into the billions of dollars from their video streaming services.

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More fallout from Netflix’s win in the streaming wars. Who’s big enough to stand alone? Netflix, Amazon, Apple. Any others?
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‘A mass exodus’: why so many LA restaurants are closing • SF Gate

Karen Palmer:

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pandemic-era government assistance in the form of Paycheck Protection Program loans and the Restaurant Revitalization Fund ran out long ago, and commercial rents in Los Angeles remain staggeringly high.

Operators are also feeling a major squeeze due to rising food and labour costs. Industry vet Jeremy Adler, who is a partner in the Santa Monica Southeast Asian restaurant Cobi’s and is in construction on a new restaurant in Mar Vista, points to expensive liquor licenses and new California laws like Assembly Bill 1228 as challenges for owners. AB 1228 is intended to create a liveable wage by raising the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 in April 2024.

“That law puts pressure on independent restaurants as well,” Adler says. “When the average profit margin at a restaurant is 5-7%, 1% really matters.”

“The economics of owning a restaurant are completely out of whack right now,” says seasoned chef Chris Feldmeier, who shuttered his Silver Lake Spanish restaurant Bar Moruno in November. “We used to try to keep our labour costs under 30%, but now they’re inching up closer to 40%. With cooks making $22 to $25 an hour, it’s just hard for a small, private restaurant.”

Ciccolella adds, “It’s impossible to get quality food at a fair price. I have to sell my lobster roll for $29 at the restaurant, but I can sell it for $20 at my new Little Anchor truck because it’s just me and I don’t have all the labour costs.”

Manzke and the others also note that the Hollywood strikes this year were a major blow to restaurants.
“We always had a lot of support from Netflix at Republique. There would be someone there from the company every night, and that just stopped overnight,” he says. “Los Angeles is so tied to the entertainment industry.”

“We used to cater for all of the studios in Culver City, and that completely went away,” Ciccolella says. Adler, meanwhile, notes that event business in early December, usually a way for restaurants to balance out the slower weeks at the end of the month, was also severely mitigated by the strike.

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So the TL;DR is: the places where Hollywood’s writers and actors did their side business suddenly found they didn’t have any writers or actors. Double whammy for all the wait staff looking for acting jobs by slipping their details to directors. Perhaps a few more streaming merger negotiations will help matters.
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Tech billionaires need to stop trying to make the science fiction they grew up on real • Scientific American

Charlie Stross, who actually is a SF author:

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We were warned about the ideology driving these wealthy entrepreneurs by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the ethical artificial intelligence team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specializing in existential threats to humanity. They named this ideology TESCREAL, which stands for “transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism.” These are separate but overlapping beliefs in the circles associated with big tech in California.

…TESCREAL is also heavily contaminated with Christian theological reasoning, [John] Campbellian white supremacism, Randian ruthlessness, the eugenics that was pervasive in the genre until the 1980s and the imperialist subtext of colonizing the universe.

But there is a problem: SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental. We recycle the existing material—and the result is influenced heavily by the biases of earlier writers and readers. The genre operates a lot like a large language model that is trained using a body of text heavily contaminated by previous LLMs; it tends to emit material like that of its predecessors. Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.

Science fiction, therefore, does not develop in accordance with the scientific method. It develops by popular entertainers trying to attract a bigger audience by pandering to them. The audience today includes billionaires who read science fiction in their childhood and who appear unaware of the ideological underpinnings of their youthful entertainment: elitism, “scientific” racism, eugenics, fascism and a blithe belief today in technology as the solution to societal problems.

In 2021 a meme arose based on writer and game designer Alex Blechman’s tweet about this issue (which was later posted to Mastodon):

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Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

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It’s a worryingly accurate summary of the situation in Silicon Valley right now: the billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we’re trapped in the passenger seat.

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That idea of SF as an early self-feeding LLM (though aren’t all literary genres therefore that?) is novel.
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Researchers fear the spoken ‘r’ is ready to roll away from the last bastion of rhoticity in England • Phys.org

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How do you pronounce your “r”s towards the ends of words like Shearer, purr, nerd and pore? And what about those in car, bird and her?

Chances are that if you are English, you will likely soften it out so that it sounds more like an elongation of the vowel, rather than the kind of “r” you find in words such as red or right.

The evidence is, according to Lancaster University researchers, that “r”s are becoming a thing of the past in England—apart from in Blackburn, where the “r” is still very much rolling.

Traditionally, parts of Lancashire have very clearly articulated “r”s, similar to the stereotype of Cornwall and the West Country. The pronunciation of these “r”s towards the ends of words is called rhoticity.

In fact, historically, hundreds of years ago, people throughout England used to pronounce strong “r”s. But now, says the research paper, these strong “r”s are definitely dying out.

In Blackburn, young speakers do mostly say their “r”s, but they are, according to the research team, phonetically very weak and often difficult to perceive. And they pronounce them less frequently than older speakers.

According to lead researcher Dr. Danielle Turton, who worked with Dr. Robert Lennon on the research project, the “r” in the spelling for speakers from these areas means that it should be pronounced like an “r” at the beginning of a word, rather than just creating a longer vowel.

“Speakers from places like Blackburn usually differentiate between pairs of words such as ‘stellar’ and ‘stella’, whereas most of England would consider them to be the same,” says Dr. Turton.

“However, for the youngest speakers in Blackburn, these ‘r’s are very weak, which raises the question of whether future generations will even hear these weak ‘r’s at all and whether this distinction will eventually fade away. Accent change is often like a puddle: it dries up in most places and leaves remnants around the edges, hence why Cornwall and East Lancs behave similarly here today.”

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Read more about rhoticity – you thought it was the thing they turned the chicken on, didn’t you? – in the full paper.
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AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism • Dan McQuillan

dan mcquillan is, well, taking no prisoners:

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Faced with social structures whose foundations have been eaten away by decades of privatisation and austerity, the political response is to pump money into ‘frontier AI’ while hyping it up as the most awe-inspiring technology since the Manhattan Project. The Prime Minister says he will “harness the incredible potential of AI to transform our hospitals and schools” while ignoring leaking roofs in the NHS and the literally collapsing ceilings in local schools. This focus on the immaterial fantasies of AI is a deliberate diversion. When large language models are touted as passing basic medical exams, it’s because they’ve absorbed answers from across the internet. They are incapable of the embodied understanding and common sense that underpin medicine, education or any other form of care.

One thing that these models definitely do, though, is transfer control to large corporations. The amount of computing power and data required is so incomprehensibly vast that very few companies in the world have the wherewithal to train them. To promote large language models anywhere is privatisation by the back door. The evidence so far suggests that this will be accompanied by extensive job losses, as employers take AI’s shoddy emulation of real tasks as an excuse to trim their workforce. The goal isn’t to “support” teachers and healthcare workers but to plug the gaps with AI instead of with the desperately needed staff and resources.

Real AI isn’t sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form. Like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable. Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn’t provide insights as it’s just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences. The logics of ranking and superiority are buried deep in the make up of artificial intelligence; married to populist politics, it becomes another vector for deciding who is disposable.

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How Bing Crosby made Silicon Valley possible • The Honest Broker [not Roger Pielke]

Ted Gioia:

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Long before he became chief engineer for Bing Crosby Enterprises, Jack Mullin was a major in the US Army Signal Corp, who spent a lot of time listening to Nazi radio broadcasts during World War II. Unlike his colleagues, Mullin was puzzled by the classical music he heard coming out of Germany—it sounded like live performances by orchestras, but somehow he doubted that the Berlin Philharmonic was really giving a concert so late at night.

After the end of the war, he solved the mystery. The army sent him to Germany to document their electronics technology, and he discovered magnetic tape recorders. This device, known as the Magnetophon was even used by Hitler to pre-record speeches, which could later be broadcast on the radio as live announcements.

Mullin returned to California, after the war, with two of these tape recorders, and plenty of tape, along with instruction manuals and schematic drawings. His goal was to create his own tape recording equipment with American parts.

On May 16, 1946, Mullin gave a demonstration of German Magnetophons at the NBC Studio in San Francisco. The buzz it created soon led to the launch of Ampex.

…Ampex, launched in San Carlos, California in 1944 is the key connecting point between music storage and data storage. That tiny startup, according to Silicon Valley historians Peter Hammar and Bob Wilson, was involved directly or indirectly in the launch of “almost every computer magnetic and optical disc recording system, including hard drives, floppy discs, high-density recorders, and RFID devices.”

Crosby himself moved to Silicon Valley in 1963, buying a home in Hillsborough for $175,000. (The house was recently listed for $14m.) According to his son Nathaniel, Crosby and his wife Kathryn didn’t want to raise their children in Hollywood. A few months later, they moved to an even larger house on the other side of town.

By any measure, Bing Crosby’s life was an amazing success story. And he understood the financial upside enough to become a West Coast distributor for both Ampex and 3M magnetic tape. But if he had taken equity positions in Silicon Valley startups, instead of just financing them as a customer and distributor, he might have become the godfather of high tech—and the Crosby family would be on the Forbes billionaire list today.

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Thanks for the link (well worth reading in full!) to Mark C, who points out “in light of the Apple Watch problems: how Bing Crosby enabled a whole US industry to rip off German tech, patent-free”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK government has a plan to digitise and then destroy old wills – a move like that which helped spark the Windrush crisis. CC-licensed photo by Ken Mayer 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.

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

Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders • The Guardian

Daniel Boffey:

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The police will be able to run facial recognition searches on a database containing images of Britain’s 50 million driving licence holders under a law change being quietly introduced by the government.

Should the police wish to put a name to an image collected on CCTV, or shared on social media, the legislation would provide them with the powers to search driving licence records for a match.

The move, contained in a single clause in a new criminal justice bill, could put every driver in the country in a permanent police lineup, according to privacy campaigners.

Facial recognition searches match the biometric measurements of an identified photograph, such as that contained on driving licences, to those of an image picked up elsewhere.

The intention to allow the police or the National Crime Agency (NCA) to exploit the UK’s driving licence records is not explicitly referenced in the bill or in its explanatory notes, raising criticism from leading academics that the government is “sneaking it under the radar”.

Once the criminal justice bill is enacted, the home secretary, James Cleverly, must establish “driver information regulations” to enable the searches, but he will need only to consult police bodies, according to the bill.

Critics claim facial recognition technology poses a threat to the rights of individuals to privacy, freedom of expression, non-discrimination and freedom of assembly and association.

Police are increasingly using live facial recognition, which compares a live camera feed of faces against a database of known identities, at major public events such as protests.

Prof Peter Fussey, a former independent reviewer of the Met’s use of facial recognition, said there was insufficient oversight of the use of facial recognition systems, with ministers worryingly silent over studies that showed the technology was prone to falsely identifying black and Asian faces.

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The Tories: famously the party that wants to keep the government out of people’s lives.
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Tesla recalls over two million cars due to Autopilot concerns • Consumer Reports

Keith Barry:

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A preliminary evaluation of Autopilot after the software update was installed on CR’s [Consumer Report’s] Tesla Model S suggests that the fix is insufficient, a CR safety expert says, explaining that it’s still too easy for drivers to misuse the feature.

“Although we welcome some of the changes that Tesla made as part of the most recent software update, including warning text that’s easier to read, the new software doesn’t go far enough to prevent misuse or address the root causes of driver inattention,” says Kelly Funkhouser, associate director of vehicle technology at CR’s Auto Test Center. 

For example, we were still able to engage and use Autopilot after covering the in-car driver monitoring system camera. “Drivers can still use Autopilot if they’re looking away from the road, using their phone, or otherwise distracted,” says Funkhouser. “We know that drivers who have the ability to misuse a system such as Autopilot will do so unless the software prevents it,” she says. Our top-rated ADA [active driver assistance] systems use driver-monitoring cameras to prevent this kind of foreseeable misuse. 

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Remains to be seen if this fix will be satisfactory for the US’s NHTSA, which ordered the recall/update.
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Why is the US is producing more oil than ever? • The Atlantic

Rogé Karma, on the US producing about a fifth of world oil production in 2023:

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By boosting domestic oil supply, the Biden administration seems to be contributing to the very problem it claims to want to solve.

The reality is more complicated. “Pushing for reductions in U.S. oil production is like squeezing a balloon—the production will ‘pop out’ somewhere else,” writes Samantha Gross, an energy-and-climate expert at the Brookings Institution. The world’s energy needs are growing rapidly, which means oil companies are going to supply it regardless of what the White House does.

If the US were to cut back tomorrow, prices would rise. In the short term, this would lead to less consumption and lower emissions. But those high prices would only entice producers in other countries to step in, as many did in the months after Russia’s invasion. For that reason, reductions in US oil production could actually result in higher overall emissions. The US has one of the least emissions-intensive oil industries on the planet. Shifting production to countries with looser standards would likely be worse for the climate.

But the deeper explanation for the Biden administration’s actions has to do with the politics of climate change. Put simply, pursuing a decarbonization agenda requires Biden to maintain political support, and there is no surer way to lose political support than by presiding over high gas prices. Biden’s approval rating has tracked gas prices for most of his presidency (although he hasn’t yet benefited from recent improvements), and the drop in prices in the months leading up to the 2022 midterms may have contributed to Democrats’ unexpectedly strong performance in those elections. Plus, when the price of energy goes up, the price of everything else tends to rise as well, sparking further inflation.

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Well, OK. Though sometimes it takes a real external shock to force a change in behaviour. The 1973 oil shock changed behaviours. In the intervening 50 years, we’ve gotten used to surplus when all the requirements are for less.
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YouTube is the last bastion of unbiased journalism in India • Rest of World

Sonia Faleiro:

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[Ravish] Kumar is one of several high-profile Indian journalists who have left mainstream media organizations over the past few years and turned to YouTube and other social media platforms instead. These journalists see their own channels as the only way to continue their work in a country where the government is hounding noncompliant media out of their jobs. Ahead of the general election expected to take place in April or May 2024, in which Modi is standing for a third term, social media may be the last space to share unbiased news. “The idea is to report the news the old-school way,” Faye D’Souza, a former executive editor at the media company Times Network, told Rest of World. “To calmly tell people what is going on.”

But going solo is punishing work in a country that the World Press Freedom Index now ranks 161st out of 180. A YouTube channel or Instagram account does not offer the same protections as working for a mainstream media company: There is little financial security, legal support, or physical protection. Alone in their own homes, several of India’s best-known journalists told Rest of World they are fearful for their future. They spoke of online threats and warnings over the phone, of being frozen out by friends and family; of fears their equipment could be seized, their homes raided, or they could be thrown into jail.

For many, the NDTV takeover that inspired Kumar’s resignation was a nail in the coffin for journalism in India. Akash Banerjee, who hosts the political satire channel The DeshBhakt (The Patriot) on YouTube, said he had lawyers in place. “Because I know the knock on my door is inevitable. The government has a way of getting to you.”

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Bloomberg: Vision Pro production moving at full speed, February launch planned • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Bloomberg reports that Apple is ramping up production of its impending Vision Pro headset. The current goal is for the first units to be ready by the end of January, with a retail launch planned for February.

Mark Gurman writes that Vision Pro production is “running at full speed” in Apple’s factories in China, and has been for several weeks:

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Production of the new headset is running at full speed at facilities in China and has been for several weeks, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The goal is for customer-bound units to be ready by the end of January, with the retail debut planned for the following month, the people said.

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The report does note, however, that “last-minute production hiccups or other snags” could still impact Apple’s timeline. Still, the company has a clear goal in mind and is currently on track to meet that goal.

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Yes, of course the Bloomberg story contains a caveat. That February date is interesting: pep up the end of the January-March quarter by selling some of the most expensive items it’s ever made, perhaps.
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Reliving my memories in Apple Vision Pro almost brought me to tears • Inverse

Raymond Wong:

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I noted in my viewing session last time that the 3D has just the right amount of depth, not too strong or too weak — or because you can look at them in an “Immersive” view where the border of the video becomes glowy and dream-like to give it characteristics of a memory. Either way, spatial videos feel alive. The dream-like memory border sells that feeling pretty well.

In one spatial video, my mom and I were having dim sum at a restaurant, and I was explaining to her what the Apple Vision Pro is and what it does. It was recorded last weekend, so the memory was fresh in my mind. Rewatching the video inside of the Vision Pro, it was as if we were transported back to the restaurant, sitting across from each other over a table of dishes. I kept tilting my head a lot, almost in disbelief at how surreal it was to see my mom talking, laughing, and eating in spatial video.

My mom was who got me interested in technology, and I don’t think I would have a career writing about new consumer tech if not for her interest in it. To me, these convos are very precious, so to see them replayed with a sense of presence really tugged at my heartstrings. At one point, I fought back a few tiny tears, if only because there were three Apple reps sitting next to me.

Self-aware of EyeSight and the possibility that they might be able to see my tears, I asked if they could see my eyes on the Vision Pro’s outside display. I was told they couldn’t. Pre-release software, you know? I obviously couldn’t confirm that myself as the person wearing Vision Pro. At a certain distance and window size, spatial videos can look life-sized. But even when I “pushed” the video window farther away (enabled by looking at the bar at the bottom of the window and then pushing it farther from me), seeing my mom in 3D made me emotional. I even laid back on the sofa and placed the virtual video on the ceiling.

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Another account of using this stuff, and even allowing for the fact that Apple must be choosing these folk carefully, it’s evident that spatial video is something special.
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Ministry of Justice plan to destroy historical wills is ‘insane’, say experts • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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“Sheer vandalism” and “insane”. This is how leading historians have described government plans to destroy millions of historical wills to save on storage costs.

The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitising and then throwing away about 100m paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save £4.5m a year.

But Tom Holland, the classical and medieval historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, said the proposal to empty shelves at the Birmingham archive was “obviously insane”. Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Germany and modern Europe, said “to destroy the original documents is just sheer vandalism in the name of bureaucratic efficiency”.

Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as “bananas” and “a seriously bad idea”.

The government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of “famous people” – likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales – but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept.

It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost. Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links.

The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October. The apparent vulnerability was also revealed this month when the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the former prime minister Boris Johnson both claimed they could no longer access WhatsApp messages sought by the UK Covid-19 public inquiry.

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Short memories in government: the Windrush scandal followed the destruction of hundreds of landing cards.
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Apple loses attempt to halt Apple Watch sales ban – The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Apple has lost its bid to delay an import and sales ban [starting December 26] on the Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2. In a filing on Wednesday, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) denied Apple’s motion to stay the ban while awaiting an appeal.

…The ban is only in effect in the US, and third-party retailers such as Best Buy will still be able to sell the pair of watches until their supplies run out. Although Apple’s attempt to stop the ban has failed, it still has a chance to undo the decision if President Joe Biden vetoes it. However, as my colleague Victoria Song points out, Apple getting a presidential veto “would be like lightning striking the same place twice.”

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Ben Thompson made the good point on his Dithering podcast that Biden might not want to be seen acting to help out a “big tech” company against a smaller one. It’s not as if Apple is short of money to pay Massimo, which won the patent argument at the ITC; nor that Apple hasn’t been shy of asserting its patents when it can. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
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AI machine cannot be called an inventor, rules UK supreme court • FT

George Hammond:

»

The UK’s Supreme Court has ruled that a machine cannot be named on a patent as the inventor of new products or ideas, in a landmark decision that tackles the issue of who — or what — can claim credit for innovative creations.

The country’s highest court unanimously rejected a challenge, which has been working its way through the courts since 2018, that would have seen artificial intelligence tools designated as inventors. Wednesday’s decision puts an end to the case in the UK.

The case goes to the heart of questions about what rights and protections machines deserve. Those questions have grown increasingly complex as a result of rapid developments in the technology this year, which have included AI matching or outperforming humans on a range of tasks. 

The advances are challenging existing legal frameworks in the UK and elsewhere, designed to strictly uphold the rights of human inventors.

Handing down the Supreme Court’s judgment on Wednesday, Lord Kitchin said: “We conclude that an ‘inventor’ must be a natural person. Only a person can devise an invention.”

«

Though the US Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on this, that’s the same direction that it’s going in. Certainly makes sense: we’re humans! We’re the ones! This should forestall things until aliens get here and start showing off their tricks.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How much sugar was removed from people’s diets in the UK by a £300m tax system? A lot less than you think. CC-licensed photo by Uwe Hermann 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 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.

TikTok allowing under-13s to keep accounts, evidence suggests • The Guardian

Hibaq Farah and Dan Milmo:

»

TikTok faces questions over safeguards for child users after a Guardian investigation found that moderators were being told to allow under-13s to stay on the platform if they claimed their parents were overseeing their accounts.

In one example seen by the Guardian, a user who declared themselves to be 12 in their account bio, under TikTok’s minimum age of 13, was allowed to stay on the platform because their user profile stated the account was managed by their parents.

The internal communication sent in the autumn involved a quality analyst – someone who is responsible for any queries related to moderating video queues – who was asked by a moderator whether they should ban the user’s account.

The advice from the TikTok quality analyst was that if the account bio said it was managed by parents then moderators could allow the account to stay on the platform. The message was sent into a group chat with more than 70 moderators, who are responsible for looking at content mostly from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

It has also been alleged that moderators have been told in meetings that if a parent is in the background of a seemingly underage video, or if the bio says an account is managed by a parent, those accounts can stay on the platform.

Suspected cases of underage account holders are sent to an “underage” queue for further moderation. Moderators have two options: to ban, which would mean the removal of the account, or to approve, allowing the account to stay on the platform.

A staff member at TikTok said they believed it was “incredibly easy to avoid getting banned for being underage. Once a kid learns that this works, they will tell their friends.”

TikTok said it was false to claim that children under 13 were allowed on the platform if they stated in their bio that the account was managed by an adult.

«

Who you going to believe, your lying eyes or TikTok’s PR person?
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Next Beeper Mini fix requires users to have a Mac • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

The developers behind Beeper Mini are continuing with their effort to make iMessage for Android function despite Apple’s mitigations, and the latest “fix” requires Beeper Mini users to have access to a Mac.

On Reddit, the Beeper Mini team says that the Mac-based fix coming on December 20 stabilizes iMessage for Beeper Cloud and Mini, and it “works well” and “is very reliable.”

It is unclear how many Android users have a Mac or have a friend with a Mac to rely on, but the fix requires using a Mac to connect to iMessage on Beeper. According to Beeper Mini’s developers, registration data from an actual Mac has to be sent to Apple to use iMessage on Beeper. Beeper has been using its own Mac servers to provide that information to Apple, but that resulted in thousands of Beeper users having the same registration info, which was an “easy target for Apple.”

The Beeper update will instead generate unique registration data for each Mac, making it harder for Apple to tell which users are accessing iMessage through an Android device.

«

Oh good grief. Don’t tell me, the next forced update to Beeper will require users to have an iPhone.
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A bitter pill for public health • The Critic Magazine

Christopher Snowdon:

»

claiming that the UK sugar tax had led to a 10% reduction in the amount of sugar consumed in soft drinks. Although one of its authors admitted that a decline of this magnitude “might sound modest”, it was presented as a win for public health. The preposterous pressure group Action on Sugar called for the tax to be “extended to other categories” and the 10% figure soon found its way into the National Food Strategy and several World Health Organisation reports.

Last week the study was retracted, along with an editorial titled “UK sugar tax hits the sweet spot” that had been published in the British Medical Journal claiming that the tax was “working exactly as intended”.

It turns out that tax has not been not working exactly as intended. In a new version of the study, the authors estimate that the decline in sugar consumption from soft drinks was just 2.7%, barely a quarter of the original figure, and that in contrast to the original study, which claimed that there had been no change in soft drink sales, the volume of soft drinks rose by 2.6%.

The decline in sugar consumption was originally said to be 30 grams per household per week. In the new study, it is estimated to be 8 grams per household per week. That works out at less than two calories per person per day. To get an idea of how little that is, get a slice of bread and take the tiniest nibble off one of the corners. That is the amount of calories reduced by a tax that costs consumers £300m a year.

«

Snowdon tends to start from a place of “this won’t work” about such taxes used to change behaviour, but in this case he turns out to have been dead right.
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Inside The New York Times’ big bet on games • Vanity Fair

Charlotte Klein:

»

n the ninth floor of the New York Times headquarters, high above the bustling newsroom, a group of editors are doing the Sunday crossword. Or, rather, they’re undoing it. The editors already accepted this submission, one of the 150 to 200 puzzles arriving weekly, and are now working through it clue by clue—questioning, waffling, rewriting. They nitpick and fact-check. They debate the timelessness of a hint; whether the solver’s reaction will be Oh, I guess versus Aha!

…Joel Fagliano, sporting a New York Times T-shirt, a hoodie, and Allbirds sneakers, hunches over his computer and clicks around the grid while reading each clue and its answer aloud. Fagliano, known for never letting a meeting run long, works efficiently but also lets the group nerd out when appropriate. Like now. “All right, ‘Norwegian city depicted in’—oh really? I didn’t know Oslo was in the background of The Scream,” Fagliano says. He pulls up an image of the iconic Edvard Munch painting. “Hard to say what’s back there,” he chuckles, squinting at the ghostly image. “It seems like it’s sort of a whirling.”

The other editors are similarly skeptical as to whether the city of Oslo, the answer to the proposed clue, is clearly identifiable in the painting. “It’s just a blur. Maybe Munch says it was. I know it’s in Oslo,” says Iverson, referring to the physical location of the work. “If the painting is in an Oslo art gallery, I like that,” Ezersky says. Fagliano, still googling, adds, “This says they located the spot to a fjord overlooking Oslo.”

«

Sweet mother of god. 1) That is TOO MANY PEOPLE. American newspapers suffer from chronic overemployment, and this is a classic case. The Guardian, whose crosswords have a world-beating reputation, has one or two people who check the crossword. 2) That crossword clue is atrocious. You’d either know the answer, or guess it, but that’s an appalling way to clue anything.
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Is this the end of geofence warrants? • Electronic Frontier Foundation

Jennifer Lynch is the EFF’s general counsel:

»

Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if not impossible—for Google to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant, a change we’ve been asking Google to implement for years.

Geofence warrants require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or devices located within a geographic area during a time period specified by law enforcement. These warrants violate the Fourth Amendment because they are not targeted to a particular individual or device, like a typical warrant for digital communications. The only “evidence” supporting a geofence warrant is that a crime occurred in a particular area, and the perpetrator likely carried a cell phone that shared location data with Google. For this reason, they inevitably sweep up potentially hundreds of people who have no connection to the crime under investigation—and could turn each of those people into a suspect.

Geofence warrants have been possible because Google collects and stores specific user location data (which Google calls “Location History” data) altogether in a massive database called “Sensorvault.” Google reported several years ago that geofence warrants make up 25% of all warrants it receives each year.

Google’s announcement outlined three changes to how it will treat Location History data. First, going forward, this data will be stored, by default, on a user’s device, instead of with Google in the cloud. Second, it will be set by default to delete after three months; currently Google stores the data for at least 18 months. Finally, if users choose to back up their data to the cloud, Google will “automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google.”

«

It’s a sort of arms race between legal loopholes and technological ones.
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Studios are loosening their reluctance to send old shows back to Netflix • The New York Times

John Koblin and Nicole Sperling:

»

For years, entertainment company executives happily licensed classic movies and television shows to Netflix. Both sides enjoyed the spoils: Netflix received popular content like “Friends” and Disney’s “Moana,” which satisfied its ever-growing subscriber base, and it sent bags of cash back to the companies.

But around five years ago, executives realized they were “selling nuclear weapons technology” to a powerful rival, as Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, put it. Studios needed those same beloved movies and shows for the streaming services they were building from scratch, and fueling Netflix’s rise was only hurting them. The content spigots were, in large part, turned off.

Then the harsh realities of streaming began to emerge.

Confronting sizable debt burdens and the fact that most streaming services still don’t make money, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have begun to soften their do-not-sell-to-Netflix stances. The companies are still holding back their most popular content — movies from the Disney-owned Star Wars and Marvel universes and blockbuster original series like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” aren’t going anywhere — but dozens of other films like “Dune” and “Prometheus” and series like “Young Sheldon” are being sent to the streaming behemoth in return for much-needed cash. And Netflix is once again benefiting.

Ted Sarandos, one of Netflix’s co-chief executives, said at an investor conference last week that the “availability to license has opened up a lot more than it was in the past,” arguing that the studios’ earlier decision to hold back content was “unnatural.”

“They’ve always built the studios to license,” he said.

As David Decker, the content sales president for Warner Bros. Discovery, said: “Licensing is becoming in vogue again. It never went away, but there’s more of a willingness to license things again. It generates money, and it gets content viewed and seen.”

«

This story could have been headlined “Studios are rediscovering their eagerness to make money from their content, who cares where it’s shown”. It also shows that Netflix has won the streaming wars. Now it’s just a question of which ones drop out and which ones can find a niche in which to thrive.
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Carter-Ruck and the Ponzi scheme • Tax Policy

Dan Neidle:

»

OneCoin was one of the biggest scams in history. There was no “mining”. There was no blockchain. The “exchange” presented fake prices, designed to make investors think the price of OneCoin was rising when, in reality, there was no price at all. OneCoin was a fraud from the start – a Ponzi [pyramid] scheme, where new investors’ money was used to pay old investors. It also had pyramid scheme features – existing investors were incentivised to sell packages to new investors, who’d pay up to €118,000 for worthless “training courses” accompanied by “tokens” that could be exchanged for OneCoins.

OneCoin it failed spectacularly in 2017, and its executives are all now either in jail or in hiding. Around $4bn was stolen from millions of investors. Its founder, Ruja Ignatova, is one of the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives.

Carter-Ruck is possibly the UK’s most well-known libel-specialist law firm. At some point in 2016 it decided to act for OneCoin and Ruja Ignatova. How did it make that decision?

I was a partner in a large law firm for many years. Before a partner could act for a new client, a team went through procedures to check the bona fides of that client and their business. This included searches of the internet and other open source materials, as well as searches of private databases. Partly this was about protecting the firm’s reputation. But also it was about the serious consequences for a law firm which facilitated criminal activity or received money that was the proceeds of crime. I am not giving away any secrets by saying this, because these are procedures followed by all UK law firms.

What would reasonable due diligence have found in mid-2016, if we limit ourselves to material available on the public internet?

«

Neidle’s dissection of this, and letters sent to various publications by Carter-Ruck, really is a delight. As a side note on the whole business, there’s a great deal of suspicion that Ignatova is now resting at the bottom of several lakes and/or concrete piles, as OneCoin is thought by some to have been a reservoir for some extremely shady money.

I wonder if Carter-Ruck’s bills were paid, and in what currency.
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Facebook is being overrun with stolen, AI-generated images that people think are real • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

In the photo, a man kneels in an outdoor sawmill next to his painstaking work: An intricate wooden carving of his bulldog, which he proudly gazes at. “Made it with my own hands,” the Facebook caption reads. The image has 1,300 likes, 405 comments, and 47 shares. “Beautiful work of art,” one of the comments reads. “You have an AMAZING talent!,” another says. “Nice work, love it!” “Awesome work keep it up.” 

This incredible work of art, a “wooden monument to my dog,” has been posted dozens of times across dozens of engagement bait Facebook pages. But every time, the man and the dog are different. Sometimes the dog is hyperrealistic. Sometimes the bulldog is a German Shepherd. Sometimes the man’s hair is slicked back, sometimes it stands up. Sometimes the man sits on the other side of the dog. Sometimes the man looks Latino, other times he looks white; clearly, it is a different man, and a different dog, in most of the images. 

Depending on the image, it is obvious, to me, that the man and the dog are not real. The dog often looks weirdly polygonal, or like some wood carving filter has been applied to an image of a real dog. Sometimes the dog’s ear has obvious artifacts associated with AI-generated images. Other times, it’s the man who looks fake. Variations of this picture are being posted all over Facebook by a series of gigantic meme pages with names like “Go Story,” “Amazing World,” “Did you know?” “Follow me,” “Avokaddo,” and so on.

Universally, the comment sections of these pages feature hundreds of people who have no idea that these are AI-generated and are truly inspired by the dog carving. A version of this image posted on Dogs 4 life has 1 million likes, 39,000 comments, and 17,000 shares. The Dogs 4 life account has spammed links to buy cheap, dog-branded stuff to the top of the comments section.

In many ways, this is a tale as old as time: people lie and steal content online in exchange for likes, influence and money all the time. But the spread of this type of content on Facebook over the last several months has shown that the once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.

It also shows Facebook is doing essentially nothing to help its users decipher real content from AI-generated content masquerading as real content, and that huge masses of Facebook users are completely unprepared for our AI-generated future.

«

And that last paragraph is the point, really. (Also, just as frustrating: there is a real man and the wooden dog he made.) How shocking of course that it should be Facebook’s denizens who aren’t willing to dig just a little bit to confirm whether something is real.
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Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore – The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day.

The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless” and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, “the age of social media is ending,” and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web. Behind these theories is the same general perception: Understanding what is actually happening online has become harder than ever.

…Consider TikTok for a second—arguably the most vibrant platform on the internet. Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East or incendiary commentary on the mass bombings in Gaza? Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend or gossip about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips racking up as many as half a billion views each—aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man. As a Verge headline noted earlier this month, “TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen.” Other platforms have the same issue: Facebook’s most recent “Widely Viewed Content Report” is full of vapid, pixelated, mostly repackaged memes and videos getting tens of millions of views.

The dynamic extends beyond social media too. Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers for most of the TV shows and movies in its library—more than 18,000 titles in all. The attempt at transparency caused confusion among some viewers: Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, which was streamed for 812 million hours globally. “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows – legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.

«

I thought I’d never seen The Night Agent, and then recalled that I’d watched the first five minutes or so and filed it in the “White House CIA conspiracy murder lone good guy” mental drawer, along with stuff like Salt (OK female lead but was written for Tom Cruise), White House Down, Designated Survivor, and so on. But the wider question is the big one: we’re now in a position where we’re trying to understand everything in the world, and that’s impossible.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Future Apple Watch buyers might have to take blood oxygen readings using more traditional methods if a trade ban is enforced. CC-licensed photo by Chic Bee 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.

A selection of 8 links for you. Giving it 110%. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple halting Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales: Here’s why • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple has announced that it will soon halt sales of its flagship Apple Watch models in the United States.

The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.

The move comes following an ITC ruling as part of a long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo around the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Series 9 will no longer be available to order from Apple’s website in the US after 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 21. In-store inventory will no longer be available from Apple retail locations after December 24.

The International Trade Commission announced its ruling in October, upholding a judge’s decision from January. This sent the case to the Biden administration for a 60-day Presidential Review Period.

During this process, President Biden could veto the ruling, although this has not yet occurred. The Presidential Review Period expires on December 25, and Apple is making this announcement today to “preemptively” take steps to comply with the ITC’s decision.

Apple says that the ITC’s ban only impacts sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 because those devices offer blood oxygen monitoring capabilities. The lower-end Apple Watch SE, which lacks this sensor, is unaffected and will remain available for sale. 

The ITC’s decision only prohibits Apple from selling the affected Apple models. For now, this means the devices will remain available for purchase from other outlets including Amazon and Best Buy. Our friends over at 9to5Toys also have details on some get-the-while-can Apple Watch deals.

However, the order does block all Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 imports to the United States after December 25. At this point, Apple would also be prohibited from selling those devices to resellers, as well. So if the ruling is upheld, it could subsequently impact Apple Watch availability for other retailers as well. 

Meanwhile, any Apple Watch with a blood oxygen sensor that has already been sold is unaffected by today’s news. The blood oxygen sensor first debuted with the Apple Watch Series 6 in 2020.

«

Unwary you looks at this and thinks “wow, Apple is really screwed. No more Watch sales.” But as Neil Cybart points out, look closer: Apple’s basically telling everyone who wants a Watch to BUY IT NOW. The Christmas deadline for Biden to waive the ruling is close, but conveniently placed: imagine if it had been on December 18th, or 8th. But the day when the shops are all shut? Sail on.
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Are AI language models in hell? • Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan is an author and commentator:

»

You can get into deep debates about the role of language in the human mind, but no one would suggest that it repre sents the totality of our expe ri ence. Humans obviously enjoy a rich sensorium — one that goes way beyond the “big five”, by the way. Our language draws on these sensations; vibrates against them.

We have a world to use language in, a world to compare language against.

There’s the cosmic joke about the fish:

»

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then even tu ally one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

«

Now, imagine one language model saying to another: “What the hell is text?”

It gets worse. A language model’s expe ri ence of text isn’t visual; it has nothing to do with the bounce of hand written script, the cut of a cool font, the layout of a page. For a language model, text is normalized: an X is an X is an X, all the same.

Of course, an X is an X, in some respects. But when you, as a human, read text, you receive a dose of extra infor ma tion — always! The mono spaced grid of code tells you something (along with the syntax highlighting, of course). The “nothing to see here” of a neo-grotesque font tells you something. The wash of a web page’s muted back ground color tells you something.

Language models don’t receive any of this infor ma tion. We strip it all away and bleach the text pale before pouring it down their gullets.

It gets WORSE. How does time pass for a language model? The clock of its universe ticks token by token: each one a single beat, indivisible. And each tick is not only a demarcation, but a demand: to speak.

Think of the drum beating the tempo for the galley slaves.

The model’s entire world is an evenly-spaced stream of tokens — a relent less ticker tape. Out here in the real world, the tape often stops; a human operator considers their next request; but the language model doesn’t expe ri ence that pause.

For the language model, time is language, and language is time. This, for me, is the most hellish and horrifying realization.

We made a world out of language alone, and we abandoned them to it.

«

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Adobe abandons $20bn acquisition of Figma • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

Following mounting pressure from regulators in the UK and EU, Adobe and Figma announced on Monday that both companies are mutually terminating their merger agreement, which would have seen Adobe acquire the Figma product design platform for $20bn.

As a result of the termination, Adobe will be required to pay Figma a reverse termination fee of $1bn in cash.

“Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” said Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen in a statement. “While Adobe and Figma shared a vision to jointly redefine the future of creativity and productivity, we continue to be well positioned to capitalize on our massive market opportunity and mission to change the world through personalized digital experiences.”

Regulators cited Adobe’s near-monopoly in the design software market as they pushed back on the deal. By purchasing Figma, a fast-growing product design platform that’s now more popular than Adobe’s rival XD application, regulators worried that Adobe would harm innovation that could have occurred should Figma be allowed to flourish independently. Designers have expressed similar worries since the merger was announced in September 2022, but Adobe pushed back on those claims throughout the various ongoing probes.

In a letter dated December 14th, Adobe rejected remedies suggested by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to approve the merger following an in-depth antitrust probe.

«

Many toys being thrown out of the American pram, but allowing yet another tech company to become absolutely gigantic through another industry vertical seems a bad move (or lack of one).
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‘Hydrogen village’ plan in Redcar abandoned after local opposition • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

»

A plan to test the use of hydrogen to heat homes in a village in the north-east of England has been abandoned after months of strong opposition from concerned residents.

The government said the Redcar “hydrogen village” scheme, which had been expected to start in 2025, wouldnot go ahead because of insufficient local hydrogen production for the trial to replace the home gas supplies with the low-carbon alternative.

The decision ends months of protest against the scheme locals feared could raise energy bills and prove unsafe. A similar decision was taken in July, when plans to pilot hydrogen in Whitby, Cheshire, were scrapped after local opposition. Some residents raised concerns that they were at risk of becoming unwilling “lab rats” for a technology that would never take off in the UK.

The government is due to make a decision about whether its net zero climate plans will include replacing household gas with hydrogen by 2026. It will assess evidence from a pilot in Fife in Scotland, and similar schemes in Europe.

Many experts, including the government’s infrastructure tsars, believe that most households should switch to electric heating options, such as heat pumps, while hydrogen is used in heavy industry.

On Wednesday, the UK government formally backed plans to ban gas and “hydrogen-ready” boilers from new-build homes in England from 2025. [ie those homes will have heat pumps] Claire Coutinho, the energy security secretary, said: “Hydrogen presents a massive economic opportunity for the UK, unlocking over 12,000 jobs and up to £11bn of investment by 2030.”

The government said on Thursday it would back 11 new projects that planned to make “green hydrogen”, which is produced by splitting water molecules with renewable electricity. Other hydrogen types include blue hydrogen, which is extracted from fossil gas using carbon capture technology to prevent producing emissions.

«

The latter should be called “brown hydrogen” (why isn’t it? Who got to make that decision?), but anyway: this seems to be a quixotic attempt to make hydrogen happen, but hydrogen just doesn’t want to cooperate.
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September 2020: EV supplier Nikola: how to parlay an ocean of lies into a partnership with the largest auto OEM in America • Hindenburg Research

“Short-selling activist firm” Hindenburg Research in September 2020:

»

• Today, we reveal why we believe Nikola is an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies over the course of its founder and executive chairman Trevor Milton’s career.

• We have gathered extensive evidence—including recorded phone calls, text messages, private emails and behind-the-scenes photographs—detailing dozens of false statements by Nikola founder Trevor Milton. We have never seen this level of deception at a public company, especially of this size.

• Milton has managed to parlay these false statements made over the course of a decade into a ~$20 billion public company. He has inked partnerships with some of the top auto companies in the world, all desperate to catch up to Tesla and to harness the EV wave.

• We examine how Nikola got its early start and show how Milton misled partners into signing agreements by falsely claiming to have extensive proprietary technology.

•We reveal how, in the face of growing skepticism over the functionality of its truck, Nikola staged a video called “Nikola One in Motion” which showed the semi-truck cruising on a road at a high rate of speed. Our investigation of the site and text messages from a former employee reveal that the video was an elaborate ruse—Nikola had the truck towed to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill.

«

Monday: Milton sentenced to four years in prison. Short sellers don’t mess about.
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Musk’s X hit with EU’s first investigation of Digital Services Act violations • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

The European Union has opened a formal investigation into whether Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter) violated the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6% of global revenue. A European Commission announcement on Monday said the agency “opened formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.”

This is the commission’s first formal investigation under the Digital Services Act, which applies to large online platforms and has requirements on content moderation and transparency. The step has been in the works since at least October, when a formal request for information was sent amid reports of widespread Israel/Hamas disinformation.

The European Commission today said it “decided to open formal infringement proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act” after reviewing X’s replies to the request for information on topics including “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel.” The commission said the investigation will focus on dissemination of illegal content, the effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on X, transparency, and “a suspected deceptive design of the user interface.”

The illegal content probe will focus on “risk assessment and mitigation measures” and “the functioning of the notice and action mechanism for illegal content” that is mandated by the DSA. The commission said this will be evaluated “in light of X’s content moderation resources,” a reference to the deep staff cuts made by Musk since purchasing Twitter in October 2022.

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Musk peevishly responded “Are you taking action against other social media? Because if you have those issues with this platform, and none are perfect, the others are much worse.”

Unfortunately, no Community Note on it yet.
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Seven months inside an online scam labour camp • The New York Times

Isabell Qian:

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He had been promised a generous salary. A better work-life balance. A chance to live in the vibrant metropolis of Bangkok. His fluency in English would be put to good use as a translator for an e-commerce company, the recruiter had said.

More than anything else, Neo Lu, a 28-year-old Chinese office worker, believed the gig would be the new start he needed to save money for his dream of emigrating to the West. So in June of last year, he said his goodbyes, flew to Thailand and headed for his new job.

But when he arrived, his head was spinning from the scorching sun — and the feeling that something was very wrong. Instead of an office building in a city, Mr. Lu had been dumped at what looked like a labour camp haphazardly built on a patch of jungle and muddy fields.

Within the compound were spartan, low-rise concrete buildings with barred windows and doors. Two men in combat fatigues, carrying rifles, guarded the main entrance. High walls and fences topped with razor wire surrounded the compound, clearly meant to keep not only outsiders at bay, but also those inside from leaving.

As Mr. Lu quickly realized, there was, in fact, no translation job. No e-commerce company, either. It had all been part of a ruse, starting with a posting on a Chinese job forum, perfected by human traffickers to get people like him to travel to Thailand.

The traffickers had led Mr. Lu across the Moei River, a muddy waterway on Thailand’s porous border, and smuggled him, without his knowledge, into a remote corner of Myanmar. There, they handed him over to a Chinese gang that had paid for him.

Mr. Lu had essentially been abducted and sold into a criminal enterprise, far away from everything he knew.

That was how he became one of hundreds of thousands of people who have been trafficked into criminal gangs and trapped in what one research group has called a “criminal cancer” of exploitation, violence and fraud that has taken root in Southeast Asia’s poorest nations.

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The “labour” involved running the “pig butchering” scams – where rich westerners are conned into sending more and more money to scams by people who pop up in their WhatsApp or similar messages.
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Bus times, stops and live maps • Bustimes

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bustimes.org is the unofficial home of bus, coach, tram and ferry transport information

Search for places, operators or routes

Track buses and find bus stops

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Made by Josh Goodwin: impressive. I do recall being in a ministerial meeting some time not long after 2010 which Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt were already attending, and the topic of bus timetables being free data coming up. Good to see it got past that hurdle, but having more buses would also be a good thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Stuck in a boring meeting? The CIA’s predecessor wrote a guide on how to make them as ineffective as possible during the Second World War. CC-licensed photo by Travis Wise 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.

A selection of 10 links for you. Just updating the app, back soon. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

These AI-generated news anchors are freaking me out • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

startup Channel 1’s vision of a near-future where AI-generated avatars read you the news was a bit of a shock to the system. The company’s recent proof-of-concept “showcase” newscast reveals just how far AI-generated videos of humans have come in a short time and how those realistic avatars could shake up a lot more than just the job market for talking heads.

To be clear, Channel 1 isn’t trying to fool people with “deepfakes” of existing news anchors or anything like that. In the first few seconds of its sample newscast, it identifies its talking heads as a “team of AI-generated reporters.” A few seconds later, one of those talking heads explains further: “You can hear us and see our lips moving, but no one was recorded saying what we’re all saying. I’m powered by sophisticated systems behind the scenes.”

Even with those kinds of warnings, I found I had to constantly remind myself that the “people” I was watching deliver the news here were only “based on real people who have been compensated for use of their likeness,” as Deadline reports (how much they were compensated will probably be of great concern to actors who recently went on strike in part over the issue of AI likenesses). Everything from the lip-syncing to the intonations to subtle gestures and body movements of these Channel 1 anchors gives an eerily convincing presentation of a real newscaster talking into the camera.

Sure, if you look closely, there are a few telltale anomalies that expose these reporters as computer creations—slight video distortions around the mouth, say, or overly repetitive hand gestures, or a nonsensical word emphasis choice. But those signs are so small that they would be easy to miss at a casual glance or on a small screen like that on a phone.

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This is the future, isn’t it. Disinformation doesn’t have to just like on TikTok.
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Ukraine war: How TikTok fakes pushed Russian lies to millions • BBC News

Olga Robinson, Adam Robinson & Shayan Sardarizadeh:

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A Russian propaganda campaign involving thousands of fake accounts on TikTok spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine has been uncovered by the BBC.

Its videos routinely attract millions of views and have the apparent aim of undermining Western support.
Users in several European countries have been subjected to false claims that senior Ukrainian officials and their relatives bought luxury cars or villas abroad after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

The fake TikTok videos played a part in the dismissal last September of Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, according to his daughter Anastasiya Shteinhauz.

The BBC has uncovered nearly 800 fake accounts since July. TikTok says it was already investigating the issue and says it has taken down more than 12,000 fake accounts originating in Russia.

Ms Shteinhauz told the BBC she found out about the Russian disinformation campaign when she received a surprising call from her husband while on holiday.

