The Voyager spacecraft has suffered the same fate as HAL: gone mad in the vastness of space. CC-licensed photo by Tutoriales CIS on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Major Tom too? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI • Ars Technica
Timothy Lee and James Grimmelmann:
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This article is written by two authors. One of us is a journalist who has been on the copyright beat for nearly 20 years. The other is a law professor who has taught dozens of courses on IP and Internet law. We’re pretty sure we understand how copyright works. And we’re here to warn the AI community that it needs to take these lawsuits seriously.
In its blog post responding to the Times lawsuit, OpenAI wrote that “training AI models using publicly available Internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents.”
The most important of these precedents is a 2015 decision that allowed Google to scan millions of copyrighted books to create a search engine. We expect OpenAI to argue that the Google ruling allows OpenAI to use copyrighted documents to train its generative models. Stability AI and Anthropic will undoubtedly make similar arguments as they face copyright lawsuits of their own.
These defendants could win in court—but they could lose, too. As we’ll see, AI companies are on shakier legal ground than Google was in its book search case. And the courts don’t always side with technology companies in cases where companies make copies to build their systems. The story of MP3.com illustrates the kind of legal peril AI companies could face in the coming years.
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Well, they make an argument. Perhaps Mike Masnick (see below) will be along in a week or so to tell us how wrong they are, because credentials aren’t necessarily what wins legal arguments; the precision of your argument is.
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Has Wired given up on fact checking, given its facts-optional screed against Section 230 that gets almost everything wrong? • Techdirt
Mike Masnick:
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let’s return to this article. The title is “The One Internet Hack That Could Save Everything.” With the provocative subhed: “It’s so simple: Axe 26 words from the Communications Decency Act. Welcome to a world without Section 230.”
Now, we’ve spent the better part of the last 25 years debunking nonsense about Section 230, but this may be the worst piece we’ve ever seen on this topic. It does not understand how Section 230 works. It does not understand how the First Amendment works. It’s not clear it understands how the internet works.
But also, it’s just not well written. I was completely confused about the point that the article is trying to make, and it was only on the third reading that I finally understood the extraordinarily wrong point that is at the heart of the article: that if you got rid of Section 230, websites would have to moderate based on the First Amendment — but also they would magically get rid of harassment and other bad content, but be forced to leave up the good content. It’s magic fairytale thinking that has nothing to do with reality. There’s also some nonsense about privacy and copyright that have nothing to do with Section 230 at all, but the authors seem wholly unaware of that fairly basic fact.I’m going to skip over the first section of the article, because it’s just confused babble, and move onto some really weird claims about Section 230. Specifically, that it somehow created a business model.
… Literally none of that makes sense, nor is any citation or explanation given for what is entirely a “vibes” based argument. Section 230 has nothing to do with the advertising market directly. Advertising existed prior to Section 230 and has been a way to subsidize content going back centuries. It’s unclear how the authors think Section 230 is somehow responsible for internet advertising as a business model, and the article does nothing to clarify why that would be the case. Because it’s just wrong. There is no way to support it.
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I’m glad that Mike Masnick has decided to go into detail about that terrible, terrible S230 article, because if he had thought it had any merit I’d be seriously worried that I’d lost my bearings. Generally, if I find myself disagreeing with Masnick, I consider my position carefully because there’s a high probability it’s me that’s wrong.
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Google’s retiring of Internet archiving tool draws ire of China researchers • Al Jazeera
Erin Hale:
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Late last year, Google began quietly removing links to cached pages from its search results, a function that had allowed Internet users to view old versions of web pages.
Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, confirmed earlier this month that the function had been discontinued. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it,” Sullivan said in a post on X earlier this month.
Although originally introduced to improve internet performance, Google’s cache function had the unintended effect of boosting transparency and became an invaluable resource for researchers.
Academics, journalists and others used cached pages to view past incarnations of websites and deleted content – a particularly useful tool for China’s internet, which Beijing carefully edits to avoid embarrassment and ward off potential dissent.
“The loss of the Google cache function will be a blow to China researchers who have long leaned on this function to preserve access to information that may later be removed, particularly in research citations,” Kendra Schaefer, the head of tech policy research at Trivium China, told Al Jazeera.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the change to Al Jazeera. “Google’s cached page feature was born over two decades ago, at a time when pages might not be dependably available. The web – and web serving as a whole – has greatly improved since then, making the need for cached pages less necessary,” the spokesperson said by email.
China’s “Great Firewall” means that popular sites from Wikipedia to Facebook are inaccessible without a virtual private network, while its government censors trawl the web for sensitive content to remove.
…There are alternatives to Google’s cached pages, namely the non-profit Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
But Google’s removal of cached links makes it harder to know what is missing in the first place, said Dakota Cary, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.
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The lonely, lonely death of Voyager • Crooked Timber
Doug Muir:
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We thought we knew how [the spacecraft] Voyager would end. The power would gradually, inevitably, run down. The instruments would shut off, one by one. The signal would get fainter. Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.
We didn’t expect that it would go mad.
