You already know that wireless charging is less efficient than wired – but now iFixit has evaluated precisely how much. CC-licensed photo by HS You on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Watts up? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
China orders Apple to remove popular messaging apps • WSJ
Aaron Tilley, Liza Lin and Jeff Horwitz:
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China ordered Apple to remove some of the world’s most popular chat messaging apps from its app store in the country, the latest example of censorship demands on the iPhone seller in the company’s second-biggest market.
Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads as well as messaging platforms Signal and Telegram were taken off the Chinese app store Friday. Apple said it was told to remove certain apps because of national security concerns, without specifying which.
“We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree,” an Apple spokesperson said.
These messaging apps, which allow users to exchange messages and share files individually and in large groups, combined have around three billion users globally. They can only be accessed in China through virtual private networks that take users outside China’s Great Firewall, but are still commonly used.
Beijing has often viewed such platforms with caution, concerned that these apps could be used by its citizens to spread negative content and cause social unrest. Much of the news China censors at home often makes it beyond the Great Firewall through such channels.
The Cyberspace Administration of China asked Apple to remove WhatsApp and Threads from the App Store because both contain political content that includes problematic mentions of the Chinese president, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Apple spokesperson said that wasn’t part of the reasoning.
The move shrinks the number of foreign chat apps Chinese internet users can use to communicate with those outside of the country, a further tightening of internet controls by Beijing, which is sensitive to uncensored information circulating.
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Feelings, it could be said, run strong over this. There’s the Apple view: got to follow the laws. Then there’s the people outside Apple who say that it does anything it can to protect its revenue streams ahead of principles. China is its Kobayashi Maru: the conflict from which it cannot escape successfully.
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Is your PC having trouble? Your smart TV might be to blame • The Verge
Elizabeth Lopatto:
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It turns out your TV can actually mess up your computer — at least if you’re using a Hisense TV and Windows.
Kevin Snow, a video game narrative designer, wrote on Cohost that they’d been having trouble with their PC. The “Display Settings” menu didn’t open. The “Task Manager” started hanging. Then things necessary to making the computer work started to fail. Spelunking in hidden comments on Microsoft forums revealed the problem: Snow’s TV.
Basically, the TV had been generating Universal Plug and Play IDs and had, over the course of several years, convinced Snow’s computer that there were essentially an infinite number of devices on their network. Snow’s smart TV, a Hisense 50Q8G, had inadvertently created a denial-of-service attack on their PC.
Snow fixed the issue with their computer by deleting the keys the TV had generated for five minutes. Then they restarted the computer. “Everything worked again,” Snow wrote. “I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I’d solved a murder.”
Look, I’m very glad Snow fixed the problem — sounds annoying — but I am sort of stuck on why the problem exists in the first place. I’ve emailed HiSense requesting comment, but the company hasn’t replied. (I’ve also reached out to Snow.) I assume the problem is due simply to bad code, but I don’t know for sure.
What I do know is that this isn’t a problem dumb TVs ever had. Full disclosure: I am strongly in favor of a dumb home. My thermostat should not connect to the internet, and neither should my fridge. If a company goes bankrupt, I should not have to worry about whether my coffee maker’s software is suddenly broken or whether my lights will turn on. The only things using my Wi-Fi should be my phone and my computer. Everything else should remain offline, where it belongs.
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Apple acquires French AI company specializing in on-device processing • MacRumors
Hartley Charlton:
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Apple has acquired the Paris-based artificial intelligence startup Datakalab amid its push to deliver on-device AI tools.
Datakalab specializes in algorithm compression and embedded AI systems. The acquisition, finalized on December 17 last year, was quietly conducted but noted in a European Commission filing spotted by French publication Challenges (via iPhoneSoft). While the financial details of the transaction remain undisclosed, the move is almost certainly part of Apple’s broader strategy to bring more sophisticated AI technology to its devices, such as those expected to be introduced in iOS 18.
The company was established in 2016 by Xavier and Lucas Fischer and made significant strides in AI technology focusing on low-power, high-efficiency deep learning algorithms that function without relying on cloud-based systems. This approach aligns with Apple’s oft-touted commitment to user privacy, data security, and reliable performance, as processing data locally minimizes the risk of data breaches and ensures faster processing times.
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Unsurprising, but also indicative of the direction it’s all heading. Which is a direction it’s been headed in for a long time.
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Wireless charging: trading efficiency for convenience • iFixit News
Shahram Mokhtari, Chayton Ritter and Arthur Shi tested wired versus wireless charging:
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Apple’s MagSafe charger did relatively well in the 0-100% charge scenario but as the graph shows, there were some key differences when compared to our baseline wired test. First off, we can see the power draw ramps up faster and earlier in the charge process but also ramps down a little quicker later on. This results in a total energy use of 23.33Wh. That’s a 24.4% increase in energy consumption when compared to our wired test and represents a 59% loss of energy to charge a 12.7Wh battery.
In addition to the extra 5.08Wh required to get to a full charge, taking our 7 hour sleep cycle scenario means the wireless charger continues to draw 1.5W from mains for another 4 hours and 55 minutes which uses another 7.4Wh. We’re now at 30.73Wh, and we’re not done yet.
Once you remove your phone from the wireless charging station, the station continues to draw power to “probe” for the presence of a device on the pad that may need to be charged. These probe signals are sent out often enough that we see energy fluctuations from the mains that average to around 0.2W, even though we’re not charging anything. So over the 17 hours that our phone isn’t being charged, the device itself draws 3.4Wh. This gives us a total draw of 34.13Wh per day, or 12.36kWh per year. That’s 36.48% more energy used when compared to a wired charge.
Since we’re using 15.88Wh of energy above our baseline of 18.25Wh, this means that a potential 5.8kWh a year is being wasted.
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They also tested a cheap Amazon wireless charger (used 100% more energy than wired) and a Tesla one of unknown configuration which chews up a ton of energy even when just plugged in and not charging anything; it used 113% more than the wired one.
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Amazon ends California drone deliveries • TechCrunch
Brian Heater:
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Amazon confirmed it is ending Prime Air drone delivery operations in Lockeford, California. The Central California town of 3,500 was the company’s second US drone delivery site, after College Station, Texas. Operations were announced in June 2022.
The retail giant is not offering details around the setback, only noting, “We’ll offer all current employees opportunities at other sites, and will continue to serve customers in Lockeford with other delivery methods. We want to thank the community for all their support and feedback over the past few years.”
College Station deliveries will continue, along with a forthcoming site in Tolleson, Arizona set to kick off deliveries later this year. Tolleson, a city of just over 7,000, is located in Maricopa County, in the western portion of the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Prime Air’s arrival brings same-day deliveries to Amazon customers in the region, courtesy of a hybrid fulfillment center/delivery station. The company says it will be contacting impacted customers when the service is up and running. There’s no specific information on timing beyond “this year,” owing, in part, to ongoing negotiations with both local officials and the FAA required to deploy in the airspace.
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The details around this are confusing: Amazon seems to be both going ahead and retreating from drone delivery. Whichever it is, the trials are on a very small scale. And it’s moved really slowly. Here’s a story I wrote about Amazon seeking permission from the US Federal Aviation Authority to fly drones.. in 2014.
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Google all at sea over rising tide of robo-spam • The Register
Rupert Goodwins:
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AI spam is proliferating out of control. Content spam was two% of search hits before ChatGPT: it’s 10% now; Google is manually delisting sites like never before.
It takes a lot for Google to remove sites from its search results. That means losing ad revenue – the main reason spam sites exist – and revenue is the crack cocaine of publicly traded tech companies. See Microsoft’s continued attempts to monetize the Windows desktop. Or Meta’s alleged use of harmfully addictive algorithms.
You know this already, you use big tech services and you know the difference between what the companies say in public and what they actually deliver. You don’t matter, the revenue you represent does.
The primary reason Google is spending its own money to reduce its revenue is that AI spam content is so cheap and easy to produce that it has a much better chance of overwhelming everything else. It is so toxic, moreover, that it risks driving mass migration of users away from Google, people already fed up with sponsor-heavy search results heavily spiced with pre-AI clickbait garbage. This is certainly an exponential threat to Google, and potentially to all other on-ramps to web content. Which is to say, the web as we know it as a place to create and discover outside big known brands.
Stopping this is hard. One answer is to out-AI the AI spammers, automating the business of finding and isolating the cheats. Two problems: AI is very resource-intensive and this risks joining cybercurrency in the business of boiling the oceans in an exponential megawatt orgy. The other is that there is no way to win, as AI spam develops the equivalent of antibiotic immunity.
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The secret water footprint of AI technology • The Markup
Nabiha Syed in conversation with Shaolei Ren, associate professor of computer science at University of California:
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Syed: With very good reason, we’re starting to see more scrutiny of the carbon footprint of various technologies, including AI models like GPT‑3 and GPT‑4 as well as bitcoin mining. But your research focuses on something receiving less attention: the secret water footprint of AI technology. Tell us about your findings.
Ren: Water footprint has been staying under the radar for various reasons, including the big misperception that freshwater is an “infinite” resource and the relatively lower price tag of water. Many AI model developers are not even aware of their water footprint. But this doesn’t mean water footprint is not important, especially in drought regions like California.
Together with my students and my collaborator at UT Arlington, I did some research on AI’s water footprint using state-of-the-art estimation methodology. We find that large-scale AI models are indeed big water consumers. For example, training GPT‑3 in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art US data centers can directly consume 700,000 litres of clean freshwater (enough to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles), and the water consumption would have been tripled if training were done in Microsoft’s data centers in Asia. These numbers do not include the off-site water footprint associated with electricity generation.
For inference (i.e., conversation with ChatGPT), our estimate shows that ChatGPT needs a 500-ml bottle of water for a short conversation of roughly 20 to 50 questions and answers, depending on when and where the model is deployed. Given ChatGPT’s huge user base, the total water footprint for inference can be enormous.
Then, we further studied the unique spatial-temporal diversities of AI models’ runtime water efficiency—the water efficiency changes over time and over locations. This implies that there’s potential to reduce AI’s water footprint by dynamically scheduling AI workloads and tasks at certain times and in certain locations, the way we reduce our electricity bills by utilizing the low electricity prices during the night to charge our electric vehicles.
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What if your AI girlfriend hated you? • WIRED
Kate Knibbs:
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It seems as though we’ve arrived at the moment in the AI hype cycle where no idea is too bonkers to launch. This week’s eyebrow-raising AI project is a new twist on the romantic chatbot—a mobile app called AngryGF, which offers its users the uniquely unpleasant experience of getting yelled at via messages from a fake person. Or, as cofounder Emilia Aviles explained in her original pitch: “It simulates scenarios where female partners are angry, prompting users to comfort their angry AI partners” through a “gamified approach.” The idea is to teach communication skills by simulating arguments that the user can either win or lose depending on whether they can appease their fuming girlfriend.
…Obviously, I downloaded AngryGF immediately. (It’s available, for those who dare, on both the Apple App Store and Google Play.) The app offers a variety of situations where a girlfriend might ostensibly be mad and need “comfort.” They include “You put your savings into the stock market and lose 50% of it. Your girlfriend finds out and gets angry” and “During a conversation with your girlfriend, you unconsciously praise a female friend by mentioning that she is beautiful and talented. Your girlfriend becomes jealous and angry.”
The app sets an initial “forgiveness level” anywhere between 0 and 100%. You have 10 tries to say soothing things that tilt the forgiveness meter back to 100. I chose the beguilingly vague scenario called “Angry for no reason,” in which the girlfriend is, uh, angry for no reason. The forgiveness meter was initially set to a measly 30%, indicating I had a hard road ahead of me.
Reader: I failed.
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“Hello, I’ve come to couples counselling today because my AI girlfriend is stuck at 25%.” More seriously, do people really, honestly need more anger in their lives?
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FBI chief says Chinese hackers have infiltrated critical US infrastructure • Reuters via The Guardian
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Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into US critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow”, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has warned.
An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday.
China is developing the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing”, Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt summit on modern conflict and emerging threats.
He added: “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”
Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning, which was aligned with China’s broader intent to deter the US from defending Taiwan.
China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China’s sovereignty claims and says only the island’s people can decide their future.
Earlier this week, a Chinese ministry of foreign affairs (MFA) spokesperson said Volt Typhoon was in fact unrelated to China’s government, but was part of a criminal ransomware group.
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Couldn’t it be both? Just asking.
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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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 