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.

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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.

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

Kyle Orland:

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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:

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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:

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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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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified