An AI system can apparently identify whether separate fingerprints come from the same person. CC-licensed photo by jakub on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Just pointing it out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Avoiding another Horizon • Public Digital

Mike Bracken:

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In the early 2010s, I was the UK government’s Chief Digital Officer and running the Government Digital Service (GDS). This was a new team in the heart of government specifically set up to show a different way of working, and stop the state from blundering into more disasters like Horizon. GDS was created in the wake of the NHS National Programme for IT’s £10 billion collapse. This failure, now more than 15 years past, bears similar imprints to what has happened in the Post Office.

Why did this happen again? There is no doubt that as the suppliers of flawed technology, Fujitsu have a case to answer. During my time in government, it was made clear to me that they and the Post Office would be following the same playbook they always had, regardless of how often that had been shown up as inadequate. They had no interest in embracing the new ways of working GDS was advocating for.

But it is important to stress – this is not simply an IT failure or one rogue supplier. This is an organisational and systemic failure. One where senior officials and politicians did not get it right in ways that are predictable and repeated.

Oversight and governance in the departments’ responsible for governing the Post Office (and the Royal Mail previously) should have sounded the alarm far earlier. But they didn’t. I believe one reason they didn’t, based on my Whitehall experience, was that those supposed to be on watch lacked the experience and curiosity required to intervene effectively in technology-enabled programmes. They took the Post Office and Fujitsu at their word, and didn’t know the right questions to ask. Suppliers may occasionally behave badly, but they usually behave rationally. Fujitsu couldn’t have done this if they had been managed differently.

This yawning gap in knowledge and curiosity around technology remains true across senior levels of government, the civil service, parliament, and the judiciary.

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I worked at The Guardian at the same time as Mike; he was impressive there, and did even better work at GDS, which was transformed. Too late, of course, for Horizon.
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Gasoline is cheap right now — but charging an EV is still cheaper • Yale Climate Connections

Karin Kirk:

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It was easy to make the case for the low cost of electric vehicle charging way back in 2022 when gasoline prices were high and charging an EV was about 70% cheaper than filling up at the pump. But now that the price of gasoline is dipping below $3 per gallon, is it still cheaper to fill up a car on electrons rather than gasoline? The answer is yes — by a lot. 

By far the least expensive and least polluting option is to get around on foot, bike, or public transit. But if you need a personal vehicle, EVs cost less to drive compared to a similar gasoline-powered vehicle, and they also emit less carbon pollution. 

The map [at the post] shows the price of charging an EV expressed in “eGallons,” which is the cost of charging an EV by an amount equivalent to one gallon of gasoline. In other words, the map shows how cheap gasoline would have to be in order to be on par with the cost of at-home EV charging.

In most parts of the country, charging an EV is equivalent to a gasoline price of $1 to $2 per gallon. The national average is $1.41 per eGallon, which is less than half the current gasoline price of $3.09 (as of Jan. 5, 2024).

Washington State and Louisiana have the lowest residential electricity rates, so those are the cheapest states to charge up an EV, clocking in at less than one dollar per gallon-equivalent. Electrified driving is an especially good deal in Washington state because gasoline is over $4 per gallon, making EV charging less than one-quarter of the price of gasoline.

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$3 per US gallon is £2.35 per 3.78 litres, or 62 pence per litre. Present UK petrol prices are £1.51 per litre in my county. Though electricity is pricier too. As are EVs – though that is changing rapidly.
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The rise and fall of podcasting • Adam Davidson

Davidson (who runs a podcasting company) with a detailed look at its economics, particularly for celebrity ones:

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If one of these [celebrity] shows hits big, you get: $100,000 PER EPISODE (1 million listeners, paying $100 per 1,000 listeners). And you get to do 50 episodes in a year. So, you get $5m in revenue. Off of ONE show. The other nine shows you do could be total failures. But let’s say two of them become 500,000 listener shows. Then you’re making another $100K/week, or $5m/year. And most of that is pure profit, because you’ve covered all your costs with your one hit. The other shows can all be failures and you’re still profitable. But if those shows can break even at around 60,000 listeners per episode, which is pretty low for a celebrity-driven show. And every listener above that is profit.

For the people laying out the dough – the investors and the executives who control the spend – these are low risk engagements. You do have to promise $250k up front. But most of the profit for the talent is only realized if the show is successful. So, yes, you do have to give something like 25% to 35% to talent and their team. But you are still keeping a ton of dough. And if the show is created and owned by the talent, they get all the upside.

Again, these numbers are quite rough and each company’s picture is different. But you start to see why Conan O’Brien sold his company for $150m and the Smartless folks are getting as much as $80m from Amazon.

And this shows why the companies that focused on highly-produced, non-celebrity shows have gone defunct or are heading there. Gimlet, Three Uncanny Four, Pushkin, and on and on.

I know many (most?) of the people involved in most of these companies. And, yes, we have all made a lot of dumb choices and bad decisions. But that was true during the fast-growth stage of podcasting, too. I’m not sure there was any set of choices in which these companies would have succeeded. What changed is that podcasting became mature and the economics fundamentally shifted.

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There’s also a piece at the Daily Beast about financial troubles at Pushkin Industries, Malcolm Gladwell’s baby.
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eBay hit with $3m fine as it admits to “terrorizing innocent people” • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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eBay has agreed to pay $3m—the maximum criminal penalty possible—after employees harassed, intimidated, and stalked a Massachusetts couple in retaliation for their critical reporting of the online marketplace in 2019.

“Today’s settlement holds eBay criminally and financially responsible for emotionally, psychologically, and physically terrorizing the publishers of an online newsletter out of fear that bad publicity would adversely impact their Fortune 500 company,” Jodi Cohen, the special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Boston Division, said in a Justice Department press release Thursday.

eBay’s harassment campaign against the couple, David and Ina Steiner, stretched for 18 days in August 2019 and was led by the company’s former senior director of safety and security, Jim Baugh. It started when then-CEO Devin Wenig and then-chief communications officer Steven Wymer decided to “take down” the Steiners after growing frustrated with their coverage of eBay in a newsletter called EcommerceBytes.

Executing the “takedown,” Baugh and six co-conspirators “put the victims through pure hell,” acting US attorney Joshua S. Levy wrote in the DOJ’s press release.

The former eBay employees turned the Steiners’ world “upside-down through a never-ending nightmare of menacing and criminal acts,” Levy said. That included “sending anonymous and disturbing deliveries,” such as “a book on surviving the death of a spouse, a bloody pig mask, a fetal pig and a funeral wreath and live insects,” the DOJ said.

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You have to wonder about how some people behave once they’re inside organisations. Would they do this to their neighbours? Did they think being at eBay made them beyond the law? Did Baugh tell anyone above him what he would do? (The DoJ letter isn’t clear on that.)
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Praised for AI breakthrough by Google CEO, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t sure which one • Business Insider

Kwan Wei Kevin Tan:

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In 2021, Zuckerberg met Google CEO Sundar Pichai at an Allen & Co. conference in Idaho. During their meeting, Pichai expressed his admiration for an AI breakthrough that Facebook had accomplished.

However, Zuckerberg didn’t know what achievement Pichai was talking about, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing sources familiar with the meeting. [Translation: someone at Meta who Zuck talked to about the meeting – Overspill Ed.]

The meeting ended up igniting Zuckerberg’s interest in the field. Zuckerberg requested a briefing on his company’s latest work on AI after talking to Pichai, per Bloomberg.

Meta’s former vice president for AI, Jerome Pesenti, told Bloomberg that Zuckerberg has now “educated himself a lot more” about the subject. [Told you – Overspill Ed.]

Zuckerberg was, at one point, focused on his company’s other fields of work. The Facebook founder flirted with cryptocurrencies in 2019 when the company announced that it was launching its cryptocurrency, Libra. Regulatory hurdles eventually caused interest in the project to peter out.