In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data. A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.
The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — the operating system, as it were. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.
(This is a problem NASA long since solved. These days, every space probe that launches, leaves a perfect duplicate back on Earth. Remember in “The Martian”, how they had another copy of Pathfinder sitting under a tarp in a warehouse? That’s accurate. It’s been standard practice for 30 years. But back in 1977, nobody had thought of that yet.)
Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens. Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds. The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age.
And they’re trying to fix the problem. But right now, it doesn’t look good. You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away. (For starters, there isn’t the bandwidth.) They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day. They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds.
So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat. And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.
And that’s all.
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The EU is formalizing rules for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere • The Verge
Justine Calma:
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The European Council and European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on Tuesday to create the first-of-its-kind certification framework for carbon removal technologies. The new climate tech has yet to prove itself at scale, but the EU is already folding it into its plan to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Net zero implies that the bloc would resort to capturing any remaining CO2 emissions that it hasn’t been able to prevent, either by harnessing the natural ability of plants to absorb carbon dioxide or by building technologies that filter CO2 out of the air or seawater.
There are inherent risks to that net-zero strategy — which is why rules like the ones laid out today are so important. They’ll dictate what counts as carbon removal, hopefully sifting out shoddy projects that don’t meaningfully fight climate change. Lax rules — or no rules at all — could give companies a way to keep polluting while misleadingly promising to draw down those emissions later. If those promises fall through, or the technologies they rely on fail, then it leaves behind all of that pollution that could have been prevented in the first place by opting for clean energy instead of carbon removal.
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Formalisation is good: there have been plenty of “set-aside” projects which are anything but in reality. Strong certification is really needed.
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‘Apple Ring’ allegedly in development to rival Samsung Galaxy Ring • MacRumors
Tim Hardwick:
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Apple has toyed with the idea of a ring wearable for several years, as indicated by several patents, but with Samsung preparing to bring its own product to market, the time could be ripe for Apple to follow it with something that embodies CEO Tim Cook’s mantra, “be best, not first.”
According to the Electronic Times, Apple has been paying close attention to the market for signs that a smart ring would be a popular, less intrusive alternative to a watch, that can be worn for longer and is easier to sleep with.
Apple is said to be seriously weighing up the idea as a viable expansion of its wearables lineup, and has been increasingly applying for patents related to an NFC-enabled finger-worn device as it coordinates the timing of the release.
“It seems likely that commercialization is imminent,” said an industry insider quoted in the machine-translated report.
The rumor comes as Samsung prepares to unveil a Galaxy Ring at its second Galaxy Unpacked 2024 event, which is likely to take place in the second half of July. The Korean firm teased the product’s existence at the end of its first Unpacked event in January, and it is now expected to enter mass production in the second half of the year.
Besides its rumored ability to measure blood flow, the Galaxy Ring is also expected to feature ECG monitoring, sleep tracking, and functionalities for controlling other devices and making wireless payments remotely. The device is expected to come in several sizes.
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My reading is this is that Samsung really hopes Apple is developing a ring, because that would validate the ring that it is making. In – surprise! – several sizes.
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Fake funeral live stream scams are all over Facebook • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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Facebook is awash with scams that direct visitors to fake live streams of funeral services, preying on relatives and friends of the deceased when they might be at their most vulnerable, 404 Media has found. The scams involve pulling details of real deceased people from legitimate funeral services pages and then making copycat announcements, before pushing victims to a site that asks for their credit card information allegedly in order to watch the funeral of their loved one.
The scams cause “panic on the day where you shouldn’t be thinking of that,” the cousin of one recently deceased person, whose name and photo were recently used in a scam, told 404 Media. 404 Media is not publishing his name or that of the deceased relative for privacy reasons. The relative described the scam as “disgusting.”
In that specific case, a Facebook account pointed visitors to a tinyurl link. “Please Like,Share Your Family and Friends,” a post on the Facebook account read, next to a photo of the deceased. “You will get the link once the registration is complete.I introduced this rule only for scams.thank you.”
That link then went to a website claiming to host a livestream of the deceased’s funeral service, complete with a video player that takes a few seconds to load. “WATCH LIVE NOW,” a button underneath the player reads. On other nearly identical scam sites 404 Media found, clicking such a link directs visitors to enter their credit card information, presumably the point at which the scammers extract value from their unsuspecting victims.
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Facebook has become a place to find all the scammers’ marks in the world in one convenient location.
In passing, 404 Media – set up by journalists laid off by Vice/Motherboard when it hit hard times – gets better and better (because they were and are damn good journalists), and requires email registration on the basis that it lets them stay in touch directly with readers. It’s a smart move, in these times when sites are so plentiful and hard to tell apart.
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Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: please stop hurting journalism • Check My Ads
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Josh Jackson was shocked when he found out what term, if used in the music publication he co-founded, could automatically strip an article of ad revenue.
It was the word “song.”
That was just one of more than 4,000 “negative keywords” a major advertiser looking to run ads on Paste Magazine, Jackson’s website, included in a brand safety spreadsheet it shared with him.
