Most cars in Ethiopia are very old – but a government scheme is pushing electric vehicles, as electricity is cheap and oil expensive. CC-licensed photo by Rachel Strohm on Flickr.
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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.
Microsoft Copilot+ Recall feature is a ‘privacy nightmare’ • BBC News
Imran Rahman-Jones:
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The UK data watchdog says it is “making enquiries with Microsoft” over a new feature that can take screenshots of your laptop every few seconds.
Microsoft says Recall, which will store encrypted snapshots locally on your computer, is exclusive to its forthcoming Copilot+ PCs. But the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) says it is contacting Microsoft for more information on the safety of the product, which privacy campaigners have called a potential “privacy nightmare”.
Microsoft says Recall is an “optional experience” and it is committed to privacy and security. According to its website, external, users “can limit which snapshots Recall collects”.
“Recall data is only stored locally and not accessed by Microsoft or anyone who does not have device access,” the firm said in a statement. And it said a would-be hacker would need to gain physical access to your device, unlock it and sign in before they could access saved screenshots.
But an ICO spokesperson said firms must “rigorously assess and mitigate risks to peoples’ rights and freedoms” before bringing any new products to market. “We are making enquiries with Microsoft to understand the safeguards in place to protect user privacy,” they said.
Recall has the ability to search through all users’ past activity including files, photos, emails and browsing history. Many devices can already do this – but Recall also takes screenshots every few seconds and searches these too.
“This could be a privacy nightmare,” said Dr Kris Shrishak, an adviser on AI and privacy. “The mere fact that screenshots will be taken during use of the device could have a chilling effect on people.”
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Recall does feel like a half-done solution to a tricky problem. At the very least you’d want the screenshots to be protected behind a password that isn’t the same as the login password, and ideally encrypted in the same way.
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Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut • The Verge
Chris Welch:
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Humane, the startup behind the poorly-reviewed AI Pin wearable computer, is already hunting for a potential buyer for its business. That’s according to a report from Bloomberg, which says the company — led by former longtime Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno — is “seeking a price of between $750m and $1bn.”
That might be a tough sell after the $699 AI Pin’s debut: the device has been widely panned for its slow responses and a user experience that falls well short of the always-on, wearable AI assistant concept that its founders promised in the run-up to the device’s release. The product was pitched at least partially as a way for people to be more present and reduce their ever-growing dependence on smartphones.
Humane developed its own operating system called CosmOS that runs on the AI Pin. It hooks into a network of AI models to fetch answers for voice queries and to analyze what the built-in camera is pointed at. For some interactions, the device beams out a laser “display” that is projected onto the wearer’s inner palm. A monthly subscription is required to keep the device active.
The Bloomberg report notes that Humane has raised $230m from investors including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is rumored to be developing an unrelated product (in collaboration with legendary Apple designer Jony Ive) that could better showcase AI’s promise.
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Overpriced, even in its death throes. What do we think: $50m and an acquihire in a couple of months?
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Google Search’s new AI overviews will soon have ads • WIRED
Paresh Dave:
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Last week Google introduced a radical shake-up of search that presents users with AI-generated answers to their queries. Now the company says it will soon start including ads inside those AI Overviews, as the automatic answers are called.
Google on Tuesday announced plans to test search and shopping ads in the AI summaries, a move that could extend its dominance in search advertising into a new era. Although Google rapidly rolled out AI Overviews to all US English users last week after announcing the feature at its I/O developer conference, it’s unclear how widely or quickly ads will start appearing.
Screenshots released by Google show how a user asking how to get wrinkles out of clothes might get an AI-generated summary of tips sourced from the web, with a carousel of ads underneath for sprays that purport to help crisp up a wardrobe.
Google’s AI Overviews are meant to keep users from shifting to alternatives such as ChatGPT or the startup Perplexity, which use AI-generated text to answer many questions traditionally thrown at Google. How and when Google would integrate ads into AI Overviews has been a significant question over the company’s ChatGPT catch-up strategy. Search ads are the company’s largest revenue generator, and even subtle changes in ad placements or design can spur big swings in Google’s revenue.
Google shared few details about its new Overview ad format in its announcement Tuesday. Ads “will have the opportunity to appear within the AI Overview in a section clearly labeled as ‘sponsored’ when they’re relevant to both the query and the information in the AI Overview,” Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president and general Manager for ads, wrote in a blog post.
AI Overview will draw on ads from advertisers’ existing campaigns, meaning they can neither completely opt out of the experiment nor have to adapt the settings and designs of their ads to appear in the feature.
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Srinivasan was described by Ed Zitron as “The Man Who Killed Google Search“, based on documents released at the DoJ trial which showed how more and more ads were packed into search results to hit financial targets. Seems like this is the continuation: strangle the web in favour of adverts.
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Connected fitness is adrift post-pandemic • TechCrunch
Brian Heater, amid the news that Peloton is looking to refinance its debt while taking on a $1bn five-year loan:
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The pandemic has certainly had long-term impacts on the economy. For instance, while work from home has obviously declined from its COVID heights, a report earlier this year notes that it’s still in the area of three to four times more common than it was in 2019. Connected fitness’ big bet was that while some regression was inevitable, the cultural shift was going to be permanent.
Ultimately, however, many were eager for a “return to normality,” and arrival of vaccinations, coupled with lowered rates of infection, emboldened many to get back to the gym. Unlike commuting into an artificially lit cubical farm five times a week, plenty of people genuinely enjoy the experience of working out in person.
The struggle isn’t universal, however. Hydrow, which raised $55m in 2022, purchased a majority stake in AI-based strength training firm Speede Fitness earlier this month. The firm has done a good job capitalizing on interest around rowing machines, even as Peloton’s answer to the category was entirely overshadowed by its very public struggles.
Despite some major regressions and broader economic headwinds, there’s always money to be raised if you’ve got a compelling enough product. Ultimately, however, those rounds should be consistently lower than they were in the home fitness salad days. For a recent example, Kabata, the maker of the “world’s first AI-powered dumbbells,” announced a $5m seed round on Tuesday. That’s follows a $2m seed round raised in May 2022.
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AI-powered dumbbells. The website makes lots of promises. They’re not on sale yet (autumn!), require a subscription, iOS only, require Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, US only.
How much? $800 outright. Suggestion to American fitness readers: buy normal dumbbells, get a personal trainer.
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‘Climate change is on the ballot’: Prime Minister calls surprise summer UK election • BusinessGreen News
Michael Holder and James Murray:
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Government Ministers have repeatedly argued Labour’s plan to deliver a clean power system by 2030 is not feasible and risks driving up energy bills, while also highlighting their record of delivering the deepest decarbonisation in the G20 and engineering a huge increase in renewables capacity and green investment.
But Labour has hit back by accusing the government of overseeing policy uncertainty and insufficient infrastructure underinvestment that has hampered the clean energy transition, driven up energy bills, and led to a sewage pollution crisis.
Green groups today urged both main parties to prioritise ambitious climate action in the coming election.
“The election has been called on the day that scientists announced that “never ending” rain in the UK in autumn and winter has been made 10 times more likely by the climate crisis,” said Ed Matthew, campaigns director at climate change think tank E3G. “Climate change is already causing devastation to crops and homes in the UK and our dependence on fossil fuels has been at the heart of the cost of living crisis. Climate change is on the ballot like never before and voters will be looking for bold manifesto pledges to show parties are committed to ambitious action to rapidly build a clean, green energy system. Any party failing to take action on climate change is condemning itself to electoral oblivion.”
Leo Murray, co-director of climate charity Possible, urged political leaders to avoid the temptation to stoke divisions on environmental issues.
“We can’t let climate change become a culture war in this general election campaign,” he said. “During the 2019 general election, it was an issue on the doorstep for the first time. The first ever televised climate debate was broadcast into millions of living rooms and leading politicians pledged billions for climate action. But going into this election, the political consensus around climate is in peril. Government ministers peddle conspiracy theories. Our prime minister has watered down net zero targets. Politicians are trying to turn climate into a dividing line, rather than a way to bring people together.”
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Related: heavy rainfall expected to lead to £1bn fall in arable farm revenues – which will probably push up inflation in the autumn. By which time it’ll be Someone Else’s Problem, as far as the Tories are concerned.
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Ethiopia shows us just how fast the transition to electric mobility can happen in Africa • CleanTechnica
Remeredzai Joseph Kuhudzai:
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Like a lot of countries on the African continent, Ethiopia has an exceptionally low motorisation rate. Ethiopia has a population of 126 million people, but the total number of vehicles registered in Ethiopia is around 1.2 million. Most of these vehicles are over 20 years old.
According to reports and announcements from the Ethiopian government, Ethiopia had a plan to catalyse adoption of electric vehicles in Ethiopia with a 10 year target to see 148,000 electric cars and close to 50,000 electric buses on Ethiopia’s roads by 2030. However, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Transport and Logistics recently said that this target of over 100,000 EVs has already been met in just the first two years of this plan.
Due to this incredible progress, the target has since been bumped up to close to 500,000 in the 10-year period. So, in just two years, locally assembled EVs and imported EVs have added almost 10% of Ethiopia’s current total ICE vehicle registrations. If all the vehicles in the current fleet stay on the road for the next 8 years (highly unlikely), the total fleet will be 1.7 million. If the target is met, it would mean the penetration of electric vehicles in Ethiopia’s total fleet will be close to 30% at that time.
Of course, the actual number will be more than 30%, as a lot of the vehicles in the current ICE fleet will be retired by then. Also, given the extremely low motorisation in Ethiopia, vehicle sales should grow at a much faster rate going forward, and probably the penetration of EVs in the country’s total fleet will hit close to 50% by then.
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And why the push for EVs?
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Ethiopia spends over US$5bn annually on petrol and diesel imports, precious foreign currency it does not have. Ethiopia has also recently started generating electricity from the first units at the 5-gigawatt Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, adding to its other hydro and renewable energy resources. Electricity is ridiculously cheap in Ethiopia at under 1¢ USD per kWh in many cases.
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Microsoft’s AI obsession is jeopardizing its climate ambitions • The Verge
Justine Calma:
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Back in 2020, Microsoft set a target of becoming carbon negative by the end of the decade. To translate the jargon, it pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions by more than half and then capture a greater amount of carbon dioxide emissions than it would produce. It was an audacious commitment to make at the time, considering carbon capture technologies were barely coming into existence. The company would also have to spur the deployment of way more renewable energy onto power grids where it operates.
Now, it looks like the company’s recent obsession with AI is making that much harder to achieve. Microsoft has invested more than $13bn in OpenAI to date, and it’s “turning everyone into a prompt engineer” for generative AI with new features in Copilot for Microsoft 365. (The Verge’s Tom Warren just launched a newsletter called Notepad to keep you up to date on all things Microsoft and AI.)
“In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence,” Microsoft president Brad Smith said in an interview with Bloomberg. “So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs.”
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But on the plus side, you have autocomplete for that code to make a box of advertising pop up in the middle of the screen when someone’s reading a story, so net-net about even?
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Risk assessment of a highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus from mink • Nature Communications
Katherine Restori et al:
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Outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b viruses in farmed mink and seals combined with isolated human infections suggest these viruses pose a pandemic threat. To assess this threat, using the ferret model, we show an H5N1 isolate derived from mink transmits by direct contact to 75% of exposed ferrets and, in airborne transmission studies, the virus transmits to 37.5% of contacts. Sequence analyses show no mutations were associated with transmission.
The H5N1 virus also has a low infectious dose and remains virulent at low doses. This isolate carries the adaptive mutation, PB2 T271A, and reversing this mutation reduces mortality and airborne transmission. This is the first report of a H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus exhibiting direct contact and airborne transmissibility in ferrets. These data indicate heightened pandemic potential of the panzootic H5N1 viruses and emphasize the need for continued efforts to control outbreaks and monitor viral evolution.
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Watching brief, nothing more. Cross-species transmission without laboratory manipulation, you say? Unimaginable.
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Eventbrite promoted illegal opioid sales to people searching for addiction recovery help • WIRED
Matt Burgess and Dhruv Mehrotra:
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This June, approximately 150 motorcycles will thunder down Route 9W in Saugerties, New York, for Ryan’s Ride for Recovery. Organized by Vince Kelder and his family, the barbecue and raffle will raise money to support their sober-living facility and honor their son who tragically died from a heroin overdose in 2015 after a years-long drug addiction.
The Kelders established Raising Your Awareness about Narcotics (RYAN) to help others struggling with substance-use disorder. For years, the organization has relied on Eventbrite, an event management and ticketing website, to arrange its events. This year, however, alongside listings for Ryan’s Ride and other addiction recovery events, Eventbrite surfaced listings peddling illegal sales of prescription drugs like Xanax, Valium, and oxycodone.
“It’s criminal,” Vince Kelder says. “They’re preying on people trying to get their lives back together.”
Eventbrite prohibits listings dedicated to selling illegal substances on its platform. It’s one of the 16 categories of content the company’s policies restrict its users from posting. But a WIRED investigation found more than 7,400 events published on the platform that appeared to violate one or more of these terms.
Among these listings were pages claiming to sell fentanyl powder “without a prescription,” accounts pushing the sale of Social Security numbers, and pages offering a “wild night with independent escorts” in India. Some linked to sites offering such wares as Gmail accounts, Google reviews (positive and negative), and TikTok and Instagram likes and followers, among other services.
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Not only that, but the algorithm pushed those illicit listings to people trying to recover. Shall we guess? Could it be that Eventbrite doesn’t monitor the listings at all, just takes the money from them? What an incredible thought. Would it surprise you to hear that “Eventbrite appears to have removed most, if not all, of the illicit listings that WIRED identified after we alerted the company to the issue.” [Italics added.]
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Nova explosion visible to the naked eye expected any day now • Ars Technica
Jacek Krywko:
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When you look at the northern sky, you can follow the arm of the Big Dipper as it arcs around toward the bright star called Arcturus. Roughly in the middle of that arc, you’ll find the Northern Crown constellation, which looks a bit like a smiley face. Sometime between now and September, if you look to the left-hand side of the Northern Crown, what will look like a new star will shine for five days or so.
This star system is called T. Coronae Borealis, also known as the Blaze Star, and most of the time, it is way too dim to be visible to the naked eye. But once roughly every 80 years, a violent thermonuclear explosion makes it over 10,000 times brighter. The last time it happened was in 1946, so now it’s our turn to see it.
“The T. Coronae Borealis is a binary system. It is actually two stars,” said Gerard Van Belle, the director of science at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. One of these stars is a white dwarf, an old star that has already been through its fusion-powered lifecycle. “It’s gone from being a main sequence star to being a giant star. And in the case of giant stars, what happens is their outer parts eventually get kind of pushed into outer space. What’s left behind is a leftover core of the star—that’s called a white dwarf,” Van Belle explained.
The white dwarf stage is normally a super peaceful retirement period for stars. The nuclear fusion reaction no longer takes place, which makes white dwarfs very dim. They are still pretty hot, though, and they’re super dense, with a mass comparable to our Sun squeezed into a volume resembling the Earth.
But the retirement of the white dwarf in T. Coronae Borealis is hardly peaceful, as it has a neighbor prone to littering. “Its companion star is in the red giant phase, where it is puffed up. Its outer parts are getting sloughed off and pushed into space. The material that is coming off the red giant is now falling onto the white dwarf,” Van Belle said.
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Just as long as it’s not our star going nova.
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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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