Potholes are a growing problem in the US and UK, worsened by climate change exacerbating freeze/thaw. How should we fix them? CC-licensed photo by Alan Stanton 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. Take it slowly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple warns proposed UK law will affect software updates around the world • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Apple is “deeply concerned” that proposed changes to a United Kingdom law could give the UK government unprecedented power to “secretly veto” privacy and security updates to its products and services, the tech giant said in a statement provided to Ars.

If passed, potentially this spring, the amendments to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) could deprive not just UK users, but all users globally of important new privacy and security features, Apple warned.

“Protecting our users’ privacy and the security of their data is at the very heart of everything we do at Apple,” Apple said. “We’re deeply concerned the proposed amendments” to the IPA “now before Parliament place users’ privacy and security at risk.”

The IPA was initially passed in 2016 to ensure that UK officials had lawful access to user data to investigate crimes like child sexual exploitation or terrorism. Proposed amendments were announced last November, after a review showed that the “Act has not been immune to changes in technology over the last six years” and “there is a risk that some of these technological changes have had a negative effect on law enforcement and intelligence services’ capabilities.”

The proposed amendments require that any company that fields government data requests must notify UK officials of any updates they planned to make that could restrict the UK government’s access to this data, including any updates impacting users outside the UK.

UK officials said that this would “help the UK anticipate the risk to public safety posed by the rolling out of technology by multinational companies that precludes lawful access to data. This will reduce the risk of the most serious offenses such as child sexual exploitation and abuse or terrorism going undetected.”

«

The amendment is presently chugging through the Lords. Let’s hope it just runs out of Parliamentary time like all the other poorly thought-through ideas of this government.
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Climate change is causing a pothole plague. Are robots and self-healing pavement the solution? • BBC Future

Mia Taylor:

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In 2023, there were nearly 630,000 reports of potholes in the UK, which marked a five-year high, according to data compiled by campaign group Round Our Way. In the United States, meanwhile, about 44 million drivers reported damage to their vehicles from potholes in 2022, which was a massive 57% increase over 2021, according to AAA.

While ageing infrastructure and limited road maintenance budgets play a significant role in the problem, another culprit behind the marked proliferation of potholes is severe weather brought about by climate change, which is weakening roads.

“There are a number of issues caused by climate change that are impacting roads,” says Hassan Davani, an associate professor in San Diego State University’s department of civil, construction, and environmental engineering. “Excessive heat can ultimately cause buckling of the roads, where additional thermal stress to the pavement materials can lead to cracks and potholes. We’re also experiencing more extreme flooding events, which causes a higher velocity of stream flow over the roads, resulting in more severe erosion of the pavement.”

Another contributing factor is the increased number of freeze and thaw cycles taking place each year as climate change worsens, which is also undermining road conditions.

With more freezing and thawing comes more frost heaves impacting roads. “Frost heaves are ice lenses that form in underlying layers of the road. When they melt during the spring thaw, the moisture is trapped and that’s a big part of the issue causing the formation of potholes,” adds Jo Sias, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of New Hampshire.

«

The solutions, in the story, are fascinating – though who knew about “ice lenses” before this? Not me, for sure.
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New ransomware reporting requirements kick in as victims increasingly avoid paying • Coveware

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In Q4 2023, the average ransom payment decreased to $568,705 (-33% from Q3 2023), whereas the median ransom payment stabilized and remained at $200,000 (no change from Q3 2023). The trend aligned with a relative decline in the size of victims impacted (discussed further in this report), and a reappearance of small game actors groups who reclaimed some market share after previously dropping in frequency during Q3. 

The proportion of ransomware victims that opted to pay ransoms in Q4 2023 dropped to a record low margin of 29%. This data point is driven by several variables: (1) Continued resiliency growth in enterprise environments; companies impacted by ransomware are increasingly able to recover from incidents partially or fully without the use of a decryption tool. (2) Data driven reluctance to pay for intangible promises from cybercriminals, such as the promise not to publish/misuse stolen data and the promise to exempt the company from future attacks or harassment; the industry continues to get smarter on what can and cannot be reasonably obtained with a ransom payment. This has led to better guidance to victims and fewer payments for intangible assurances.  

Echoing the sentiment above, we observed a decrease in the volume of data-exfiltration-only payments. Q4 was rife with examples of how data assurances can fail, even when interacting with well-known “brand established” ransomware groups. These cautionary tales have allowed us to offer timely and detailed examples to other companies of why threat actors cannot be trusted to prevent ongoing misuse/publication of stolen data, and why payments to them for these imaginary assurances have zero if not sub-zero value.

«

So organisations are getting better at having backups so ransomware doesn’t affect them as badly, and discount claims by hackers about publishing sensitive data; as a result ransomware payout numbers as a proportion are falling fast. But as a total number? Not clear, though the suspicion has to be that it’s still growing. Plenty of fish in the sea.
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New lithium discoveries can secure America’s clean energy future • The National Interest

Joseph Bouchard:

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On November 28, 2023, the US Department of Energy confirmed its discovery of a 3,400-kiloton reserve of lithium in California’s Salton Sea, making it one of the largest exploitable lithium deposits in the world. 

In August, American volcanologists and geologists found a large lithium deposit in Nevada’s ancient McDermitt Caldera volcano, which could produce between 20,000 and 40,000 kilotons. If fully exploited, both deposits would be sufficient to fulfill the world’s lithium needs many times over. 

Besides minor grants provided to the researchers and companies who discovered these two immense lithium deposits, no efforts have been made to develop the technology, capacity, and infrastructure necessary to exploit these two deposits. These incredible discoveries should be a wake-up call for American investors and lawmakers to stop investing in foreign, unreliable partners and begin an ambitious project to exploit the lithium reserves here at home. 

Currently, the US is almost entirely dependent on foreign countries for all lithium extraction, manufacturing, and production. The largest exploitable lithium reserves are in South America’s Lithium Triangle, which comprises Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. While Chile has been a productive ally of the US, Bolivia and Argentina have faced enormous economic, political, and geopolitical barriers to production. 

…After extraction, most of the world’s raw lithium is then transported to China, which has over half of the world’s lithium refining capacity. While the US has talked a big game about boosting domestic critical mineral production, it has increased its imports of lithium products from China, including lithium batteries used in electric vehicles and specialized electronics.

«

So the US needs to get mining, and it needs to get refining. Seems straightforward enough.
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Texas just broke a record for how much power it got from the sun • KUT Radio, Austin

Mose Buchele:

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Solar energy provided more power to Texas than ever before on Sunday morning, generating more than one third of the electricity on the state’s grid. Experts say it’s a Texas record that’s not expected to last very long – because it will soon be broken again.

Weather conditions were ideal for solar, with clear skies across most of the state, when the Electric Reliability Council of Texas recorded the record at 10:09 a.m. Sunday.

At that time, about 15,222 megawatts of solar ran over Texas transmission lines to homes and businesses. According to ERCOT, one megawatt can power 200 homes in times of peak energy use.

Later that day, Texas broke a record for the share of electricity on the grid that comes from the sun: 36.11%.

Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at UT Austin, said he thinks the state will be breaking more records in the near future “as we install more [solar facilities] and the sun’s higher in the sky during the summer.”

Rhodes said the new record is the result of recent years of meteoric growth in solar installations in Texas, which recently surpassed California as the state that produces the most energy from solar power.

«

Of course Texas’s administrators hate renewables, and think oil is the most splendiferous, because oil has concentrated ownership which means personal lobbying and political donations. Solar is smaller and decentralised; and the figure above doesn’t even include microgeneration from rooftop solar.
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Signs of ‘transmissible’ Alzheimer’s seen in people who received growth hormone • Nature

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Researchers say they have uncovered more evidence to support a controversial hypothesis that sticky proteins that are a signature of Alzheimer’s disease can be ‘transmitted’ from person to person through certain surgical procedures.

The authors and other scientists stress that the research is based on a small number of people and is related to medical practices that are no longer used. The study does not suggest that forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease can be contagious.

Still, “we’d like to take precautions going forward to reduce even those rare cases occurring”, says neurologist John Collinge at University College London who led the research, which was published1 in Nature Medicine on 29 January.

For the past decade, Collinge and his team have studied people in the United Kingdom who in childhood received growth hormone derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers to treat medical conditions including short stature. The latest study finds that, decades later, some of these people developed signs of early-onset dementia. The dementia symptoms, such as memory and language problems, were diagnosed clinically and in some patients appeared alongside plaques of the sticky protein amyloid-beta in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors suggest that this amyloid protein, which was present in the hormone preparations, was ‘seeded’ in the brains and caused the damage.

«

I first came across Collinge back in 1996, when I started covering the crossover of BSE in cows to variant CJD in humans. He had already been working for years on what came to be recognised (as BSE and vCJD are) as prion disease, where a common protein which can take two different shapes (one good, one bad) switches to the “bad” one and triggers a cascade in the brain. And now he’s finding the same effect around Alzheimers.
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Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not • The Verge

Nilay Patel:

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the Vision Pro also represents a series of really big tradeoffs — tradeoffs that are impossible to ignore. Some of those tradeoffs are very tangible: getting all this tech in a headset means there’s a lot of weight on your face, so Apple chose to use an external battery pack connected by a cable. But there are other, more philosophical tradeoffs as well. 

As I’ve been using it for the past few days, I kept coming up with a series of questions — questions about whether the tradeoffs were worth it.

• Is using the Vision Pro so good that I’m willing to mess up my hair every time I put it on?
• Is it so good that I want to lug it around in its giant carrying case instead of my laptop bag?
• Is it so good that I want to look at the world around me through screens instead of with my own eyes?

Basically, I keep asking if I prefer using a computer in there rather than out here. And as interesting as the Vision Pro is, there’s a long way to go before it can beat out here.

…Watching movies on the Vision Pro is a ton of fun, especially in the Apple TV app’s immersive movie theater that lets you pick where you want to sit. It’s also very cool to watch a movie in one of Apple’s virtual environments like Mount Hood and see the colors from the screen reflect onto the landscape or look around one of the Disney Plus environments like Avengers Tower. And movies themselves look great — the incredible quality of the Vision Pro’s displays is really obvious when you’re watching something. I watched far more of Top Gun: Maverick than I intended to just because it looked so good blown up to drive-in movie size, floating over a mountain.

Since the Vision Pro sends separate images to each eye, it can do true 3D movies — and Apple and its partners like Disney have already released quite a few. If you have a large Apple movie library, you get the 3D versions for free — you just choose 2D or 3D playback when you hit play. Apple is also making immersive versions of some of its Apple TV Plus shows, which basically means a 180ish-degree 3D video that feels like the best Google Cardboard demo of all time. I watched someone walk a tightrope in Adventure, and it was very convincing — but if you’ve never tried this before, I’d be careful that you get used to VR motion before diving into 3D videos. Apple has also promised immersive sports content, but sadly, I wasn’t able to try any of that yet.

«

This is very long, but I feel like these elements form the nut of it.
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Apple has sold approximately 200,000 Vision Pro headsets • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple has sold upwards of 200,000 Vision Pro headsets, MacRumors has learned from a source with knowledge of Apple’s sales numbers. Apple began accepting pre-orders for the Vision Pro on January 19, so the headset has been available for purchase in the U.S. for 10 days.

Last Monday, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that Apple had sold an estimated 160,000 to 180,000 Vision Pro units during the pre-order weekend for the device, so sales may have slowed somewhat since then.

Vision Pro headsets for launch day home delivery sold out within hours of pre-orders launching, and in-store pickup options followed shortly after, so it is no surprise that interest in the headset has started to wane somewhat after the initial rush of orders.

Media reviews for the Vision Pro are set to go live on Tuesday, and that could push more sales, plus there will likely be an uptick in purchases after actual consumers begin sharing hands-on experiences.

«

Interesting if Apple, which seems the likely “source”, is pushing out numbers like this. But not to Bloomberg or a big media site; it’s letting it permeate up through the system.
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ChatGPT is leaking passwords from private conversations of its users, reader says • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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ChatGPT is leaking private conversations that include login credentials and other personal details of unrelated users, screenshots submitted by an Ars reader on Monday indicated.

Two of the seven screenshots the reader submitted stood out in particular. Both contained multiple pairs of usernames and passwords that appeared to be connected to a support system used by employees of a pharmacy prescription drug portal. An employee using the AI chatbot seemed to be troubleshooting problems they encountered while using the portal.

“THIS is so f-ing insane, horrible, horrible, horrible, i cannot believe how poorly this was built in the first place, and the obstruction that is being put in front of me that prevents it from getting better,” the user wrote. “I would fire [redacted name of software] just for this absurdity if it was my choice. This is wrong.”

Besides the candid language and the credentials, the leaked conversation includes the name of the app the employee is troubleshooting and the store number where the problem occurred.

The entire conversation goes well beyond what’s shown in the redacted screenshot [in the story]. A link Ars reader Chase Whiteside included showed the chat conversation in its entirety. The URL disclosed additional credential pairs.

The results appeared Monday morning shortly after Whiteside had used ChatGPT for an unrelated query.

“I went to make a query (in this case, help coming up with clever names for colors in a palette) and when I returned to access moments later, I noticed the additional conversations,” Whiteside wrote in an email. “They weren’t there when I used ChatGPT just last night (I’m a pretty heavy user). No queries were made—they just appeared in my history, and most certainly aren’t from me (and I don’t think they’re from the same user either).”

Other conversations leaked to Whiteside include the name of a presentation someone was working on, details of an unpublished research proposal, and a script using the PHP programming language. The users for each leaked conversation appeared to be different and unrelated to each other. The conversation involving the prescription portal included the year 2020. Dates didn’t appear in the other conversations.

«

No, I’m sure this is all perfectly fine. Nothing to see.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

To preserve your privacy, lie about your birthday online. Almost always. CC-licensed photo by Daniel M. Hendricks 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. Younger every day. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Website that posted deepfake AI porn of Taylor Swift has been sharing explicit images of celebrities for YEARS • Daily Mail Online

Lewis Pennock:

»

The website which shared explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift has been posting faked pornographic photos of the singer and other celebrities for years, seemingly with impunity.

Celeb Jihad is believed to be the origin of recent graphic images which depict Swift at a Kansas City Chiefs game. The images, which were created using AI software, were shared by the website on January 15 under a headline titled: ‘Taylor Swift Chiefs Sex Scandal Caught On Camera’.

The images were later posted on X with Celeb Jihad’s watermark, triggering a massive backlash from Swift’s fans and others who likened the pictures to a form of sexual assault.

The scandal is the latest of many involving Celeb Jihad, which was created by its anonymous founder in 2008. Along with deepfakes – the name given to hyper-realistic fake content – of Swift and other stars, the website has also published droves of leaked explicit photos of other celebrities, including images that were hacked from their cellphones. Astonishingly, the site claims its content is ‘satire’ and states it is ‘not a pornographic website’.

Swift’s legal team previously issued a warning to Celeb Jihad in 2011 after it published a faked photo which depicted the singer topless. The picture appeared with the caption ‘Taylor Swift Topless Private Pic Leaked?’

At the time, her lawyers threatened to file a trademark-infringement suit and accused it of spreading ‘false pornographic images’ and ‘false news’. The website appears to have published hundreds, and potentially thousands, more faked images of Swift since it was started.

Celeb Jihad was also involved in several massive leaks of private photos hacked from celebrities’ cellphones, including iCloud accounts, in 2017. The website was one of several which published illicitly-obtained photos of celebrities including Miley Cyrus and Tiger Woods and his former girlfriend Lindsey Vonn. Vonn said the leak was an ‘outrageous and despicable invasion of privacy’.

Several of the celebrities threatened legal action against Celeb Jihad, which removed pictures of some of the stars including Vonn and Woods.

«

Swift’s legal team surely has the resources to sue this site utterly into the ground, though that surely won’t stop the production of images. But now it’s come to wider notice, it’s going to be hard to stop a bandwagon looking for regulation. Non-consensual nudity is, as Ex-Twitter said, already illegal to post in many countries. The problem is the platforms. Ex-T blocked searches for Taylor Swift, which is a terrible sticking plaster on a gaping wound.
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Lie about your birthday 🎂 • The Markup

Sisi Wei:

»

Getting presents on your birthday can be really fun.

So I can understand if, when companies have asked you for your date of birth (so they can send you something special on your special day!), you shrugged and thought, “eh, what’s the harm,” and handed your data over.

But your birth date, like your phone number (get a burner number), is personal information that scammers can use to steal your identity or target you for fraud. Think back: How many times have you been asked to verify your date of birth in serious situations, like when recovering your login from your bank, or getting your medical information from your doctor office? 

Is getting free stuff on your birthday worth taking that risk? For me, the answer is no. 

That’s why I lie about my birthday on the Internet.

Now, there’s an art to this, so here are some general rules and tips.

• I only lie about my birthday when it’s a company trying to use that data to get me to buy more stuff from them. Do not lie about your birthday to your doctor. Or your bank. Or when you’re trying to get your driver’s license. You get my point.
• If you want to receive these promotions at the same time as your birthday, pick a fake birthday close to your real one. For example, if my birthday was December 13, 1989, like Taylor Swift, I could pick the first of the month, December 1, 1989, as my fake birthday. Or December 25, if I wanted everything to come around Christmas. Most companies run their birthday promotions for the entire birthday month, so you can still decide to use their promos on your actual birthday.
• Go back into your existing retail accounts, remove your real birthday and submit a fake one.
• But don’t be a jerk about it. Companies are on the lookout for people who try to change their birthday multiple times per year and double or triple dip. Pick a fake birthday and don’t change it again.
• When you’re creating new retail accounts in the future, remember to use your fake birthday the first time around.
• Finally, when I’m at a restaurant that gives birthday discounts and the only person who sees my birthday is the staff member glancing at my ID, I don’t worry about it.

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Personally I share a birthday with Unix – 1 January 1970 – for the purposes of the internet.
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What’s behind the tech industry’s mass layoffs in 2024? • NPR

Bobbly Allyn:

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All of the major tech companies conducting another wave of layoffs this year are sitting atop mountains of cash and are wildly profitable, so the job-shedding is far from a matter of necessity or survival.

Then what is driving it?

“There is a herding effect in tech,” said Jeff Shulman, a professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, who follows the tech industry. “The layoffs seem to be helping their stock prices, so these companies see no reason to stop.”

Some smaller tech startups are running out of cash and facing fundraising struggles with the era of easy money now over, which has prompted workforce reductions. But experts say for most large and publicly-traded tech firms, the layoff trend this month is aimed at satisfying investors.

Shulman adds: “They’re getting away with it because everybody is doing it. And they’re getting away with it because now it’s the new normal,” he said. “Workers are more comfortable with it, stock investors are appreciating it, and so I think we’ll see it continue for some time.”

Interest rates, sitting around 5.5%, have risen substantially from the near-zero rates of the pandemic. And some tech companies are reshuffling staff to prioritize new investments in generative AI. But experts say those factors do not sufficiently explain this month’s layoff frenzy.

Whatever is fueling the workforce downsizing in tech, Wall Street has taken notice. The S&P 500 has notched multiple all-time highs this month, led by the so-called Magnificent Seven technology stocks. Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft all set new records, with Microsoft’s worth now exceeding $3 trillion.

And as Wall Street rallies on news of laid-off tech employees, more and more tech companies axe workers.

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I get the impression that Shulman is actually saying “search me, makes no sense at all.”
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Amazon drops $1.4bn deal to buy iRobot after EU veto reports • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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Amazon has abandoned its planned $1.4bn (£1.1bn) acquisition of the robot vacuum cleaner company iRobot, amid EU opposition to the deal.

The e-commerce company will pay a $94m break fee to iRobot, which immediately announced plans to axe 31% of its workforce – or 350 employees – and the departure of its chief executive.

The Wall Street Journal reported on 18 January that the EU’s executive arm was preparing to block the acquisition of the Roomba maker and had informed Amazon of its proposed view.

Amazon and iRobot said in a joint statement the takeover had “no path to regulatory approval in the European Union, preventing Amazon and iRobot from moving forward together”.

David Zapolsky, the Amazon general counsel, said: “Undue and disproportionate regulatory hurdles discourage entrepreneurs, who should be able to see acquisition as one path to success, and that hurts both consumers and competition – the very things that regulators say they’re trying to protect.”

The European Commission formally raised concerns about the deal in November, saying it could restrict competition in the robot vacuum cleaner market. The commission’s concerns included Amazon reducing the visibility of rival vacuum cleaners on its retail platform.

Amazon announced the deal in August 2022. The online retailer, which already owns the Alexa smart speaker and Ring doorbell, was pushing to expand its stable of smart home devices.

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I think it’s difficult to perceive the robot vacuum cleaner market. There’s iRobot, and Dyson (very slightly at the top end). I don’t know of any others. Re mergers: Amazon/iRobot don’t merge: job cuts. Microsoft/Activision do merge: job cuts. Not sure what the message is here.
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Who would be affected by a ban on disposable vapes? A population study in Great Britain • ScienceDirect

Sara Jackson et al:

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The UK Government is consulting on banning disposable vapes. This appears to have widespread support from practitioners, politicians, and the general public. Alongside concerns about disposables’ negative environmental impact, a key concern motivating calls for a ban is the rapid rise in vaping among young people-particularly young “never smokers”–that has been driven by these products.

Our data show that adults under the age of 25 and those who have never regularly smoked are more likely to use disposable e-cigarettes than refillable or pod devices, suggesting banning disposables would particularly impact these target groups. We estimate that there are approximately 316,000 people in Great Britain aged between 18 and 24 who have never regularly smoked and are currently using disposable e-cigarettes. This number likely reflects some people who were diverted from using other nicotine products (e.g. rechargeable e-cigarettes or cigarettes), as well as others who would not have otherwise vaped or smoked.

However, our data also show that a ban would disproportionately affect the ∼1.2 million current smokers who make up around half of the population of disposable users. This is a group that would benefit from harm reduction if they switched completely to e-cigarettes.

It would also affect ∼242,000 people who have recently switched completely from smoking to vaping and ∼502,000 people who quit smoking more than a year ago. In the event of a ban, it would be important to encourage current and ex-smokers who use disposables to switch to other (rechargeable) types of e-cigarettes rather than going back to just smoking tobacco. In particular, it may be recent ex-smokers who are most likely to relapse: if they chose disposables as a preferable quitting method over other types of e-cigarettes, they may be more vulnerable to relapse even if offered other e-cigarette devices.

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The research was sponsored by Cancer Research UK, and carried out by a team from UCL, SPECTRUM (not the Captain Scarlet one, I guess?) and KCL. Rishi Sunak is proposing to ban disposables, which would have big environmental benefits (the lithium in each is essentially lost and screws up landfill), but this shows that there would have to be other handholding too for ex-smokers. Though I can’t understand why they wouldn’t go for the product that’s cheaper over the long term – a rechargeable vape.
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Automating creativity • One Useful Thing

Ethan Mollick:

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Each of the three papers [links in original article – Overspill Ed] directly compares AI-powered creativity and human creative effort in controlled experiments. The first major paper is from my colleagues at Wharton. They staged an idea generation contest: pitting ChatGPT-4 against the students in a popular innovation class that has historically led to many startups. The researchers — Karan Girotra, Lennart Meincke, Christian Terwiesch, and Karl Ulrich — used human judges to assess idea quality, and found that ChatGPT-4 generated more, cheaper and better ideas than the students. Even more impressive, from a business perspective, was that the purchase intent from outside judges was higher for the AI-generated ideas as well! Of the 40 best ideas rated by the judges, 35 came from ChatGPT.

A second paper conducted a wide-ranging crowdsourcing contest, asking people to come up with business ideas based on reusing, recycling, or sharing products as part of the circular economy. The researchers (Léonard Boussioux, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic, and Karim R. Lakhani) then had judges rate those ideas, and compared them to the ones generated by GPT-4. The overall quality level of the AI and human-generated ideas were similar, but the AI was judged to be better on feasibility and impact, while the humans generated more novel ideas.

The final paper did something a bit different, focusing on creative writing ideas, rather than business ideas. The study by Anil R. Doshi and Oliver P. Hauser compared humans working alone to write short stories to humans who used AI to suggest 3-5 possible topics. Again, the AI proved helpful: humans with AI help created stories that were judged as significantly more novel and more interesting than those written by humans alone. There were, however, two interesting caveats. First, the most creative people were helped least by the AI, and AI ideas were generally judged to be more similar to each other than ideas generated by people. Though again, this was using AI purely for generating a small set of ideas, not for writing tasks.

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Seems AI is useful for brainstorming, as I understand this.
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He died in a tragic accident. Why did the internet say he was murdered? • The New York Times

Andrew Keh and Stuart Thompson:

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Faisal Shah Khan, an internet marketer in India, knew nothing about Mr. Sachman. But suddenly, enough people were searching for “Matteo Sachman” to push his name up a list of trending Google search topics that Mr. Khan was monitoring as part of a digital moneymaking scheme.

To Mr. Khan, the rising interest meant that an audience for online content that did not yet exist was growing rapidly before his eyes. He was poised to deliver it.

Mr. Khan, 30, is part of a booming cottage industry online, in which enterprising people take advantage of the void of information in the wake of a sudden tragedy to drive web traffic to hastily assembled articles and YouTube videos. These so-called “obituary pirates” seem to know about the deaths of everyday Americans long before they have been reported publicly anywhere else.

Mr. Khan — whose website, FSK Hub, was the first site identified by The New York Times to post anything about Mr. Sachman’s death — agreed to walk The Times through his process.

Mr. Khan has spent the past five years building an online advertising business with websites devoted to celebrity news and tech reviews. But he said obituaries make up a huge part of his content farm. Working from his living room in New Delhi, he closely monitors Google Trends for activity related to certain grim keywords: obituary, accident, death.

Google allows anyone to track usage trends for search terms in windows of time as narrow as the previous hour. When Mr. Khan searches those keywords on Google Trends, the company shows what else people who are searching for those terms are actively searching for in the moment: “Matteo Sachman subway accident. Matteo Sachman obituary. Matteo Sachman death.” These were the kinds of searches for truth that precipitated the flow of misinformation back to the people doing the searching.

Based on related searches, like “subway accident,” Mr. Khan could surmise how Mr. Sachman had died. Mr. Khan could then conduct a cursory search of his own around the internet for any biographical information, leading him to a LinkedIn page detailing Mr. Sachman’s work history. And finally, he could prompt an artificial intelligence tool called a large language model to create a short article.

“The article should be written in a conversational style, using personal pronouns, rhetorical questions and analogies to engage the reader,” read one prompt intended for a language model, which was accidentally published on FSK Hub.

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Soon enough Khan will be cut out of the loop. What then? Who will the instigators be? Who gets the money?
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How beloved indie blog ‘The Hairpin’ turned into an AI clickbait farm • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

»

In 2018, the indie women’s website The Hairpin stopped publishing, along with its sister site The Awl. This year, The Hairpin has been Frankensteined back into existence and stuffed with slapdash AI-generated articles designed to attract search engine traffic. (Sample headlines: “What Does It Mean When You Remember Your Dreams?” and “White Town’s ‘Your Woman’ Explained.”) Some original articles remain but have been reformatted in a strange way, and the authors’ bylines have been replaced by generic male names of people who do not appear to exist. One piece by writer Kelly Conaboy about celebrity teeth now appears under the name “James Nolen,” of whom I can’t find a single trace online.

This would be a nasty end for any independent media property. For The Hairpin, it’s especially repulsive, because the site was the antithesis of a content mill. It never courted a huge audience or chased trending topics—it was a writer-led website that found an audience by being experimental and intimate and odd. It served as a launching pad for bona fide stars like former New York Times reporter Jazmine Hughes, Bojack Horseman designer Lisa Hanawalt, and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino precisely because it valued nurturing fresh ideas—and letting people make jokes!—not optimizing revenue per click.

In an attempt to understand the future of media, I tracked down The Hairpin’s new owner—a Serbian DJ named Nebojša Vujinović Vujo. He says the site is just the latest title in his stable of over 2,000 websites and admits that the majority of the new posts on The Hairpin are indeed AI-generated. “I buy new websites almost every day,” he says.

Vujinović Vujo was attracted to The Hairpin because of its “great reputation and excellent backlinks,” which he values because it helps with Google rankings. “It’s a common thing on the internet today.” He plans to “add all previous authors” back to the website in the future. His first priority, though, is ginning up more new algorithm-generated content.

«

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Will Meta be the Android of XR, or the Blackberry? • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

there’s a huge problem with the idea that Meta will be the equivalent of Android in the XR (AKA spatial computing) market.

Android is a semi-open software platform. Any phone maker can integrate the open-source core of Android for free and without permission, and can integrate Google’s services and the Google Play Store by agreeing to certain compatibility criteria and preinstalling Google’s suite of apps.

The Meta Quest platform on the other hand is exclusive to Meta’s own devices. Its strategy is more akin to wanting to be a second Apple than what Google did with Android. That sounds more like BlackBerry than Android, and the market combination of iPhone and Android killed off BlackBerry.

Further, Google itself is seemingly preparing to be the Android of XR with… Android. Google is building an ‘Android XR’ platform to power Samsung’s upcoming headset. It will be able to bring the full Android phone and tablet app ecosystem over, something it refused for Meta, while Samsung will be able to leverage its expertise in hardware and get priority access to key components like OLED microdisplays from its subsidiaries. And while Samsung may have a period of exclusivity, that almost certainly (and reportedly) won’t last forever.

On the other hand, a major difference between the XR market and the smartphone market renders these analogies of limited use.

Meta sells its mainline Quest headsets at cost price, and sometimes even at a loss. Barring an unprecedented revenue-sharing deal that would eat heavily into Google’s profits, hardware companies like Samsung likely won’t want to compete directly with mainline Quests any time soon, especially the rumored Quest 3 Lite. Samsung’s headset will reportedly be priced somewhere around $2000.

«

Note this implicitly accepts the Vision Pro as the iPhone of XR, which is possible – but it might be the iPad.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The advent of Small Modular Reactors means informing people about the opportunity – and lack of danger – from nuclear power. CC-licensed photo by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories 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.

The myth of technological inevitability • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

»

Of all the imagined futures buried in the pages of the WIRED magazine back catalog, I think one of the most instructive is the argument for the “inevitability” of human cloning.

In 1996, researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute cloned Dolly the sheep. Human cloning, it appeared, could not be too far behind. President Clinton declared a moratorium on federal funding for human cloning research. Governments across the world took similar steps. It was the rare moment when, instead of adopting a laissez-faire/“let markets decide” approach, elected officials asserted themselves on a major social issue.

In the pages of WIRED, this was sacrilege. You can’t stop scientific and technological progress! If the U.S. government wasn’t going to fund this research, that just meant some (privately funded) “rogue lab” would do it on their own. Or maybe (*gasp*) China would seize the initiative.*

*(In the eyes of libertarian tech-optimists, the United States’s historic dominance in science and technology is entirely due to its willingness to let innovators innovate, keeping regulators out of their way. That the US government provided ample public funding for basic research, and that the Defense Department was frequently the sole customer for their products were inconvenient facts, signifying nothing.)

And so, between 1997 and 2002, WIRED routinely articulated the case for why human cloning was the future, and it would be good, and everyone ought to just get used to it.

«

Karpf is always excellent at dissecting this attitude within American technological discourse. Cloned humans are still as far away as ever, though the topic raises its head from time to time: we’re currently in a mild revival.
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Meta preparing to support iPhone Spatial Video on Quest • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

I say “natively” because you can already play spatial videos recorded by iPhone 15 Pro on any existing VR headset by converting it to regular side-by-side 3D, the existing standard format for stereoscopic video, using an iPhone app called Spatialify. You then need to send the file to your PC or Mac, and finally transfer it to a standalone headset like Quest via USB or play it directly via PC VR software.

That’s quite an involved process, but it may not be necessary for long. X user M1Astra found strings within the code of the Meta Quest iPhone app referencing uploading spatial videos so that they will show up in the Files app on your Quest headset.

This could significantly reduce the friction of viewing spatial videos captured with iPhone on Quest, cutting out the need to transfer the file to your PC and then to your headset.

The regular non-Pro iPhone 16 coming later this year is rumored to be able to capture Spatial Videos too, so within a few years, the creator base for 3D video could rise to hundreds of millions.

«

Now that’s interesting. Meta clearly sees spatial video as a potential attractor for headsets, and knows that plenty of people won’t want to pay Apple’s prices, and anyway won’t be able to put their hands on a Vision Pro this year.
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Nuclear meltdown • Polymathic Being

Michael Woudenberg:

»

Most of our ideas of nuclear energy are nearly half a century out of date and involve archaic designs, ancient fuel technologies, and fears about realized events that were blown out of proportion. We view nuclear as especially dangerous to humans and yet, it’s actually saved millions of lives.

For example, air pollution from fossil fuels is responsible for an estimated 7 million deaths per year while nuclear carries about the same risk as wind power and is around 350 times safer than coal. [Translation for mathematicians: has 0.2% of the risk of coal. – Overspill Ed] Going back to Germany, while Fukushima has no acute radiation deaths, German coal burning has been estimated to have killed thousands since they turned off their nuclear reactors.

These fears also don’t take into consideration the incredible advancements in performance, safety, fuel, and size reduction that have occurred over the past 40 years.

What many don’t realize now is that the idea we have of a nuclear reactor like the Simpson’s TV show is an archaic relic of the past. Most of us would never even know a nuclear plant exists today due to the dramatic improvements in design.

How dramatic you ask? Well, they currently have microreactors that can fit in a shipping container in a footprint smaller than a house. These reactors can produce between 5 and 10 megawatts which can power over 2000 homes.

You can distribute these reactors nationwide and provide focused, resilient, and agile power generation to more easily balance wind and solar projects. Conversely, the large and centralized power generators today, nuclear or otherwise, require extensive power grid infrastructure to carry and distribute that volume. Small Modular Reactors require much less intensive delivery infrastructure and are less prone to disruption.

«

Bet people in the UK will go absolutely bananas if someone proposes putting an SMR near them. They go bonkers about solar panels already.
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Apple’s next iPads are “likely” due at the end of March • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Apple’s next iPads are “likely” due at the end of March. So says Mark Gurman in the latest Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. That’s not all — in addition to two iPad Air models (one a 12.9in!) and OLED iPad Pro tablets, he writes that 13in and- 15in MacBook Air models will be updated with M3 chips at the same time.

That would be the first refresh of each iPad and the 13in MacBook Air since 2022.

«

Which feels like a long time between updates for the iPad line in particular. Apple basically took 2023 off when it comes to the iPad.
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Apple shares more details about the new default web browser prompt in iOS 17.4 • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

Apple announced that iPhone users in the EU will be prompted to choose a default web browser when they open Safari for the first time after updating to iOS 17.4. The company has now shared more details on this process.

Apple tells me that the popup message in iOS 17.4 will show a list of the 12 most popular browsers from the App Store in that country. That list will be presented in random order for each user.

In addition to making it easier for users to set their default browser, iOS 17.4 will also allow third-party browsers that use different web engines than Safari for the first time. Again, these changes only apply in the European Union.

«

The linked Apple developer document makes it sound like there will be plentiful hoops to jump through in order to be that web browser. Furthermore, it will only apply on the iPhone: Apple says the DMA allows it to not implement that on the iPad. For browser companies such as Firefox, that would mean maintaining a WebKit version on iPadOS, and its own one on iOS. (Me: or just ignore iPadOS?)
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New Xamalicious Android malware installed 330k times on Google Play • Bleeping Computer

Bill Toulas:

»

A previously unknown Android backdoor named ‘Xamalicious’ has infected approximately 338,300 devices via malicious apps on Google Play, Android’s official app store.

McAfee, a member of the App Defense Alliance, discovered 14 infected apps on Google Play, with three having 100,000 installs each.

Even though the apps have since been removed from Google Play, users who installed them since mid-2020 might still carry active Xamalicious infections on their phones, requiring manual scans and cleanup.

…Also, a separate set of 12 malicious apps carrying the Xamalicious threat, for which download stats aren’t available, are distributed on unofficial third-party app stores, infecting users via downloadable APK (Android package) files.

«

Bet someone at Apple will be clipping stuff like that to put in its “Is THIS what you want?” file for when the EU drops it a line.
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The new Apple tax every developer [using European third-party app stores] will hate • The Verge

Jacob Kastrenakes:

»

[In Europe only, following the DMA] Apple is introducing a new fee structure for apps that want to operate on these third-party stores. On the surface, it looks great: apps pay no cut of sales to Apple if they’re distributed via a third-party store. And if a developer still wants to be distributed via Apple’s App Store, too, the cut drops from the traditional 30% fee down to 17%. It’s an even lower 10% fee for qualifying “small business” apps, down from the original 15%. So far, a much better deal.

The real caveat comes into play only once apps are popular enough. Any app that sees more than 1 million installs per year must pay Apple a 50 euro cent fee (about 54 cents USD) for every new installation over that first 1 million — that fee is charged once per every user each year. Crucially, app updates count as installations, too. Since no major app goes more than a year without an update, that effectively means any sufficiently popular app is going to be indefinitely paying Apple 50 euro cents per user per year, above that initial 1 million. It’s not just apps, either. Third-party app stores must also pay Apple 50 euro cents per user per year, and they do not receive the 1 million install grace that apps do.

«

Basically, this makes it pointless for free apps to use third-party stores. And app stores need free apps to build up their catalogue so they don’t look like a ghost town. It also murders any freemium business model. What’s left? Paid-only apps, for which the “app store” itself will also have to pay.

If this follows the letter of the DMA law, the EU will be fuming.
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The news business really is cratering • POLITICO

Jack Shafer:

»

The ongoing flood obviously won’t sweep all journalism away. But except for a few big players, will it become more of a cottage industry than an economic and cultural force? If great cities like Los Angeles, with its many prosperous, educated and engaged citizens, can’t support a decent daily newspaper, what hope is there for the rest of the country? Are we belatedly learning that the great journalism empires — the Times-Mirror chain, Knight Ridder, Gannett, Scripps-Howard, Tribune, McClatchy, Advance Publications, Hearst, Freedom Communications and the rest — weren’t journalism empires as much as they were advertising colossuses, and that they became doomed when they lost status as the best advertising vehicle?

Journalism will survive, of course, even if the business falters as the advertising subsidy that made it viable erodes. Publications for readers who depend on market-moving news like you find in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and other business titles will endure. So will the aforementioned New York Times, which provides news that moves political markets and has established itself as a national voice worth paying for. So, too, will the gossip and lifestyle magazines remain, as will publications like the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, which serve, boutique-style, a loyal, educated readership. But like the animals that persisted after the great comet struck the earth, most publications will be tiny and eke out an existence in the shadows. Perhaps organized labor and political parties will step forward to sponsor news. But could you trust either to produce real news? That would be like expecting General Motors or Citibank to give you the honest lowdown on the automotive and financial goings-on.

«

As Shafer also points out, the problem with this situation of fewer big news outlets is that there are fewer lower down to effectively train people in journalism. Quality is certain to drop off as a result.
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No cervical cancer cases in fully HPV-vaccinated women in Scotland • BBC News

»

A new study has found that no cases of cervical cancer have been detected in young women who have been fully-vaccinated as part of the HPV immunisation programme.

The Public Health Scotland (PHS) research said the HPV (human papillomavirus virus) vaccine was “highly effective” in preventing the development of the cancer.

HPV is a sexually transmitted infection and is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer – the fourth most common cause of cancer in women worldwide.

The vaccination programme started in 2008 with girls offered the vaccine in their first year at secondary school, aged 12 or 13.

The vaccine, which is now offered to boys, also helps to protect them from other HPV-related cancers later in life, such as head, neck and anogenital cancers as well as genital warts.

…Cervical cancer is the most common cancer in women aged 25 to 35 years of age in Scotland.

In total, about 300 women in Scotland are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year.
Screening is offered to all women aged 25 to 64.

«

Amazing result. You could imagine that in time, it might be possible to stop requiring the hated pap smears.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s late January, so surely it’s about time you sorted out that box of unsorted cables once and for all? CC-licensed photo by Andy Melton 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about all those tweets you wish you’d sent. (Sort of.)

A selection of 9 links for you. Ooh, RS-232. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple announces sweeping EU App Store policy changes—including sideloading • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

»

To comply with European Union regulations, Apple has introduced sweeping changes that make iOS and Apple’s other operating systems more open. The changes are far-reaching and touch many parts of the user experience on the iPhone. They’ll be coming as part of iOS 17.4 in March.

Apple will introduce “new APIs and tools that enable developers to offer their iOS apps for download from alternative app marketplaces,” as well as a new framework and set of APIs that allow third parties to set up and manage those stores—essentially new forms of apps that can download other apps without going through the App Store. That includes the ability to manage updates for other developers’ apps that are distributed through the marketplaces.

The company will also offer APIs and a new framework for third-party web browsers to use browser engines other than Safari’s WebKit. Until now, browsers like Chrome and Firefox were still built on top of Apple’s tech. They essentially were mobile Safari, but with bookmarks and other features tied to alternative desktop browsers.
The changes also extend to NFC technology and contactless payments. Previously, only Apple Pay could fully access those features on the iPhone. Now Apple will introduce new APIs that will let developers of banking and wallet apps gain more comparable access.

Developers will have new options for using alternative payment service providers within apps and for directing users to complete payments on external websites via link-outs. They’ll be able to use their apps to tell users about promotions and deals that are offered outside of those apps. (Apple warns that it will not be able to provide refunds or support for customers who purchased something outside its own payment system.)

«

There’s a lot still to be found out about this. We don’t know quite what percentage Apple will take, what sort of modal screens it will throw up, what the workflow is going to be like. Also, does it apply to UK users? Probably not – which will be a relief to Apple if this undermines its Services business at all.
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Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees at Activision Blizzard and Xbox this week. While Microsoft is primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted by the cuts.

The cuts work out to roughly 8% of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total. The Verge has obtained an internal memo from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer that confirms the layoffs:

»

It’s been a little over three months since the Activision, Blizzard, and King teams joined Microsoft. As we move forward in 2024, the leadership of Microsoft Gaming and Activision Blizzard is committed to aligning on a strategy and an execution plan with a sustainable cost structure that will support the whole of our growing business. Together, we’ve set priorities, identified areas of overlap, and ensured that we’re all aligned on the best opportunities for growth.

«

«

I mean honestly. What two-faced nonsense. If the business is growing, shouldn’t that mean you need at least the same number of people to get things happening? And a game that was planned has also been cancelled. So much for synergy in the Microsoft-Activision merger: as always happens, it just means job cuts and inefficiency.
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Publishers: ditch Google search addiction or die • Press Gazette

Matthew Scott Goldstein:

»

what’s the playbook for publishers in 2024? The answer is straightforward, but the execution will be challenging.

Every publisher must single-mindedly focus on obtaining and growing front-door direct traffic. Imagine Google, the malevolent (yes, I used that word) monopoly, ceases to send you traffic. Like the banks – please conduct this stress test immediately – publishers are not too big to fail. Though Google is currently risk-averse and doesn’t need to blow up publishing right now so there may be a stay of execution.

Ask yourself the following questions:
• Do you still have a business if Google ceases to send you traffic?
• How do you make your homepage a machine for getting users to come back more often?
• How do you get users to visit more pages once they arrive?
• How is your desktop versus mobile homepage differentiated?
• How do you use generative AI to adjust your homepage?
• Will community/comments help to grow your front door traffic, getting users to come back more often?
• What content do you need to bring in more direct traffic?
• How do you work with Google and Open AI/Microsoft and other LLMs allowing them to train the model in return for traffic guarantees or start/join a lawsuit?

The most important metric/KPI for publishers going forward is maintaining and attracting direct homepage users.

Of note, 2024 is a presidential election year and depending on the outcome my extinction prediction may be pushed back to 2025.

…There is hope. These publishers need to reinvent themselves and focus on homepage traffic.

«

This came out on the day that multiple publishers in the US – Business Insider, Forbes, Time – laid off around 10% of their writers. Tech and games companies are doing the same, though, so it’s not just media. Who, exactly, is doing OK?
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The Sports Illustrated cover, a faded canvas that once defined sports • The New York Times

Kevin Draper and Benjamin Mullin:

»

For sports fans of a certain age, the memory of running to the mailbox to see what was on the cover of the latest weekly issue of Sports Illustrated is indelible. For decades, the magazine’s photographers, writers and editors held the power to anoint stars and deliver the definitive account of the biggest moments in sports, often with just a single photograph and a few words on the cover. It was the most powerful real estate in sports journalism.

“When I was a kid and getting S.I., you didn’t have that immediate 24-hour news cycle just hitting you over the head,” said Nate Gordon, a former picture editor at Sports Illustrated who is now the head of content at The Players’ Tribune. “You would get that cover and you’d be like: ‘Man, this is what happened last week. That’s so cool.’”

To the extent any magazine had that power, it is severely diminished now. But the road has been particularly rough for Sports Illustrated, with its shrinking staff and reduced print frequency. Last week, most of the employees were either laid off or told their employment would be uncertain after 90 days, leaving the publication’s future in flux.

Sports Illustrated’s power to define sports discourse faded long before 2024, however. A combination of factors like growth of sports across cable channels, the presence of more team-controlled media and the ascendancy of the internet had been steadily eroding the influence of the magazine and its cover for years. But it is hard to overstate the power it once had.

«

Choosing a single image which would be seen by millions was an incredibly powerful act. Though as the story points out, sometimes that backfired when the cover wasn’t complimentary, and an athlete would boycott the magazine literally for years.

Sic transit gloria mundi: this isn’t coming back, and we’re honestly poorer for it.
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Old’aVista: Home

Rewind to the web search of 1999 and see what it was like for us working then. Try a search on “ChatGPT”: turns up nothing. The most recent result I could get was from 2014, but the FAQ doesn’t say when the index runs up to.
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HPE discloses hack by Russian group behind Microsoft email breach • CRN

Kyle Alspach and Steven Burke:

»

Hewlett Packard Enterprise disclosed that its cloud email environment was compromised in 2023 by the threat actor tracked as Midnight Blizzard, a Russia-aligned hacker group also recently blamed for an attack that compromised senior Microsoft executives.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday, HPE said it was “notified” on Dec. 12 about the incident, which began in May 2023 and impacted a “small percentage” of staff email accounts.

In a statement provided to CRN Wednesday, HPE identified its impacted cloud email system as a Microsoft Office 365 environment, and said that the threat actor leveraged a compromised account to access the email environment.

“The accessed data is limited to information contained in the users’ mailboxes,” HPE said in the statement. “We continue to investigate and will make appropriate notifications as required.”

The hacker group behind the attack, also tracked under the name Cozy Bear, was earlier held responsible by Microsoft for the recent high-profile breach of multiple senior executive emails accounts, in the company’s disclosure last Friday.

«

So much hacking of these big American companies. And speaking of the Microsoft hack..
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CrowdStrike CEO: Microsoft explanation for Russia hack doesn’t add up • CRN

Kyle Alspach:

»

In a post Friday disclosing the latest hack, Microsoft said that the incident began with a late November 2023 password spray attack, which compromised a “legacy non-production test tenant account.”

Speaking on CNBC, Kurtz contended that this explanation for the hack by Microsoft does not really add up.

“I’m confused, because what Microsoft talks about is [that] it was a non-production test environment. So how does a non-production test environment lead to the compromise of the most senior officials in Microsoft [and] their emails?” he said. “I think there’s a lot more that’s going to come out on this.”

Kurtz also cited the timing of the release of the Microsoft disclosure, which was released Friday following the close of the stock market for the weekend, in his criticism.

In addition to the blog post, Microsoft discussed the incident in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Friday, as part of complying with recently introduced SEC cyberattack disclosure rules for public companies.

“When you drop this on a Friday at five o’clock, and you have scant details, I think there’s more to come on it,” Kurtz said during the CNBC interview.

Microsoft declined to comment in an email to CRN Tuesday.