And now that his magazine resurrected the iconic feminist media outlet Jezebel last November, essential journalism going unfunded because of brand safety concerns has become a more urgent issue. Jezebel has even launched a subscription option to help fund its reporting, filling in a revenue gap created by brand safety tech.
“We’ve been doing this a long time, but hadn’t really felt the effects of brand safety until we purchased Jezebel,” Jackson told Check My Ads. “(We) very quickly got into the deep end on everything brand safety related and it’s just been blowing my mind to see.”
Jackson — or anyone who cares about quality journalism — should find this brand safety technology mind-blowing (and not in a good way).
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Since you wonder: “Check My Ads Institute is an independent watchdog reshaping the digital adtech industry from within its ranks — and building a new sustainable standard in digital advertising.” Interesting lineup of staff and directors, including Jean Donovan, who was recently “let go” from Harvard, allegedly after pressure from Facebook.
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Walmart acquiring smart TV maker Vizio for $2.3bn to bulk up advertising business • Variety
Todd Spangler:
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The companies announced Tuesday that they have entered into an agreement for Walmart to acquire Vizio, a leading seller of value-priced TV sets and connected TV ads in the US. The deal would make Walmart a significant player in connected TV advertising, competing with players including Roku, Amazon, Google/YouTube and Samsung Ads.
The combination promises to accelerate Walmart’s US. advertising business, called Walmart Connect, by bringing together Vizio’s advertising business business with Walmart’s reach and resources. Walmart Connect revenue increased 22% year over year for the quarter ended Jan. 31 (but the company did not report dollar figures). Globally, Walmart’s ad revenue grew by 28% to $3.4 billion for its 2024 fiscal year ended in January. According to Walmart, the deal for Vizio also will let the retailer “connect with and serve its customers in new ways” including through “innovative television and in-home entertainment and media experiences.”
“Put simply, the deal would combine an emerging retail media/direct response powerhouse [in Walmart], with [Vizio’s] vertically integrated, connected TV/branding advertising business (including data) to create a full-funnel offering for advertisers,” New Street Research analyst Dan Salmon wrote in a note. For Walmart, the deal “would have the added benefit of creating an offering that is more attractive to non-endemic advertisers (i.e. beyond third-party sellers transacting on Walmart Marketplace)” to those that don’t sell through Walmart but want to reach viewers on Vizio TVs.
The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. Vizio’s board has unanimously approved the transaction, and shareholders owning 89% of the voting shares in the company have also OK’d the deal. According to Vizio, no other stockholder approval is required to complete the transaction.
Irvine, Calif.-based Vizio was founded in 2002. Today, Vizio counts more than 500 direct advertiser customers, including “many of the Fortune 500.”
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Advertising! Everyone’s advertising everything to everyone all at once all the time! Advertising! Give me more! (Ignoring Vizio having been successfully sued for unannounced tracking between 2014 and 2017. All in the name of advertising! It was necessary!)
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Finally, scientists uncover the genetic basis of fingerprints • The Scientist Magazine®
James Gaines:
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[The] story begins in the outer layer of body tissue, called the epithelium. [At the University of Edinburgh, Denis] Headon’s team ultimately found that fingerprints start out looking very similar to hair follicles: Both begin as small discs of cells on the epithelium, and in both cases, the cells turn on genes for a suite of proteins including EDAR and WNT—which are respectively related to how epithelial cells and cells in general migrate, differentiate, and mature. However, hair follicles go on to recruit cells from layers below the epithelium, forming a deep tube where hair will eventually grow. Slight differences in gene expression prevent this recruitment step from happening in fingerprints.
Those same differences in gene expression also seem to set up a Turing pattern, named for the English mathematician Alan Turing who first hypothesized its existence. Back in 1952, Turing suggested that natural biological patterns like stripes or spots could form in the presence of two molecules: a slow-moving activator and a fast-moving inhibitor. The activator would do three things: 1) tell cells to do something, such as make colored pigment; 2) tell cells to make more activator; and 3) tell cells to start making its inhibitor. Meanwhile, the inhibitor tells the cell to slow down activator production (and thus, ultimately, to make less of itself). This means that the activator and inhibitor are always made in overall proportion to each other, and the whole system can propagate from even a single initiation point.
…Some of the team’s colleagues—Benjamin Walker, Adam Townsend, and Andrew Krause—created an online simulator called VisualPDE where folks can experiment with Turing patterns and initiation sites. VisualPDE’s simulation is not unique to fingerprints but can illustrate how small changes can create unique patterns.
Rasmussen says he’d be interested in seeing if scientists could reprogram the process, creating hair follicles or prints where there had been none before. That’s the hope, Headon says: that somewhere down the road this work could lead to therapies for congenital conditions or medical regeneration.
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Definitely recommend having a play with VisualPDE. This story came out a year ago, but still fun.
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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: if there’s ever an independently verified piece of information about Neuralink, rather than tweets from Musk, I’ll link to it.
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 