“OK, so now you’ve got a villa in Madrid,” he told her, before sending a link to a TikTok video narrated by an AI-generated voice that claimed she had bought a home in the Spanish capital.

…The videos sent to Ms Shteinhauz belong to a vast Russia-based network of fake TikTok accounts posing as real users from Germany, France, Poland, Israel and Ukraine.

Using a combination of hashtag searches and TikTok’s own recommendations, BBC Verify was able to trace hundreds of similar videos targeting dozens of Ukrainian officials.

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So the information war goes on too.
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Modern Britain is a scene from ‘Slow Horses’ • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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[Mick] Herron’s spy-novel series [beginning with “Slow Horses”] is now 13 years old, the same age as Britain’s floundering Conservative government. After years of obscurity, his books are now best sellers, and Apple has so far adapted three for television under the name Slow Horses, after the first novel in the series. The reviews of the show’s newest season—which premiered late last month and is based on the third novel, Real Tigers—have been adulatory.

I live in Britain. Watching Herron’s stories unfold on-screen, I’m struck by what has—and hasn’t—happened since the first book in the series appeared. The Conservative Party has achieved Brexit and precious little else since 2010, leaving the country feeling pinched, and pessimistic, and stuck.

…When I first read Herron’s books, I wondered if the murk and mildew of Slough House were an elaborate cover. What better disguise for a great spy than masquerading as a terrible one? But the decrepit building isn’t a novelist’s ruse; the agents working there really are no-hopers, misfits, and has-beens cast out of Regent’s Park, MI5’s gleaming headquarters. “The Park” is everything Slough House is not—a high-tech paradise of ambitious Millennials wearing sharp suits and headset mics. Here is the difference between Britain’s self-image as an international colossus and the reality of its poor productivity and stagnant living standards.

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A delicious read. (The link should be free.)
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Seven things we learned analyzing 515m Wordles • The New York Times

Josh Katz and Aatish Bhatia:

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Millions of people play Wordle every day, and share, discuss and debate how they tried to win.

For the first time, we’ve analyzed how players performed in half a billion of those Wordle games over the past year and compared their results with the strategies that our WordleBot recommends.

Here are seven things we learned:

1. Of the top 30 starting words, ADIEU is the most popular but least efficient. Many, many words have been written about the best opening word for Wordle. Answering this question was, in fact, one of the motivations behind WordleBot’s development. In its robot brain, a handful of words — SLATE, CRANE, TRACE — are given the bot’s seal of approval as leading to the solution in the fewest guesses on average.

But for human Wordle players, the most popular opening word by some margin is ADIEU, with AUDIO, another four-vowel word, not far behind.

…3. More people solve Wordle on their first guess than can be explained by chance. …about one game in every 250, a reader gets the answer right on the first try. This is much more often than you’d expect if you just left things to chance, although not necessarily every case is outright cheating.

Some may be using a new window to make additional guesses after failing to solve the puzzle in six tries. [This is outright cheating by my rules – Overspill Ed.]

…5. The toughest words? Keep an eye on J. The hardest words to solve started with J, ended in Y or had a double letter somewhere. The hardest of all the words last year, JAZZY, has all three.

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I’m amazed anyone thinks it will help to figure out the vowels; getting the consonants narrows it more quickly, so you want a starting word that has the most – four, or five if you count Y. To forestall boredom, I work through the alphabet for the opening word’s starting letter. 50 days so far 🤞
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EPA: radiation from coal ash poses cancer risk • Earthjustice

Kathryn McGrath:

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently published a draft risk assessment stating that the health risks of radioactivity of coal ash are much greater than previously estimated.

This prompted more than 150 public interest groups to send a letter today urging the EPA to ban the widespread use of toxic coal ash in place of soil for construction and landscaping projects in residential areas.

The letter describes the draft risk assessment: “Radioactivity is released from coal ash in subsurface deposits when ash is used as fill. EPA found cancer risks exceeding health standards when coal ash is mixed with soil at ratios that include very small amounts of coal ash (1-2% of the soil mixture). When coal ash constitutes 8% of the soil mixture, EPA found cancer risks above 1 in 10,000 — the threshold for EPA regulation. These findings are alarming because coal ash used as fill is often not diluted nor covered with soil to shield its radioactivity.”

People may be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in coal ash that has been used as fill in neighborhoods, backyards, parks, and public areas, including playgrounds and school grounds. Exposure to excess levels of radiation causes cancer. Millions of tons of coal ash are used every year as a substitute for clean fill, and there are few restrictions and little to no oversight by EPA as to how it is used.

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Easily overlooked how coal is dirty and dangerous in multiple ways.
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The 1944 CIA guide to sabotaging meetings • Authentic Comms Strategic Consultancy

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Who wrote the CIA ‘sabotaging meetings’ guide and why?

Well, it wasn’t actually the CIA.

It was written by the OSS, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, who created it during the run up to the Second World War, to instruct and guide sympathetic Axis citizens to stir up sh*t (technical phrase).

The general idea was to create chaos at the coal face; empower potential allies and equip disgruntled citizens with the tools to disturb and disrupt businesses and organisations, with an apparent aim to cause rumbling difficulties in the economy.

In an eerie way, this rebellious guidance from nearly 80 years ago (!), resonates strongly today – think gerrymandering or deflection.

Some instructions are out of date, as you’d expect, while others sounded oddly familiar. The section entitled ‘General Interference with Organizations and Productions’ is bang on:

• Make “speeches” – Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

• Slow it down – advocate caution, avoid haste

• Where possible refer all matters to committees (never fewer than five) for “consideration”

• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

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I can’t find it now, but the New Yorker had a cartoon recently suggesting “the best way to keep meetings short” in which every participant had to be in the plank position.
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Why scientists are making transparent wood • Knowable Magazine

Jude Coleman:

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Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to create transparent wood, and he published his technique in a niche wood technology journal. The 1992 paper remained the last word on see-through wood for more than a decade, until a researcher named Lars Berglund stumbled across it.

Berglund was inspired by Fink’s discovery, but not for botanical reasons. The materials scientist, who works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, specializes in polymer composites and was interested in creating a more robust alternative to transparent plastic. And he wasn’t the only one interested in wood’s virtues. Across the ocean, researchers at the University of Maryland were busy on a related goal: harnessing the strength of wood for nontraditional purposes.

Now, after years of experiments, the research of these groups is starting to bear fruit. Transparent wood could soon find uses in super-strong screens for smartphones; in soft, glowing light fixtures; and even as structural features, such as color-changing windows.

“I truly believe this material has a promising future,” says Qiliang Fu, a wood nanotechnologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China who worked in Berglund’s lab as a graduate student.

Wood is made up of countless little vertical channels, like a tight bundle of straws bound together with glue. These tube-shaped cells transport water and nutrients throughout a tree, and when the tree is harvested and the moisture evaporates, pockets of air are left behind. To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues. After bleaching lignin’s color away or otherwise removing it, a milky-white skeleton of hollow cells remains.

This skeleton is still opaque, because the cell walls bend light to a different degree than the air in the cell pockets does — a value called a refractive index. Filling the air pockets with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls renders the wood transparent.

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Marketer sparks panic with claims it uses smart devices to eavesdrop on people • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

a marketing company called CMG Local Solutions sparked panic recently by alluding that it has access to people’s private conversations by tapping into data gathered by the microphones on their phones, TVs, and other personal electronics, as first reported by 404 Media on Thursday. The marketing firm had said it uses these personal conversations for ad targeting.

CMG’s Active Listening website starts with a banner promoting an accurate but worrisome statement, “It’s true. Your devices are listening to you.”

A November 28 blog post described Active Listening technology as using AI to “detect relevant conversations via smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices.” As such, CMG claimed that it knows “when and what to tune into.”

The blog also shamelessly highlighted advertisers’ desire to hear every single whisper made that could help them target campaigns: “This is a world where no pre-purchase murmurs go unanalyzed, and the whispers of consumers become a tool for you to target, retarget, and conquer your local market.”

The marketing company didn’t thoroughly detail how it backs its claims. An archived version of the Active Listening site provided a vague breakdown of how Active Listening purportedly works.

…In a statement emailed to Ars Technica, Cox Media Group said that its advertising tools include “third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by various social media and other applications then packaged and resold to data servicers.” The statement continues:

»

Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users, and can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.

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I noticed this website a couple of weeks ago, poked around a bit, and couldn’t figure out whether it was a spoof or overstated reality. Feels like the latter.
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Microsoft inches closer to glass storage breakthrough — but only Azure customers will benefit from it • TechRadar

Keumars Afifi-Sabet:

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Microsoft has released a paper for the widely-anticipated glass-based storage technology it’s backing to replace the conventional technology that’s fitted into the best hard drives and best SSDs out there today.

The 16-page academic paper, presented at the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, outlines the principles behind the company’s plans to build a longlasting and highly efficient storage systems.

Made from quartz glass, the storage units will be primed for use in the cloud – which means Azure customers will be the first to benefit, and likely the only ones to benefit so long as the technology is embryonic in nature.

Project Silica has been years in the making – with Microsoft teaing a prototype as far back as 2019. It’s since expanded on its work ahead of designing a system that works in a remarkably similar fashion to the ceramics-based storage that Cerabyte is building.

“This paper presents Silica: the first cloud storage system for archival data underpinned by quartz glass, an extremely resilient media that allows data to be left in situ indefinitely,” the authors wrote. 

“The hardware and software of Silica have been co-designed and co-optimized from the media up to the service level with sustainability as a primary objective.”

Data is written in a square glass platter with ultrafast femtosecond lasers through voxels. These are permanent modifications to the physical structure of the glass, and allow for multiple bits of data to be written in layers across the surface of the glass. These layers are then stacked vertically in their hundreds.

To read data, they employ polarization microscopy technology to image the platter, while the read drive scans sectors in a Z-pattern. The images are then sent to be processed and decoded, which leans on machine learning model to convert analog signals to digital data.

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Was sounding great until that “machine learning” bit at the end. What happens in the remote future when those machine learning models aren’t available for whatever reason?
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Time for a complete re-think • Irish Golfer

Ivan Morris, who is a scratch (zero-handicap) golfer, on the proposed changes to golf balls in 2030 to make them fly less far:

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In modern golf, the ability to hit the same shot over and over is more important than the ability to play different (types of) shots. Top players must be bored to tears with the game they are asked to play for a living, and it is no fun to watch either. There was a time when the driver was the most difficult club in the bag to control. Now, it’s so forgiving one can blaze away without hardly a care in the world. The game has been manipulated by the ball and equipment manufacturers to a state where it has become too easy for pros while remaining more or less as difficult as ever for the club golfer.

Rory [McIlroy’s] best drives would need to be 50 yards shorter for him to notice any difference, while amateur players who shoot 80+ should be left alone to use all of the game-improvement technology they can get their hands on. I don’t understand why the manufacturers campaigned against bifurcation. It’s the 80+ shooters who buy their overpriced products, while the elites are given it for free. Plus, the 80+ shooters outnumber the pros by 100:1.

The manufacturers do not own the game and the game does not owe the manufacturers anything. It’s the manufactures who owe the game. The manufacturers must comply with whatever rules apply if they want to continue to exist. The USGA and R&A should make whatever rules they think are best for the whole game, not one cohort of it and certainly not for the manufacturers.

Meanwhile, the PGA Tour is fighting for its life. Having to deal with a super-rich, disruptive rival who is driving costs beyond what can be afforded. There is discontent everywhere. Amongst greedy pros who want to be paid more and more and sponsors who are being asked for more money for a diminished product. With charitable donations a certain casualty, what will the attitude of loyal, unpaid, and indispensable volunteers be? There is no doubt the PGA Tour model has been badly damaged, if not completely broken.

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The Ladies’ PGA (when, one wonders, will it become the WPGA?) also doesn’t like the proposed ball change. It’s interesting how some sports are resistant to technology improvement, and some aren’t. Tennis and squash have the same court dimensions as a century ago, and both have only put small limits on technology (eg racket size and stringing patterns). Golf, on the other hand, keeps redefining itself: limits on club length, on putter shape, and now balls.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Planting trees seems like a great way to tackle climate change – but preserving forests might be even more important. CC-licensed photo by Dmitry Burdakov 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.

A selection of 10 links for you. One more week to go! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Rishi Sunak considers curbing social media use for under-16s • The Guardian

Aletha Adu and Dan Milmo:

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Rishi Sunak is considering limiting social media access for teenagers under the age of 16 to try to protect them from online harm, with reports suggesting a potential ban is on the cards.

The government is considering further action despite bringing in the Online Safety Act, which requires social media platforms to shield children from harmful content or face fines of up to 10% of a company’s global revenue.

A consultation would be launched in the new year, Bloomberg first reported, to explore the risks that children were exposed to while using social media.

While some sources told the news website that social media bans for under-16s were under consideration, a government spokesperson played down such a prospect on Thursday.

“From our point of view, we’re looking at ways to empower parents rather than crack down on anything in particular,” they said. “We’ve identified that there is a gap in research so we’ll be looking at what more research into it needs to be done, but nothing is yet signed off by ministers.”

The Molly Rose Foundation, a charity set up by the family of Molly Russell, who killed herself at the age of 14 after viewing harmful content on Instagram and Pinterest, said the emphasis of any review should be on giving more powers to the communications watchdog, Ofcom.

“It is clear that further measures are necessary to protect children from online risks,” said Andy Burrows, an adviser to the foundation. “But the emphasis should firmly be on strengthening the regulator’s hand to ensure platforms are no longer awash with a set of avoidable dangers.”

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Yet another wild surmise ejected from the implosion of the Conservative Party. Who does Sunak or his SpAds (special advisers, the political aides who suggest policy and run around making tea) think is going to be persuaded by this vague offering? It would require companies to get access to the birthdates, ie identification papers, for any child between 13 and 16. You could do it via the government, since it should hold that information, except do you want the government to coordinate with social media companies about your children?
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I saw my life in iPhone Spatial Video on Apple Vision Pro • CNET

Scott Stein:

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Apple has its own recording recommendations for spatial video, suggesting not to move too much and stay in well-lit areas. I broke a lot of those rules, floating around and sometimes going into dim spaces (a dark bar with CNET colleagues, or the museum and its glow-in-the-dark rocks). The results still worked well, but brighter places pop more.

The 30-frames-per-second frame rate limitation was also visibly apparent, especially with movement. I wish 60fps were possible. If someone’s running by fast, like my kids as I followed them in Central Park as they climbed a rock next to a pond near The Ramble, that frame rate can sometimes feel too choppy for my tastes in an extremely fast refresh-rate headset like Vision Pro.

…The most compelling experiences for me were playing clips where I held the iPhone near my own line of sight with family. A clip where I’m sitting around a table at Thanksgiving with my mom at my sister’s house, telling her I’m recording in 3D for a future project. She sort of raised her eyebrows a bit, and the way she looked at me in 3D — at a scale close to normal size, with her seeming to make eye contact — made me feel like I was almost there. It made me want to climb through that fuzzy-bordered window and join my family again on the other side.

With less motion, the frame rate limit doesn’t stand out as much. The more intimate framing is better suited for the contained nature of the spatial video playback frame, as well.

I also got a kick out of seeing some of my favorite exhibits at the Museum of Natural History in 3D. I went to the Hall of Ocean Life, where a trio of little tanks on the top floor house dioramas of prehistoric sea creatures that I’ve loved since I was a kid. I captured the ammonites and trilobites, gliding from case to case. In 3D on Vision Pro, it felt like a little home diorama revisited. I could see the joy of capturing little immersive installations, or spaces, that aren’t easy to go back to, and having them in front of you again. Given the subject matter, that smaller scale in that fuzzy frame was lovely.

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Keep saying, this is going to be big. Once people have them, obviously.
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I’ve used a foldable laptop for a month, and I’m ready to return to a clamshell • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Although foldable smartphones have been available for five years, the devices are still trying to justify themselves. And after using a foldable-screen laptop as my primary PC for about four weeks, I’m not sure they’re ready for prime time.

I’m leaving my time with HP’s first foldable laptop with a sense of anticipation for the future of laptops, which I think would benefit from a resurgence of creative ideas that cater to the unique ways people use their computers. But I seriously question if the benefits of having a 17-inch screen in a 12-inch laptop body are worth the trade-offs inherent in today’s foldable PCs.

Early participants in the foldable laptop world have an opportunity to define the space, while consumers can decide if this is something they even want. HP’s foldable is the most beefed-up option ever, and weeks of use have shown me a lot about what I want and don’t want to see when the dust settles.

Ultimately, the question I’m facing regarding foldable laptops is, “Why this instead of a clamshell or 2-in-1 laptop?”

…Foldables aren’t for people looking for a PC with a favorable price-to-performance ratio. But the value proposition of the Spectre Fold is even worse than we see with other foldable laptops.

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There’s a problem of a crease down the middle if you’re watching full-screen videos; but they’re also big and heavy. It
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UK spy agency GCHQ reveals its Christmas challenge for children. Can you solve it? • CNN

Hafsa Khalil:

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What do secret codes and kids have to do with Christmas?

GCHQ, the UK’s largest intelligence agency, has sent out its annual Christmas card, complete with a set of puzzles aimed at Britain’s youngest minds.

This year’s challenge is the “toughest” one yet, the organization said in a statement Thursday, with 11- to 18-year-olds facing a series of seven “complex puzzles” masterminded by the agency’s puzzlers to uncover the final festive message.

“Puzzles have been at the heart of GCHQ from the start. These skills represent our historic roots in cryptography and encryption and continue to be important to our modern-day mission to keep the country safe,” GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler said in the statement.

“Our puzzlers have created a Challenge which is designed for a mix of minds to solve. Whether you are an analyst, an engineer or a creative, there is a puzzle for everyone,” she added, calling it “one for classmates, family and friends to try to solve together.”

The puzzles are contained within GCHQ’s Christmas card, available to download.

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Well, I can do one of the maths sums easily enough.. Enterprising kids might enjoy it.
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Stop planting trees, says guy who inspired world to plant a trillion trees • WIRED

Alen Luhn:

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The popularity of planting new trees is a problem—at least partly—of [the ecologist Thomas] Crowther’s own making. In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab’s research suggested, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere. “This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date,” the study said. Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect.

This seemingly easy climate solution sparked a tree-planting craze by companies and leaders eager to burnish their green credentials without actually cutting their emissions, from Shell to Donald Trump. It also provoked a squall of criticism from scientists, who argued that the Crowther study had vastly overestimated the land suitable for forest restoration and the amount of carbon it could draw down. (The study authors later corrected the paper to say tree restoration was only “one of the most effective” solutions, and could suck down at most one-third of the atmospheric carbon, with large uncertainties.)

Crowther, who says his message was misinterpreted, put out a more nuanced paper last month, which shows that preserving existing forests can have a greater climate impact than planting trees. He then brought the results to COP28 to “kill greenwashing” of the kind that his previous study seemed to encourage—that is, using unreliable evidence on the benefits of planting trees as an excuse to keep on emitting carbon.

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Even so, trees remain the most effect direct carbon capture (DCC) systems we know of: no external power source required, self-feeding, no external infrastructure required, and so on.
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Beeper Mini’s iMessage fight with Apple is about platforms, protocols, and power • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

What’s odd about this story is that you have two sides completely at odds, both saying entirely correct things. Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky has been telling anyone who will listen that SMS is insecure, that Apple is doing its users a disservice by requiring them to use such old and crummy tech to communicate with the vast majority of the world’s smartphone users, and that Beeper’s solution is both a better user experience and a better privacy solution. It’s all true: if you start from the premise that anything is better than SMS, which is a pretty reasonable premise for a lot of reasons, the Beeper way is a good one.

But here’s another way to look at it, which I suspect is the way Apple sees the situation: Who the hell is Beeper? This tiny company has effectively hacked a closed protocol, and now millions of iPhone users are potentially having their messages handled by a company they’ve never heard of. What’s worse, since they’re sending blue-bubble messages, those users will assume they’re sending encrypted messages through a trusted source — Apple — and they’ll never know about this intermediary that promises it’s trustworthy, but who really knows? Apple is well within its rights to run iMessage however it sees fit, and to kick out any provider or person it wants.

A fully interoperable, cross-platform messaging system would be a good thing for the world. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial. …It’s also not great how much of the world is wholly reliant on WhatsApp, a platform that has thus far mostly done right by its users but could change ownership, strategy, or business model at a moment’s notice. If messaging was based on open protocols, and you could talk to your friends across apps, the whole system would be more resilient and functional.

«

I think the response to that is “And if my aunt had wheels, she’d be a bicycle”.
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The commercial surveillance marketing storm driving the Albertsons and Kroger deal • TechPolicy.Press

Jeffrey Chester:

»

The insatiable quest to acquire more data has long been a force behind corporate mergers in the US—including the proposed combination of supermarket giants Albertsons and Kroger. Both grocery chains have amassed a powerful set of internal “Big Data” digital marketing assets, accompanied by alliances with data brokers, “identity” management firms, advertisers, streaming video networks, and social media platforms.

Albertsons and Kroger are leaders in one of the fastest-growing sectors in the online surveillance economy—called “retail media.” Expected to generate $85bn in ad spending in the US by 2026, and with the success of Amazon as a model, there is a new digital “gold rush” by retailers to cash in on all the loyalty programs, sales information, and other growing ways to target their customers.

Albertsons, Kroger, and other retailers including Walmart, CVS, Dollar General and Target find themselves in an enviable position in what’s being called the “post-cookie” era. As digital marketing abandons traditional user-tracking technologies, especially third-party cookies, in order to address privacy regulations, leading advertisers and platforms are lining up to access consumer information they believe comes with less regulatory risk.

Supermarkets, drug stores, retailers and video streaming networks have massive amounts of so-called “first-party” authenticated data on consumers, which they claim comes with consent to use for online marketing. That’s why retail media networks operated by Kroger and others, as well as data harvested from streaming companies, are among the hottest commodities in today’s commercial surveillance economy. It’s not surprising that Albertsons and Kroger now have digital marketing partnerships with companies like Disney, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Google and Meta—to name just a few.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently reviewing this deal, which is a test case of how well antitrust regulators address the dominant role that data and the affordances of digital marketing play in the marketplace.

«

Supermarket mergers in the cause of data analysis certainly is a big step into a new age.
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Misunderstanding the fertility crisis • Quillette

Alex Nowrasteh on the reason why birthrates are dropping in the developed world:

»

Tomorrow, I could book a flight to over 100 countries to see wondrous natural and man-made sights. There are thousands of good restaurants and bars within an hour’s drive. I could never hope to sample fully the range of tasty cuisine and alcoholic beverages available to me. The internet is at my fingertips, with billions of interesting articles, tweets, and videos that could fill my day. The number and quality of new books that I can download is difficult to even describe. Shooting ranges (I’m an American, after all), axe throwing, cigar lounges, rock climbing, and various novel and new exercise classes at gyms are close by—to say nothing of activities I’m not even aware of yet. And I have numerous friends and many potential friends who are just a phone call or text away. Streaming services bring the golden age of television and movies into my household. And the list goes on.

These and other options mean that every choice we make has a high opportunity cost regarding our careers and entertainment options. When countries develop, fertility falls for this and other reasons. New immigrants drop their fertility because the opportunity cost of raising children is higher in a country with enormous economic opportunities, high incomes, and vast cheap entertainment possibilities. 

But the effect isn’t limited to immigrants; it also crushes fertility for native-born Americans. Despite the nostalgianomics of Robert Reich and Josh Hawley, two-income households aren’t vastly more common than they used to be because of a brutal Malthusian competition for increasingly scarce resources. Women work because their wages are so much higher than they used to be. There isn’t a two-income trap—there’s expanded female economic opportunity, and this opportunity cost is contributing mightily to the decline in fertility.

«

Nowrasteh has three children, in case you’re wondering, and says he’d lay down his life for any of them. I was a little dubious of his argument before he revealed that. But it certainly fits the pattern of growing per-capita GDP seeing lower fertility, and birth control leading to lower birthrates.
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Using AI to talk to the dead • The New York Times

Rebecca Carballo:

»

Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were stacked against him?

The answers are rooted in William Lucas’s experience as a Black man from Harlem who made his living as a police officer, F.B.I. agent and judge. But Dr. Oney doesn’t receive the guidance in person. Her father has been dead for more than a year.

Instead, she listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone through HereAfter AI, an app powered by artificial intelligence that generates responses based on hours of interviews conducted with him before he died in May 2022.

His voice gives her comfort, but she said she created the profile more for her four children and eight grandchildren.

“I want the children to hear all of those things in his voice,” Dr. Oney, an endocrinologist, said from her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., “and not from me trying to paraphrase, but to hear it from his point of view, his time and his perspective.”

«

Black Mirror from top to bottom and people don’t even realise they’re doing it. (Via John Naughton.)
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More questions than answers • Science

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel:

»

Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year is the development of glucagon-like peptide–1 (GLP-1) agonists to treat obesity and weight gain, and this year’s discovery that they can blunt obesity-associated health problems. GLP-1 agonists have been around since 2005 to treat type 2 diabetes and were approved for weight loss as early as 2014. But it was only since 2021, when the GLP-1 drug semaglutide was approved (as Wegovy) for obesity (it is sold as Ozempic for diabetes), that the frenzy really began, and mainstream media started referring to them as “the medical sensation of the decade.”

…But for all their promise, GLP-1 agonists have raised more questions than they have answered—a hallmark of a true breakthrough. The first is about their cost and availability. These issues are likely to be worked out over the next few years, but for the moment, access to these drugs is limited. The cost can be over $1000 per month and is not always covered by insurance, if the medicine can even be obtained.

Over time, the price may well come down as supply goes up, and insurance will likely cover the medication as more benefits are demonstrated that save on health care costs down the line—both in terms of catastrophic disease and the need for additional medications required to treat other conditions known to be associated with excess weight. The pressure is on—and should stay on—the drug companies and insurance providers to work this out.

Other questions relate to the need to stay on the drugs indefinitely to avoid regaining weight. A major assumption is that these are lifetime drugs. Are there safety implications associated with long-term use? How will clinicians decide how much weight loss justifies lifetime use of the drug? And at what age? These concerns become more pronounced for younger patients who will be on the drug for longer; at the same time, obesity among adolescents is a pressing problem on multiple fronts.

«

The question of who pays becomes different in the UK, where the issue is whether it’s worth funding past a certain age.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A software update intends to make the Autopilot in two million Tesla cars in the US safer – but can it improve the drivers? CC-licensed photo by pedrik 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.

A selection of 10 links for you. Look, no hands! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT to summarize Politico and Business Insider articles in ‘first of its kind’ deal • The Guardian

Blake Montgomery (and agencies):

»

Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider and Politico, said on Wednesday it was partnering with OpenAI, which will pay the German media group to allow ChatGPT to summarize current articles in responses generated by the chatbot.

“ChatGPT users around the world will receive summaries of selected global news content from Axel Springer’s media brands,” which also includes the German tabloid Bild, the two companies said in a statement.

The chatbot’s answers will include material otherwise kept behind a paywall and offer “links to the full articles for transparency and further information”, they said. Axel Springer will be paid for making its content available to the US artificial intelligence firm, a spokesman for the media group told AFP. The deal is valid for several years and does not commit either side to exclusivity, leaving them free to sign new agreements, the spokesman said without giving more detail.

…The Axel Springer spokesman said that with the advent of platforms such as Google and Facebook, media companies had missed the opportunity to establish a new source of income “and we are all still running after the money”.

The partnership with OpenAI was “the first of its kind”, Axel Springer’s CEO, Mathias Döpfner, said in the statement.

“We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism – to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level,” Döpfner said.

«

Enterprising move by Springer: if it is getting paid by OpenAI and will continue to get paid, it might have made a smart move.
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The cable news kayfabe is dead • Nieman Journalism Lab

Ben Collins:

»

Too many news institutions have been sucked into the theatre of the absurd, and people are looking for champions who allude to that.

The good news is, the kids see the kayfabe of it all. They are now aware of the game within the game.

They aren’t watching the news because of it, but they are interested in how that kayfabe frames the ever-increasing powerlessness they feel in the ambient horrors playing in the background of their daily lives.

The cable news kayfabe, as you know, goes as follows: a powerful person says something shocking — a far-right politician launches a nativist talking point, or a billionaire speaks of a threat of financial doom if demands aren’t met. A more reasonable voice reacts, frequently asking to please remove the racism, but conceding an underlying but unprovable point that should never have been conceded. The story is framed as reaction to the initial statement, no matter how ludicrous or even impossible that initial statement is.

The reality, in this situation, is and has never been a consideration. This is how you build a world of kayfabe, and you have to turn off parts of your brain to enter it.

You can apply this to countless stories that required a nuance many mainstream news outlets have so far refused to deploy: the apocalyptic hype cycle and predictable burnout of AI, the Israel-Hamas war, TikTok’s influence on American culture and politics.

There are strict parameters on how we talk about each of these things. It’s a sort of news kayfabe: a binary, good guy–bad guy game we’ve invented that has all too often been infiltrated by all bad guys.

…Here’s the good news: The faster you stop playing those games, the faster you stop making Faustian bargains for access, the faster you stop presenting weird false choices that leave out seemingly every American under 40 years old, the faster we can gain their trust back.

The other good news is that they’re right. The kind of news that they want does not have these internecine power structures and middle school-style influence games built into it. That’s not a lot to ask.

«

Certainly seems to be true of the American media ecosystem Collins lives in; I’d like to think that other countries do less badly. But he makes many good points.
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Dear journalists: here’s how to talk to women on the Hugging Face team • LinkedIn

Emily Witko (and coworkers):

»

We here at Hugging Face have been noticing a concerning trend in tech journalism. The real achievements of women on our team often get overshadowed by a focus on personal, and sometimes very intrusive, details that aren’t relevant to their work. It’s time for that to change. Here’s a set of guidelines that the team has put together, aiming for a more respectful and balanced approach to reporting:

Highlight achievements: Center your articles on professional accomplishments, not on personal attributes like looks, age, or family status. This one is pretty self-explanatory, right folks?

Avoid gendered language: At the moment, we see lots of over-associating women with certain words and concepts, such as ‘children’ and ‘family.’ Proofread your articles to eliminate gendered descriptions that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes. 

• Problematic: Jane Janey, despite being a mother of two, has surprisingly managed to lead her team to develop a groundbreaking AI algorithm.
• Good: Jane Janey, an accomplished leader in her field, has successfully spearheaded the development of a groundbreaking AI algorithm with her team.

Respect privacy: Honour the interviewee’s wishes regarding the disclosure of personal information.

«

There’s quite a few more advisements. I’m slightly surprised that journalists – and especially American journalists – would need telling any of this.
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Russian foreign intelligence service spotted exploiting JetBrains vulnerability • The Record

Jonathan Greig:

»

Government agencies in the US, Poland and the UK said on Wednesday that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has been exploiting a vulnerability that was exposed earlier this year in a popular product from Czech software giant JetBrains.

Officials said they have notified dozens of companies across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia after discovering hundreds of compromised devices.

The agencies attributed the attacks to hackers within the SVR known as APT29 — also tracked by cybersecurity researchers as CozyBear or Midnight Blizzard — and said the “large scale” campaign began in September.

Microsoft previously said North Korean hackers were exploiting the bug — labeled CVE-2023-42793 — in September. It affects a product called TeamCity, which is used by developers to test and exchange software code before its release.

Now the SVR has been spotted “using the initial access gleaned by exploiting the TeamCity CVE to escalate its privileges, move laterally, deploy additional backdoors, and take other steps to ensure persistent and long-term access to the compromised network environments,” Wednesday’s alert said.

“Generally, the victim types do not fit into any sort of pattern or trend, aside from having an unpatched, Internet-reachable JetBrains TeamCity server, leading to the assessment that SVR’s exploitation of these victims’ networks was opportunistic in nature and not necessarily a targeted attack.”

The organizations attacked include an energy trade association; companies that provide software for billing, medical devices, customer care, employee monitoring, financial management, marketing, sales, and video games; as well as web hosting companies, tool manufacturers, and small and large IT companies.

«

A story which comes the same day that the British government was warned that the UK is very vulnerable to ransomware attacks. It doesn’t rain but it pours.
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Tesla recalls two million cars with ‘insufficient’ Autopilot safety controls • The Washington Post

Leo Sands, Aaron Gregg and Faiz Siddiqui:

»

Tesla is recalling more than two million vehicles to fix Autopilot systems that US safety regulators determined did not have enough controls to prevent misuse, the largest recall of Tesla’s driver-assistance software to date.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tesla’s method of ensuring drivers are still paying attention while the driver-assistance system is activated is “insufficient.”

“There may be an increased risk of a crash,” the agency wrote, in some situations when the system is engaged “and the driver does not maintain responsibility for vehicle operation and is unprepared to intervene as necessary or fails to recognize when Autosteer is canceled or not engaged.”

The recall comes days after The Washington Post published an investigation that found Teslas in Autopilot had repeatedly been involved in deadly crashes on roads where the software was not intended to be used.

NHTSA said Tesla will send out a software update to fix the problems affecting its 2012-2023 Model S, 2016-2023 Model X, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles, effectively encompassing all Tesla vehicles equipped with Autopilot on US roads. Autopilot is a standard feature on Tesla’s vehicles; only some early Tesla models are not equipped with the software.

…The software update, which was to be deployed on “certain affected vehicles” starting Dec. 12, will add extra controls and alerts to “encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility,” the recall report said. The update also will include controls that prevent Autosteer from engaging outside of areas where it is supposed to work as well as a feature that can suspend a driver’s Autosteer privileges if the person repeatedly fails to stay engaged at the wheel.

«

“Recall” in this context doesn’t actually mean “take back into its factories” – at least for Tesla, which can (as the story says) just send out a software update over the air; nobody’s car has to move an inch. The problem of inattentive or unready drivers, though, can’t be so easily fixed.
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20 things we learned from the Epic v. Google trial • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

I have spent 15 days reporting live from the Epic v. Google trial: an antitrust dispute over whether Google’s Android app store is an unfair monopoly. I’ve watched a parade of witnesses go by, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. We’re now in a weeklong break before both parties return on December 11th to make their closing arguments, after which a jury will decide who’s right. I’ve chronicled every major thrust, parry, and riposte leading up to that in our Verge StoryStream, writing nearly 600 dispatches from the courtroom so far.

But who’s got the time to dig through all that, am I right?

So here are straightforward versions of the 20 most interesting things we’ve learned — starting with the fact that Epic could win the whole thing.

«

This was last week, but Hollister was right about Epic winning, and a number of the other details are just as interesting – notably No.9: “This trial destroyed any notion that Google treats developers fairly and equally”. Also No.13: profit margins for the Play Store were north of 70%.
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Cop28 is a farce rigged to fail, but there are other ways we can try to save the planet • The Guardian

George Monbiot:

»

Since this horrible farce [of Cop] began 31 years ago, plenty of people have proposed reforms. The proposals fall into three categories. One is to improve the way consensus decisions are made. Well-meaning as these are, they’re futile: you can tweak the process, but it will remain dysfunctional.

Another approach is to replace consensus decision-making with voting, an option that remains, in draft form, in the UN rules. The obvious objection is that a majority would impose decisions on other nations. But this reflects a narrow conception of what voting could do. There are plenty of ways of ensuring everyone can be heard, without relying on crude binary choices. One of the most promising is the Borda count, a decision-making method first proposed in 1435.

The modified Borda count developed by the de Borda Institute looks especially useful. First, the delegates agree on what the principal issues are. These are then turned into a list of options, on which everyone is asked to agree (the options could range from the immediate phase-out of fossil fuels to planetary Armageddon). The options are listed on a ballot paper, and each delegate is asked to rank them in order of preference. A scoring system awards points for every ranking. The more options a delegate ranks, the more points each one is worth to them. This enables complex decisions to be made without excluding anyone.

The third approach, which could run alongside the second, is to bypass the Cop process by developing new binding treaties. The professor of environmental politics Anthony Burke suggests an approach modelled on the 2017 treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the 1997 anti-personnel mine ban convention and the 2008 convention on cluster munitions. In these cases, states and citizens’ groups frustrated with a lack of progress began building treaties without the participation of the powerful nations – the US in particular – that sought to resist them. They developed enough momentum not only to push the treaties through the UN general assembly, but also to establish new diplomatic norms that made defiance of the treaties much harder to justify, even for nations that refuse to ratify them.

«

In retrospect, it’s absolutely incredible that the Montreal Protocol – to drastically cut CFC production and use – was agreed and implemented. Could it be done today?
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Bluesky isn’t a mere Twitter clone, says CEO Jay Graber • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

As 2023 winds down, Bluesky, which still hasn’t opened up to all comers, has grown to 2.3 million users. Like Mastodon, Threads, and other refuges for Twitter expatriates, it hasn’t become the sort of one-stop conversation megahub that Twitter once was. Instead, an eclectic subset of the Twitter masses has landed there. CEO Jay Graber says the 30-person Bluesky team tried to recreate “the platonic ideal of microblogging as it once was” and calls out some constituencies who have bonded with the service: meme lovers, writers and artists, and people who find enforced pithiness to be a fun, creative challenge. (Bluesky has a 300-character limit.)

Why has Bluesky kept its invite system in place even though that means many would-be members still haven’t gotten in? “To be honest, we didn’t have the capacity to absorb all of that in a day,” says Graber. “It’s a full-time effort for engineers to scale up the service at the level that we were going. We actually have not had significant downtime, which is a testament to this controlled-growth strategy—you know, Twitter early on had a lot of failwhales.”

Whether you’re already on Bluesky or not, thinking of it purely as a Twitter-esque app misses the point. The app is just a testbed for the protocol the startup has been building to help nudge us out of the era of centralized social networking. And Graber—who got her job as CEO in 2021 after DMing Dorsey to express enthusiasm for the Bluesky project—says that the founding goal is soon to get its first major real-world test.

«

That test will be in early 2024, when decentralisation will be tried, and the invite system will become redundant.
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Apple is holding the final nail for X’s coffin • Bloomberg

Dave Lee:

»

To celebrate the return of such a man [as Infowars’ Alex Jones], Musk joined Jones in a live audio chat on Sunday. Other attendees included Andrew Tate, who faces rape and sex-trafficking charges, and Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who last week rattled off a raft of unfounded conspiracy theories on the debate stage. With saner minds abandoning X, this is the clientele that’s left.

Apple’s marketing team clearly wants no part of it. It’s among the companies that have decided to “pause” advertising on the platform, having previously been its biggest spender. While not mentioned directly, Apple was implied among the group — along with Disney, Walmart and others — that Musk recently told to go f— themselves.

But Apple holds an even greater power than that. Having decided X is too dangerous for its brand, the reinstatement of Jones now forces it to confront a bigger question: When does X become too dangerous for Apple’s users? Or when do Apple’s supposed corporate principles demand it no longer take the 30% it enjoys from sign-ups to X’s premium services? (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Apple has answered this question before. Jones’s InfoWars app was banned from the App Store in 2018. His content, the company said at the time, fell afoul of “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or place a targeted individual or group in harm’s way.” The company did not specify which specific material had forced it to act. The ban appears to remain in place today.

…The fallout would be several magnitudes greater were Apple to take any action against X. But on its current trajectory — with Musk himself amplifying some of the platform’s most vicious elements — there will come a time when inaction would be just as damaging to Apple.

«

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Musk’s X 2023 ad sales projected to slump to about $2.5bn • Bloomberg via MSN

Kurt Wagner:

»

Elon Musk’s X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is on track to bring in roughly $2.5bn in advertising revenue in 2023 — a significant slump from prior years, according to people familiar with the matter.

X generated a little more than $600m in advertising revenue in each of the first three quarters of the year, and is anticipating a similar performance in the current period, according to a person familiar with the numbers. That compares to more than $1bn per quarter in 2022. 

Ad sales currently make up between 70% and 75% of X’s total revenue, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. That would imply 2023 sales of roughly $3.4bn, including sales from subscriptions and data licensing deals. 

The previously unreported sales figures underscore with greater clarity advertisers’ unease with how X is handling content moderation under Musk, and in particular the new owner’s posts that amplify antisemitic and other extremist views.

X executives had originally targeted $3bn in revenue from advertising and subscriptions in 2023, but will fall far short of that number, one of the people said. The annual number is still in flux because the holiday quarter isn’t yet over. 

“This presents an incomplete view of our entire business, as the sources you’re relying on for information are not providing accurate and comprehensive details,” said Joe Benarroch, head of business operations for X.

«

For comparison, revenue in the year before Musk was $5bn (though it wasn’t profitable then either). No publisher would think they were making a roaring success of things if they halved income, though he may have halved – or cut even further – the outgoings.

What’s notable is that Wagner actually got a response from a human at the company. That’s how significant it sees both Bloomberg, and this revelation. Anyway, perhaps he can blame it all on whoever let that sink in, and the bozo who was holding it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The E3 video games show is officially dead: it failed to power up and Covid was a boss level too far. CC-licensed photo by Sergiy Galyonkin 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.

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’s forthcoming iOS 17.3 Stolen Device Protection update aims to stop iPhone thieves • WSJ

Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen:

»

Apple is addressing a security vulnerability that has allowed iPhone thieves to take over customers’ accounts, access saved passwords, steal money and lock people out of their digital memories.

A new [forthcoming – Overspill Ed.] iOS setting called Stolen Device Protection is designed to defend against these attacks. It is rolling out to beta testers starting Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal reported on a nationwide spate of thefts where criminals used the iPhone passcode to break into victims’ accounts and upend their lives. Thieves in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis and other cities watch iPhone owners tap in their passcodes before stealing the targets’ devices.

The Journal’s reporting outlined for the first time how these thefts resulted in losses far beyond phones, and how Apple’s security settings gave victims few ways of preventing harm once their passcodes fell into the wrong hands. We have heard from hundreds of people over the past year whose iPhones and digital lives were stolen.

…Your passcode, that short string of numbers that grants access to an iPhone, has powerful reach. With this number, typically four or six digits, thieves can access a lot of your data and make sweeping changes to your accounts. And when Face ID or Touch ID fails, the passcode serves as a fallback.

If you enable the new Stolen Device Protection, your iPhone will restrict certain settings when you are away from a location familiar to the iPhone, such as your home or work. Here’s the rundown:

…• With Stolen Device Protection: If you want to change an Apple ID password when away from a familiar location, the device will require your Face ID or Touch ID. It will then implement an hour-long delay before you can perform the action. After that hour has passed, you will have to reconfirm with another Face ID or Touch ID scan. Only then can the password be changed.

«

That first one is the big one, but there are plenty more. This should be a free link, available to all, but in case not there’s an Apple Insider writeup. Credit to Stern and Nguyen, who first revealed this flaw back in February.
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The 21 most defining memes of 2023 • Rolling Stone

Julia Reinstein:

»

2023 was a heck of a year on the internet. Whether we were eating our girl dinners or declaring our allegiances in the orca wars, this year was jam-packed with memes that captivated us even harder than the Roman Empire. The following are some of the most defining memes of 2023, from nepo babies to babygirl. Here’s to our bygone memes, and may 2024 be as fruitful. 

«

The web headline for this story was “The 21 Best Memes of 2023 That Took Over the Internet”, which feels like an overstatement. My internet definitely wasn’t taken over by many of those, though of course you now have plenty to bone up on and talk about at the Christmas dinner table.
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E3 is officially dead, and so is the version of the industry it was made for • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

As smartphones and high-speed Internet access became more popular, though, publishers increasingly found they could get much of the same effect with widely downloadable game demos and choreographed YouTube video presentations. Why pay to impress the media with an E3 press conference when a Nintendo Direct-style video stream can get as much media attention and reach your customers directly as well?

Sure, these purely digital promotions lacked some of the glitz and glamor of the ostentatious, console-war-driven E3 booths of the past. But everyday gamers only got to experience that glamor vicariously, anyway—the show only started offering limited public access in 2017. Meanwhile, the growth of fan-focused events like the Penny Arcade Expo and countless regional expos gave publishers large and small more direct (and cheaper) in-person access to their most devoted fans.

Earned media aside, E3’s importance as a gathering place for business meetings has also eroded over the years. When brick-and-mortar retailers ruled the industry, a summer show was an important place for publishers to woo retail buyers with demos and hype ahead of the all-important holiday season releases. Those relationships and orders had to be established early to allow time for production and shipping to the stores that would make or break a publisher’s year.

Contrast that with today’s industry, where gamers tend to download games without ever leaving the house, and major titles can be released any time of the year—2022’s biggest release quickly sold 12 million copies after a February launch, after all. Just as the Internet blunted E3’s importance as a media show, this transition largely obviated the need for a business gathering as well.

By the time COVID hit in 2020, the writing was already on the wall for what was once the industry’s most important annual showcase. The show’s legacy branding helped it limp along for a while as an important place to be seen as a major industry player. But that bubble of earned self-importance was also remarkably easy to pierce once major publishers started examining what they were actually getting for the sizable expense of a show floor booth.

«

E3, which was the video games industry’s big thing, is dead; will that ever happen to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas?
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Why Li-Fi might be better than Wi-Fi • IEEE Spectrum

Qusi Alqarqaz:

»

IEEE 802.11bb defines the rules for how Li-Fi devices will communicate with each other and how fast they can transfer data. According to the standard, such devices should be able to send and receive data at speeds between 10 megabits per second and 9.6 gigabits per second.

The standard introduces a new realm of fast, reliable wireless communication that promises to revolutionize the way we connect and communicate.

Li-Fi uses special light fixtures that have small control units and solid-state light emitters and photosensitive receivers. The fixtures can send and receive information using light waves. To connect to Li-Fi, smartphones, tablets, and other devices need emitters and sensors that can send and see the light signals. Advanced mobile phones already use the emitters and sensors for other applications such as face recognition and lidar.

In a typical installation, we connect to the Internet via a local-area network. LANs now will be able to offer a new wireless access opportunity via Li-Fi-enabled access points (APs) installed in areas such in ceilings or inside desk lamps connected via power over Ethernet or power-line communications.

…One of the key factors driving the adoption of Li-Fi is that it enables peak rates by using the same advanced modulation techniques to encode data onto light waves that are used for Wi-Fi. The optical wireless transmission channel is less disturbed by multipath, Doppler, phase noise, and other interference. Therefore, it can realize the highest speeds through a variant of multicarrier modulation, called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. OFDM implements subcarriers transmitting multiple parallel data streams. By leveraging the properties of light, Li-Fi results in unprecedented data transfer speeds over short distances typically inside one room.

«

Of course, light travels at the same speed as electromagnetic waves used in Wi-Fi because.. light is an EM wave. But the interference risk is different from something at 2.4GHz. Plenty more in the interview that follows the explanation in the article.
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iOS 17.2 arrives with new Journal app and spatial video capture support • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

Apple’s iOS 17.2 update is now available for recent iPhones. The update includes Apple’s new Journal app, which is designed to get you writing about events in your life with prompts that draw from data on your phone as well as the option to record spatial videos.

Announced back at WWDC in June, the Journal app is a health- and wellness-focused feature that aims to get you reflecting on the small and big moments in your life. Although we found its interface a little basic when we tried it out in beta for ourselves, its superpower is its ability to recognize “Moments” based on your phone’s data, including locations you’ve visited, photos you’ve taken, or workouts you’ve done. It can then make writing suggestions based on these Moments.

There’s also support for recording spatial videos, a feature announced alongside the iPhone 15 in September. This works by recording footage simultaneously from the phone’s main and ultrawide cameras to create 3D video. You might struggle to find much to do with the footage for now, but it’s designed to be played back on the upcoming Vision Pro headset after its release next year.