«

Like Kurtz, I thought that the timing of the announcement was suspicious. And the escalation is also peculiar.
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How to organize your tech and purge that random box of cables • WIRED

Simon Hill:

»

While it is an absolute privilege to lay hands on the latest tech, my home as a gadget reviewer often resembles a warehouse. Piled high with cardboard boxes and cables trailing everywhere, just getting to my desk is a battle on some days. Every surface is littered with chargers, security cameras, routers, and phones. To manage the flow of devices and preserve my sanity, I had to get organized.

I won’t lie to you. It’s not fun to purge your random cable collection, sorting stuff into labeled boxes, and letting go of old gadgets you no longer use. But you can benefit from my experience, and I promise it will make your life easier. It’s tough to start, but once you have a system, you will never return to the chaos.

«

Purge my cables?? Actually, the organisation part is relatively straightforward. Look, it’s something to do on a January weekend. For fun, you could count up how many of each USB connector you have.
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Korea begs citizens to stop eating fried toothpicks for viral trend • Korea JoonyAng Daily

Moon Sang-Hyeok and Kim Ju-Yeon:

»

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety warned citizens against eating toothpicks made of starch as they are “not food” and not safe for consumption, after videos of people eating fried toothpicks went viral online.

“Toothpicks are categorized as sanitary products, not food, so they have not been confirmed to be safe for consumption,” the Food Ministry said in a news release on Tuesday.

The ministry’s announcement comes following a recent trend of “mukbang,” or eating shows, for “starch toothpicks” gaining traction on YouTube and other social media platforms popular among children and teens. Dozens of search results for “fried starch toothpick” pop up on YouTube.

“While watching mukbang on YouTube I saw a video of fries being made out of toothpicks,” a YouTuber says in one video, then proceeds to fry toothpicks in oil. 
 
She then pours sauce onto the toothpicks and eats them on camera, saying the toothpicks are “very tasty.” The video has over 4.4 million views as of Wednesday.
 
Parents have taken to online forums to express concerns over children participating in the trend. “I heard there are children asking for toothpick fries after seeing it on YouTube,” one post on a “mom cafe,” or online community of mothers, read. “The problem is that children can replicate what they see on video,” another post said.
 
Starch toothpicks are made of either cornstarch or potato starch mixed with sorbitol, alum and artificial coloring. 
 
Sorbitol is a type of sugar alcohol and alum is a chemical compound found in baking powder. They are not harmful when ingested in small amounts, but can cause vomiting, diarrhea and inflammation in cases of overconsumption.

«

OK but they’re not toothpicks like people in the west would think of them. Those really would be a problem.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Why, exactly, do dogs wag their tails, given that their common ancestors, wolves, don’t? CC-licensed photo by Bill McChesney 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. Extremely good. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Inside a global phone spy tool monitoring billions • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary apps, including popular ones such as 9gag, Kik, and a series of caller ID apps, are part of a global surveillance capability that starts with ads inside each app, and ends with the apps’ users being swept up into a powerful mass monitoring tool advertised to national security agencies that can track the physical location, hobbies, and family members of people to build billions of profiles, according to a 404 Media investigation.

404 Media’s investigation, based on now deleted marketing materials and videos, technical forensic analysis, and research from privacy activists, provides one of the clearest examinations yet of how advertisements in ordinary mobile apps can ultimately lead to surveillance by spy firms and their government clients through the real time bidding data supply chain. The pipeline involves smaller, obscure advertising firms and advertising industry giants like Google. In response to queries from 404 Media, Google and PubMatic, another ad firm, have already cut-off a company linked to the surveillance firm.

“The pervasive surveillance machine that has been developed for digital advertising now directly enables government mass surveillance. Many businesses, from app publishers to advertisers to big tech, are acting completely irresponsibly. This must end,” Wolfie Christl, the principal of Cracked Labs, an Austrian research institute and co-author of a paper published last year that researched the surveillance tool, told 404 Media.

«

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Google promised to delete location data on abortion clinic visits. It didn’t, study says • The Guardian

Johana Bhuiyan:

»

Google’s original promise, made in July 2022, came shortly after the supreme court’s decision to end federal abortion protections. The tech giant said it would delete entries for locations deemed “personal” or sensitive, including “medical facilities like counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, and abortion clinics”. It did not provide a timeline for when the company would implement the new policy. Five months after that pledge, research first reported by the Guardian and conducted by tech advocacy group Accountable Tech in November 2022 showed that Google was still not masking that location data in all cases.

At the time, Google said it prioritized user privacy and that it had implemented the changes to its location retention policies in early 2022 “as promised” but that the system must not have detected that the user had visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in some of the cases.

In its newest study, which the Guardian reviewed exclusively, Accountable Tech found that the company still wasn’t deleting location history in all cases as promised, though Google’s rate of retention improved slightly. The rate of retention of location information decreased from 60% of tested cases, a measurement taken five months after Google’s pledge, to 50% of tested cases in the most recent experiment. The director of product of Google Maps, Marlo McGriff, disputed the findings of the study.

“We are upholding our promise to delete particularly personal places from Location History if these places are identified by our systems – any claims that we’re not doing so are patently false or misguided,” McGriff said in a statement.

«

Bizarre state of affairs where people can be prosecuted for the places their phone says they’ve been. The US has descended into a circle of hell without entirely noticing.

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Gene therapy allows an 11-year-old boy to hear for the first time • The New York Times

Gina Kolata:

»

The studies, researchers said, mark a new frontier for gene therapy which, until now, had steered clear of hearing loss. “There has never been a biological or medical or surgical way to correct the underlying biological changes that cause the inner ear to not function,” Dr. [Dylan] Chan [a paediatric ear/nose/mouth specialist] said.

Although otoferlin mutations are not the most common cause of congenital deafness, there is a reason so many researchers started with it. That form of congenital deafness, said Dr. John A. Germiller, an otolaryngologist who is leading the CHOP study, is “low hanging fruit.”

The mutated otoferlin gene destroys a protein in the inner ear’s hair cells necessary to transmit sound to the brain. With many of the other mutations that cause deafness, hair cells die during infancy or even at the fetal stage. But with otoferlin deafness, hair cells can survive for years, allowing time for the defective gene to be replaced with gene therapy.

There’s an advantage in using gene therapy to allow children to hear. Most of the mutations that affect hearing — there are approximately 150 — do not affect any other part of the body. Some genes are actually unique to the ear.

The inner ear is a small closed compartment, so gene therapy delivered there would not affect cells in other parts of the body, said Manny Simons, chief executive and co-founder of Akouos and senior vice president of gene therapy at Lilly.

But getting the genes to the cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity close to the center of the skull, is challenging. The cochlea is filled with fluid, is lined with 3,500 hair cells and is encased in a dense dome of bone with a tiny, round membrane. Sound sets off a wave of fluid in the cochlea and stimulates the hair cells to transmit signals to the brain. Each hair responds to a different frequency, enabling a person to hear the richness of sound.

The gene therapy consists of a harmless virus carrying new otoferlin genes in two drops of liquid that are delicately injected down the length of the cochlea, delivering the genes to each hair cell.

«

Remarkable: gene therapy starting to make a difference. The 11-year-old subject’s comment: “There’s no sound I don’t like”.
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Scientists will test a cancer-hunting mRNA treatment • WIRED

Condé Nast:

»

As the first vaccines for Covid-19 rolled out at the end of 2020, messenger RNA catapulted into public awareness. Now, a few years later, interest in mRNA has exploded. Clinical trials are underway for dozens of mRNA vaccines, including ones for flu and herpes. And scientists are hoping to use mRNA to treat disease, not just prevent it. One of the biggest targets is cancer.

But a major obstacle is how to deliver the molecule to the place in the body that needs to be treated. Fatty bubbles called lipid nanoparticles can carry RNA into cells, and they can ferry it to a wide range of tissues but not to anywhere specific. That’s a problem for cancer, says Jake Becraft, cofounder and CEO of Boston-based Strand Therapeutics, because many cancer treatments “can be incredibly toxic in off-target tissues.” But his company may have found a solution.

Strand has figured out how to “program” mRNA much like computer code, allowing it to perform certain functions—such as turning on only in specific cell types, at specific times, and in specific amounts. Today, the biotech company announced that the US Food and Drug Administration has greenlit a clinical trial testing the approach in cancer patients with solid tumors. Strand plans to begin enrolling patients this spring. It will be the first time a programmable mRNA therapy will be tested in people.

…Tumor cells notoriously evade the immune system, going undetected. But synthetic mRNA can direct cancerous cells to make certain proteins that alert the immune system to the tumor’s presence.

Strand’s therapy uses mRNA to make an inflammatory protein called interleukin-12, or IL-12, that causes immune cells to spring into action and unleash a cascade of events that kill cancer cells when and where they detect the protein.

«

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Mugger take your phone? Cash apps too easily let thieves drain accounts, DA says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Popular apps like Venmo, Zelle, and Cash App aren’t doing enough to protect consumers from fraud that occurs when unauthorized users gain access to unlocked devices, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg warned.

“Thousands or even tens of thousands can be drained from financial accounts in a matter of seconds with just a few taps,” Bragg said in letters to app makers. “Without additional protections, customers’ financial and physical safety is being put at risk.”

According to Bragg, his office and the New York Police Department have been increasingly prosecuting crimes where phones are commandeered by bad actors to quickly steal large amounts of money through financial apps.

This can happen to unwitting victims when fraudsters ask “to use an individual’s smartphone for personal use” or to transfer funds to initiate a donation for a specific cause. Or “in the most disturbing cases,” Bragg said, “offenders have violently assaulted or drugged victims, and either compelled them to provide a password for a device or used biometric ID to open the victim’s phone before transferring money once the individual is incapacitated.”

But prosecuting crimes alone won’t solve this problem, Bragg suggested. Prevention is necessary. That’s why the DA is requesting meetings with executives managing widely used financial apps to discuss “commonsense” security measures that Bragg said can be taken to “combat this growing concern.”

Bragg appears particularly interested in Apple’s recently developed “Stolen Device Protection,” which he said is “making it harder for perpetrators to use a phone’s passcode to steal funds when the user’s phone is not at home or at work.”

«

Seems to me the obvious thing is not to let those apps unlock with biometrics. Passcodes or passwords not stored in the keychain. A little inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as having your money stolen.
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Mirror publisher’s boss warns print titles could become loss-making in five years • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

»

The boss of the publisher of the Mirror, Express and Star newspapers has warned staff they have to face the “inconvenient truth” that its print titles will become loss-making in as soon as five years.

The chief executive of Reach, which also owns scores of regional titles including the Manchester Evening News, the Birmingham Mail and the Liverpool Echo, also maintained that the publisher has “significant resources” despite cutting almost 800 roles in the biggest annual cull of jobs in the newspaper industry in decades.

Jim Mullen, who has run Reach since 2019, told staff in the meeting that they had to face the ramifications of the fact its traditional print operations have declined by 17% annually over the past four years.

“Our biggest revenue stream is newsprint and the papers,” said Mullen, in an internal town hall video meeting with staff. “When I started I said there is at least 10 years of profitable business in newspapers and probably more. I have been in the business for five years so half of that is gone. There is probably five to seven years that we can look at. We have to face into this inconvenient truth.”

Mullen said the Mirror, which now sells about 230,000 copies daily, would be “pushing” 100,000 copy sales in five years at the current rate of decline.

«

There’s a longer analysis of Reach’s woes from last week, and this was discussed on the latest Private Eye podcast. The problem is that adverts shown to Reach’s readers tend to be cheap; and they won’t be willing to pay subscriptions. There are no good answers.

Noted in passing (from the podcast): Mullen, the man in charge in Reach, previously worked at.. gambling company Ladbroke’s.
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Netflix is going to take away its cheapest ad-free plan • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Although Netflix no longer allows new or returning members to sign up for the ad-free Basic subscription that costs $11.99 per month, company executives told investors while reporting its earnings results today that it’s retiring the plan in some countries where ad-supported plans are available. It’s starting with Canada and the UK in the second quarter of this year.

That leaves subscribers with Netflix’s $15.49 per month option as Netflix’s cheapest ad-free plan. Going from $11.99 to $15.49 per month is a pretty big jump, and means there’s really no middle ground for ad-free plans. Otherwise, subscribers will have to pay $6.99 per month for its ad-supported basic plan or $22.99 per month for the Premium tier.

«

The turning of the screw continues. The obvious app for someone to build: one which subscribes you to/unsubscribes you from each streaming service in order. The obvious chart for someone to compile: the rising prices of each of the streaming services over time.
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Why do dogs wag their tails? • Royal Society Biology Letters

Silvia Leonetti, Giulia Cimarelli, Taylor Hersh and Andrew Ravignani:

»

Tail wagging is a conspicuous behaviour in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Despite how much meaning humans attribute to this display, its quantitative description and evolutionary history are rarely studied. We summarize what is known about the mechanism, ontogeny, function and evolution of this behaviour. We suggest two hypotheses to explain its increased occurrence and frequency in dogs compared to other canids.

During the domestication process, enhanced rhythmic tail wagging behaviour could have (i) arisen as a by-product of selection for other traits, such as docility and tameness, or (ii) been directly selected by humans, due to our proclivity for rhythmic stimuli. We invite testing of these hypotheses through neurobiological and ethological experiments, which will shed light on one of the most readily observed yet understudied animal behaviours. Targeted tail wagging research can be a window into both canine ethology and the evolutionary history of characteristic human traits, such as our ability to perceive and produce rhythmic behaviours.

«

Not examined: whether it’s because they are good doggos. (But seriously, it is a puzzle: wolves don’t, but domesticated wolves show an inclination to do so.)
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Why China has lost interest in Hollywood movies • The New York Times

Claire Fu, Brooks Barnes and Daisuke Wakabayashi:

»

Chinese moviegoers who once flocked to Hollywood films have been steadily disappearing. China is, by far, the biggest movie market outside the United States, and a place that American studios rely on for growth and profitability as the film industry struggles.

“The days when a Hollywood film would make hundreds of millions of US dollars in China — that’s gone,” said Stanley Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies Chinese politics and the film industry.

China’s film industry is producing more high-quality movies that resonate with domestic audiences. The country’s top two films last year highlight the diversity of offerings: “Full River Red,” a dialogue-rich suspense thriller, and “The Wandering Earth II,” a science-fiction blockbuster heavy with special effects.

Against the backdrop of growing tensions with the United States, Beijing has advanced its ambitions to become a cultural influence, supporting efforts by local filmmakers to create films that are in line with the ruling Communist Party’s doctrines.

In recent years, some of the highest-grossing films have played up themes of a stronger and more assertive China. The top-grossing Chinese films of all time are “The Battle at Lake Changjin,” a 2021 film that depicts an against-all-odds defeat of the United States during the Korean War; and “Wolf Warrior 2,” a 2017 nationalist action flick in which a Chinese Jason Bourne-like character takes on an American soldier of fortune.

Shi Chuan, vice chairman of the Shanghai Film Association, said many American studios once viewed China as a market where they could always make money. That is no longer the case. Wary Chinese consumers are spending less, and box office sales have not returned to prepandemic levels.

“Now I am telling American film companies that this mentality is no longer viable,” Mr. Shi said. “You must study deeply to understand the Chinese market, Chinese audiences and Chinese pop culture.”

«

Maybe this means that Hollywood won’t try to make films with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: are you wondering why there aren’t any “40 years of the Macintosh” links? It’s because “anniversary journalism” has no place here. Sure, celebrate birthdays and weddings by the calendar, but don’t use it as a peg for stories.

A new smartphone-like device will analyse skin lesions and refer them to a dermatologist to see if they’re cancerous. CC-licensed photo by Sue Thompson 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. More suntan lotion! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Hair sample that put a man in prison turned out to be dog hair • Reason

Lenore Skenazy:

»

In 2009, the National Research Council published a report about forensic science “and that really marked a turning point in the birth of the forensic reform movement,” says [executive director of the Wisconsin-based Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences (CIFS), Kate] Judson. “It was the first time a big government agency brought together scientific experts and legal experts and said, ‘Let’s talk about what they’re saying in court and whether it passes scientific muster.'”

One big topic was hair samples. A hair with its root can provide actual DNA evidence, says Judson. But other comparisons of color and texture, even examined under the microscope, have led to many wrongful convictions. She points to the case of Santae Tribble, convicted of murder at 17, despite evidence that he had been elsewhere when the crime occurred.

An FBI analyst at his trial testified that there was just a one in 10 million chance that the hair found on a stocking mask at the crime scene belonged to someone other than Tribble.

But after spending over 20 years in prison, Tribble was cleared when the hairs were retested and none of them matched. (At least one was dog hair.)

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Plenty more examples of miscarriages of justice which leave you wondering quite how incompetent or malicious the people involved in the prosecution must have been.
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The first AI medical device that can detect all major skin cancers just received FDA approval • DigiAlps LTD

»

On January 17, 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it had cleared DermaSensor as the first AI-powered medical device able to detect the three most common types of skin cancer: melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma. Developed by medical technology company DermaSensor, Inc., the device uses a non-invasive light-based technology called elastic scattering spectroscopy (ESS) to analyze suspicious lesions on a cellular level and provide real-time cancer risk assessments to guide physicians. According to DermaSensor’s website, the device will be priced through a subscription model at $199 monthly for five patients or $399 monthly for unlimited use.

DermaSensor looks similar to a smartphone with a pointed tip on the bottom that is used to scan skin lesions. When the tip touches the skin, it projects different wavelengths of light that penetrate the skin and interact with cells. Healthy cells absorb and reflect light differently than cancerous cells based on changes at the subcellular level. An integrated AI model can analyze these light interaction patterns and identify characteristics that can indicate the presence of melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, or squamous cell carcinoma.

«

Ah, but to clarify: “The device does not make a formal cancer diagnosis but flags suspicious lesions for closer evaluation by a dermatologist.” In other words, we leave the really tricky stuff to humans, as previously.
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FTC orders Intuit to cease “deceptive” turbotax ads • ProPublica

Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel:

»

The Federal Trade Commission has ordered the maker of TurboTax to stop what it called years of widespread deceptive advertising for “free” tax-filing software.

The order, released Monday, was accompanied by a 93-page opinion that harshly criticized Intuit, the Silicon Valley company behind TurboTax. Intuit’s “deceptive ad campaign has been sufficiently broad, enduring, and willful to support the need for a cease-and-desist order,” the commission’s opinion stated.

The order caps off a process that started four years ago when the FTC launched an investigation in response to a series of ProPublica stories documenting Intuit’s ad tactics. ProPublica revealed how millions of Americans were lured into paid tax preparation products even though they were eligible to file for free through a government-sponsored program. Huge sums of money are at stake: In a single year, tax prep companies led by Intuit generated $1bn in revenue from customers who should have been able to file for free, according to one analysis.

In a statement, Intuit said it planned to appeal the order in federal court. “There is no monetary penalty in the FTC’s order, and Intuit expects no significant impact to its business,” the statement said, adding that the company “has always been clear, fair, and transparent with its customers.”

Sam Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement that the order was intended to send a message to all companies: “‘free’ means free — not ‘free for a few’ or ‘free for some.’ Businesses can expect an FTC enforcement action if they harness the power of ‘free’ in the dishonest way Intuit did.”

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Intuit’s misleading advertising around tax filings in the US have been legendary. Great to see that it’s finally being stopped.
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Raworth on the Run: ‘My joints are still capable of carrying me along’ • Runners World

Sophie Raworth:

»

I am lying in an MRI scanner in London. For an hour and a half, I’m not allowed to move. The machine whirs as images are taken of every part of my knees, hips and core muscles around my pelvis. ‘We are slicing you up like salami with our images,’ I am told. I’ve chosen to come here in the name of research. But ever since I said yes six weeks ago, I’ve been stricken by fear, convinced that I’m going to be told that running 1,500 miles a year in my fifties is damaging my ageing joints. ‘What about your knees?’ is the question runners get asked all the time. Since I took up running more than a decade ago, my knees have always felt fine. I’ve had my fair share of injuries. But my bones and joints have always felt like they’re coping with the load. Recently, though, a strange crackling noise has begun emanating from my knees when I go upstairs. I’ve convinced myself it’s the running. Lying inside this machine, I’m bracing myself for bad news.

The man who is about to determine my fate with his scans is Alister Hart, an orthopaedic surgeon who, for the past six years, has been carrying out pioneering research into what running actually does to your hips and knees. His interest was sparked after he ran his first marathon a decade ago at the age of 42. For days afterwards, he limped around the hospital where he works. ‘It really got me thinking about what it was doing to my body,’ he says.

And so he began the largest and most detailed study of the knees of middle-aged marathon runners to date. He did MRI scans of 164 knees belonging to 82 runners, all in their forties, all first-time marathon runners with no known injuries. He wasn’t sure what he would find. ‘There was a risk we could have killed off running,’ he says, smiling. The results surprised him. The runners were scanned before and after a four-month training plan that culminated in the London Marathon. ‘It looks like running, even up to marathon level, is actually good for the bones. It strengthens them. And this, in turn, is good for the cartilage; we really didn’t expect that at all.’

«

Yes, it’s Raworth, the BBC newsreader and interviewer. She’s remarkably quick. Has done the Marathon des sables. And her knees make that noise too.
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Soon will come a day that none of this exists • The Discourse Blog

Jack Crosbie:

»

It certainly seems like publications as we know them are, unless something drastically changes to the US tax code, going kaput. They dead. Some of them will cling on for a while and the brand names may persist, but in general, the idea of an organized institution where a group of journalists all collaboratively publish under one masthead in service of, generally, a shared ideological goal—that’s going tits up. There are only so many blogs a really good gochujang cookie recipe can buy, and sooner or later even the Grayest of Ladies are going to hit that limit.

This presents a problem, in my opinion. The good thing about publications is that with enough people working at them and enough people reading them you get something that approaches popular accountability. These publications are widely read and powerful enough that the people who run them were generally incentivized not to fuck up in public and embarrassing ways; couple that with a tiny shred of public altruism and belief in “the truth,” or at least in journalism as a foil to institutional power in other governments and industries, and you get for better or worse a mostly free press that mostly does good work that makes society in general a bit better off. That’s the best we can really hope for, I think.

But right now you basically can’t make money doing that, and nobody who has money is willing to support policy that would shuffle around the money to let that kind of industry exist (at this point, it would take a strong federal government hacking that money out of the tech monopolies and big financial institutions’ bottom lines, which does not seem likely).

What we’re going to get, then, is a whole lot more blogs like this. The one you’re reading. Discourse Blog. “Great!” you may think. “Independent, compassionate, reader-supported journalism, that also publishes funny stuff about birds!” First off, thank you, we know. We’re great. But the problem is there are many many people under this same model who are not great

«

And since we’re talking about the death of formal media..
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L.A. Times to lay off at least 115 people in the newsroom • Los Angeles Times

Meg James, “senior entertainment writer”:

»

The cuts were necessary because the paper could no longer lose $30m to $40m a year without making progress toward building higher readership that would bring in advertising and subscriptions to sustain the organization, the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, said Tuesday.

Drastic changes were needed, he said, including installing new leaders who would focus on strengthening the outlet’s journalism to become indispensable to more readers.

“Today’s decision is painful for all, but it is imperative that we act urgently and take steps to build a sustainable and thriving paper for the next generation. We are committed to doing so,” Soon-Shiong said.

Senior editors were part of the purge, including Washington bureau chief Kimbriell Kelly, deputy Washington bureau chief Nick Baumann, business editor Jeff Bercovici, books editor Boris Kachka, and music editor Craig Marks. The Washington bureau, photography and sports departments saw dramatic cuts, including several award-winning photographers. The video unit was hollowed out.

«

The 115 layoffs are about 20% of the newsroom. This is the entrance hall to the death spiral: there simply isn’t a place where a newspaper focused on a city will break even, especially after getting rid of so many senior staff. I have the feeling that Meg James was the only person left to write the story.
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Google introduces new Circle to Search feature on Android • Google Blog

Cathy Edwards is VP and GM of Seach:

»

Our phones are a window to the world’s information — whether it’s to explore a passion, solve a problem, buy the perfect gift, learn a new skill or simply find a reason to smile. And when you’re truly immersed in a moment of discovery or exploration, it can feel disruptive to stop what you’re doing and switch to another app to learn more.

That’s why we’re introducing Circle to Search, a new way to search anything on your Android phone without switching apps. Now, with a simple gesture, you can select what you’re curious about in whatever way comes naturally to you — like circling, highlighting, scribbling or tapping — and get more information right where you are.

For example, maybe you need help identifying a few items a creator wore in their “Outfit of the Day” video, but they didn’t tag the brands. Just long press the home button or navigation bar on your Android phone to activate Circle to Search. From there, you can select any item that you see with your preferred gesture — like circling their sunglasses — to quickly find similar, shoppable options from retailers across the web. You could scribble the bag and tap on the boots to look those up, too — all without leaving where you are. When you’re done, simply swipe away and you’re right back where you started.

Other times, you might want to ask more complex questions about what you see. Let’s say you’re browsing social media and come across an image of a delicious corn dog with some unique toppings. You’ve been seeing a lot of these online and are curious to learn more.

With multisearch — the ability to search with text and images at the same time — and our latest AI-powered upgrades, you can more easily understand concepts, ideas or topics from helpful information that’s pulled together from across the web. Simply circle the corn dog and ask a question, like “Why are these so popular?”

«

This is rather neat – though one does have to wonder how accurate it will be. What’s an acceptable error rate? 5%? 10%?
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Google CEO tells employees to expect more job cuts in 2024 • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

Google has laid off over a thousand employees across various departments since January 10th. CEO Sundar Pichai’s message is to brace for more cuts.

“We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year,” Pichai told all Google employees on Wednesday in an internal memo that was shared with me. “The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices.”

So far, those “tough choices” have included layoffs and reorganizations in Google’s hardware, ad sales, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering, and YouTube teams.

“These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions, and will not touch every team,” Pichai wrote in his memo — a reference to when Google cut 12,000 jobs this time last year. “But I know it’s very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted.”

«

Why the job growth and then the job shrinkage? The implication of the second paragraph is that it’s to fund the AI work, but does that really require all those layoffs? Google begins to look like Just Another Company.
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A ‘shocking’ amount of the web is already AI-translated trash, scientists say • Vice

Jules Roscoe:

»

“We actually got interested in this topic because several colleagues who work in MT [machine translation] and are native speakers of low resource languages noted that much of the internet in their native language appeared to be MT generated,” Mehak Dhaliwal, a former applied science intern at AWS and current PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Motherboard. “So the insight really came from the low-resource language speakers, and we did the study to understand the issue better and see how widespread it was.” 

“With that said, everyone should be cognizant that content they view on the web may have been generated by a machine,” Dhaliwal added.

The study, which was submitted to the pre-print server arXiv last Thursday, generated a corpus of 6.38 billion sentences scraped from the web. It looked at patterns of multi-way parallelism, which describes sets of sentences that are direct translations of one another in three or more languages. It found that most of the internet is translated, as 57.1% of the sentences in the corpus were multi-way parallel in at least three languages. 

Like all machine learning efforts, machine translation is impacted by human bias, and skews toward languages spoken in the Western world and the Global North. Because of this, the quality of the translations varies wildly, with “low-resource” languages from places like Africa having insufficient training data to produce accurate text.

“In general, we observed that most languages tend to have parallel data in the highest-resource languages,” Dhaliwal told Motherboard in an email. “Sentences are more likely to have translations in French than a low resource language, simply by virtue of there being much more data in French than a low resource language.”

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Two things: the paper isn’t peer-reviewed; this is machine translation, not machine generation.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A “deepfake” robocall using Joe Biden’s voice has been telling voters in New Hampshire not to bother voting in today’s primary. But nobody knows who’s behind it. CC-licensed photo by DonkeyHotey 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. The call is coming to the inside of the house. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Cops used DNA to predict a suspect’s face—and tried to run facial recognition on it • WIRED

Dhruv Mehrotra:

»

In 2017, detectives at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department working a cold case got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found Weidhofer, dead and sexually assaulted, at Berkeley, California’s Tilden Regional Park in 1990. Nearly 30 years later, the department sent genetic information collected at the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs—a company that says it can turn DNA into a face.

Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence.

The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample.

The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample.

In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software.

«

There aren’t enough facepalms in all the world for this one. But it was buried away until a hacker collective, Distributed Denial of Secrets, hacked police records and this was in it. Even so some of the police offices think it’s a hunky dory method and should continue.

(Explanation: your DNA can’t really describe what your face will look like – the best guess would use your parents’ faces – and as any result from that is a guess, so is anything you put into a facial recognition system. Better, but also probably illegal [it is in the UK, as a current TV drama points out] would be to upload the dead person’s DNA to an ancestry site and see if you get a hit.
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‘Campaigns of misinformation’ around heat pumps says energy minister amid record number of installations • Sky News

Tom Heap:

»

The government already provides a grant of up to £7,500 for households making the switch, but the upfront cost can still exceed that of a new gas boiler if other adjustments to the home are required.

We visited a home in Woking, Surrey where the gas boiler was being removed and a heat pump installed. After the government grant, the cost of the pump, water tank, new radiators and extra insulation still came to £6,500 – a cost that’s out of reach for many.

Mike Foster is from the Energy and Utilities Alliance – a trade body which represents gas and boiler companies and lobbies on their behalf. He says the higher upfront cost is a huge barrier.

“If we alienate the consumer on the journey to net zero, my fear and the fear of people in organisations like mine is that we’ll fail to get to net zero, and that will be the biggest crime.”

He rejected accusations that the industry has been spreading misinformation. “Far from it. Our members make heat pumps. They make boilers. They make parts for heat networks, heat interface units. So we are technology agnostic, but we want to do what is right for the consumer,” Mr Foster said.

But the government says that the cost of swapping gas for a heat pump is already coming down – and that some installations are already cheaper than a boiler replacement.

“Fairly soon, as prices come down, the installation routine becomes more efficient, the prices will be very low,” [energy minister in the House of Lords] Lord Callanan said.

The UK had a record year for heat pump installations last year, with 35,000 put into our homes. But that’s still a fraction of the 600,000 a year the government is targeting by 2028.

«

The real problem is how astonishingly badly insulated UK housing stock is (shakes fist at putting houses on “lists” on the basis they were built a long time ago) which makes a heat pump a poor choice.
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We may not lose our jobs to robots so quickly, MIT study finds • CNN Business

Catherine Thorbecke:

»

“In many cases, humans are the more cost-effective way, and a more economically attractive way, to do work right now,” Neil Thompson, one of the study’s authors and the director of the future tech research project at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab, told CNN in an interview.

“What we’re seeing is that while there is a lot of potential for AI to replace tasks, it’s not going to happen immediately,” Thompson added, saying that amid all the headlines about robots taking jobs, “It’s really important to think about the economics of actually implementing these systems.”

In the study, Thompson and his team analyzed the majority of jobs that have been previously identified as “exposed” to AI, or at risk of being lost to AI, especially in the realm of computer vision. The researchers then looked at the wages paid to workers currently doing these jobs, and calculated how much it might cost to bring on an automated tool instead.

A retail worker, for example, might currently be responsible for visually checking inventory or ensuring that the prices listed throughout a store on specific merchandise is accurate. A machine trained in computer vision could technically do this job, Thompson notes, but at this stage it would still make the most economic sense for an employer to pay a human worker to do it.

“There’s a reason that AI has not been everywhere immediately,” Thompson said. “There’s an economics behind that.”

«

Quelle surprise – capitalism favours doing things cheaply with easily replaceable elements.
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“Deepfake” Joe Biden robocall tells New Hampshire Democrats not to vote on Tuesday • NBC News

Alex Seitz-Wald and Mike Memoli:

»

The New Hampshire attorney general’s office says it is investigating what appears to be an “unlawful attempt” at voter suppression after NBC News reported on a robocall impersonating President Joe Biden telling recipients not to vote in Tuesday’s presidential primary.

