A sheep farmer in Montana had pleaded guilty to creating giant hybrids using an illegally cloned Marco Polo sheep.CC-licensed photo by Hans Birger Nilsen on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about TikTok, because why not.
A selection of 10 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.
FTC goes undercover against fake antivirus companies • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a legal complaint against two companies based in Cyprus on Wednesday that it claims are behind a wave of malicious pop-ups that trick people into downloading a fake piece of antivirus software that generated tens of millions of dollars for its operators, according to court records. The scam also involved misrepresenting results on malware repository VirusTotal as infections on the user’s own computer. (Update: after the publication of this piece the FTC announced that Restoro and Reimage will pay $26m to settle the FTC’s charges.)
The move is the latest from the FTC in a series of actions in the privacy and cybersecurity space. In January, the FTC banned a data broker called X-Mode from selling sensitive location data after I revealed it was harvesting location data from Muslim prayer and dating apps. In this case, the FTC says it went “undercover” against the two related companies, called Restoro and Reimage, to buy the deceiving software and have phone calls with company representatives.
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The FTC “made four undercover purchases” of the companies’ products, and called them too. Of course the scammers tried to upsell them as well, aiming to get hundreds of dollars.
The other day I watched a terrible film called The Beekeeper, in which Jason Statham has the part of a (retired, of course) super-adept secret agent who keeps bees, but is also, er, one of a select group called, and this will surprise you, The Beekeepers (“we look after the hive”).
Anyhow, the first act setup is a friend of his being scammed for all her life savings and more by one of these fake antivirus companies. I found it notable how we didn’t need it explained that fake antivirus popups are a thing. Of course Statham Has His Revenge on the company, though that’s only the first act. They probably could – and should – have stopped there.
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Montana man pleads guilty to creating massive franken-sheep with cloned animal parts • Gizmodo
Matt Novak:
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An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally importing animal parts from central Asia, cloning the sheep, and then breeding an enormous hybrid species.
Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, owns and operates the 215-acre “alternative livestock” ranch in Vaughn, Montana where he started this operation in 2013, according to a press release from the US Department of Justice. Alternative livestock includes hybrids of mountain sheep, mountain goats, and other large mammals which are often used for trophy hunting by wealthy people.
An unnamed accomplice of Schubart kicked off the decade-long scheme by illegally bringing biological tissue from a Marco Polo sheep, the largest sheep in the world, from Kyrgyzstan into the US in 2013, according to prosecutors.
How big are these sheep? An average male can weigh over 300 pounds with horns over five feet wide, giving them the largest sheep horns on the planet. The sheep are endangered and protected by both international treaties and US law. Montana also forbids the import of these foreign sheep or their parts in an effort to protect local American sheep from disease.
Once Schubart had smuggled his sheep parts into the US, he sent them to an unnamed lab which created 165 cloned embryos, according to the DOJ.
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The lab embryos only seem to have resulted in one viable animal, a male which was then used to sire hybrids with normal sheep. Even so, interesting that cloning has become a workable scheme for animal smuggling.
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Vision Pro is an over-engineered “devkit”.. and other thoughts • Hugo’s Blog
Hugo Barra led the design team at Google for Android, then went to Xiaomi, and then to head the Oculus division at Meta, so he knows all pitfalls and summits of VR; thus his take on the Apple Vision Pro is not short, but is very insightful:
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the Vision Pro likely draws as much as 40 watts of power, which is more than most MacBook laptops. This also means it has a power supply with the potential of generating a lot of heat. So, in addition to transferring the battery weight out of the headset, the decision to move to a tethered pack also keeps a huge heat source safely away from your head.
MY TAKE: All that said, the long-term strategic reason for having an external battery pack is to set expectations with Vision Pro users that there will always be an external box connected to the headset. In future Vision headsets, Apple should be able to comfortably start moving a lot of electronics off the headset, possibly shaving off as much half of the weight over a few generations and target around 300g. This also opens an extremely interesting path for Apple in a few years to use an iPhone, iPad or MacBook as the tethered computer driving the headset, which would dramatically simplify the headset.
Interestingly, there is a tethered VR headset in the market today that demonstrates this desirable end state. It’s the Bigscreen Beyond, the world’s smallest PC VR headset (i.e. needs to be tethered to a computer) that is lighter than even most ski goggles at 127 grams. Bigscreen’s ability to build this product is in many ways a bit of cheating since the headset was stripped of all sensors (no external cameras or eye tracking), but its existence nonetheless plays an important role in letting us experience what the future holds and where Apple’s sights are focused.
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He also thinks that “Live sports will be Apple’s secret weapon to sell a huge number of Vision Pro headsets to hardcore fans — but it’s going to be a long & expensive journey”. Agree on that.
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Meta to replace widely used data tool—and largely cut off reporter access • WSJ
Jeff Horwitz:
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Meta Platforms plans to shut down a data tool long used by academic researchers, journalists and others to monitor the spread of content on its Facebook and Instagram services, the company said on Thursday.
The social-media giant said it will decommission CrowdTangle in five months and is replacing it with a tool called the Meta Content Library, which will be available only to academic and nonprofit researchers, not to most news outlets.
CrowdTangle has been widely used by journalists, researchers and regulators seeking to understand social-media platforms and studying the viral spread of content including false information and conspiracy theories. Reporting based on data that the tool produced often caused frustration for Meta’s leaders, who have been gradually limiting the tool in recent years.
Meta has already started taking applications for access to the new tool, which it said it is continuing to develop. The company said it will be an upgrade over CrowdTangle, with features the old tool lacked, such as the ability to search content based on how widely it was viewed and to see data on public comments on posts.
Two researchers granted early access to the new system offered a mixed appraisal.
Cody Buntain, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, agreed that the new features are valuable, but said the new system lacks CrowdTangle’s ability to study social-media activity in specific geographic locations.
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I mean, it’s not as if it’s an election year in multiple countries, or that Facebook and Instagram are widely used, is it?
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Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, high court rules • The Guardian
Alex Hern:
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In a highly unusual decision, the presiding judge, Mr Justice Mellor, issued the verdict within seconds of the case concluding, promising to issue a “fairly lengthy written judgment” in due course.
“However, having considered all the evidence and submissions presented to me in this trial, I’ve reached the conclusion that the evidence is overwhelming,” Mellor said.
“First, that Dr Wright is not the author of the bitcoin white paper. Second, Dr Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011. Third, Dr Wright is not the person who created the bitcoin system. And, fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the bitcoin software.”
Wright was sued by a conglomerate of cryptocurrency companies called the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa), which sought to prevent him from continuing to claim he had invented the cryptocurrency and from using this to expand his influence over the sector.
The trial took an unusual turn even before it started. Copa, whose membership includes the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s Block, Coinbase and the bitcoin investment vehicle MicroStrategy, accused Wright of fabricating a significant quantity of the documents provided as evidence.
The group’s expert witnesses said they found hallmarks of backdated edits, created or altered using versions of software that did not exist at the time the documents were supposedly made. One document contained traces of the involvement of ChatGPT in its creation, Copa claimed, despite the fact that the software did not exist until years after the document was supposedly written.
…The expert witnesses for Wright’s defence concurred with many of the assessments, including the finding that the original document describing bitcoin had been made using OpenOffice software, while the version provided by Wright had been written using a tool called LaTeX.
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Patrick McKenzie, an advisor to Stripe and financial knower of things, has a thread about Wright. Of whom an American judge once said he’d perjured himself and filed forged documents.
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The murderous energy suck of Universal Paperclips • Hill Heat
Brad Johnson:
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Last week, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said she “couldn’t sleep last night because of the enormous energy suck from AI and crypto.”
None of us should be sleeping.
In 2003, Nick Bostrom warned, as a thought experiment, that an artificial intelligence optimized to create paperclips would decide the optimal outcome would be a universe with “a lot of paper clips but no humans.” In 2017, Frank Lantz designed a game where you can play the role of the paperclip maximizer, where you buy out competition, increase human trust by solving male pattern baldness and global warming, then release the hypnodrones and eventually convert all matter in the universe into paperclips.
As Charles Stross and others have pointed out, the AI-paperclip maximizer is already here, in the form of the modern corporation. A corporation, Stross notes, is a “hive organism” which “pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance,” with “a sociopathic lack of empathy.”
The few humans who live to serve these all-consuming organisms, such as Silicon Valley neo-fascist Marc Andreesen, glorify these goals as “techno-optimism” or “effective accelerationism.”
Even as most humans recognize the wisdom and necessity of reducing energy consumption and the pollution destroying our planet’s habitability, these corporate servants embedded in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and K Street instead want to feed the borg, with hyper-consumptive computing projects such as cryptocurrency and the machine-learning models currently dubbed “artificial intelligence.”
Bitcoin mining now uses more energy than the entire nation of the Netherlands and as much fresh water as Switzerland. And AI is catching up fast, Elizabeth Kolbert warns. This is great news for NVIDIA stock and bad news for humanity.
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Johnson has a certain, um, assertiveness about his writing. But it’s refreshing too.
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The three-dimensional porous mesh structure of Cu-based metal-organic-framework – aramid cellulose separator enhances the electrochemical performance of lithium metal anode batteries • ScienceDirect
Why? Let’s skip past the abstract and go to the Introduction, which begins thus:
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Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for high-energy-density rechargeable batteries due to their low electrode potentials and high theoretical capacities [1], [2].
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Strangely, though, ChatGPT is not cited as an author for this article. (It’s possible the authors, who are based in China, needed this for the translation, but it’s odd to not get it round-tripped back to Chinese just to check ChatGPT didn’t insert something foolish.)
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Cockpit voice recorders only record two hours at a time. The NTSB chair wants it to be 25 • CNN
Gregory Wallace:
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Under US standards, cockpit voice recorders, or CVRs, are set up to record on a two-hour loop. As each cycle repeats, the previous audio is overwritten with new sound – a factor that has impacted 10 investigations in the last five years, including several probes into near-collisions on US runways in 2023, according to National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy.
“Cockpit voice recorders aren’t just convenient … they are critical to helping us accurately pinpoint what was going on,” she said in a news conference Sunday night. “And it’s key to safety.”
It is an anomaly in the era of inexpensive and expansive digital storage, when the phone of each passenger onboard a flight could easily have more capacity than the plane’s voice recorder.
Now, Homendy wants the recording standard to change.
She is calling on the Federal Aviation Administration to require a 25-hour recording window for the cockpit voice recorder in all aircraft – a duration that is already a standard requirement under European airline regulations.
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Following on from Boeing so sadly wiping over video of its workers labouring on the door panel which blew off (which is what the NTSB wants the CVR data from). Strange how the US standard is behind the European one. Or is it? (Thanks Joe for the link.)
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Energy industry’s methane emissions near record despite pledges • Bloomberg via Luxembourg Times
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Global methane emissions from fossil fuels held near a record high last year, the International Energy Agency said in its annual Methane Tracker report, renewing concerns that governments and industry aren’t doing enough to stem releases of the devastating greenhouse gas.
While the analysis highlighted progress in some places, on the whole it suggests global oil, gas and coal producers and governments are falling short of promises to cut methane emissions, directly jeopardizing global efforts to limit climate change. The fossil fuel industry must cut methane emissions 75% by 2030, the IEA said, in order to be on pace for net-zero emissions in 2050, which aligns with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Cumulative methane emissions from the energy sector remained near a 2019 record, though fossil fuel output is higher. The report stressed how methane releases from coal, oil and gas operations can be curbed through changes in operator behaviour, equipment upgrades and capture technology. Those interventions would require an estimated $170bn in investment by the end of the decade, or roughly 5% of the industry’s 2023 income.
…Large methane releases – the kind typically associated with big leaks – grew 50% last year, “a worrying trend,” according to Christophe McGlade, head of the IEA’s energy supply unit and lead author of the report.
“It’s very often the case that once a leak is detected, once we know that it’s occurring, it can be quite quick and quite easy to stop,” he said. “Sometimes someone’s left a latch open on a tank, sometimes it’s a flare that’s gone out and once they are aware that this is happening they can stop it.”
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Lots of pledges. Very little action.
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Gurman: AirPods Pro to gain ‘Hearing Aid Mode’ in iOS 18 • MacRumors
Tim Hardwick:
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AirPods Pro will gain a new “hearing aid mode” with the release of iOS 18 later this year, according to the latest report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Writing in the subscriber edition of his regular Power On newsletter, Gurman claims that the “big news” for AirPods Pro in the near term will be support for a hearing aid-style function when iOS 18 drops in the fall.
To be clear, this isn’t the first time we have heard a potential hearing aid feature for AirPods Pro. The first rumor appeared in a 2021 Wall Street Journal report, but it was previously framed as a feature that would be exclusive to a next-generation model of AirPods Pro. However, Apple in September 2022 released the second-generation AirPods Pro, while the company more recently released a refreshed model with a USB-C port.
AirPods Pro already offer a Conversation Boost feature, which boosts the volume and clarity of people directly in front of the wearer, but Apple has not advertised the earbuds as a hearing aid device, because this would require FDA regulatory approval.
As per the FDA, a hearing aid is defined as “any wearable device designed for, offered for the purpose of, or represented as aiding persons with or compensating for, impaired hearing.” This definition encompasses both air-conduction and bone-conduction devices in a variety of styles (for example, behind-the-ear, in-the-canal, or body worn).
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Apple has been edging towards the health appliance market – witness the Watch adding blood oxygen reading (and then subtracting it 😬) – so this is a logical next step.
| • 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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 