The quality of USB memory sticks is falling, according to new research, because flawed memory is being resold. CC-licensed photo by Brett Jordan on Flickr.
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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.
A selection of 10 links for you. But which year? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Biden leading US push for OpenRAN intended to undercut Huawei • The Washington Post
Eva Dou:
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As President Biden met with heads of state around the world these past couple of years, he’s been repeating a curious phrase: “Open RAN.”
This obscure technology for cellular towers — which the Brookings Institution once dubbed the “Huawei killer” — is Washington’s anointed champion to try to unseat Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies from its throne as the largest supplier of the “pipes” that carry the world’s internet data and phone calls.
Open radio access networks, or OpenRAN, is an emerging technology for cell towers that allows for the use of mix-and-match parts from different vendors — a little akin to Google’s Android ecosystem. This diverges from the Apple-esque, proprietary, all-in-one systems from Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia that dominate the market. US officials hope that this new initiative will help US vendors get back in a game they were largely squeezed out of during two decades of globalization.
Biden’s personal appeals to the leaders of India, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and other countries reflect the issue as a top priority in Washington. A broad administration push is underway to persuade countries around the world to say “yes” to OpenRAN and “no” to Huawei.
“This has been a whole-of-government approach,” Alan Davidson, assistant secretary of commerce and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) administrator, said in an interview. “We’ve been working very closely with the State Department, with the White House. …We’re trying to bring all the tools that we have to bear.”
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As you might expect, Nokia and Ericsson aren’t that mad keen about an open standard backed by the US government. (Thanks G for the link.)
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The Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point which would see extreme climate change within decades • The Conversation
Henk A. Dijkstra, René van Westen and Michael Kliphuis are scientists at Utrecht University:
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Instruments deployed in the Atlantic ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies also suggest that the circulation has reached a dangerous tipping point in the past that sent it into a precipitous, unstoppable decline, and that it could hit that tipping point again as the planet warms and glaciers and ice sheets melt.
In a new study using the latest generation of Earth’s climate models, we simulated the flow of fresh water until the ocean circulation reached that tipping point.
The results showed that the circulation could fully shut down within a century of hitting the tipping point, and that it’s headed in that direction. If that happened, average temperatures would drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see severe and cascading consequences around the world.
We also discovered a physics-based early warning signal that can alert the world when the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing its tipping point.
…Regions that are influenced by the Gulf Stream receive substantially less heat when the circulation stops. This cools the North American and European continents by a few degrees.
The European climate is much more influenced by the Gulf Stream than other regions. In our experiment, that meant parts of the continent changed at more than 5ºF (3ºC) per decade – far faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36ºF (0.2ºC) per decade. We found that parts of Norway would experience temperature drops of more than 36ºF (20ºC). On the other hand, regions in the Southern Hemisphere would warm by a few degrees.
These temperature changes develop over about 100 years. That might seem like a long time, but on typical climate time scales, it is abrupt.
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Still looking for good news on the climate. Still not finding it.
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You’re not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse • The Register
Dan Robinson:
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A German data recovery specialist has confirmed what many readers will have suspected: USB memory sticks are getting less reliable. The cause, as you might have guessed, is inferior memory chips, while the move to storing multiple bits per flash cell also plays a part.
CBL Data Recovery posted that the quality of newer memory components in microSD and USB sticks is declining, and it reported that USB sticks where the NAND manufacturer’s logo had been removed from the chip are increasingly turning up in its data recovery laboratory.
It suspects that flash chips from manufacturers such as SK hynix, Sandisk or Samsung that fail quality control checks are being resold into the market, but marked as components with lower memory capacities.
“When we opened defective USB sticks last year, we found an alarming number of inferior memory chips with reduced capacity and the manufacturer’s logo removed from the chip,” wrote CBL Managing Director Conrad Heinicke (translated from German).
Heinicke said that many of the USB sticks actually contained microSD cards that had been mounted onto the circuit board and were being managed by an external controller chip. While USB sticks like this were mostly promotional gifts, he said, there were also branded products among them, adding: “You shouldn’t rely too much on the reliability of flash memory.”
Heinicke’s view is that the adoption of multi-level cell architectures, where a single memory cell is coaxed into storing more than just a single bit by varying the voltage, has also exacerbated the situation. With quad level cells (QLC), for example, four bits are stored per cell, which means that 16 states have to be distinguished.
This path was chosen by the NAND flash manufacturers because it delivers greater storage density, which means higher capacity drives and lower costs per GB. But it also has implications for the endurance, or longevity of the cells. In other words, the cells wear out faster the more bits they are used to store.
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Personally I only use USB sticks to store photos briefly so I can print them at Boots. It’s nearly as dead as the DVD.
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Lies, damned lies, and manometer readings • Asterisk
Jesse Smith:
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“It just knows.”
The senior HVAC [heating/ventilation/air conditioning] technician I’d been working with on a home remodel answered with the conviction of decades of experience. I, on the other hand, was less certain. How could a new furnace “know” that it had just been connected to a 20-year-old air conditioner (from a competing brand), somehow read that unit’s cooling capacity, and then calibrate its own output to the precisely required airflow? In a bid to reconcile the reading on my manometer [a device that measures fluid pressures] with the tech’s supposed savvy, I asked whether he was certain. He was, he told me, quite positive. “Tell you what,” he said. “If I’m wrong, then there’s probably 200 air conditioners in Princeton with bad airflow. And that can’t be right.”
…I’d already had — for years leading up to the housing crash — nagging concerns about the suboptimal HVAC performance on our projects. In spite of paying premiums to local, supposedly expert subcontractors, the homes we worked in were frequently plagued by problems: high humidity, lots of noise, room-to-room temperature differences, and some full mechanical failures. HVAC training classes were partly a way to boost revenue, but I also figured that having that expertise would allow me to help our HVAC subcontractors make minor tweaks to greatly improve their installations. And that’s how I found myself in a Princeton basement reading a digital display that suggested the furnace, in fact, didn’t know it had been connected to anything. It had to be told.
I soon came to realize that there were probably many more than 200 air conditioners with bad airflow in Princeton.
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You might care nothing about HVAC, but you read this and think: in how many other manual professions (because HVAC technicians have to pass certification of sorts in the US) do people just lie? Some of the scams outlined in the piece are quite eye-opening.
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Running Ethernet over existing coaxial cable • Simon Willison’s TILs
Simon Willison:
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I recently noticed that the router in our garage was providing around 900 Mbps if I plugged my laptop directly into it via an Ethernet cable, but that speed fell to around 80Mbps (less than 1/10th that speed) elsewhere in our house.
Our house came pre-wired with Ethernet, and we run a Netgear Orbi mesh network where the main router lives in the garage and the other two satellite routers are connected to it via that in-the-wall Ethernet.
Those numbers would seem to indicate that the Ethernet that is built into the walls is Cat5, which maxes out at about 100Mbps. If we had Cat5e or Cat6 those cables would likely go up to 1000Mbps instead.
After some poking around I convinced myself that this was the problem – that the cables in the walls were Cat5. I didn’t particularly want to run new cables through our walls, so I poked around with ChatGPT to see if there were any alternatives. It led me to an option called MoCA – for Multimedia over Coax Alliance.
MoCA lets you run Ethernet over existing coaxial cables. And our house has coaxial cables running from the garage to several different rooms. Crucially, MoCA 2.5 can run at up to 2.5Gbps, easily enough to handle the 900Mbps we’re getting in the garage. I ordered a ScreenBeam MoCA 2.5 Network Adapter kit from Amazon ($129.99 at time of purchase) to see if I could hook one of our Orbi satellites up to the garage router via the coaxial cables.
… and it seems to work!
Today I installed the MoCA adapters. There are two of them – one for each end of the in-wall coaxial cable. They each included a power adapter, a Cat5e Ethernet cable and a coaxial cable, plus a “splitter” in case I wanted to also run a TV off the same cable
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This seems like magic, though of course Ethernet – and any digital signalling, really – is just a carefully crafted sequence of high-frequency pulses: frequency A is a 1, frequency B is a 0, and you can multiplex many frequencies to have parallel data streams. If your cabling doesn’t attenuate the signals too much (and an in-house run of coax won’t) then you can transmit high data volumes. Which is also how Ethernet-over-mains systems work.
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Can you freeze…? • MenuAid
Dan Wirepa:
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Ever found yourself too excited at the prospect of $1 avocados, bought too many, then realised you’ll never get through them in time? Well, if you’ve ever wondered “Can you freeze avocados?”, you’re in luck!
You can freeze pretty much anything!
Learning how to utilise your freezer more effectively can help you to save money and reduce food waste. And, it can also make meal planning and preparation a breeze. Discover new foods you didn’t know you could freeze, and stop throwing perfectly good
moneyfood into the bin.«
I think this is best read with a Bob The Builder voice: “Can we freeze it? Yes We CAN!” (Perhaps Bob The Freezer. Fred The Freezer? Just spitballing here, but I’m pretty sure we can get Netflix to commission one, maybe two seasons if we work at it.)
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Bluesky opens up to the world – but can anything really replace Twitter? • The Guardian
Alex Hern:
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When it’s finished, the vision for Bluesky is to hover somewhere between a straight-up replacement for Twitter and a fully decentralised service like Mastodon, the second of the big three post-Twitter social networks: like Mastodon, the technology underpinning Bluesky should eventually allow your account to outlast the company that created it, but unlike Mastodon, Bluesky is less eager to foreground the technological differences between it and Twitter, with the vast majority of users remaining on the official app and service for the foreseeable future.
And then there’s Threads. Meta’s Twitter clone is, unquestionably, the biggest of the three by user count alone, but it’s also barely made a ripple in the wider culture. The site’s policy of suppressing political content – it won’t get algorithmic promotion, according to Threads’ platform safety policies – doesn’t help matters. There are parallels with earlier periods of online culture, here: Twitter dominated discussion even while having a fraction of the size of Facebook, and TikTok does the same despite the vastly larger number of users on YouTube.
Elizabeth Lopatto, at the Verge, explained the disconnect with a taxonomy so spot-on that I can’t do anything but quote her at length:
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The silent majority of every successful text-based social media site is lurkers. These are sane, normal people with sane, normal lives … The influencer is building a business. They are making #content … The commenter is trying to have a conversation with another human being. They are hoping, however misguidedly, to have a meaningful interaction online … The reply guy can be thought of as the most important subclass of commenter; they are specific. They are usually interacting with or on behalf of a favored internet user … Finally, we have the poster, sometimes referred to as a poaster. The poster is required for every social network to function.
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The issue facing all Twitter replacements is that the balance is off. Threads is massive, but its user base is lurkers and influencers. Like being in the audience of a Marvel movie, you may consume some professionally produced content, but you’re certainly not going to form any lasting memories. For the past year, Bluesky has been pure posters, locked in a room with each other, deprived of much of the dopamine that they need to maintain their frenetic energy. And Mastodon is a community of commenters and reply guys, decentralised to the point that it’s possible to have a nice chat, but difficult to discern a conversation arising from within.
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I tried Bluesky a while back. Didn’t catch for me.
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Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU • The Verge
Jon Porter:
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“Following a thorough assessment of all arguments, taking into account input by relevant stakeholders, and after hearing the Digital Markets Advisory Committee, the Commission found that iMessage, Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising do not qualify as gatekeeper services,” the EU’s press release reads, despite them meeting the quantitative thresholds of a core platform service designation. Both Apple and Microsoft welcomed the Commission’s decision in statements made to The Verge.
The decision is the culmination of a five month investigation which the Commission opened when it published its list of 22 regulated services last September. Although it designated Apple’s App Store, Safari browser, and iOS operating system as core platform services, it held off on making a final decision on iMessage until an investigation could be completed. A similar investigation into iPadOS is ongoing.
Meta, meanwhile, has seen two of its messaging platforms, WhatsApp and Messenger, designated as core platform services under the DMA, and has been working to make them interoperable with third-party services. The company recently outlined how WhatsApp’s interoperability will work, explaining how its users will have to opt-in to receiving communications from external messaging apps, and that these messages will then appear in a separate inbox. Companies that want to interoperate with WhatsApp will have to sign an agreement with Meta and follow its terms.
…Google expressed disappointment with the Commission’s decision. “Excluding these popular services from DMA rules means consumers and businesses won’t be offered the breadth of choice that already exists on other, more open platforms,” Google spokesperson Emily Clarke told The Verge in a statement.
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Sure that if Meta needs any help drafting its external messaging agreement then Apple has people who could help make it unpalatable to anyone by imposing per-message charges and so on.
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AI is starting to threaten white-collar jobs. Few industries are immune • WSJ
Ray Smith:
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Since last May, companies have attributed more than 4,600 job cuts to AI, particularly in media and tech, according to [senior vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Andy] Challenger’s count. The firm estimates the full tally of AI-related job cuts is likely higher, since many companies haven’t explicitly linked cuts to AI adoption in layoff announcements.
Meanwhile, the number of professionals who now use generative AI in their daily work lives has surged. A majority of more than 15,000 workers in fields ranging from financial services to marketing analytics and professional services said they were using the technology at least once a week in late 2023, a sharp jump from May, according to Oliver Wyman Forum, the research arm of management-consulting group Oliver Wyman, which conducted the survey.
Nearly two-thirds of those white-collar workers said their productivity had improved as a result, compared with 54% of blue-collar workers who had incorporated generative AI into their jobs.
Alphabet’s Google last month laid off hundreds of employees in business areas including hardware and internal-software tools as it reins in costs and shifts more investments into AI development. The language-learning software company Duolingo said in the same week that it had cut 10% of its contractors and that AI would replace some of the content creation they had handled.
…United Parcel Service said that it would cut 12,000 jobs—primarily those of management staff and some contract workers—and that those positions weren’t likely to return even when the package-shipping business picks up again. The company has ramped up its use of machine learning in processes such as determining what to charge customers for shipments. As a result, the company’s pricing department has needed fewer people.
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The one internet hack that could save everything • WIRED
Jaron Lanier and Alison Stanger (the latter is the Leng professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College) have a modest proposal – delete Section 230 from US law:
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An individual yelling threats at someone in passing, for instance, is quite different from a million people yelling threats. This type of amplified, stochastic harassment has become a constant feature of our times—chilling speech—and it is possible that in a post-230 world, platforms would be compelled to prevent it. It is sometimes imagined that there are only two choices: a world of viral harassment or a world of top-down smothering of speech. But there is a third option: a world of speech in which viral harassment is tamped down but ideas are not. Defining this middle option will require some time to sort out, but it is doable without 230, just as it is possible to define the limits of viral financial transactions to make Ponzi schemes illegal.
With this accomplished, content moderation for companies would be a vastly simpler proposition. Companies need only uphold the First Amendment, and the courts would finally develop the precedents and tests to help them do that, rather than the onus of moderation being entirely on companies alone. The United States has more than 200 years of First Amendment jurisprudence that establishes categories of less protected speech—obscenity, defamation, incitement, fighting words—to build upon, and Section 230 has effectively impeded its development for online expression. The perverse result has been the elevation of algorithms over constitutional law, effectively ceding judicial power.
When the jurisprudential dust has cleared, the United States would be exporting the democracy-promoting First Amendment to other countries rather than Section 230’s authoritarian-friendly liability shield and the sewer of least-common-denominator content that holds human attention but does not bring out the best in us.
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Included because it’s the most fantastic nonsense; spotting where the lacunae in the argument lie is mostly left as an exercise for the reader, but it’s worth pointing out that contrary to their claims, Section 230 (which specifies that providers of internet services aren’t treated as “publishers” like newspapers) has not of itself invented clickbait, attention-whoring or doxing. You only have to look at newspapers and magazines in the US and beyond which existed long before the internet to realise that.
Plus removing S230 would turn every service provider into a publisher. YouTube would grind to a halt at once as it tried to premoderate the videos being uploaded.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 