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I think one of these features will be used a lot more than the other. Hint: it’s not the Journal app (which might have been welcomed during the pandemic, but now?). I agree with Dan Moren at Six Colo(u)rs:

»

Though Apple may have great hopes for its new Journal app, I think it unlikely that it will transform the average person into an avid journal-keeper if they aren’t already. And, frankly, if they already are, I’m not sure Apple’s Journal app is going to sway those folks from their current journal of choice.

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Spatial video, on the other hand, feels like one of those slow-burn giants. We’ve seen it in SF films of the future; now we just need to fulfil it.
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Women buy more cars, so why are the designs so macho? • WIRED

Nicole Gull McElroy:

»

Funnily enough, while the topic feels timely, electric cars [which offer a reset in design terms] have been around since the late 1800s. Ferdinand Porsche’s first car, the Egger-Lohner Model C.2 Phaeton, was electric, and by the turn of the 19th century, the US Department of Energy estimates, one-third of all cars were electric. They were quiet, easy to use, and perfect for local trips around town—which is why they were marketed to women. One model, the 1912 Waverly Electric, highlighted cleanliness and space (“delicate gowns not marred in this roomy electric!”).

As for what’s next in EVs today, [Volvo’s global head of design, Jeremy] Offer says the objective is to “explore a level of customization and modularity in a vehicle that can flex to your own needs: shopping, camping, taking the kids to school. It’s about making the vehicle adaptable whether you’re a man, woman or neither.” Data from the Organisation for Economic Coordination and Development shows that, worldwide, women still do most of the heavy lifting in unpaid household chores and responsibility. Men average a touch more than 2 hours per day, while women complete a little more than 4 hours daily.

Building design elements into cars that make sense for dogs and kids and groceries isn’t sexist, or buying into a stereotype—it’s a nod to the invisible labour women do every day, regardless of whether they work full-time, stay home, or something in between. And, incidentally, plenty of men do that labour, too, and might appreciate a small detail that makes dealing with a car seat or traveling with a golden retriever easier.

Scotty Reiss, founder of the site A Girls Guide To Cars, spends her time helping women navigate the car industry, exploring things like which cars have headrests best suited for ponytails (which lots of people wear regardless of gender), or the way fashion influences car design, even profiling designers at OEMs like GMC and Toyota. She says she’s seeing some inklings of Offer’s notion already, namely at Buick (which, incidentally, S&P Mobility said accounted for more than 55% of all new female vehicle registrations in 2022).

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The Cybertruck, and various other “concept” EV designs, are presented as the counterpoint. One person suggests that Formula 1 cars are the epitome of “masculine” design, which seems wrong to me: they tend to be incredibly thin, like flying insects. It’s NASCAR cars which look beast-like.

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F-150 Lightning: Ford cuts 2024 production plans in half • CNBC

Michael Wayland:

»

Ford Motor will cut planned production of its all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup roughly in half next year, marking a major reversal after the automaker significantly increased plant capacity for the electric vehicle in 2023.

The new production plans call for average volume of around 1,600 F-150 Lightnings a week at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, starting in January, according to a source familiar with the decision. The automaker most recently planned to produce roughly 3,200 of the vehicles on average per week.

“We’ll continue to match production with customer demand,” a Ford spokeswoman said Monday.

Ford executives have recently said the automaker will match production to demand, as the company cancels or postpones $12bn in upcoming EV investments.

…Sales of the F-150 Lightning have steadily increased in 2023, notching a monthly record of roughly 4,400 sold in November. The company has only sold 20,365 of the trucks this year through November, up 54% from a year earlier.

«

Meanwhile Ford’s F-150 petrol-fuelled pickup has been the best-selling truck for 46 years. In 2022, Ford sold more than 640,000. So the EV 2023 sales are about 3% of that total. There’s a long way to go.
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Your Smart TV knows what you’re watching; here’s how to stop it • The Markup

Mohamed Al Elew and Gabriel Hongsdusit:

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If you bought a new smart TV during any of the holiday sales, there’s likely to be an uninvited guest watching along with you. The most popular smart TVs sold today use automatic content recognition (ACR), a kind of ad surveillance technology that collects data on everything you view and sends it to a proprietary database to identify what you’re watching and serve you highly targeted ads. The software is largely hidden from view, and it’s complicated to opt out. Many consumers aren’t aware of ACR, let alone that it’s active on their shiny new TVs. If that’s you, and you’d like to turn it off, we’re going to show you how.

First, a quick primer on the tech: ACR identifies what’s displayed on your television, including content served through a cable TV box, streaming service, or game console, by continuously grabbing screenshots and comparing them to a massive database of media and advertisements. Think of it as a Shazam-like service constantly running in the background while your TV is on.

These TVs can capture and identify 7,200 images per hour, or approximately two every second. The data is then used for content recommendations and ad targeting, which is a huge business; advertisers spent an estimated $18.6 billion on smart TV ads in 2022, according to market research firm eMarketer. 

For anyone who’d rather not have ACR looking over their shoulder while they watch, we’ve put together a guide to turning it off on three of the most popular smart TV software platforms in use last year. Depending on the platform, turning off ACR took us between 10 and 37 clicks.

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Instructions provided for Roku (boxes), and for Samsung and LG TVs. No word on whether Amazon’s Fire Stick or Google’s Chromecast are doing the same. I’d think probably they are, but as they’re the conduit, no way to stop them.
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BOOM: Google loses antitrust case • BIG

Matt Stoller on the Google/Epic verdict:

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So what happens now? In this case, the judge will come up with remedies next year. The order could be broad, and will likely loosen Google’s control over the mobile app ecosystem. Google has already announced that it will appeal, so the case isn’t over.

That said, Google is likely to be in trouble now, because it is facing multiple antitrust cases, and these kinds of decisions have a bandwagon effect. The precedent is set, in every case going forward the firm will now be seen as presumed guilty, since a jury found Google has violated antitrust laws. Judges are cautious, and are generally afraid of being the first to make a precedent-setting decision. Now they won’t have to. In fact, judges and juries will now have to find a reason to rule for Google. If, say, Judge Amit Mehta in D.C., facing a very similar fact-pattern, chooses to let Google off the hook, well, he’ll look pretty bad.

There are a few important takeaways. First, this one didn’t come from the government; it was a private case by a video game maker that sued Google over its terms for getting access to the Google Play app store for Android, decided not by a fancy judge with an Ivy League degree but by a jury of ordinary people in San Francisco. In other words, private litigation, the “ambulance-chasing” lawyers, are vital parts of our justice system.

Second, juries matter, even if they are riskier for everyone involved. It’s kind of like a mini poll, and the culture is ahead of the cautious legal profession. This quick decision is a sharp contrast with the six-month delay to an opinion in the search case that Judge Mehta sought in the D.C. trial.

Third, tying claims, which is a specific antitrust violation, are good law. Tying means forcing someone to buy an unrelated product in order to access the actual product they want to buy. The specific legal claim here was about how Google forced firms relying on its Google Play app store to also use its Google Play billing service, which charges an inflated price of 30% of the price of an app. Tying is pervasive throughout the economy, so you can expect more suits along these lines.

And finally, big tech is not above the law. This loss isn’t just the first antitrust failure for Google, it’s the first antitrust loss for any big tech firm.

«

Stoller is very big on antitrust and monopoly abuse (to the extent that I feel he sees it everywhere, even when its presence is difficult to prove). What he doesn’t mention is that Apple won against Epic in a similar (though, Google insisted, not legally identical) case, decided by a judge.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The COP28 summit on Monday offered a milquetoast text with no mention of phasing out fossil fuels. CC-licensed photo by Palácio do Planalto 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.

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.

Cop28: Australia, US and UK say they won’t sign agreement that would be ‘death certificate’ for small islands • The Guardian

Adam Morton:

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A group of countries including Australia, the US, the UK, Canada and Japan have said they will “not be a co-signatory” to “death certificates” for small island states, and have demanded a stronger agreement at the Cop28 summit to deal with fossil fuels and address the climate crisis.

A statement delivered by the Australian climate change minister, Chris Bowen, on behalf of what’s known as the umbrella group of countries, came as tensions flared at the United Arab Emirates over the text of a draft deal proposed by the summit presidency.

Released early on Monday evening local time, the draft avoided highly contentious calls for a “phase-out” or “phase-down” of fossil fuels in an attempt to find consensus from nearly 200 countries that have been meeting in Dubai for nearly a fortnight.

Some observers welcomed elements of the draft, including the first mention in a Cop text of reducing fossil fuel production, but others were scathing, describing it as “grossly insufficient” and “incoherent”.

Cedric Schuster of Samoa, the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: “We will not sign our death certificate. We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.”

Bowen referred to Schuster’s statement in his intervention in a later meeting between government representatives and the UAE summit president, Sultan Al Jaber. He was speaking on behalf of the umbrella group of countries, which also includes New Zealand, Norway, Israel, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

“My friend Cedric Schuster, the Samoan minister, said tonight of this draft that we will not sign our death certificates,” Bowen said. “That’s what’s at stake for many countries who are represented here tonight and many people who do not have a voice. We will not be a co-signatory to those death certificates.”

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Israel v Hamas is awful: people dying unnecessarily, playing out over the course of weeks. The climate indifference has the same effect, but much, much more slowly, without obvious bombs or guns.
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Podcasts aren’t as doomed as they look. But some of the best ones are • Slate

Scott Nover:

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By just about every metric, podcasts are still gaining popularity with listeners: 130 million Americans will have listened to a podcast each month of this year, according to Insider Intelligence, which expects that figure to jump to 150 million by 2027. Meanwhile, in the decade since podcasting’s Serial moment, casuals have become die-hards: In 2015, weekly podcast listeners spent about 4.5 hours listening to podcasts, according to Edison Research. Now that figure is north of 9 hours a week.

Melissa Kiesche, senior vice president of research at Edison, continues to see growth both in the share of Americans listening to podcasts and how much time they’re dedicating to podcasts. “Both monthly and weekly listenership reached their highest levels this year,” she says.

Ad revenue is growing too. In 2022, podcasts generated $1.8bn in ad revenue in the US, up 26% from the year prior, says the industry body Interactive Advertising Bureau. That’s drastically outpacing the 11% growth for the rest of the online ad sector. Furthermore, the IAB expects that revenue to double to about $4bn by 2025.

Advertisers have reduced spending this year amid rising prices, rising interest rates, and still-unrealized fears of an economic recession, but it seems to be more of a pullback from runaway COVID-era spending rather than a full stoppage.

Rachael King, the founder and CEO of Pod People, which makes branded podcasts for companies like Netflix and Intuit, says the sales pitch for podcasts is as strong as ever. “It’s the most desirable demographic in the world,” she says. Podcast listeners “are curious, intellectual, and more likely to take action” based on what they hear.

But perhaps there was too much hype, too many unrealistic expectations—and, dare we say, too many podcasts? Or at least too many podcasts that couldn’t turn a profit based on high talent or production costs?

«

Ad revenue might be growing, but the number of podcasts is probably growing faster, and Spotify isn’t pumping money in as it previously did. Result, less money on average.
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Mail Online looks set to adopt partial ‘freemium’ paywall in 2024 • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Mail Online users could soon be asked to pay to access a small amount of content each day under a new paywall model as advertising revenues plunge across the digital news market.

Most of the up to 1,500 stories published daily on the Mail Online website would remain free to access but a “freemium” paywall model could ask people to pay to read around ten to 15 stories per day, Press Gazette understands.

The new model would only apply to Mail Online users in the UK and would likely begin to be implemented in January.

The plan is understood to be based on German tabloid Bild’s model. Bild began charging for access to premium content in 2013 and has now reached more than 675,000 subscribers.

It is also a similar model to the The Independent, which puts certain in-depth stories and analyses behind a paywall under the Independent Premium branding, while also in the UK GB News began charging users for “exclusive analysis and opinion” last month.

…Although the online ad market is growing, the share of revenue going to publishers has plunged this year as all the growth has instead gone to tech platforms.

«

This is a quietly significant development: the implication is that free-to-read ad-supported just doesn’t cut it, even for the most-read news site in the world. The phrase “difficult advertising market”, which also appears in the story, is typical publishers’ understatement. It means apocalyptically bad.
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Apple foldable is coming soon, new Samsung Display rumor says • BGR

José Adorno:

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It’s been a few years since we first heard rumors about Apple’s foldable strategy. While Samsung, Motorola, and other brands already sell foldable devices, Cupertino decided to take the long route and wait until this technology matures.

This foldable Apple product could be an iPhone or an iPad/MacBook hybrid. But, so far, we only know that this release is at least a couple of years ahead of us, so nothing is concrete at the moment.

That said, while a foldable Apple product might not be nearing its release, it doesn’t mean Apple and its manufacturers aren’t doing everything they can to ship this product as soon as possible. In the latest report by the Korean publication The Elec, Samsung is reorganizing its teams to focus on the capabilities to respond to Apple’s foldable initiatives.

According to the publication, the South Korean manufacturer wants a new source of income. Despite the leadership with OLED panels, Samsung aims to secure Apple orders for future foldable products since both Samsung and LG are working on projects for Apple foldable products, including 20.25in panels.

Several DSCC, Bloomberg, and Omdia reports have corroborated this future device. They believe Apple is working on a hybrid foldable iPad/MacBook with a 20in display. The latter stated that this device could be released by 2026.

In 2022, DSCC Ross Young shared that suppliers were in talks with Apple to create a 20in foldable of some kind. The idea would be to bring together the usefulness of a notebook with a singular display like you might see on the iPad. Young even went so far as to say that the foldable MacBook Hybrid could serve as a true dual-use product.

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This is not really “soon” except in the perspective of the heat death of the universe. Also, while I can just about believe Apple could make such a product, I don’t really know why it would. Plus, and this is the most important question, would it fold from top to bottom, or from side to side? Those create very different use cases.
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Beeper Mini is back • Beeper Blog

Beeper:

»

The security and privacy of Beeper Mini is unchanged. It is still local, end-to-end encrypted on your device, as we described in our post.

Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID. Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently working on a fix for this.

We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on subscriptions again. If you want to keep supporting us, feel free to leave the subscription on 🙂.

Our Play Store ranking dropped precipitously on Friday. Leaving us a nice review there would help tremendously.

It’s been an extremely busy, tiring, exciting, and eventful week.

…What happened: on Friday, we started getting reports that Beeper Cloud and Beeper Mini users could not send or receive messages. We investigated the issue [“the issue” being that Apple had determined this was a form of hacking – Overspill Ed] and started working on a fix.

Within 24 hours, we fixed the issue for Beeper Cloud and published an update. Beeper Cloud users can now send and receive messages. It’s working exactly as it did before Friday.

(Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.)

At the same time, we took steps to deregister all phone numbers associated with Beeper Mini, and we sent push notifications to all users updating them on the situation. In hindsight, our timing was a mistake: we should have communicated to our users sooner. We’re extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused by the outage.

Today, less than three days later, we are publishing an update to fix Beeper Mini. Users can now sign in, send and receive messages. Beeper Mini is back.

Despite reaching out, we still have not heard anything directly from Apple.

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So Beeper now works, if you use an Apple ID to sign in. That’s rather different from the previous system which did work on phone numbers and didn’t seem to need an Apple ID. Now we wait to see if Apple will swat this too. Macworld’s editor Michael Simon thinks it will.
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The weird world of celebrity training: how Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Madonna get in shape for their shows • The Guardian

Elle Hunt:

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Being a pop star used to mean having a nice face and a good voice, and learning a few dance routines. That no longer cuts it at the top, as Taylor Swift reminded us last week, when she revealed how she had prepared for her Eras tour. “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she told Time magazine. “Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs. Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones.”

If you have seen Eras live, or watched it at the cinema, you will know why she had to put in the work. Part pop extravaganza, part endurance feat, it involves almost three hours of costume changes, vigorous dancing and sprints from one end of the stage to the other – all while belting out songs. As the colour rises in Swift’s face and the sweat gathers at her hairline, you start to feel tired yourself. Swift is not unique. Beyoncé’s film Renaissance also documents the physical labour required for a tour, while 65-year-old Madonna’s current Celebration tour, which is due to conclude next April after 78 shows, makes clear how long that commitment can last.

“We treat them as athletes: what stress is going to be put on the body?” says Dan Roberts. A personal trainer based in London, he is one of a handful of fitness professionals engaged in what he calls the “weird world of celebrity training”. Most often, it involves getting actors in shape for superhero roles (or shirtless scenes); some of his clients are on Broadway, on stage for two hours a night for six months at a time. But he also works with royalty and famous musicians. Nondisclosure agreements mean he can’t name names – but he can speak generally.

Sometimes, Roberts is flown out to support an artist mid-tour, but more often he liaises with other A-list trainers around the world to look after his regular clients. And he trains those who are passing through London. His first step is to assess the needs of the individual and their goals. “Someone like Beyoncé, for example, has got very energetic dance routines, whereas Liam Gallagher can just stand there.”

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Trying to imagine what Liam Gallagher’s fitness routine would look like.
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Continued treatment with Tirzepatide for maintenance of weight reduction in adults with obesity: the SURMOUNT-4 randomized clinical trial • JAMA Network

Louis Aronne et al from multiple academic centres:

»

Key Points:
Question: Does once-weekly subcutaneous tirzepatide with diet and physical activity affect maintenance of body weight reduction in individuals with obesity or overweight?

Findings: After 36 weeks of open-label maximum tolerated dose of tirzepatide (10 or 15 mg), adults (n = 670) with obesity or overweight (without diabetes) experienced a mean weight reduction of 20.9%. From randomization (at week 36), those switched to placebo experienced a 14% weight regain and those continuing tirzepatide experienced an additional 5.5% weight reduction during the 52-week double-blind period.

Meaning: In participants with obesity/overweight, withdrawing tirzepatide led to substantial regain of lost weight, whereas continued treatment maintained and augmented initial weight reduction.

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Further meaning: the pharma companies making GLP-1 agonists (semaglutide etc) are going to be able to persuade people to keep taking them for years and years.
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Apple, Google, and Comcast’s plans for L4S could fix internet lag • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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The L4S standard [which was only published in January] adds an indicator to packets, which says whether they experienced congestion on their journey from one device to another. If they sail right on through, there’s no problem, and nothing happens. But if they have to wait in a queue for more than a specified amount of time, they get marked as having experienced congestion. That way, the devices can start making adjustments immediately to keep the congestion from getting worse and to potentially eliminate it altogether. That keeps the data flowing as fast as it possibly can and gets rid of the disruptions and mitigations that can add latency with other systems.

In terms of reducing latency on the internet, L4S or something like it is “a pretty necessary thing,” according to Greg White, a technologist at research and development firm CableLabs who helped work on the standard. “This buffering delay typically has been hundreds of milliseconds to even thousands of milliseconds in some cases. Some of the earlier fixes to buffer bloat brought that down into the tens of milliseconds, but L4S brings that down to single-digit milliseconds.” 

That could obviously help make the everyday experience of using the internet nicer. “Web browsing is more limited by the roundtrip time than the capacity of the connection these days for most people. Beyond about six to 10 megabits per second, latency has a bigger role in determining how quickly a web page load feels.”

However, ultra-low latency could be vital for potential future use cases. We’ve touched on game streaming, which can turn into a mess if there’s too much latency, but imagine what would happen if you were trying to stream a VR game. In that case, too much lag may go beyond just making a game less fun to play and could even make you throw up.

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A good article which is also an excellent backgrounder on why your “fast” internet connection might feel snail-slow, and how large amounts of data really get sent.
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Google’s Gemini AI model looks remarkable, but it’s still behind OpenAI’s GPT-4 • Bloomberg Opinion

Parmy Olson:

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Then there’s the video demo that technologists described as “jaw-dropping” on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

On first viewing, this is impressive stuff. The model’s ability to track a ball of paper from under a plastic cup, or to infer that a dot-to-dot picture was a crab before it is even drawn, show glimmers of the reasoning abilities that Google’s DeepMind AI lab have cultivated over the years. That’s missing from other AI models. But many of the other capabilities on display are not unique and can be replicated by ChatGPT Plus, as Wharton professor Ethan Mollick has demonstrated here and here.

Google also admits that the video is edited. “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity,” it states in its YouTube description. This means the time it took for each response was actually longer than in the video.

In reality, the demo also wasn’t carried out in real time or in voice. When asked about the video by Bloomberg Opinion, a Google spokesperson said it was made by “using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text,” and they pointed to a site showing how others could interact with Gemini with photos of their hands, or of drawings or other objects. In other words, the voice in the demo was reading out human-made prompts they’d made to Gemini, and showing them still images. That’s quite different from what Google seemed to be suggesting: that a person could have a smooth voice conversation with Gemini as it watched and responded in real time to the world around it.

The video also doesn’t specify that this demo is (probably) with Gemini Ultra, the model that’s not here yet. Fudging such details points to the broader marketing effort here: Google wants us remember that it’s got one of the largest teams of AI researchers in the world and access to more data than anyone else. It wants to remind us, as it did on Wednesday, how vast its deployment network is by bringing less-capable versions of Gemini to Chrome, Android and Pixel phones.

«

It is worth discussing this tendency of Google’s to overstate what its technologies can do right now. The first was probably Google Glass, where the 2012 intro concept video wildly overstated its capabilities. (Though consider how much the initial view is like Apple’s Vision Pro.) More recently there was the 2018 “Duplex assistant can book your haircut”, which wasn’t real then either. Now this. Is it a culture thing, Google?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, the top 10% of drivers use more fuel than the bottom 60%. CC-licensed photo by The Library of Congress 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.

A selection of 9 links for you. Just a fiver’s worth. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

EU agrees ‘historic’ deal with world’s first laws to regulate AI • The Guardian

Lisa O’Carroll:

»

The world’s first comprehensive laws to regulate artificial intelligence have been agreed in a landmark deal after a marathon 37-hour negotiation between the European Parliament and EU member states.

The agreement was described as “historic” by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner responsible for a suite of laws in Europe that will also govern social media and search engines, covering giants such as X, TikTok and Google.

Breton said 100 people had been in a room for almost three days to seal the deal. He said it was “worth the few hours of sleep” to make the “historic” deal.

Carme Artigas, Spain’s secretary of state for AI, who facilitated the negotiations, said France and Germany supported the text, amid reports that tech companies in those countries were fighting for a lighter touch approach to foster innovation among small companies.

The agreement puts the EU ahead of the US, China and the UK in the race to regulate artificial intelligence and protect the public from risks that include potential threat to life that many fear the rapidly developing technology carries.

Officials provided few details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law, which would not take effect until 2025 at the earliest.

The political agreement between the European Parliament and EU member states on new laws to regulate AI was a hard-fought battle, with clashes over foundation models designed for general rather than specific purposes.

But there were also protracted negotiations over AI-driven surveillance, which could be used by the police, employers or retailers to film members of the public in real time and recognise emotional stress.

The European Parliament secured a ban on use of real-time surveillance and biometric technologies including emotional recognition but with three exceptions, according to Breton.

It would mean police would be able to use the invasive technologies only in the event of an unexpected threat of a terrorist attack, the need to search for victims and in the prosecution of serious crime.

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I’ll just emphasise that middle sentence: “few details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law”.
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Ex-commissioner for facial recognition tech joins Facewatch firm he approved • The Guardian

Mark Townsend:

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The recently-departed watchdog in charge of monitoring facial recognition technology has joined the private firm he controversially approved, paving the way for the mass roll-out of biometric surveillance cameras in high streets across the country.

In a move critics have dubbed an “outrageous conflict of interest”, Professor Fraser Sampson, former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, has joined Facewatch as a non-executive director.

Sampson left his watchdog role on 31 October, with Companies House records showing he was registered as a company director at Facewatch the following day, 1 November. Campaigners claim this might mean he was negotiating his Facewatch contract while in post, and have urged the advisory committee on business appointments to investigate if it may have “compromised his work in public office”. It is understood that the committee is currently considering the issue.

Facewatch uses biometric cameras to check faces against a watch list and, despite widespread concern over the technology, has received backing from the Home Office, and has already been introduced in hundreds of high-street shops and supermarkets.

Mark Johnson, advocacy manager at Big Brother Watch, said the hiring of Sampson painted a “murky picture.” He added: “It cannot be acceptable for those in taxpayer-paid oversight roles to negotiate contracts with the very companies they scrutinise while still in post.”

“There is no specific law regulating the use of facial recognition surveillance in the UK. Given that this Orwellian technology is already operating in a legal vacuum, we cannot have a revolving door between those tasked with scrutinising the use of facial recognition surveillance and those selling it. When the independence of public officials is compromised by private interests, it undermines public trust in our institutions.”

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Astonishing. Sampson however says the government proposed to abolish his job and so he handed in his notice on August 1. Three months later is 1 November.
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Military briefing: the Israeli bombs raining on Gaza • FT

John Paul Rathbone:

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“We need three things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions,” the Israeli prime minister told a group of local government officials, according to a recording obtained by the Israel Hayom newspaper.

“There are huge demonstrations in western capitals,” added Netanyahu, who is concerned political pressure overseas might threaten the US arms shipments. “We need to apply counter-pressure . . . There have been disagreements with the best of our friends.”

Israel has expended vast amounts of ammunition in its war against Hamas in Gaza. The modern western weaponry used, from satellite-guided “bunker busting” bombs to pinpoint-accurate laser-guided missiles, have eroded Hamas’s military capabilities and, according to the Israel Defense Forces, killed more than 5,000 of the group’s estimated 30,000 fighters.

However, the damage wrought by Israel’s attack — triggered by Hamas’s assault on October 7 when it killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages — has been catastrophic.

Citing estimates of damage to urban areas, military analysts say the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war.

“Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne — some of the world’s heaviest-ever bombings are remembered by their place names,” said Robert Pape, a US military historian and author of Bombing to Win, a landmark survey of 20th century bombing campaigns. “Gaza will also go down as a place name denoting one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns.”

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The real research behind the wild rumors about OpenAI’s Q* project • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

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OpenAI hasn’t published details on its supposed Q* breakthrough, but it has published two papers about its efforts to solve grade-school math problems. And a number of researchers outside of OpenAI—including at Google’s DeepMind—have been doing important work in this area.

I’m skeptical that Q*—whatever it is—is the crucial breakthrough that will lead to artificial general intelligence. I certainly don’t think it’s a threat to humanity. But it might be an important step toward an AI with general reasoning abilities.

In this piece, I’ll offer a guided tour of this important area of AI research and explain why step-by-step reasoning techniques designed for math problems could have much broader applications.

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If you choose to read all of this (long) piece, you will understand the current problems with LLMs very well.
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52 things I learned in 2023 • Magnetic Notes on Medium

Tom Whitwell with his usual selection of fascinating discoveries:

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25. The top 10% of US motorists use more petrol than the bottom 60%. [Robert N. Charette]

26. New research shows that placebos are effective in reducing feelings of guilt, but they work less well on shame. [Shayla Love, Dilan Sezer]

27. People in historically rice-farming areas are less happy and compare themselves socially more than people in wheat-farming areas. [Thomas Talhelm]

28. French Champagne is too cheap. [Daniel Langer]

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Also unmissable: No.4 about payola guitars (Bruce Springsteen uses what used to be one) and No.13 (human heights over history; you won’t come close to guessing this one). Though they’re all fascinating.
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The Copia Institute tells the Copyright Office again that copyright law has no business obstructing AI training • Techdirt

Cathy Gellis:

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trying to use copyright to obstruct development of the technology instead creates its own harms, especially when applied to the training aspect.

One of those harms, as we reiterated here, is that it impinges on the First Amendment right to read that human intelligence needs to have protected, and that right must inherently include the right to use technological tools to do that “reading,” or consumption in general of copyrighted works. After all, we need record players to play records – it would do no one any good if their right to listen to one stopped short of being able to use the tool needed to do it. We also pointed out that this First Amendment right does not diminish even if people consume a lot of media (we don’t, for instance, punish voracious readers for reading more than others) or at speed (copyright law does not give anyone the right to forbid listening to an LP at 45 rpm, or forbid watching a movie on fast forward). So if we were to let copyright law stand in the way of using software to quickly read a lot of material to it would represent a deviation from how copyright law has up to now operated, and one that would undermine the rights to consume works that we’ve so far been able to enjoy.

Which is why we also pointed out that using copyright to deter AI training distorted copyright law itself, which would be felt in other contexts where copyright law legitimately applies. And we highlighted a disturbing trend emerging in copyright law from other quarters as well, this idea that whether a use of a work is legitimate somehow depends on whether the copyright holder approves of it. Copyright law was not intended, or written, to give copyright owners an implicit veto over any or all uses of works – the power of a copyright is limited to what its exclusive rights allow control over and fair use doesn’t otherwise justify.

A variant of this emerging trend also getting undue oxygen is the idea that profiting from a use of a copyrighted work used for free is somehow inherently objectionable and therefore ripe for the copyright holder to veto. But, again, such would represent a significant change if copyright law could work that way. Copyright holders are not guaranteed every penny that could potentially result from the use of a copyrighted work, and it has been independently problematic when courts have found otherwise.

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I find this argument persuasive.
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Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science? • Nature

Philip Ball:

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During the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020, testing kits for the viral infection were scant in some countries. So the idea of diagnosing infection with a medical technique that was already widespread — chest X-rays — sounded appealing. Although the human eye can’t reliably discern differences between infected and non-infected individuals, a team in India reported that artificial intelligence (AI) could do it, using machine learning to analyse a set of X-ray images1.

The paper — one of dozens of studies on the idea — has been cited more than 900 times. But the following September, computer scientists Sanchari Dhar and Lior Shamir at Kansas State University in Manhattan took a closer look2. They trained a machine-learning algorithm on the same images, but used only blank background sections that showed no body parts at all. Yet their AI could still pick out COVID-19 cases at well above chance level.

The problem seemed to be that there were consistent differences in the backgrounds of the medical images in the data set. An AI system could pick up on those artefacts to succeed in the diagnostic task, without learning any clinically relevant features — making it medically useless.

Shamir and Dhar found several other cases in which a reportedly successful image classification by AI — from cell types to face recognition — returned similar results from blank or meaningless parts of the images. The algorithms performed better than chance at recognizing faces without faces, and cells without cells. Some of these papers have been cited hundreds of times.

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Classic cases of not realising what it is you’re training, but the potential for AI to make the content space explode means a real prospect of non-reproducibility.
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Apple cuts off Beeper Mini’s access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage, the company reported via a post on X on Friday. And Apple is to blame, it seems. Users, including those of us at TechCrunch with access to the app, began seeing error messages when trying to send texts via the newly released Beeper Mini and messages are not going through.

The error message reads: “failed to lookup on server: lookup request timed out” spelled out in red letters.

In a response to a question on Reddit as to whether or not the app was broken, a Beeper team member had earlier replied, “Report a problem from the app, give us a chance to look into it.”

However, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky responded to TechCrunch’s inquiry about Beeper Mini’s status by pointing us to the X post acknowledging the outage, and providing more detail. Asked if possibly Apple found a way to cut off Beeper Mini’s ability to function, he replied, “Yes, all data indicates that.”

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Apple confirmed this on Sunday, with a statement saying in part ““We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.”

This was inevitable: Beeper worked by using faked credentials, as Apple notes in the full statement. So it’s going to be blocked just as a(ny) hacker would be.

I still don’t get the desire to create cross-platform iMessage, though, beyond hackers’ fascination with doing something. Encrypted cross-platform messaging apps exist (Signal, WhatsApp). iMessage isn’t even the best messaging app out there. All of which makes Senator Elizabeth Warren’s intervention look even more foolish.
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Verizon gave phone data to armed stalker who posed as cop over email • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim’s data to the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife, according to the record.

The news is a massive failure by Verizon who did not verify that the data request was fraudulent, and the company potentially put someone’s safety at risk.

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I think “massive failure” is putting it mildly. “Culpable near-homicide” gets closer.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified