An AI system at Google DeepMind has predicted the structure of nearly half a million novel crystals for future materials technologies. CC-licensed photo by Francisco Anzola on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
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.
Biden administration stops warning some social platforms of foreign meddling • The Washington Post
Naomi Nix and Cat Zakrzewski:
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Meta no longer receives notifications of global influence campaigns from the Biden administration, halting a longtime partnership between the federal government and the world’s largest social media company, senior security officials said Wednesday. Federal agencies have also stopped communicating about political disinformation with Pinterest, according to the company.
The developments underscore the far-reaching impact of a conservative legal campaign against initiatives established to avoid a repeat of the 2016 election, when Russia manipulated social media in an attempt to sow chaos and swing the vote for Donald Trump. Republican lawmakers even have proposed cutting funding for combatting foreign disinformation and subpoenaed government agencies, including the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which counters foreign propaganda.
For months, researchers in government and academia have warned that a barrage of lawsuits, congressional demands and online attacks are having a chilling effect on programs intended to combat health and election misinformation. But the shift in communications about foreign meddling signals how ongoing litigation and Republican probes in Congress are unwinding efforts once viewed as critical to protecting U.S. national security interests.
Ben Nimmo, chief of global threat intelligence for Meta, said government officials stopped communicating foreign election interference threats to the company in July.
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This could be seen as Definitely Bad. But: X/Twitter is now an absolute morass of misinformation, with a falling user base, so Russia isn’t going to have much joy there. (Nor anyone else.) Facebook, well, it’s where the boomers hang out – nobody much else – and they’re always susceptible to any old crap, if they’re susceptible at all. Instagram, folk don’t get taken in by that. TikTok, well, that’s China, and doesn’t really listen to the US. What else is there? (Thanks G for the link.)
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Meta sues FTC, hoping to block ban on monetizing kids’ Facebook data • Ars Technica
Jon Brodkin:
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Meta sued the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday in a lawsuit that challenges the FTC’s authority to impose new privacy obligations on the social media firm.
The complaint stems from the FTC’s May 2023 allegation that Meta-owned Facebook violated a 2020 privacy settlement and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The FTC proposed changes to the 2020 privacy order that would, among other things, prohibit Facebook from monetizing data it collects from users under 18.
Meta’s lawsuit against the FTC challenges what it calls “the structurally unconstitutional authority exercised by the FTC through its Commissioners in an administrative reopening proceeding against Meta.” It was filed against the FTC, Chair Lina Khan, and other commissioners in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Meta is seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the FTC proceeding, pending resolution of the lawsuit.
Meta argues that in the FTC’s administrative proceedings, “the Commission has a dual role as prosecutor and judge in violation of the Due Process Clause.” Meta asked the court to “declare that certain fundamental aspects of the Commission’s structure violate the US Constitution, and that these violations render unlawful the FTC Proceeding against Meta.”
Meta says it should have a right to a trial by jury and that “Congress unconstitutionally has delegated to the FTC the power to assign disputes to administrative adjudication rather than litigating them before an Article III court.” The FTC should not be allowed to “unilaterally modify the terms” of the 2020 settlement, Meta said.
The FTC action “would dictate how and when Meta can design its products,” the lawsuit said.
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Well, yes, that’s sort of the point of the FTC order, Meta. The core of Meta’s suit is that the FTC is itself unconstitutional because its commissioners can act as prosecutor, judge and jury in a case. (Explained here; others have tried the same.)
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Nearly 100,000 Gaza buildings may be damaged, satellite images show • BBC News
Dominic Bailey, Erwan Rivault and Daniele Palumbo:
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New satellite images commissioned by the BBC reveal the extent of destruction across northern Gaza, before the start of the temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
The satellite images were taken last Thursday, just before the suspension of hostilities came into force, following weeks of Israeli air strikes and on-the-ground fighting. Separate satellite data analysis also provides a snapshot of the destruction across the whole of Gaza.
Drone footage and verified video also show buildings and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. While northern Gaza has been the focus of the Israeli ground offensive and has borne the brunt of the destruction, widespread damage extends across the entire strip.
Israel says northern Gaza, which includes the major urban centre of Gaza City, was a “centre of gravity of Hamas”, the group behind the deadly 7 October attacks on Israel. Israel says its bombing campaign has successfully targeted Hamas commanders and fighters and accuses the group of embedding itself in civilian areas.
Satellite data analysis suggests that almost 98,000 buildings across the whole Gaza Strip may have suffered damage, with most of it concentrated in the north – as shown in the above map.
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On the technology front, what’s amazing here is that a media company can commission satellite images and then get them analysed in less than a week to derive information like this.
On the human front, it’s utterly shocking. Yes, Hamas’s murder of more than a thousand Israelis on October 7 was evil and deserved retribution. But even at the last election, in 2006, it only got 44% of the vote, and much of Gaza’s population on October 7 had never voted at all. The idea that there were Hamas commanders and fighters in every single one of those levelled properties is for the birds.
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‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza • 972
Yuval Abraham:
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The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.
The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.
…According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”
According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.
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The Israel Defence Force (IDF) has been very cagey about talking about its AI system, and what it does, and how it’s used. This is the first report I’ve seen which describes what its role could be.
About 972 Magazine: “+972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.” The name comes from the dialling code, which reaches numbers in Israel and Palestine.
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What a bloody San Francisco street brawl tells us about the age of citizen surveillance • WIRED
Lauren Smiley:
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One day in July, I spotted a camera on the front of a tidy house on Magnolia—the place whose driveway had been the site of the 2021 attack where a man was sprayed in the face for five seconds. I walked up to the open garage and asked the man inside if I could talk to him about the Ring cam footage that had emerged of the incident. He said he’d rather not, that he was thinking he would be subpoenaed. [Assault-accused homeless man Garret] Doty’s trial was coming up—it’s now set for mid-November—and the man said he had to get an attorney himself. He hadn’t authorized the release of his footage to the media, he explained, and he wasn’t happy that it wound up on national TV.
As I became yet another Marina [Bay area in San Francisco] surveillant [by recording some video of a homeless man], I thought of what one regular chronicler of the homeless in the neighborhood had told me—that he doubted all the careful surveillance had added up to much other than “On my phone I have a bunch of stupid photos now.” San Francisco’s police chief has called the city’s bonanza of surveillance footage a “golden” tool for solving crimes, but it can just as easily set people free: The public defender’s office is one of the main requesters of footage from the Tenderloin’s camera network. One defense attorney in the city, Elizabeth Hilton, told me that in many of her cases the trove of San Francisco video evidence ends up helping the accused, contradicting victims’ and witnesses’ accounts of what went down.
…As I kept my eye on the Marina, I couldn’t stop thinking about the guy I’d met in his garage that day in July, bewildered that his Ring footage had ended up on the national news, that this little piece of hardware had unleashed something bigger than he’d ever intended. His reaction struck me as genuine and understandable—what most people would feel in his position. Yet it also seemed quaintly naive, a reminder that those engaged in citizen surveillance in 2023 still don’t totally get what it means to have a camera watching the street.
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An absorbing long read about the incredible tensions between residents and homeless on San Francisco’s streets.
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Message received • The Rebooting
Brian Morrissey:
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as publishers know well, the ad business is often illogical and possibly more mercurial than [Elon] Musk. It can gyrate wildly. And publishers have little control of their distribution, putting themselves in a double bind. I don’t think it took very long for Musk to figure this out. The parts of the ad business that the engineering mind like are in the direct marketing part that’s driven by math and quantifiable results. Ironically, he bought the one scaled tech platform that is more reliant on the other part of advertising, the part that’s more about branding, since Twitter doesn’t have the kind of intent signals other platforms have.
Big brands care about flaccid concepts like brand safety and alignment. And sure, they’re hypocrites – aren’t we all? – but you only get a pass if you perform. Twitter has never been a must-buy on the basis of performance. Musk made sure to specifically call out Bob Iger in the audience during his GFY, since Disney is among the advertisers who have paused spending due to Musk’s latest controversial post that strayed into the territory of Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The truth is Disney’s business is not going to be hurt by not advertising on X.
I believe he knows this. The subscription model is the only path for X, at least as the core of its business if it is truly going to maximize free speech. I believe that’s why he shrunk the size of the organization. The ad business will be niche, more digital [junk catalogue] SkyMall than vying for the TV ad budgets [CEO] Linda Yaccarino has been adept at grabbing. I’m unclear the point of her role at the company with that focus.
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Yaccarino is now being referred to online as the “CNO”, or CENO – CEO In Name Only. Certainly can’t have been her most comfortable moment sitting in the front row as Musk torpedoed her role. Shall we start a resignation clock?
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Millions of new materials discovered with deep learning • Google DeepMind
Amil Merchant and Ekin Dogus Cubuk:
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Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation.
Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.
With GNoME, we’ve multiplied the number of technologically viable materials known to humanity. Of its 2.2 million predictions, 380,000 are the most stable, making them promising candidates for experimental synthesis. Among these candidates are materials that have the potential to develop future transformative technologies ranging from superconductors, powering supercomputers, and next-generation batteries to boost the efficiency of electric vehicles.
GNoME shows the potential of using AI to discover and develop new materials at scale. External researchers in labs around the world have independently created 736 of these new structures experimentally in concurrent work. In partnership with Google DeepMind, a team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has also published a second paper in Nature that shows how our AI predictions can be leveraged for autonomous material synthesis.
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AI for good. (Though I’m sure someone will come along presently and suggest it can be used by terrorists to do.. something bad.)
In passing, you can tell this didn’t go through a subeditor. The second sentence of the first paragraph should read more like “To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable, or else they can decompose. Finding a new, stable crystal can take months of painstaking experimentation.”
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China’s wind and solar surge threatens Australian coal exports • Australian Financial Review
Ben Potter:
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Two new reports, from global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie and Sydney-based Climate Energy Finance, show that China is building wind and solar at twice the rate of the US and Europe combined, and also leading the way with huge energy storage installations.
The startling acceleration comes as world leaders and officials prepare to descend on Dubai for the United Nations climate change conference (COP28) and wrangle over phasing out fossil fuels and supporting developing countries’ clean energy projects.
“China’s demand for Australian exports of thermal and coking coal is set to decline structurally over the longer term due to the greening of China’s power sector and economy,” said Climate Energy Finance director Tim Buckley. “The report recommends that to minimise economic risk, Australia urgently comprehends and responds at speed to align with China’s massive investment pivot.”
China’s accelerating clean energy shift challenges Australia, which has planned for continued exports of coal and gas while cautiously backing US-led efforts to wean the West off China’s clean energy goods and commodities and build up alternative sources of supply.
Wood Mackenzie expects China to continue to command 80% of the global supply chain for solar energy until at least 2026. It says in a new report, “How China became the global renewables leader”, that the giant economy is on track to build 230 gigawatts of wind and solar power this year at a cost of $US140bn ($210bn), compared with 75GW for Europe and 40GW for the US. A gigawatt is the size of a small coal-fired power station.
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So much implied judgement in this piece. “Startling acceleration” – not really; China loses out from runaway climate change too. And as for China getting ahead on making renewables: Australia could have grasped that opportunity decades ago (it has lots of empty space for wind and solar). It chose not to. Cry me a river.
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Inside Foxconn’s India iPhone factory expansion • Rest of World
Viola Zhou and Nilesh Christopher:
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Foxconn began manufacturing iPhones at Sunguvarchatram in 2019, starting with the iPhone XR. At that point, the model was more than a year old. When Li [Hai, from Foxconn China] arrived at Foxconn Sunguvarchatram in early 2023, the factory was making iPhone 14s, for which production in India had begun two months after its launch. This year, the goal was to have a shipment of made-in-India iPhone 15s ready to go as soon as the model was announced.
The iPhone plant is part of a sprawling 60-hectare campus where Foxconn also makes phones for other brands. About 35,000 employees go to work inside half a dozen white, three-story factory buildings. Li may as well have been walking back into the Chinese plant he was familiar with at home: the same advanced equipment, the same rows of tables with workers repeating tasks thousands of times a day, the same final product. But there was one obvious difference. Unlike in China, the assembly line was staffed almost exclusively by young women.
When electronics manufacturing took off in China in the 1980s, rural women who had just begun moving to the cities made up the majority of the factory workforce. They didn’t have many other options. Managers at companies like Foxconn preferred to hire women because they believed them to be more obedient, Jenny Chan, a sociologist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University who studies labor issues at Foxconn, told Rest of World.
Over the past 30 years, that’s changed. Today, most of China’s iPhone workers are men; women have moved into less arduous service sector jobs. But in India, Foxconn and other electronics manufacturers are once again recruiting from a female workforce beginning to migrate for better jobs.
…Foxconn also had to find a workaround for employing married women. The company typically requires workers to pass through metal detectors when entering and exiting its factories in order to prevent leaks about upcoming products, according to reports. But in India, married women wear a mangalsutra, a metal pendant; and a metti, a metal toe ring. These workers are searched manually and have their jewelry logged in a notebook.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Interesting to note that “global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie” started out as a stockbroking firm in Edinburgh that after passing through many hands morphed into its present state.