“Although the voice in the robocall sounds like the voice of President Biden, this message appears to be artificially generated based on initial indications,” the attorney generals office said in a statement. “These messages appear to be an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire Presidential Primary Election and to suppress New Hampshire voters. New Hampshire voters should disregard the content of this message entirely.”

The investigation comes after a prominent New Hampshire Democrat, whose personal cell phone number showed up on the caller ID of those receiving the call, filed a complaint.

“What a bunch of malarkey,” the robocall phone message begins, echoing a favorite term Biden has uttered before. The message says that “it’s important that you save your vote for the November election.”

“Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” it says.

«

Owning a telephone in the US sounds like one of the inner circles of hell. Imagine getting unwanted calls like that and not having any way to reject them first.
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Vision Pro’s first-weekend pre-order review: expectations in line, but concerns raised • Medium

Ming-Chi Kuo:

»

Based on pre-order inventory and shipping time, I estimated that Apple sold 160,000 to 180,000 Vision Pro units during the first pre-order weekend.

As predicted, the Vision Pro sold out immediately after the pre-order opened, with shipping times for all models extending to 5–7 weeks within hours.

The instant sold-out and extended shipping times seem positive at first, but a key concern emerged: shipping times remained unchanged 48 hours after pre-orders opened. It indicates that demand may quickly taper off after the core fans and heavy users place their orders.

Popular iPhone models also sell out immediately upon pre-order, and shipping times typically increase to several weeks within hours. However, unlike Vision Pro, iPhone models usually continue to see a steady increase in shipping times 24 to 48 hours after pre-orders open, indicating that demand continues to grow even after the initial sold-out.

…Achieving a shipment volume of 500,000 units for Vision Pro this year should not be challenging. However, because demand tapers off quickly after the initial sold-out, it’s critical to closely monitor demand in other markets and application updates to assess changes in demand.

«

The observation Kuo makes is that the Vision Pro is a niche product. Well, of course. This is the worst Vision Pro that Apple will ever make.
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Apple releases iOS 17.3 and iPadOS 17.3 with Stolen Device Protection, collaborative Apple Music Playlists and more • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

iOS 17.3 and iPadOS 17.3 can be downloaded on eligible iPhones and iPads over-the-air by going to Settings > General > Software Update. Apple has also released iOS 15.8.1 and iOS 16.7.5 for those running older versions of iOS.

With iOS 17.3, Apple is adding Stolen Device Protection to the iPhone, limiting access to private information just in case someone gets ahold of both your iPhone and your passcode. It requires biometric authentication to do things like access passwords, turn off Lost Mode, make purchases in Safari, and more.

«

The Stolen Device Protection bit (to defeat people who watch you enter your passcode in a bar, then steal it and lock you out of your iCloud account) sounds smart, though there are little wrinkles to be figured out: can you choose your “home” and “work” locations? Is the blocking time configurable? But definitely a good thing.
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Inside the collapsing US political-media-industrial-complex • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

It was a little-kept secret of Trump’s rise that, even as he attacked American media and was treated by them as a threat to democracy, he rescued their advertising and subscription businesses. As CBS Chairman Les Moonves notoriously quipped to investors in February of 2016, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Media executives are beginning to reckon with the reality that the 2024 race won’t bring a “Trump bump” to save ad budgets or bring back readers, listeners, and viewers. In a public interview at Davos last week, the new Washington Post CEO, Will Lewis said the publication that boomed during the first Trump era will now be looking for subscribers elsewhere.

“I’m not convinced that will be the case,” Lewis said of predictions of another “Trump bump.”

News consumers are smart, and have internalized a reality that many in the political class are still reluctant to acknowledge: That the options on the ballot in November will, barring some extreme event, be Trump and Biden once again. Recent polls show South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is within striking distance of Trump in New Hampshire, which could theoretically give her a boost as Republican primary voters consider her a more serious possibility headed into South Carolina. But the electoral path remains extremely narrow.

That’s left the national news media, which is constructed around the four-year election cycles, with not a lot to do on the campaign trail. I bumped into a well-known reporter at a Trump rally in Concord, New Hampshire on Friday who compared himself to an on-air sports commentator filling airtime when a football team is up by 30 points. Trudging through the snow en route Ron DeSantis’ sparsely-attended town hall in Hampton, New Hampshire on Wednesday days before the Florida governor called it quits, another reporter covering their sixth New Hampshire primary described this year’s as “just a bummer.”

«

[American] news consumers are smart? I think “sufficiently familiar with this merry-go-round” might describe it better. This of course won’t stop the media trying to amp up anything Trump-related.
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Global warming picks up speed • Open Mind

Grant Foster has a (rather scary) graph showing global warming picking up speed recently:

»

James Hansen and others published a new paper recently, claiming that not only will global warming, in the very near future, proceed faster than expected, it is already doing so — that the pace of global warming had accelerated. Temperature increase after 2010, it suggests, will be at 0.027°C/yr, 50% faster than the lazy 0.018°C/yr it had been rising for decades before that. As a result, we have less than a decade until we cross the much-discussed threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial, so any idea of keeping global warming below that limit is “deader than a doornail.”

There are other controversial ideas in the paper, including that climate sensitivity is on the high side at 4.8°C per doubling of CO2 rather than the 3°C per doubling considered the “mainstream” scientific estimate. There is no shortage of critics of many of these ideas, but I can only comment on the surface temperature warming rate. My analysis, based on the adjusted data representing the true global warming trend, confirms their claim about recent acceleration.

«

Which you’d sort of expect (as you shiver in realisation). Venus is ungodly hot because of runaway greenhouse warming. We seem to be trying to follow it.
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Bill Ackman is a brilliant fictional character • The Atlantic

Kurt Andersen on the hedge fund billionaire who has recently been the latest example of how Twitter can separate billionaires from their sanity:

»

“When former [Harvard] president Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community,” Ackman posted while on holiday in the Caribbean, the day after he’d helped force her out over her plagiarism. But now, given her handling of the Harvard anti-Israel protests, he’d realized she was “not qualified,” having been chosen by a board looking for “a DEI-approved candidate.” And by the way, “in light of the amount, nature, and degree of plagiarism that had surfaced in her work,” why wasn’t she also booted from her tenured Harvard professorship?

The very next day, speaking of pat parallels and ironies standard in fiction but not so much in real life, came the first Business Insider story about plagiarism by his wife, an artist-designer-technologist and former MIT professor named Neri Oxman. In real life, one would expect a response from the plagiarist like the abashed explanation and apology Oxman immediately posted on X, and then the chatter would run its course over the weekend, and the attention and embarrassment would dissipate.

But that would have been too boring for the Bill Ackman character. Ackman, with his 1.1 million followers on X, surely saw an opportunity for a fight, for more attention, for the story to continue with him as its star. He simultaneously complained and bragged about the attention being given to the news stories about his wife’s misdeeds. “It is now the number one trending item on X,” he posted a couple of days after the articles appeared, “with 35,600 posts versus number two which is the Princess of Wales with 3,174 posts.” Even before he’d really put his weight behind it. An effort that would—tragic irony!—inevitably make his wife’s mistakes still more widely known, extending and perhaps deepening her pain.

«

Andersen skewers Ackman – more accurately, narrates the process as Ackman skewers himself – with a delightful light touch. Funny throughout. (He doesn’t mention, but Ackman gained most notoriety for shorting the stock of Herbalife, and losing millions of dollars doing so. Smartest guy in the room, huh.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The San Francisco city council has spent half a million dollars dithering over its replacement for a public rubbish bin. CC-licensed photo by Rafael Castillo 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. You say trash, we correctly say rubbish. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

DPD AI chatbot swears, calls itself ‘useless’ and criticises delivery firm • The Guardian

Jane Clinton:

»

The delivery firm DPD has disabled part of its artificial intelligence (AI) powered online chatbot after a disgruntled customer was able to make it swear and criticise the company.

Musician Ashley Beauchamp, 30, was trying to track down a missing parcel but was having no joy in getting useful information from the chatbot. Fed up, he decided to have some fun instead and began to experiment to find out what the chatbot could do. Beauchamp said this was when the “chaos started”.

To begin with, he asked it to tell him a joke, but he soon progressed to getting the chatbot to write a poem criticising the company.

With a few more prompts the chatbot also swore.

Beauchamp shared the conversation on X, with the chatbot replying to one message: “Fuck yeah! I’ll do my best to be as helpful as possible, even if it means swearing.” Then in another instance, the chatbot calls itself a “useless Chatbot that can’t help you”.

One post by Beauchamp, a classical musician from London, was viewed 800,000 times in 24 hours. Referring to the chatbot, he wrote on X: “It’s utterly useless at answering any queries, and when asked, it happily produced a poem about how terrible they are as a company.”

DPD uses AI in its online chat to answer queries as well as human operators. The company said a new update had been behind the chatbot’s unusual behaviour and it had since disabled the part that was responsible and was updating its system as a consequence.

«

“A new update” suuuuuuuuure. Expect plenty more like this. First contact with the enemy: people primed to screw things up. But now let’s see what Sam Altman thinks.
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ChatGPT is best for people in these industries: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman • CNBC

Tom Huddleston Jr.:

»

Anyone can ask ChatGPT to answer a question or perform a task. But the popular chatbot is particularly useful for workers in three specific industries, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“Coding is probably the single area from a productivity gain we’re most excited about today. It’s massively deployed and at scaled usage, at this point,” Altman said during a recent episode of “Unconfuse Me,” a podcast hosted by Bill Gates. “Healthcare and education are two things that are coming up that curve that we’re very excited about, too.”

Altman, whose company makes ChatGPT, made a point of noting that today’s AI systems “certainly can’t do [those] jobs” for you. But in those three fields, workers might benefit from using the chatbot as a productivity tool, he said.

«

Strange how he doesn’t mention marketing spiels and advertising and particularly helpline chatbots, but maybe that would sound a bit trivial.
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You are not an embassy • How To Survive The Internet

Jamie Bartlett:

»

One of the trickier aspects of digital life is the constant pressure to opine. To have a strong opinion on a subject, and to share it with the world. It’s literally baked into the design of the most popular platforms. ‘What’s happening!?’ barks X. (Interestingly, until April 2023, X merely asked ‘What is happening?’ Notice the subtle difference of tone.) ‘What’s on your mind, Jamie?’ wonders Facebook. Some of the finest minds in the world work extremely hard to encourage you to tell everyone what you’re thinking and feeling. No wonder it’s hard to resist.  

Well – what is happening? (?!) If you watch the news, lots of bad things. And so we become something of a one-person embassy, pronouncing publicly where we stand on the key moral issues of the day. Anything from a government announcement, to a think-tank report, to a tragic event. We are ‘Devastated to hear about….’ We are ‘Outraged by the news of… ‘ And we are ‘Disappointed to see that [insert name] supports…’   

If I am honest, I know very little about most bad things going on in the world. Certainly not enough that sharing my view will inform or educate or enlighten. Yet whenever I see a news report, an urgent need rises up: what shall I say about this? I have a feeling about it – which must be shared! (And ideally in emotionally charged language, since that will receive more interactions). 

What’s wrong with calling out the bad stuff going on? Nothing per se. And certainly not on an individual level. The problem is when people feel a soft and gentle pressure to denounce, to praise, to comment on things they don’t feel they fully understand. Things they don’t feel comfortable speaking about. Things that are contentious and difficult to discuss on heartless, unforgiving platforms where the wrong phrase or tone might land you in hot water.  

What social media has done is to make silence an active – rather than the default – choice. To speak publicly is now so easy that not doing it kind-of-implies you don’t know or don’t care about what’s going on in the world. Who wants to look ignorant or indifferent? And besides, who doesn’t want to appear kind or wise, or morally upstanding in front of others?  

But the result is an undirected anger from all sides: frenetic, purposeless, habitual and above all moralising.

«

“You are not an embassy” is such a good point. I’m always amazed by people who think that their holding an opinion will somehow make a difference. Bartlett is always worth reading.
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No more ‘Big IT’: the failed 90s model has ruined too many lives • FT

Mike Bracken:

»

Since the 1990s, both Labour and Conservative ministers have handed control to “the Big IT crowd”. Successive prime ministers bought the line that major-project databases and applications would deliver great outcomes. They didn’t.

This orthodoxy still prevails. Entire services — tax, immigration, passports, benefits — have been given over to IT suppliers and their favoured consultancies, who in the absence of true competition can inflate contract values in return for maintenance and minimal changes. The resulting pattern is services becoming fixed, more expensive to run and unable to adapt.

Meanwhile, organisations born in the Internet era, from payments to retail sectors, have demonstrated how to deliver services cheaply, at global scale. Gareth Davies, the National Audit Office chief executive recently recommended the UK adopts “manageable projects compared to gigantic, overambitious attempts to change the whole world with one IT system.” He estimates we could save £20bn. I think that’s modest.

We already know what to do because it has been tried with success elsewhere. Namely design services with a “test and learn” approach that adapts as user needs and behaviour change, rather than making one big bet on an IT tender that tries to predict requirements years in advance. Inside government, put experienced operators rather than generalist policymakers in charge. And crucially, reform the Treasury approach: selecting single IT suppliers on long-term contracts creates the legacy IT arrangements that bedevil the public sector.

Horizon is just another painful chapter in the long story of Big IT failure: no empathy for users, leaders that do not understand the value of service delivery and technology, and a civil service culture that refuses to put procurement, commercial and technology skills on a par with policy.

«

Here’s something from Bracken’s post last week that’s worth considering:

»

In 2013-14, 70 nurses at the Princess of Wales Hospital were suspended as they were suspected of falsifying blood glucose results from patients. Five were charged by police, two went to prison. An expert witness uncovered that the digital records had been affected by the WannaCry cyber attack, and an engineer from the system supplier had accidentally deleted some of the records while making repairs. The IT team at the hospital was aware that this had happened, but the investigation team was not, and proceeded on the basis that computer evidence is always correct. It wasn’t. More ruined lives.

«

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Our tiny magazine exposed the Post Office. They underestimated us • The Sunday Times

Katie Gatens:

»

The ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office brought the struggle of the postmasters into the nation’s living rooms and back on to the floor of the Commons, resulting in legislation that should overturn all the wrongful convictions in one go.

But it was [Rebecca] Thomson, now 41, and Computer Weekly’s chief reporter, Karl Flinders, 51, who were the first to really take on the story. In 2010, Thomson left the title and Flinders took over reporting. He has since written 350 articles for Computer Weekly on the scandal. Theirs is the story of how a tiny trade publication of ten editorial staff exposed the biggest miscarriage of justice in the UK –– and persevered for 15 years.

Thomson tracked down and spoke to seven postmasters for her initial article, including Bates and Castleton. She also found Jo Hamilton, who was spared prison after villagers raised the money for her, and Noel Thomas, who was sentenced to nine months in jail and spent his 60th birthday behind bars.

But to her disappointment her investigation, published in 2009, didn’t have the desired effect. “I thought there’d be a much bigger reaction,” she says. “I thought people would look at it and say, clearly questions need to be answered.”

Thousands of viewers were left distraught by the trauma portrayed by actors and Thomson says speaking to the real victims was emotionally draining.

“It’s really upsetting to hear someone say, ‘I’ve been diagnosed with a terrible illness and still they won’t give me any compensation’,” she says. “You start to feel guilty for putting them through it, especially if you feel like you’re not getting the results that you wish you were getting.”

Computer Weekly had a small team of lawyers who they called on for that first article, but much of their reporting had to be scaled back for fear of being taken to court. The team were careful to strike out mentions of the Japanese tech firm Fujitsu, which created the software that led to the errors. “We had to be careful in that first piece, because we thought they might sue,” says Thomson. “It was hard to stay motivated especially because there were so many setbacks.”

«

A long time ago I worked at Computer Weekly; the team competed furiously with two other weekly computer trade publications for all sorts of scoops and exclusives and investigations. The teams were bigger; but also national publications took more notice of what we wrote. Though as Flinders explains, the Post Office told reporters on nationals the stories were rubbish, putting them off the deep investigation required for this story.
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Twin Pics: create this image with AI

»

Use AI to create a matching image. Your goal is to match the image below as closely as possible. The closer you get, the higher your score.

«

Some of the people are getting 90%+, though quite how it’s measured might be open to question given that you can get 50% for something you wouldn’t really call “a match”.
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Microsoft ‘senior leadership’ emails accessed by Russian SolarWinds hackers • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft has discovered a nation-state attack on its corporate systems from the same Russian state-sponsored group of hackers responsible for the sophisticated SolarWinds attack. Microsoft says the hackers, known as Nobelium, were able to access email accounts of some members of its senior leadership team late last year.

“Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents,” says the Microsoft Security Response Center in a blog post filed late on Friday.

Microsoft says the group was “initially targeting email accounts” for information about themselves, but it’s not clear what other emails and documents have been stolen in the process. Microsoft only discovered the attack last week on January 12th, and the company hasn’t disclosed how long the attackers were able to access its systems.

“The attack was not the result of a vulnerability in Microsoft products or services. To date, there is no evidence that the threat actor had any access to customer environments, production systems, source code, or AI systems,” says Microsoft.

The attack took place just days after Microsoft announced its plan to overhaul its software security following major Azure cloud attacks.

«

As to the timing of the blogpost, it seems to have been published around 9pm GMT, 4pm EST, 1pm PST. There’s certainly a faint element of “taking out the trash” – publishing something near the end of the business week so that it gets minimal pickup. Sorry if we spoiled that, Microsoft.
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SF’s long, expensive odyssey to build bespoke trash cans stalls • San Francisco Chronicle

Aldo Toledo:

»

San Francisco Public Works has paused its quest to deploy new bespoke trash cans across the city amid a looming budget deficit, the department told the Chronicle on Friday.

The department, which has spent more than half a million dollars on the project, said in a statement Friday that it’s moving forward with the new trash can — the Slim Silhouette design, which won in a three-way contest in 2022 — but that “the procurement may be put on hold because of the city’s significant budget shortfall projections.”

The statement says that the city is “in the midst of the budget process” and that Mayor London Breed has asked all departments to look for significant savings of at least 10%. “At this point, everything is on the table,” Public Works spokesperson Beth Rubenstein said, adding that the agency has held off on issuing a request for proposals “because of the projected budget shortfall and the current budget process.”

The update from Public Works comes nearly a year after the department announced it had decided on the Slim Silhouette to replace aging green trash cans the city has been using since 1993. Those trash cans have long been criticized for often being soiled, filled to the brim with garbage or, paradoxically, making street corners dirtier. 

To replace the cans, San Francisco spent an eye-popping $537,000 to test three prototypes. The cost was later lowered to $400,000, and after many tests, a final prototype was selected. The city has still spent more than $500,000 on the entire effort, though updated costs were not immediately available. 

In summer 2022, the city deployed six custom trash can models across the city, giving residents a chance to weigh in on their favorite design. 

Aside from a slight hiccup in May when officials in the Civic Design Review Committee put the process on hold because of skepticism about the new design’s effectiveness, Public Works has been mum on its plans for finding a manufacturer and rolling out the sleek, silver cans. The department estimated in 2022 that the 3,000 cans would be ready in 2023.

«

Astonishing. The bins are too full so we need to redesign them? Why not more emptying runs?
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National Grid: Live

»

Great Britain’s exposed position in the north-east Atlantic makes it one of the best locations in the world for wind power, and the shallow waters of the North Sea host several of the world’s largest offshore wind farms.

New wind power records are set regularly, and between 9:00am and 9:30am on 21st December 2023 British wind farms averaged a record 21.81GW of generation.

…An open source project by Kate Morley.

…The data comes from National Grid ESO’s Data Portal, Elexon’s Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service, and the Carbon Intensity API (a project by National Grid ESO and the University Of Oxford Department Of Computer Science).

«

Given we’ve just experienced one of the strongest winter storms, that record might have been broken.
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Lots of good news – and good numbers – again in offshore wind • WindEurope

»

Things are looking up again for offshore wind in Europe. 2023 saw a record 4.2GW of new offshore wind farms come online, up 40% on 2022. And €30bn of new investments were confirmed – covering 9GW that’ll be built over the coming years. The supply chain is also seeing a turnaround, with new factories announced in Poland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.

2023 was the best year on record for new offshore wind installations in both the EU and across Europe as a whole. Europe built 4.2GW of offshore wind in 2023. That’s 1.7GW more than in 2022. Of that, 3GW was in the EU, an increase of 2.1GW year on year.

The Netherlands, France and the UK installed the most new capacity. This includes the 1.5 GW “Hollandse Kust Zuid” project in the Netherlands – now the world’s largest operational wind farm.

Offshore wind investments in Europe also reached a new record. A total of €30bn was raised across 8 wind farms. This will finance 9 GW of new offshore capacity. This record comes after legal uncertainty and unhelpful market intervention had led to a drop in offshore wind investments, falling to an all-time low of €0.4bn in 2022. It also means that projects which had to postpone their final investment decision in 2022 are now moving ahead – excellent news for Europe’s energy security and competitiveness.

«

Would not have guessed a couple of decades ago that wind would play such a gigantic part in renewables. But here we are.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Drivers of electric vehicles are more likely to have a crash in the year after first getting them, insurance data shows. CC-licensed photo by Chris Yarzab 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Foot on the gas? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Netflix won’t have a Vision Pro app, compromising the device’s appeal • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

»

In the leadup to Vision Pro preorders on Friday, Apple has seemingly been prioritizing the message that the device will be an ideal way to watch movies and TV shows. In many ways, that might be true, but there’s one major caveat: Netflix.

In a statement reported by Bloomberg today, Netflix revealed that it does not plan to offer an app for Vision Pro. Instead, users will have to use a web-based interface to watch the streaming service.

Netflix compares the experience to the Mac, but there are a few reasons this won’t be an ideal experience for users. First, the iPad and iPhone mobile apps support offline viewing of downloaded videos. That’s particularly handy for when you’re flying, which is arguably one of the best use cases for Vision Pro.

Unfortunately, Netflix doesn’t support offline downloads on the web. It also remains to be seen what resolution will be achievable—the maximum resolution of a Netflix stream depends on the browser, with most capping out at 720p. That wouldn’t look so great on a 100-foot virtual screen.

Granted, Netflix streams at up to 4K on Safari for macOS, but we don’t know if that will be the case for Safari on Vision Pro.

It will also make launching the app more complicated, and the interface won’t be as nice to use as a native app.

«

Apple here perhaps reaping what it sows: it insists on that 30% from anything on the App Store, Netflix refuses and isn’t even allowed to explain how people can sign up outside the app. So Netflix is happy to slow-walk any VisionOS product. Plus, of course, there’s essentially zero user base right now. The combination of no demand and a bit of corporate schadenfreude must be irresistible.
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Teslas crash more than fuel-powered cars. Here’s why • CNN Business

Peter Valdes-Dapena:

»

insurance analysts at LexisNexis found that, when vehicle owners switch from gasoline-powered cars to electric cars, they tend to crash more. Drivers also tend to crash somewhat more when switching to [different] fuel-powered vehicles, too, but the increase is more pronounced with EVs. The frequency of insurance claims rises by about 14.3% while the severity of claims, or the amount that has to be paid out, increases by 14.5%, according to the data.

The increase in incidents is highest during the first year or so after drivers get the new electric vehicle, but then tapers off after that, according to LexisNexis, presumably as people get used to driving the new model. There is much less of a problem when a driver changes from a gasoline-powered vehicle to another gas-powered one, they found.

…In the insurance business, there is a long-established connection between horsepower [which EVs have in spades] and the frequency and amount of insurance claims. Fast cars hit things more often and they hit them harder, leading to more – and more severe – crashes. Added to this, EVs lack the usual engine sounds that go along with rapid acceleration and high speeds, so it’s conceivable drivers are less aware of how fast they’re going.

Besides their added speed, EVs are also heavier than gas-powered vehicles because of their large, dense battery packs. That also leads to more damage in the vehicles the EV hits resulting in higher insurance claims.

High speeds aren’t even necessarily the issue, said Lu. Controlling speed is especially critical in low-speed environments, like a parking garages, with other cars and concrete posts all around. With gas cars, starting off from a stop requires the engine to rev up a bit before the car can start moving. Not so with EVs, which respond differently to pedal pressure.

«

So it’s not Teslas per se, it’s the EV experience. (Insurers have also, the story says, seen the same pattern in China, where Teslas aren’t the dominant EV at all.)
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Billionaires wanted to save the news industry. They’re losing a fortune • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson:

»

There’s an old saying about the news business: If you want to make a small fortune, start with a large one.

As the prospects for news publishers waned in the last decade, billionaires swooped in to buy some of the country’s most fabled brands. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013 for about $250m. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotechnology and start-up billionaire, purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500m. Marc Benioff, the founder of the software giant Salesforce, purchased Time magazine with his wife, Lynne, for $190m in 2018.

All three newsrooms greeted their new owners with cautious optimism that their business acumen and tech know-how would help figure out the perplexing question of how to make money as a digital publication.

But it increasingly appears that the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies’ finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.

“Wealth doesn’t insulate an owner from the serious challenges plaguing many media companies, and it turns out being a billionaire isn’t a predictor for solving those problems,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. “We’ve seen a lot of naïve hope attached to these owners, often from employees.”

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Buying Time probably wasn’t the smartest move – its glory days are far in the past – but if you’re a billionaire, surely you can tell yourself that you can afford to lose $30m to $40m (as the LA Times looks like doing) per year? Or maybe your mindset is always for more, and more, and more.
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Garbage AI rewrites are starting to infect Google News • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Google News is boosting sites that rip-off other outlets by using AI to rapidly churn out content, 404 Media has found. Google told 404 Media that although it tries to address spam on Google News, the company ultimately does not focus on whether a news article was written by an AI or a human, opening the way for more AI-generated content making its way onto Google News.

The presence of AI-generated content on Google News signals two things: first, the black box nature of Google News, where gaining entry into Google News’ rankings at all is an opaque, but apparently gameable, system. Second, how Google may not be ready for the moderation demands needed of its News service in the age of consumer-access AI, where essentially anyone is able to churn out a mass of content with little to no regard for its quality or originality.

“I want to read the original stories written by journalists who actually researched them and spoke to primary sources. Any news junkie would,” Brian Penny, a ghostwriter who first flagged some of the seemingly AI-generated articles to 404 Media, said.

One example was a news site called Worldtimetodays.com, which is littered with full page and other ads. On Wednesday it published an article about Star Wars fandom. The article was very similar to one published a day earlier on the website Distractify, with even the same author photo.

One major difference, though, was that Worldtimetodays.com wrote “Let’s be honest, war of stars fans,” rather than Star Wars fans. Another article is a clear rip-off of a piece from Heavy.com, with Worldtimetodays.com not even bothering to replace the Heavy.com watermarked artwork. Gary Graves, the listed author on Worldtimetodays.com, has published more than 40 articles in a 24 hour period. 

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Well how do you do fellow people who are not yet adults, as the caption (nearly) goes. Google does face a problem here: it is going to have to moderate more heavily, and some sites (looking at you, CNet and Sports Illustrated) mix AI-generated and human-written content. (As an aside, I tweaked some of the sentences in this extract because I thought they could be expressed better. Do a diff and let me know your thoughts. No AI used.)
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US buildings kill up to a billion birds a year. These architects want to save them • The Guardian

Maanvi Singh:

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Chicago’s 82-story Aqua Tower appears to flutter with the wind. Its unusual, undulating facade has made it one of the most unique features of Chicago’s skyline, distinct from the many right-angled glass towers that surround it.

In designing it, the architect Jeanne Gang thought not only about how humans would see it, dancing against the sky, but also how it would look to the birds who fly past. The irregularity of the building’s face allows birds to see it more clearly and avoid fatal collisions. “It’s kind of designed to work for both humans and birds,” she said.

As many as 1 billion birds in the US die in building collisions each year. And Chicago, which sits along the Mississippi Flyway, one of the four major north-south migration routes, is among the riskiest places for birds. This year, at least 1,000 birds died in one day from colliding with a single glass-covered building. In New York, which lies along the Atlantic Flyway, hundreds of species traverse the skyline and tens of thousands die each year.

As awareness grows of the dangers posed by glistening towers and bright lights, architects are starting to reimagine city skylines to design buildings that are both aesthetically daring and bird-safe.

Some are experimenting with new types of patterned or coated glass that birds can see. Others are rethinking glass towers entirely, experimenting with exteriors that use wood, concrete or steel rods. Blurring lines between the indoors and outdoors, some architects are creating green roofs and facades, inviting birds to nest within the building.

“Many people think about bird-friendly design as yet another limitation on buildings, yet another requirement,” said Dan Piselli, director of sustainability at the New York-based architecture firm FXCollaborative. “But there are so many design-forward buildings that perfectly exemplify that this doesn’t have to limit your design, your freedom.”

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The only thing more deadly, by numbers, to birds: cats.
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Each Facebook user is monitored by thousands of companies • The Markup

Jon Keegan:

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By now most internet users know their online activity is constantly tracked. No one should be shocked to see ads for items they previously searched for, or to be asked if their data can be shared with an unknown number of “partners.” 

But what is the scale of this surveillance? Judging from data collected by Facebook, and newly described in a unique study by non-profit consumer watchdog Consumer Reports, it’s massive. Examining the data may leave you with more questions than answers.

Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data. 

The Markup helped Consumer Reports recruit participants for the study. Participants downloaded an archive of the last three years of their data from their Facebook settings, then provided it to Consumer Reports.

By collecting data this way, the study was able to examine a form of tracking that is normally hidden: so-called “server-to-server” tracking, in which personal data goes from a company’s servers to Meta’s servers. Another form of tracking, in which Meta tracking pixels are placed on company websites, is visible to users’ browsers. 

Because the data came from a self-selected group of users, and because the results were not demographically adjusted, the study does not “make any claims about how representative this sample is of the US population as a whole,” Consumer Reports noted. Participants were also likely more privacy conscious and technically inclined than typical users and more likely to be members of Consumers Reports.

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Meta’s response, in the story, is hardly a refutation. It’s a colossal number. I’d love to see the number for the UK or Europe.
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Google is changing search results for EU citizens • The Register

Richard Speed:

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Google is making some changes to how its products, including search, will work in Europe.

The reason? It is preparing for the new Digital Markets Act (DMA) rules scheduled to come into play in March. Under the DMA, Google is a classified as a “Gatekeeper,” meaning it holds “considerable market power.”

Changes to search results will be the most visible alteration for the majority of users. Where Google might show a link to several businesses – for example, hotels – it will add a space for comparison sites and a way for users to refine their searches to include comparison sites.

The company said: “For categories like hotels, we will also start testing a dedicated space for comparison sites and direct suppliers to show more detailed individual results including images, star ratings and more.”

The result is that some other services, such as its own third party booking service, Google Flights, will be cut from search pages.

Google is also adding choice screens to Android phones to allow users to select a default search engine. The same type of choice might also turn up when you set up Chrome on a desktop or iOS device.

There will be extra consents for linked services – European users can expect to see some additional consent banners regarding data sharing. According to Google, opting out of linking services could result in limited functionality or some features stopping working altogether.

Google has yet to give any clarity on what exactly will stop working should a European user opt out of linking and sharing their data between services.

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Space for comparison sites? Which the comparison sites don’t have to pay for? That sounds like a win for the case originally brought back in 2010 to the European Commission by British comparison site Foundem, which saw Google fined in 2017.
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ChatGPT’s looks for its FarmVille moment • The Atlantic

David Karpf:

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Initially announced two months ago, the GPT Store allows the product’s business and “ChatGPT Plus” users—those paying $20 a month for an upgraded version of the service—to create, share, and interact with customized AI agents (called GPTs) that are tailored to specific tasks. The company claims that its users have built more than 3 million of these custom bots since they were granted the ability to do so in November, in preparation for this launch.

When OpenAI debuted the store, it highlighted six specific GPTs: A bot that will recommend hiking and biking trails, one that synthesizes and summarizes academic papers for you, a coding tutor from Khan Academy, a presentation-design assistant from Canva, an AI that recommends new books to read, and an AI math-and-science tutor. The immediate aim of these entries and others is presumably to persuade users to pay that monthly subscription fee. But the broader project here is more ambitious. OpenAI is trying to turn ChatGPT into a platform.

It’s deeply reminiscent of Facebook circa 2007. OpenAI has begun the hunt for its FarmVille.

…The problem for OpenAI is that the majority of ChatGPT’s 100 million weekly users rely on the free product. Meanwhile, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, has described the cost of keeping ChatGPT’s underlying engine running as “eye-watering.” In the short term, the more outside developers that OpenAI attracts, the more tailored GPTs offering trail recommendations and science tips it hosts, the greater the chance that those free users choose to sign up as paying subscribers. The company did not comment on its plans when reached for this article—a spokesperson only pointed to a November blog post about the GPT Store—but the medium-term ambition seems identical to Facebook’s in 2007. OpenAI can take the next step in remaking the internet user experience only if it can come up with a better answer to the question “Okay, but what else will people use it for?”

Altman, like Mark Zuckerberg before him, has imperial ambitions. Zuckerberg aimed to colonise the internet, remaking it in Facebook’s image. He largely succeeded. Altman’s ambitions are even larger.

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Even larger than “colonise the internet”? Yikes.
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What killed the fight scene? And is it finally coming back? • Fast Company

Ryan Broderick:

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On a rainy weekend last year, after realizing that my viewing queue had run dry, I started plumbing the depths of my streaming services in search of the shows and movies that are buried behind the subpages and subdirectories of bloated streaming platforms. This is how I stumbled across a show called Warrior on Max (though at the time the platform was still called HBO Max). 

I didn’t leave my couch all day. The show is set in 1870s San Francisco and follows Chinese gangs, brutal Irish cops, and corrupt politicians as the different factions attempt to survive in America. It’s based on the writings of Bruce Lee, but is largely its own story. And while it isn’t exactly prestige TV, it’s well-made, has some fascinating things to say about race in America, and, most crucially, has some of the best fight choreography I’ve ever seen.

As I kept watching the show, binging my way well into the second season, I realized that I had actually been starved for fight scenes. Not CGI-filled laser beam battles, but emotive, story-driven, visually interesting fight choreography. Duels that used their surroundings and involved characters with unique, personality-driven fighting styles. Warrior felt like stumbling across an oasis in the desert when I didn’t even know I was thirsty. I began to wonder exactly how long it had been since I’d watched a really good fight on screen.

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I found the argument in this a little incoherent – but like him, I long ago tired of superhero (and light sabre) fight scenes, and find humans knocking bits out of each other far more compelling. He mentions the Bourne fight sequences, to which I’d add Gangs of London’s first episode, and of course the fight sequences in Atomic Blonde, especially including the 10-minute single-take one near the end. (It’s so long YouTube sticks an advert in the middle 😫). Fight choreography is at an all-time high, superhero junk excepted.

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TikTok is a time bomb • The Prism

Gurwinder [who seems only to have one name, like Prince]:

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Mao is credited with eventually crushing the opium epidemic, and since then the view among many in China has been that Western liberalism leads to decadence and that authoritarianism is the cure. But one man has done more than anyone to turn this thesis into policy.

His name is Wang Huning, and, despite not being well known outside China, he has been China’s top ideological theorist for three decades, and he is now member number 4 of the seven-man Standing Committee—China’s most powerful body. He advised China’s former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and now he advises Xi Jinping, authoring many of his policies. In China he is called “guoshi” (国师: literally, “teacher of the nation”).

Wang refuses to do press or to even speak with foreigners, but his worldview can be surmised from the books he wrote earlier in his life. In August 1988, Wang accepted an invitation to spend six months in the US, and traveled from state to state noting the way American society operates, examining its strengths and weaknesses. He recorded his findings in the 1991 book, America Against America, which has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US.

The premise of the book is simple: the US is a paradox composed of contradictions: its two primary values—freedom and equality—are mutually exclusive. It has many different cultures, and therefore no overall culture. And its market-driven society has given it economic riches but spiritual poverty. As he writes in the book, “American institutions, culture and values oppose the United States itself.”

For Wang, the US’s contradictions stem from one source: nihilism. The country has become severed from its traditions and is so individualistic it can’t make up its mind what it as a nation believes. Without an overarching culture maintaining its values, the government’s regulatory powers are weak, easily corrupted by lobbying or paralyzed by partisan bickering. As such, the nation’s progress is directed mostly by blind market forces; it obeys not a single command but a cacophony of three hundred million demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere.

In Wang’s view, the lack of a unifying culture puts a hard limit on the US’s progress. The country is constantly producing wondrous new technologies, but these technologies have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation.

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I know: you’re saying “where’s TikTok in all this?” But this is a fascinating essay, which does focus on TikTok, and is well worth considering; especially because it tells you why China loves Trump.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Greenland ice cap is losing 30 million tonnes of ice per hour, one-fifth more than previously thought. CC-licensed photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center 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.

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A selection of 9 links for you. World’s biggest G+T? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same • The Guardian

Kyle Chayka:

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the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.

In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. “AirSpace” was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.

My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map.

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Greenland losing 30m tonnes of ice an hour, study reveals • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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The Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, a study has revealed, which is 20% more than was previously thought.

Some scientists are concerned that this additional source of freshwater pouring into the north Atlantic might mean a collapse of the ocean currents called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is closer to being triggered, with severe consequences for humanity.

Major ice loss from Greenland as a result of global heating has been recorded for decades. The techniques employed to date, such as measuring the height of the ice sheet or its weight via gravity data, are good at determining the losses that end up in the ocean and drive up sea level.

However, they cannot account for the retreat of glaciers that already lie mostly below sea level in the narrow fjords around the island. In the study, satellite photos were analysed by scientists to determine the end position of Greenland’s many glaciers every month from 1985 to 2022. This showed large and widespread shortening and in total amounted to a trillion tonnes of lost ice.

“The changes around Greenland are tremendous and they’re happening everywhere – almost every glacier has retreated over the past few decades,” said Dr Chad Greene, at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US, who led the research. “It makes sense that if you dump freshwater on to the north Atlantic Ocean, then you certainly get a weakening of the Amoc, though I don’t have an intuition for how much weakening.”

The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years and in 2021 researchers spotted warning signs of a tipping point.

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Tetris: how a US teenager achieved the ‘impossible’ and what his feat tells us about human capabilities • BBC Future

Tom Stafford:

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In the dying days of 2023, US teenager Willis Gibson – online handle “Blue Scuti” – “beat” the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the video game Tetris, which was first released in 1989.

The original Tetris designers thought it couldn’t be done – the game is designed to play endlessly. The pieces fall faster and faster until a player is overwhelmed. To beat the game, a player has to achieve scores so high that the game’s memory banks overload and it crashes. Victory is achieved because the computer simply cannot continue.

As a professor of cognitive science, I’m interested in how people acquire expertise, particularly in video games, so when Gibson performed his dizzying feat, it immediately caught my eye. How this 13-year-old did it tells us a lot about how the limits of human performance are changing in the digital age.

Previously, the NES version of Tetris had only been beaten by AI. A specially designed program was able to perceive, near-instantly, the state of the Tetris game and select actions as fast as the console could register them. It played tirelessly, never making an error – something that seemed far beyond the constraints of mere human performance.

At the time, 2021, the AI-Tetris player was able to show humans previously uncharted levels of the game. Like physics at the limits of a black hole, the reality of Tetris begins to bend at the higher levels. The speed suddenly doubles at level 29, a level few humans reach and fewer survive for long. When the score counter breaks 1 million, the digits begin to be replaced by letters, and then finally glyphs from the Tetris graphic set. Eventually, the colours of the blocks warp and change, some levels are all violent pink, others have blocks so dark you can hardly see them – especially at the speed you need to act to survive.

This is the context for the game Gibson streamed on 21 December 2023, in which he played the game at increasingly frenetic speeds for 40 minutes. In the process, he set new world records for high score, levels played and lines cleared.

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Also: the psychology of Tetris: “it takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in tidying up.” Why then does it work on teenagers?
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Google is losing its Fitbit leaders and laying off hundreds of AR employees • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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Google’s hardware division just took a body blow. The company has confirmed it’s laying off hundreds of hardware workers, especially in its augmented reality division — and 9to5Google is reporting that Fitbit co-founders James Park, Eric Friedman, and other Fitbit leaders are leaving the company entirely.

Here’s Google’s statement to 9to5Google:

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A few hundred roles are being eliminated in DSPA with the majority of impacts on the 1P AR Hardware team. While we are making changes to our 1P AR hardware team, Google continues to be deeply committed to other AR initiatives, such as AR experiences in our products, and product partnerships.

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Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini confirmed the numbers to The Verge.

This is likely the end of Fitbit as we know it, just over four years after Google bought the company for $2.1bn in November 2019.

Not that this entirely comes as a surprise. My colleague Victoria Song spent a good portion of last year writing about how Google was not only dropping the ball with Fitbit, but hanging users out to dry by axing beloved features, presiding over multi-day outages, and generally pushing people towards a Pixel Watch instead of a Fitbit band. The company even quietly pulled Fitbit products from over a dozen countries.

I’m not going to say we told you so, particularly since the Pixel Watch is shaping up to be a decent device, but… we definitely discussed the possibility that Google-Fitbit could be quite a mess.

For its part, Google’s spokesperson says that Fitbit will live on: “We remain very committed to serving our Fitbit users well, innovating in the health space with personal AI, and building on the momentum with Pixel Watch, the redesigned Fitbit app, Fitbit Premium service, and the Fitbit tracker line. This work will continue to be a key part of our new org model,” Mencini tells The Verge.

…When Google says its “1P AR hardware team” is seeing the majority of impacts, that means it’s chosen to spend fewer dollars on developing its own glasses by itself.

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The incredible shrinking podcast industry • Semafor

Max Tani:

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Apple has quietly tightened its reporting of how many people listen to podcasts, sending shock waves through an embattled audio industry still reeling from the end of the COVID-era production bubble.

The shift, Apple wrote in a blog post, was technical: the dominant podcasting platform [Apple Podcasts] had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.

But while few users noticed the shift, some of the biggest podcasts in the world saw their official listener numbers drop dramatically. Long-running shows that publish frequently were hit particularly hard. A user who listened to a show like The New York Times’ The Daily a few times, subscribed, but stopped listening would continue to count as a download indefinitely. Even better under the old rules: for people who listened to a show, dropped off for a while, but started listening again later, Apple would automatically download every show in between. The arrangement drove big download numbers, a crucial metric for ad sales and a sign of the vast reach of podcasts as a medium.

For instance, The Daily and Dateline both publicly touted reaching over a billion total downloads. But representatives for these shows would not say if those numbers or other impressive daily or weekly download stats are still accurate, though several of the biggest podcasts acknowledged privately to Semafor that they had seen noticeable declines, and were still trying to determine the actual size of their audience following the change.

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Some are seeing downloads reduced by as much as 40%. But the move certainly makes sense: if you haven’t listened to something for two weeks, you’re probably not really into it. Though that’s going to kill a lot of advertising.
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OpenAI quietly removes ban on military use of its AI tools • CNBC

Hayden Field:

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OpenAI has quietly walked back a ban on the military use of ChatGPT and its other artificial intelligence tools.

The shift comes as OpenAI begins to work with the U.S. Department of Defense on AI tools, including open-source cybersecurity tools, Anna Makanju, OpenAI’s VP of global affairs, said Tuesday in a Bloomberg House interview at the World Economic Forum alongside CEO Sam Altman.

Up until at least Wednesday, OpenAI’s policies page specified that the company did not allow the usage of its models for “activity that has high risk of physical harm” such as weapons development or military and warfare. OpenAI has removed the specific reference to the military, although its policy still states that users should not “use our service to harm yourself or others,” including to “develop or use weapons.”

“Because we previously had what was essentially a blanket prohibition on military, many people thought that would prohibit many of these use cases, which people think are very much aligned with what we want to see in the world,” Makanju said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The news comes after years of controversy about tech companies developing technology for military use, highlighted by the public concerns of tech workers — especially those working on AI.

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Internet cafes introduced Uganda to the internet; now they’re closing • Rest of World

Jon Lubwama:

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In 2014, [then 30-year-old Derrick] Bukenya launched his own internet cafe, BK Internet Cafe, in Mpererwe, a low-income Kampala suburb. At the time, the Uganda Communications Commission estimated that Uganda had about 10 million internet users, representing roughly a third of the country’s population.

“When I launched my cafe, the business was booming,” Bukenya said. He launched four more cafes in the neighborhood and remembers them being packed with young people. “Facebook was the go-to social network. Young people could spend hours just chatting and catching up with friends,” he said. “Then also Google had taken a foothold, so our customers were just searching for anything. YouTube was prohibited because it would consume a lot of data and the internet speeds weren’t great anyway.” 

Bukenya said the industry shifted in 2016. Cheap Chinese smartphones suddenly became widely available across Uganda. “All of a sudden, one could get a good smartphone for less than 500,000 shillings ($170),” he said. In their wake, telecom providers launched cheap internet and data bundles.

Over the next three years, internet cafes in Mpererwe closed down. “By the time Covid-19 came around, I was the only internet cafe left standing,” said Bukenya, who has since diversified his revenue. He now makes the most money selling movies, and offering printing, photocopying, and scanning services.

Bukenya admits the internet part of his cafe no longer attracts users. Some days, no one uses the computers at all. “I don’t think it makes sense to have a business that serves very few users,” he said. “Printing, scanning, and photocopying documents sustain us for now … but I am thinking of pivoting to a coworking space to tap into the remote workers.”

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Apple grabs the top spot in the smartphone market in 2023 along with record high market share • IDC

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The last time a company not named Samsung was at the top of the smartphone market was 2010, and for 2023 it is now Apple. A sort of shifting of power at the top of the largest consumer electronics market was driven by an all-time high market share for Apple and a first time at the top.

Overall, the global smartphone market remains challenged, but momentum is moving quickly toward recovery. According to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, global smartphone shipments declined 3.2% year over year to 1.17bn units in 2023.

While this marks the lowest full-year volume in a decade, driven largely by macroeconomic challenges and elevated inventory early in the year, growth in the second half of the year has cemented the expected recovery for 2024. The fourth quarter (4Q23) saw 8.5% year-over-year growth and 326.1m shipments, higher than the forecast of 7.3% growth.

“While we saw some strong growth from low-end Android players like Transsion and Xiaomi in the second half of 2023, stemming from rapid growth in emerging markets, the biggest winner is clearly Apple,” said Nabila Popal, research director with IDC’s Worldwide Tracker team. “Not only is Apple the only player in the Top 3 to show positive growth annually, but also bags the number 1 spot annually for the first time ever. All this despite facing increased regulatory challenges and renewed competition from Huawei in China, its largest market.

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Maybe foldables weren’t the answer? Apple reached the top because it lives at the premium end, and while the market shrank overall the premium end stayed the same. Overall, it barely sold more – IDC puts it at 3% – while Samsung’s figure shrank by 14%. You could guess more of that reduction is at the low end.

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Apple revises US App Store rules to let developers link to outside payment methods, but it will still charge a commission • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Apple has also confirmed that it will charge a commission on purchases made through alternative payment platforms. This commission will be 12% for developers who are a member of the App Store Small Business Program and 27% for other apps.

The commission will apply to “purchases made within seven days after a user taps on an External Purchase Link and continues from the system disclosure sheet to an external website.”

Apple says developers will be required to provide accounting of qualifying out-of-app purchases and remit the appropriate commissions.

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“To help ensure collection of Apple’s commission, developers are required to provide a periodic accounting of qualifying out-of-app purchases, and Apple has a right to audit developers’ accounting to ensure compliance with their commission obligations and to charge interest and offset payments.”

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As both this Court and the Ninth Circuit recognized, collecting a commission in this way will impose additional costs on Apple and the developers.

However, Apple also says that collecting this commission will be “exceedingly difficult and, in many cases, impossible.”

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Darkly hilarious. Apple doing the absolute bare minimum to comply with the letter of the law, while not letting go in the slightest of its grip on the App Store and its monetisation thereof.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified