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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.”
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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:
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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.
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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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| • 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 
The creation of computer-generated simulations of dead people is a very old science-fiction idea. Interestingly, note we don’t find anything wrong or scary about when performers try to simulate a famous person in terms of showing what they were like. I’m referring here to “An Evening With …” type performances. And we’ve grown up with photography, so it’s normal to us. But some people who have never seen it apparently find it troubling. The cliche is “captures your soul”. However, if you think about it, a photograph could be pretty disturbing to someone who is new to it. This mysterious technologist points some device at you, and then – MY GOD, CAN YOU IMAGINE THIS – it immediately creates an image of YOU! I can see how someone would legitimately consider it pretty weird.