Zuckerberg then decided to make a huge push into the metaverse. In October 2021, he renamed Facebook, rechristening it “Meta.” That strategy, unfortunately, has yet to pay off for Zuckerberg. The company division that works on virtual and augmented reality projects lost $4bn in the first quarter of 2023.

But Zuckerberg has been quick to pivot his company toward working on AI. “In terms of investment priorities, AI will be our biggest investment area in 2024 for both engineering and compute resources,” Zuckerberg said in an earnings call last year.

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Chrome users now worth 30% less money thanks to Google’s cookie killing, ad firm says • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

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On January 4th, Google disabled tracking cookies for 30 million Chrome users, amounting to just 1% of the 3 billion people who use the internet’s most popular browser. By the end of the year, Google will block these cookies entirely and replace them with a new tracking system that’s a bit more private called “Privacy Sandbox.” That will spell the death of cookies across the web, ushering in one of the biggest changes in the history of the internet. It’s early days for the project, but one company’s data offers a preview of how it will affect the digital economy.

According to Raptive, an ad tech firm, Google’s new cookieless users are bringing in a whopping 30% less revenue. What’s really surprising, however, is that Raptive thinks that’s good news.

“If you had asked me a week ago what I thought the numbers could be, I would have said cookieless users would perform 50% worse, so I’m optimistic,” said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Raptive. “The goal is to design a system to increase privacy and also help publishers keep making money, and a 30% drop in monetization feels like a hill that can be climbed.”

The difference comes down to how digital advertising works. When you visit a website with ads on it (Gizmodo.com, for example), an auction happens in fractions of a second to determine which ads you see. Companies that want to show targeted ads set up bids in advance, saying how much they’re willing to pay for certain demographics, say, up to $1 for a man between 25-30 in Chicago who’s demonstrated an interest in buying a car. So when you load a webpage, a call goes into the advertising system and says, “There’s a guy here, these are the details we know about him. Now who wants to show him an ad?”

The problem is cookies are one of the primary ways that information is collected and shared on the web. Without cookies, it’s hard for websites to tell the ad system much more than “there’s a person here reading this really cool article.” Advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much for random internet users, so every time the page loads for a cookieless Chrome user, it’s bringing in less money than it might have before.

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However advertisers reckon that 30% is a hill that they can climb by using new tracking technologies. They never give up.
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AI can now link two separate fingerprints from same person

Kaya Burgess:

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Scientists have shocked forensics experts by finding that it is possible to detect when two different fingerprints come from the same person, claiming that it could help in reopening cold cases and overturning wrongful convictions.

It is a cornerstone of forensic science that all fingerprints are unique, even among the ten fingers on an individual’s hands.

This means that if a burglar leaves a fingerprint from their index finger at one crime scene and a print from their little finger at another, it is impossible to tell that both came from the same criminal as the fingerprints share no common features.

Scientists from the United States now claim to have “shattered” this understanding. They performed a computer analysis of 60,000 fingerprints, feeding in pairs of prints into an artificially intelligent system called a “deep contrastive network”. Half of the pairs belonged to different people and half came from the same individual, allowing the system to learn to spot similarities between different prints from one person.

The researchers found that their system ultimately learnt to detect with 88% accuracy similarities between any two prints taken from different fingers belonging to an individual. They found that it “performed similarly across genders and races”.

…The findings were deemed so surprising that their study was rejected by an unnamed forensics journal, with researchers hearing back from one anonymous reviewer that, “it is well known that every fingerprint is unique”.

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This does challenge our understanding of how fingerprints form – as essentially random variations in ridging during development in the womb. If correct, it points to something deeper about fingerprints and even fetal development.
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Game Over: more than 30% of crypto games have been discontinued • Decrypt

Kate Irwin:

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Recent research from blockchain gaming group Game7 reported that nearly 50 crypto games stopped development in 2023. But new data collected by Big Blockchain Games List creator Jon Jordan, who also writes for BlockchainGamer.biz, suggests that the number of crypto games that have been shuttered or halted is actually much, much higher.

In fact, it’s well over triple Game7’s initial number.

Big Blockchain Game List found that 248 crypto games were discontinued or became inactive in the first half of 2023, and 162 were discontinued in the second half of last year. This means that an estimated 410 blockchain games went dark last year, making up over 30% of the 1,322 games that have ever appeared on that list.

The most common reason cited for marking a game as “discontinued” is a prolonged period of no updates or activity—meaning, a game simply went radio-silent across all its social media channels and website for months on end.

…In the case of Blankos Block Party, the Mythical Games team quietly announced the desktop game’s closure in December, just a year and a half after a splashy Epic Games Store launch. Now, the NFL Rivals developer is planning a Blankos Mobile game instead. 

Some blockchain games have been marked discontinued because they’ve deleted all their accounts and disappeared. And a few have abandoned their blockchain plans to become a cryptoless game, like Neopets Metaverse and Immortal Game. Neopets CEO Dominic Law previously told Decrypt that they ditched crypto because most of their fans simply don’t care about it, while Immortal’s team said that they transitioned their game away from blockchain because of “heavy cheating.”

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That last one puzzles me, but doesn’t have any further explanation. I thought the whole point about a blockchain was that it prevented cheating.
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US Air Force cyber analyst arrested and accused of running NFT scam • Forbes

Cyrus Farivar:

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Prosecutors in Florida have accused an active duty United States Air Force cyber analyst of conducting a “rug pull” – an NFT-fuelled scam where creators of NFTs fraudulently hype up their value and then abscond with the proceeds before the price crashes.

Devin Alan Rhoden, who had top secret clearance while serving as an airman, according to what appears to be his LinkedIn, was also allegedly involved in creating and promoting “UndeadApes NFTs,” a riff on the then-popular Bored Apes Yacht Club images in 2022, according to a 19-page criminal complaint.

The United States Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Forbes.

In preparation to release a related set of NFTs called “Undead Tombstones,” Rhoden and another organizer claimed to have made a deal with a more successful group, known as the Stoned Ape Crew. However, federal authorities allege that this arrangement was totally bogus, and the price of the new NFT collection along with two previous ones quickly collapsed.

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Shocked, I tell you, shocked to hear that pump-and-dump would be used in conjunction with such inherently valuable items as NFTs. You never hear about pump-and-dump with uncut diamonds, do you.
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Inside the Messenger’s money-torching bet to make media great again • The Washington Post

Laura Wagner:

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“There’s a group of people who are actually attempting to do the kind of reporting you would expect from an aspiring national news outlet,” said a staffer who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain work relationships. “It just gets drowned out by chum.”

The thing about chum, though, is that a lot of fish are willing to bite. Recent headlines have included: “TikTok Influencer Says She Was Shamed For Wearing ‘Inappropriate’ Amazon Dress to a Wedding,” “Florida Man ‘Launched’ Into Garbage Truck During Trash Pickup Gone Wrong” “Mom of Three Says ‘Crackling’ Noise Inside Her Ear Turned Out To Be a Spider’s Nest.”

[Founder of The Messenger, and previously The Hill, Jimmy] Finkelstein’s new business idea was vintage, harking back to the early 2010s when publishers wanted two things: content and more content. The operating idea back then was that more stories meant more clicks meant more ad sales and, eventually, profitability.

“There’s a direct correlation between traffic and revenue,” he said last week, “because you bring in programmatic revenue by increasing your traffic.”

Yet it’s a business model that many other publishers have lately steered away from.

“The relationship between traffic and sustainable revenue, let alone profit, is not as obvious as it once was,” said Caitlin Petre, author of “All the News That’s Fit to Click” and a Rutgers University professor of media studies. She cited a number of reasons businesses are hesitant to advertise on news sites — social media platforms that have de-emphasized news, privacy-minded regulations that made it harder to target specific reader niches, fear of wasting ad dollars on what might turn out to be junky AI-generated sites.

There is still money to be made from digital advertising, she added. “The question is whether it can keep a media business afloat.”

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Finkelstein is 74 (maybe 75 now) and I think he’s ten years behind the times in his understanding of modern web media. Which is why The Messenger is gently crisping.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified