What if you went to a dog show, determined to pet every dog that was there? CC-licensed photo by Salon NYC on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

With regret, there’s no Social Warming Substack this week. The chosen topic simply didn’t work, and I ran out of time to find another. Apologies. Perhaps it’ll be a twofer next week.

A selection of 9 links for you. Very good indeed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Ofcom: almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones • BBC News

Chris Vallance and Philippa Wain:

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Nearly a quarter of UK five-to-seven-year-olds now have their own smartphone, Ofcom research suggests.

Social media use also rose in the age group over last year with nearly two in five using messaging service WhatsApp, despite its minimum age of 13.

The communications regulator warned parental enforcement of rules “appeared to be diminishing.”
It also said the figures should be a “wake up call” for the industry to do more to protect children.

In its annual study of children’s relationship with the media and online worlds, Ofcom said the percentage of children aged between five and seven who used messaging services had risen from 59% to 65%. The number on social media went up from 30% to 38%, while for livestreams it increased from 39% to 50%. Just over 40% are reported to be gaming online – up from 34% the year before.

Over half of children under 13 used social media, contrary to most of the big platforms’ rules, and many admitted to lying to gain access to new apps and services.

“I think this is a wake up call for industry. They have to take account of the users they have, not the users that their terms and conditions say they have,” Mark Bunting, from Ofcom’s Online Safety Group told BBC News.

“We’ve known for a long time that children, under the age limit on a lot of the most popular apps, are widely using those apps, and companies are now under a legal obligation to take steps to keep those children safe,” he added.

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Sony Music warns global tech and streamers over AI use of its artists • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

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Sony Music is sending warning letters to more than 700 artificial intelligence developers and music streaming services globally in the latest salvo in the music industry’s battle against tech groups ripping off artists.

The Sony Music letter, which has been seen by the Financial Times, expressly prohibits AI developers from using its music — which includes artists such as Harry Styles, Adele and Beyoncé — and opts out of any text and data mining of any of its content for any purposes such as training, developing or commercialising any AI system.

Sony Music is sending the letter to companies developing AI systems including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Suno and Udio, according to those close to the group.

The world’s second-largest music group is also sending separate letters to streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, asking them to adopt “best practice” measures to protect artists and songwriters and their music from scraping, mining and training by AI developers without consent or compensation. It has asked them to update their terms of service, making it clear that mining and training on its content is not permitted.

Sony Music declined to comment further.

…Executives at the New York-based group are concerned that their music has already been ripped off, and want to set out a clearly defined legal position that would be the first step to taking action against any developer of AI systems it considers to have exploited its music.

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This is rather the point surely: this horse has long since bolted, judging by the number of AI music generators (plural) already available.
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New energy weapon replaces million-dollar missiles at 13c a shot • New Atlas

David Szondy:

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A new directed energy weapon (DEW) is being rolled out to bolster British defense capabilities. And, at 13 cents a shot, it’s just as effective, but a lot cheaper than the multi-million dollar missiles it’s designed to replace.

The Radio Frequency Directed Energy Weapon (RFDEW) is part of the British government’s policy to respond to a changing geopolitical situation, placing the country’s defense on more of a war footing as it increases spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. This policy change also includes fast-tracking the rollout of lasers and other directed energy weapons.

The latter is extremely important, because, well, knocking out a drone that costs a few grand with a missile costing millions of dollars per round is bad economics – see, for example, the US$1.3-2.5m Sea Viper missile used to take out a US$20,000 Huthi drone, as reported by Navy Lookout. Also, missile stockpiles tend to be pretty small, and swarms of cheap drones could easily exhaust them.

Energy weapons overcome these problems because, though the weapon itself costs money, on a shot by shot basis they are astonishingly cheap. And, since they fire energy rather than solid rounds, they can potentially fire an infinite number of times so long as the energy holds.

The RFDEW is a self-contained energy weapon that can be operated by one person, and can detect, track, and engage multiple threats at a range of up to 1km. It can also be installed on everything from a warship to the back of a lorry. The main target will be drones or aircraft electronics, blasting them with a burst of electromagnetic radiation.

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Still “in development”, but clearly it’s fun toys time for the army and the police.
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A new theory says gravity is weaker at the largest scales • Nautilus

Tom Metcalfe:

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instein’s theory of gravity is a cornerstone of modern cosmology. It has been tested and proven correct over and over again and is supported by the discovery of countless cosmic phenomena: from the gravitational lensing detected by Arthur Eddington in 1919 and the anomalies observed in the orbit of Mercury, to galactic redshifts and gravitational waves. The theory of general relativity—to give Einstein’s theory of gravity its proper name—has precisely predicted them all.

But astronomical observations near the “cosmological horizon”—where the farthest galaxies recede from us at nearly the speed of light—suggest gravity may act differently at the very largest scales. Now, some scientists propose Einstein’s theory of gravity could be improved by adding a simple “footnote” to his equations, which amounts to a “cosmic glitch” in the scientific understanding of gravity.

…“From an observational standpoint, there have been these anomalies in the data for well over a decade now,” says Afshordi, a professor of astrophysics at Canada’s University of Waterloo and a researcher at the Perimeter Institute.

Scientists have made dozens of attempts over recent decades to modify Einsteinian gravity to better fit observations. One of these is the theory of “massive gravity” proposed by Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. Another is MOND, which applies modified Newtonian dynamics and was developed as an alternative to dark matter theories; in addition, there are several early dark energy theories, which propose that the dark energy thought to drive the expansion of the universe was much stronger in the first 100,000 years after the Big Bang.

Unlike these other theories, which are driven by discrepancies in the data, the cosmic glitch model is derived from specific fundamental theoretical challenges to Einsteinian gravity that have been developed in recent decades, says Afshordi. These challenges include the Hořava-Lifshitz proposal—the idea that quantum gravity works differently at high energies—and the Einstein-aether framework, which reintroduces a dynamic form of the “aether” that Einstein aimed to eliminate.

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Lovely if we’ve come completely around to where we were back with Michelson-Morley, the most consequential null outcome ever.
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What happens when a romance writer gets locked out of Google Docs • WIRED

Madeline Ashby:

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On the evening of March 24, 2024, writer K. Renee was doing what she often does: curling up on the couch and watching hockey with her husband. It was the Dallas Stars versus the Arizona Coyotes. Renee has followed the Stars her whole life. She was born the season they won the Stanley Cup. As she watched, she got a strange message: a friend texted to say the shared Google folders where Renee kept her works in progress were no longer accessible. Her friend had planned to read and make notes on one of Renee’s stories and was surprised to be locked out.

“You no longer have permission to view this document,” said the pop-up message. “If you believe this is an error, contact the document owner.”

This was how Renee experienced a moment that most of us have heart-pounding 3 am stress nightmares about. All 10 of her works in progress—some 222,000 words across multiple files and folders—were frozen. Not just frozen, but inaccessible on her phone and tablet. When her husband fetched her laptop, Renee logged into Docs and tried sharing the documents again. Then she received her own message from Google.

“Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text.

Renee writes hockey romance. People who get to see her drafts first, her community of alpha and beta readers, all have that in common. Renee describes her work as “open-door spice.” Aside from being an amazing name for an overpriced cocktail, the term serves as a descriptor for the level of explicitness in romance fiction. Simply put, “open-door” means more explicit; “closed-door” means less. Reading an open-door romance is like watching a John Wick movie. You see the knife go in. Closed-door romances are like watching a Marvel movie. You know something is happening to someone’s body, but you never really see it.

When she saw the word inappropriate in the notification, Renee worried her work had been dinged for its spice. “I thought I was the problem,” she says. “I thought I had somehow messed it up.”

But she hadn’t. At least, she hadn’t messed it up in any way she could hope to avoid in the future. Google never specified which of her 222,000 words was inappropriate.

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Used to be authors would lose their work because their hard drive crashed. (Doesn’t happen now: thanks SSDs!) Losing it because someone blocks access to your cloud drive is a new one. Unclear if this is resolved even now: author’s web page doesn’t say.

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We tried to pet all 200 breeds at the Westminster dog show • The Washington Post

Maura Judkis:

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If you play it right, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is not just a competition for the finest-bred dog. It is also a fancy petting zoo.

You can pet them all — from Airedale to Yorkie, silky terrier to wire-haired pointer, hairless Xoloitzcuintli to moppish Komondor. You can pet them even when their hair-care routine is an elaborate, six-hour process with mousses and gels more exquisite than most humans use on themselves. You can pet them even when they look like a sculpture, or a Victorian-era painting of royal dogs on a hunt. You just have to ask nicely.

…Petting a dog, studies have proved, activates our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls cognitive and emotional activity. It also increases our oxytocin, the body’s feel-good chemical, and lowers our stress hormones. Researchers have observed this effect even in those who don’t own dogs, but who pet ones belonging to strangers.

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Can confirm.
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The Messenger crashed and burned—now the CEO Jimmy Finkelstein is trying again • Daily Beast

Justin Baragona:

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Despite falling flat on his face with doomed media outlet The Messenger, Jimmy Finkelstein is already looking to launch another project, multiple sources familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast.

The former owner of The Hill recently met with potential investors in New York, according to three sources familiar with the matter, in an effort to drum up interest in a new venture. This potential new project is still very much in the planning stages, the sources emphasized.

Details are still scant on what exactly Finkelstein may be cooking up, with sources speculating that it could be health industry-related and possibly not even a traditional media company.

Either way, the 76-year-old mogul does appear determined to add another chapter to his lengthy career. “Jimmy is definitely doing something. He’s not prepared to be on the sidelines,” one person close to Finkelstein told The Daily Beast.

Another source close to the situation relayed last month that Finkelstein was in New York City, meeting with potential investors and promising to soon launch a project with the potential to clear his name after The Messenger’s spectacular failure. Finkelstein did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Finkelstein has recently met with Loews CEO James Tisch and Newsmax chief Chris Ruddy to discuss his ideas, our sources said.

Tisch was a key investor in The Messenger, the $50m “centrist” news site that launched last spring before crashing and burning less than a year later, leaving hundreds of journalists out of work.

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He’s either utterly delusional (and some of the post-crash interviews don’t entirely remove that possibility) or just loves spending other people’s money. Anyhow, it would be amazing to see who would be credulous enough to work for him if he manages to start another site in the teeth of the gale of AI-generated Google search results.
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Full-colour 3D holographic augmented-reality displays with metasurface waveguides • Nature

Wetzstein et al (from the University of Stanford, University of Hong Kong, and NVidia):

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Emerging spatial computing systems seamlessly superimpose digital information on the physical environment observed by a user, enabling transformative experiences across various domains, such as entertainment, education, communication and training. However, the widespread adoption of augmented-reality (AR) displays has been limited due to the bulky projection optics of their light engines and their inability to accurately portray three-dimensional (3D) depth cues for virtual content, among other factors.

Here we introduce a holographic AR system that overcomes these challenges using a unique combination of inverse-designed full-colour metasurface gratings, a compact dispersion-compensating waveguide geometry and artificial-intelligence-driven holography algorithms.

…Holographic principles could enable the ‘ultimate display’ using their ability to produce perceptually realistic 3D content using ultrathin optical films.

…Here we develop a new AR display system that pairs a lensless holographic light engine with a metasurface waveguide optimized for full-colour optical-see-through (OST) AR display applications in a compact form factor.

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Blimey, they’re really going there. This may be a few (many) years off, but it’s going to be amazing when they do it.
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Crew trapped on Baltimore ship, seven weeks after bridge collapse • BBC News

Bernd Debusmann Jr:

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As a controlled explosion rocked the Dali on Monday, nearly two dozen sailors remained on board, below deck in the massive ship’s hull.

The simultaneous blasts sent pieces of Baltimore’s once iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge into the dark waters of Maryland’s Patapsco River, seven weeks after its collapse left six people on the bridge dead and the Dali marooned.
Authorities – and the crew – hope that the demolition will mark the beginning of the end of a long process that has left the 21 men on board trapped and cut off from the world, thousands of miles from their homes. But for now, it remains unclear when they will be able to return home.

The Dali – a 948ft (289m) container ship – was at the start of a 27-day journey from Baltimore to Sri Lanka when it struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, sending thousands of tonnes of steel and cement into the Patapsco. It left the ship stranded under a massive expanse of shredded metal.

A preliminary NTSB report found that two electrical blackouts disabled equipment ahead of the incident, and noted that the ship lost power twice in the 10 hours leading up to the crash.

The crew, made up of 20 Indians and a Sri Lankan national, has been unable to disembark because of visa restrictions, a lack of required shore passes and parallel ongoing investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FBI.

On Monday, the crew remained on board even as authorities used small explosive charges to deliberately “cut” an expanse of the bridge lying on the ship’s bow.

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Amazing to think it’s still there, but the bridge isn’t even properly demolished yet.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Portugal, an amazing 95% of electricity came from renewables through April. CC-licensed photo by Vitor Oliveira on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. That’s hot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

It’s the end of Google Search as we know it • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

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Eight months ago [SEO company] BrightEdge developed something it calls a generative parser, which monitors what happens when searchers interact with AI-generated results on the web. He says over the past month the parser has detected that Google is less frequently asking people if they want an AI-generated answer, which was part of the experimental phase of generative search, and more frequently assuming they do. Jim Yu, executive chair of BrightEdge says: “We think it shows they have a lot more confidence that you’re going to want to interact with AI in search, rather than prompting you to opt in to an AI-generated result.”

Changes to search also have major implications for Google’s advertising business, which makes up the vast majority of the company’s revenue. In a recent quarterly earnings call, Pichai declined to share revenue from its generative AI experiments broadly. But as WIRED’s Paresh Dave pointed out, by offering more direct answers to searchers, “Google could end up with fewer opportunities to show search ads if people spend less time doing additional, more refined searches.” And the kinds of ads shown may have to evolve along with Google’s generative AI tools.

Google has said it will prioritize traffic to websites, creators, and merchants even as these changes roll out, but it hasn’t pulled back the curtain to reveal exactly how it plans to do this.

When asked in a press briefing ahead of I/O whether Google believes users will still click on links beyond the AI-generated web summary, Reid said that so far Google sees people “actually digging deeper, so they start with the AI overview and then click on additional websites.”

In the past, [Google head of search Liz] Reid continued, a searcher would have to poke around to eventually land on a website that gave them the info they wanted, but now Google will assemble an answer culled from various websites of its choosing. In the hive mind at the Googleplex, that will still spark exploration. “[People] will just use search more often, and that provides an additional opportunity to send valuable traffic to the web,” Reid said.

It’s a rosy vision for the future of search, one where being served bite-size AI-generated answers somehow prompts people to spend more time digging deeper into ideas. Google Search still promises to put the world’s information at our fingertips, but it’s less clear now who is actually tapping the keys.

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Google is delusional if it thinks it can provide correct – as in accurate, truthful – answers to queries. It didn’t manage it in the first 25 years, and adding an LLM won’t change that.
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For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point • Blood in the Machine

Brian Merchant:

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When OpenAI debuted its new voice interface program, ChatGPT-4o, it quickly invited a flood of comparisons to Her, the 2013 Spike Jones film in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a program voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The comparison was encouraged by OpenAI — both in the very design of the flirty voice agent itself, which sounds suspiciously like Johansson, and by CEO Sam Altman himself, who tweeted “her” as the demo was underway.

In response, observers — myself included — took to what’s become a time-honored internet tradition: pointing out that the science fictional reference point a tech founder put forward was not an aspirational one, but, in fact, a dystopia containing a warning meant to be heeded, not emulated.

“I Am Once Again Asking Our Tech Overlords to Watch the Whole Movie,” Wired’s Brian Barrett wrote in a fun piece that runs through recent some recent offenders in the genre, including Elon Musk and his suggestion that the Cybertruck is “what bladerunner [sic] would have driven,” and Mark Zuckerberg’s love of the metaverse, the idea for which came from Snowcrash and Ready Player One — both pessimistic cyberpunk dystopias.

“Begging the AI companies building stuff modeled on “Her” to finish the movie!” the New York Times’ Kevin Roose wrote on X. “It does not end well!”

That tech executives have a penchant for mining inspiration from dystopian sci-fi films and books has become a running gag at this point — I wrote a longish piece for Motherboard (RIP) needling Zuck for trying to cash in on a dystopian metaverse back in 2021 — but maybe best nailed by the infamous Torment Nexus tweet.
[Sci-fi author: in my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: at long last we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.]

That’s the gist of it! And yet. As much as we needle, or mock, or point out that the tech titans are stripping their references and products of context — it’s all in vain. The CEOs obviously don’t much care what some flyby cultural critics think of their branding aspirations, but beyond even that, we have to bear in mind that these dystopias are actively useful to them.

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What really happens when emissions vanish • BNN Bloomberg

Ben Elgin and Sinduja Rangarajan:

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Procter & Gamble Co. vowed to cut its heat-trapping emissions in half by 2030, before announcing it had surpassed its target a decade early. Cisco Systems Inc. recently said it had exceeded a goal to reduce its climate pollution by 60% over 15 years. Continental AG, the German tire and auto parts juggernaut, claimed it had slashed greenhouse gases by an astounding 70% in 2020.

These appear to be exactly the kind of giant leaps needed to forestall the most destructive impacts of climate change. But a substantially different picture emerges when using a different accounting method that more accurately measures the pollution from a company’s operations. Procter & Gamble more realistically cut its emissions by 12%, Continental’s pollution fell a more pedestrian 8%, and Cisco’s actually climbed 22%.

In the cases of each of these companies—along with similar claims made by hundreds of others—they’re relying on a common, but controversial, form of climate bookkeeping known as “market-based accounting.” This allows businesses to buy credits from clean energy providers to say they’re running on green power when they actually aren’t, wiping from their ledgers vast quantities of pollution caused by the electricity powering their offices, data centers, and factories.

…When wind or solar farms sell their power to the grid, they get paid for the electricity like any other power plant. The owners of clean energy resources also usually get tax credits from governments. To increase the incentives, corporations began paying the renewable plants an extra bonus for the right to take credit for that clean energy.

This approach relies on a measure of fiction. The corporate buyers never physically use the clean electricity, yet they can claim credit for zero-emission energy on their ledgers.

Many companies became enamored with this method as they discovered it could seemingly wipe away vast quantities of emissions in a hurry. But market-based accounting sparked a bitter debate. The US Environmental Protection Agency and nonprofits such as CDP embraced it as a way to funnel more money into clean energy, believing these extra payments from companies would accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. On the other side, dozens of academics cringed at the idea of allowing companies to take credit for green energy they hadn’t actually used, fearing it would warp the accuracy of emissions reports and provide a cheap cop-out instead of meaningful greenhouse gas cuts.

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Renewables are meeting 95% of Portugal’s electricity needs. How did it become a European leader? • Euronews

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Portugal generated an ‘historic’ 95% of its electricity from renewables in April, according to the network operator REN.

Renewable energy generation averaged just below that for the first four months of the year, covering 91% of the nation’s power needs. It’s one national good news story within a great continental shift: fossil fuels provided less than a quarter of the EU’s energy for the first time ever last month.

Ember, the clean think tank behind that assessment, also found that more than 30% of the world’s electricity is now generated using renewables. “Solar in particular is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible,” Ember’s director of global insights, Dave Jones told us.

…Portugal has made some huge strides in renewable power, up from 27% in 2005 and 54% in 2017.

It phased out coal-fired generation in 2021, and boosted its large hydropower fleet with added storage capacity. And since 2019, the state’s renewable energy auctions have been increasing utility-scale projects, with clear guidance for green companies.

All this has laid the ground for some milestone moments. For six consecutive days last autumn, for example, renewable energy production actually exceeded the country’s electricity needs.

Portugal had the third highest share of wind energy in its electricity mix last year at 29%, behind Ireland (36%) and Denmark (58%). But, as elsewhere, it’s no good a renewable leader resting on its laurels. Ember’s new European Electricity Review report notes that Portugal has still not moved past the peak in wind generation it achieved in 2019.

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UK peaks for April: 48% total from renewables (including biomass); wind making up 31% of demand. Helps if, like Portugal, you’re by the sea and have lots of sunlight.
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Southeast Asian scam syndicates stealing $64bn annually, researchers say • The Record

James Reddick:

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Online fraud operations in Southeast Asia continue to grow, with organized scamming syndicates netting an estimated $64 billion each year worldwide, according to new research. 

In Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, the criminal groups are stealing about $43.8bn each year through scams — some 40% of the three nations’ combined formal GDP — according to a report released Monday from the United States Institute of Peace. 

The scams typically involve pig butchering, when potential victims are contacted on messaging platforms or dating apps. The scammers try to develop relationships and eventually convince victims to make fraudulent investments which are siphoned off by criminals. 

“This has gone from being very much a regional issue that was focused on criminal markets within the region to a global issue in a very short period of time,” Jason Tower, Myanmar country director at USIP, said during an event to discuss the research.  “And it’s spreading into other countries… There’s new linkages into the Middle East, into Africa, that the same criminal actors are beginning to exploit.”

The researchers noted that in recent months there has been a “massive upsurge in the targeting of victims who are not Chinese and do not speak Mandarin” — perhaps as a response to Chinese law enforcement’s increasing scrutiny of the industry. 

Last year, such scams resulted in about $3.5bn in losses in the US, while Canadians lost an estimated $413m and Malaysians more than $750m, researchers said. 

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Of note, the report says: “The scamming operations are powered by hundreds of thousands of people, many duped by fraudulent online ads for lucrative high-tech jobs and trafficked illegally into scam compounds, where they are held by armed gangs in prisonlike conditions and forced to run online scams.” That’s scary.
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Leonardo police spy tech scans cars for phones, pets and books • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

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American police are testing a new technology that can scan moving vehicles for anything that emits a signal, including phones, smartwatches, cat and dog tracking chips and even library books, according to its creator, Rome, Italy-based surveillance, defense and aerospace company Leonardo.

The nascent technology, called Elsag EOC Plus, is typically incorporated into one of Leonardo’s Elsag license plate readers, though can be deployed as a standalone surveillance device, and is designed to help police monitor suspects as they move. But privacy advocates told Forbes the new technology could be abused to warrantlessly track people across large tranches of the country, learning more about them by identifying their belongings without their knowledge.

Leonardo claims the tool can identify specific models of devices like iPhones and Bose headphones inside moving vehicles, according to a marketing brochure from the Milipol conference in Paris last year. It can also identify unique signals emitted by pet chips, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, wearable tech like fitness trackers, in-car infotainment systems and tire pressure sensors, and can even detect the RFID of a library book, according to the brochure. For law enforcement, all that data can be linked to a car’s license plate number, becoming a unique “fingerprint.” As a person travels through other license plate scanners, their fingerprint can be followed around a given area, even when the driver or passenger switches vehicles.

“As an example, while 30 cars in 100 may contain iPhones, only one will have an iPhone 13rev2, an Audi radio, a pair of Bose headphones, a Garmin sports watch, a key finder and the license plate ABC-1234. The collection of data represented by these specific things is an electronic signature,” Leonardo explained in its brochure.

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As you might imagine, privacy groups are not enamoured of this. It seems to be “novel police technology” week, though.
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Smiles, waves and flashed body parts: video portal links Dublin and New York • The Guardian

Rory Carroll:

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Rain sluiced down on a grey Dublin afternoon but the crowd clustering around the portal ignored the downpour and waved at a man cycling towards the screen on a sunny morning in Manhattan.

He gazed back, waved and wobbled before recovering his balance and vanishing down Fifth Avenue, eliciting a cheer from the sodden observers on North Earl Street.

Monday was day five of a live stream that has connected Ireland’s capital with New York via an interactive sculpture and webcam that allows people to see, but not hear, each other.

Seconds after the cyclist, a woman appeared walking her dog. She stopped, stared at the screen and grinned. She picked up her dog and waved his paw. The crowd in Dublin, huddled under umbrellas, gave another cheer. “I wish I’d brought my dog,” said Amy Ferguson, 24.

The fleeting, playful interactions between people separated by 3,000 miles and five time zones exemplified the hope of authorities when the art installation launched on 8 May. “Two amazing global cities connected in real time and space,” said New York’s chief public realm officer, Ya-Ting Liu.

“I would encourage Dubliners and visitors to the city to come and interact with the sculpture and extend an Irish welcome and kindness to cities all over the world,” said Dublin’s lord mayor, Daithí de Róiste.

Not all, however, have followed that utopian exhortation. Some on the Irish side have flashed body parts, while others displayed images of swastikas and the twin towers aflame on 9/11. One man made a theatrical show of snorting what appeared to be cocaine. Police escorted away a woman who was grinding against the portal.

“Portal to hell: NYC-Dublin live video art installation already bringing out the worst in people,” lamented the New York Post, which blamed Dublin’s “Guinness-glugging patrons”.

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Such a simple, fabulous idea: the thing we’ve seen in so many SF TV shows and films made real. Apart from the stepping through and going there. The choice (one assumes it’s a choice?) not to include sound is peculiar, though. Naturally, within a few hours, the portal in New York was fenced off. Spoilsports.
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Don’t fret about green subsidies • Project Syndicate

Dani Rodrik:

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China has scaled up its green industries with mind-boggling speed. It now produces nearly 80% of the world’s solar PV modules, 60% of wind turbines, and 60% of electric vehicles and batteries. In 2023 alone, its solar-power capacity grew by more than the total installed capacity in the US. These investments were driven by a variety of government policies at the national, provincial, and municipal levels, allowing Chinese firms to travel rapidly down the learning curve to dominate their respective markets.

But there is a big difference between solar PV cells, electric vehicles, and batteries, on one hand, and older industries such as steel and gas-powered cars. Green technologies are crucial in the fight against climate change, making them a global public good. The only way we can decarbonize the planet without undermining economic growth and poverty reduction is to shift to renewables and green technologies as rapidly as possible.

The case for subsidizing green industries, as China has done, is impeccable. Beyond the usual argument that new technologies provide know-how and other positive externalities, one also must account for the immeasurable costs of climate change and the huge prospective benefits of accelerating the green transition. Moreover, because the knowledge spillovers cross national borders, China’s subsidies benefit not only consumers everywhere, but also other firms along the global supply chain.

Another powerful argument follows from second-best reasoning. If the world were organized by a social planner, there would be a global carbon tax; but, of course, there is no such thing. Although a variety of regional, national, and subnational carbon-pricing schemes do exist, only a tiny share of global emissions is subject to a price that comes close to covering the true social cost of carbon.

Under these circumstances, green industrial policies are doubly beneficial – both to stimulate the necessary technological learning and to substitute for carbon pricing. Western commentators who trot out scare words like “excess capacity,” “subsidy wars,” and “China trade shock 2.0” have gotten things exactly backwards. A glut in renewables and green products is precisely what the climate doctor ordered.

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The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition) • High Caffeine Content

Steve Troughton-Smith is a very (very) experienced Mac and iOS developer:

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Another year, another series of incredibly-overpowered new iPads Pro, another round of ‘…shame the software sucks, though’ reviews. But ‘sucks’ means different things to different people, and it’s been a while since I put together an iPad manifesto so I thought I’d delineate where I think iPadOS is dropping the ball or needs improvement specifically from a core OS/developer perspective.

Below are the tentpoles that I think should be, need to be, addressed to make iPad Pro live up to the expectations of its monstrously-powerful M-series chip and multi-thousand-dollar asking price.

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They’re all the sorts of things you’d expect, but most of all, given that the latest iPads have an M4 chip which makes most PCs on the market look a bit sluggish, it’s utterly obvious that Apple has some sort of strategy tax around the Mac: it can’t accept that the iPad could and should compete on a level playing field, so it doesn’t put the effort in to make it a first-class citizen. Is the fear that people will stop buying Macs? The problem at the moment is that not enough people are buying tablets.

There’s an equally good article by Federico Viticci at MacStories on the same topic; his requests are more as a user, but it all washes out to the same thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Police in Britain could get “Ghostbusters-style backpacks” firing targeted EMPs to stop stolen e-bikes. So the police say, at least. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 11 links for you. Streaming, uncrossed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

As Google AI search rolls out to more people, websites brace for carnage – The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck and Cat Zakrzewski:

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As the tech giant gears up for Google I/O, its annual developer conference, this week, creators like [Easy Family Recipes website owner Kimber] Matherne are worried about the expanding reach of its new search tool that incorporates artificial intelligence. The product, dubbed “Search Generative Experience,” or SGE, directly answers queries with complex, multi-paragraph replies that push links to other websites further down the page, where they’re less likely to be seen.

The shift stands to shake the very foundations of the web.

The rollout threatens the survival of the millions of creators and publishers who rely on the service for traffic. Some experts argue the addition of AI will boost the tech giant’s already tight grip on the internet, ultimately ushering in a system where information is provided by just a handful of large companies.

“Their goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the information they want,” Matherne said. “But if you cut out the people who are the lifeblood of creating that information — that have the real human connection to it — then that’s a disservice to the world.”

Google calls its AI answers “overviews” but they often just paraphrase directly from websites. One search for how to fix a leaky toilet provided an AI answer with several tips, including tightening tank bolts. At the bottom of the answer, Google linked to The Spruce, a home improvement and gardening website owned by web publisher Dotdash Meredith, which also owns Investopedia and Travel + Leisure. Google’s AI tips lifted a phrase from The Spruce’s article word-for-word.

A spokesperson for Dotdash Meredith declined to comment.

The links Google provides are often half-covered, requiring a user to click to expand the box to see them all. It’s unclear which of the claims made by the AI come from which link.

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Of course Google will have the answer to those worried about being pushed out of sight by SGE: buy an advert! It’ll be prominent above the SGE! And thus the conversion from “search engine which doesn’t take payment for placement” to “search engine where without payment you’re invisible, so you might as well pay”.
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Facebook news referrals: no sign of the slowdown stopping • Press Gazette

Aisha Majid:

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Facebook referral traffic continues to plummet for news publishers as Meta’s turn away from the news industry continues.

New data shared with Press Gazette from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat and digital intelligence platform Similarweb show just how steep that fall has been. 

Aggregate Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites that have been tracked by the Chartbeat since 2018 shows that referrals to the sites have plunged by 58% in the last six years from 1.3bn in March 2018 to 561m last month. Traffic from Facebook fell by 50% in the last 12 months alone as the decline shows little sign of slowing.

As a share of total page views coming from external, search and social, Facebook referrals are now less than a quarter of their 2018 level, down from 30% in March 2018 to 7% in March 2024.

Changes to the Google search algorithm over the last 18 months have led to falling traffic for many news publishers, with matters compounded for many by the last series of updates rolled out in March.

The UK’s biggest commercial news publisher Reach has reported page views down by a third in the first three months of 2024.

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Reach, in particular, is going to be in trouble: it’ heavily dependent on ad-driven page views for revenue. Meanwhile Facebook is turning into AI spam.
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Google is building Gemini Nano AI right into Chrome • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Google is building its Gemini AI into Chrome on desktop. During its I/O event on Tuesday, Google announced that Chrome 126 will use Gemini Nano to power on-device AI features such as text generation.

Gemini Nano is the lightweight large language model Google introduced to the Pixel 8 Pro last year — and, later, the Pixel 8. To get Gemini Nano on Chrome, Google says it tweaked the model and optimized the browser to “load the model quickly.”

The integration will let you do things like generate product reviews, social media posts, and other blurbs directly within Chrome. Microsoft similarly added its AI assistant Copilot to Edge last year, letting you ask questions and summarize the information on your screen. Unlike Gemini Nano in Chrome, Copilot in Edge doesn’t run locally on your device.

Google also announced that it will make Gemini available in Chrome DevTools, which developers use to debug and tune their apps. Gemini can provide explanations for error messages as well as suggestions on how to fix coding issues.

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AI everywhere, whether you want it or not. And what’s with “generate product reviews, social media posts, and other blurbs”? It makes me even less inclined to write product reviews.
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Laughing, chatting, singing, GPT-4o is AI close to human, but watch out: it’s really not • The Guardian

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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The smooth interactivity that OpenAI has laboured hard to enable does well to paper over the cracks of the underlying technology. When ChatGPT first elbowed its way noisily into our lives in November 2022, those who had been following the technology for decades pointed out that AI in its current form was little more than snazzy pattern-matching technology – but they were drowned out by the excited masses. The next step towards human-like interaction is only going to amplify the din.

That’s great news for OpenAI, a company already valued at more than $80bn, and with investment from the likes of Microsoft. Its CEO, Sam Altman, tweeted last week that GPT-4o “feels like magic to me”. It’s also good news for others in the AI space, who are capitalising on the ubiquity of the technology and layering it into every aspect of our lives. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint now come with generative AI tools folded into them. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is putting its AI chatbot assistant into its apps in many countries, much to some users’ chagrin.

But it’s less good for ordinary users. Less friction between asking an AI system to do something and it actually completing the task is good for ease of use, but it also helps us forget that we’re not interacting with sentient beings. We need to remember that, because AI is not infallible; it comes with biases and environmental issues, and reflects the interests of its makers. These pressing issues are explored in my book, and the experts I spoke to tell me they represent significant concerns for the future.

So try ChatGPT by all means, and play about with its voice and video interactions. But bear in mind its limitations, and that this thing isn’t intelligent, but it certainly is artificial, no matter how much it pretends not to be.

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I went to China and drove a dozen electric cars. Western automakers are cooked • Inside EVs

Kevin Williams:

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It would be naive to assume that China doesn’t have its finger on the scale for EV production. But believing that the success of China’s electrified vehicle industry is all the sole result of a brutish government forcing its citizens to buy its domestic products rings false in an almost childlike, sour-grapes way. 

I spent a week in China for the Beijing Auto Show, the country’s biggest car industry event. As a guest of the Geely Group along with a few other international journalists, I drove more than a dozen vehicles, sat in many more, and had a lot of important conversations. The real story is far more nuanced than a simplistic “Us vs. Them”; a story of a China that has fraudulently over-invested in electric cars and is desperately seeking a space to dump their inferior products.

That narrative is false. Western automakers are cooked. And a lot of this is probably their damn fault.

…Chinese EVs are so good now—as is much of its urban infrastructure—that concerns about range or charging just aren’t as pertinent to the average consumer as they once were.

Zeekr representatives said that now, the brand must figure out ways to attract consumers that don’t involve range or charging speed. Hell, the whole Chinese car industry has the same conundrum. Thus, all of its domestic brands (and some foreign ones) have ingratiated themselves with Chinese tech companies, and the two have moved in lockstep to figure out just what that means.

«

It’s a long and detailed report, but Williams is uniformly impressed. Though there’s also this:

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Beijing’s traffic was infinitely worse than Shanghai’s. Despite leaving the hotel at 8:30 a.m., it took us more than an hour and a half to drive just nine miles to the New China International Expo Center.

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Next time take an e-bike? Meanwhile on Tuesday, Joe Biden announced 100% tariffs on imports to the US of Chinese EVs. What’s that going to do? Read the next link.
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The Big Tariffs are here • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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Tariffs are applied based on where final assembly for a good takes place. So if BYD or other Chinese carmakers put their factories in America — or in Mexico, or Canada, or any place other than China — they will still be able to sell EVs to the US without getting hit by Biden’s new tariff. This is already in progress…

Chinese-owned car factories in Mexico will be able to take advantage of Chinese supply chains (especially batteries), driving down their cost. They will make innovative Chinese designs, with those big screen interfaces that Kevin Williams loves so much. And they will incorporate whatever assembly-line innovations Chinese factories have discovered, driving costs down even further.

So Americans will still be able to get “Chinese” EVs, just not from Chinese factories. That’s fine. Mexico needs the jobs and income, American consumers could use some cheap futuristic cars, and American car companies could use the competition.

An open question is to what degree China’s government will decide to subsidize Chinese-owned factories in Mexico. Theoretically, China could deploy all the same policy tools that it uses to subsidize domestic production — tax credits, cheap loans, direct payments, etc. — to help Chinese companies pump out cheap cars from Mexican factories. Whether it’ll actually do that is another question entirely — China’s government may want to keep manufacturing jobs in the country, and thus be leery of subsidizing FDI [foreign direct investment]. So we’ll see.

But even without subsidies, Chinese companies do indeed make cheap good EVs, and Americans will still be able to get their hands on them under the new tariff regime.

This gets a lot harder, of course, if we also put tariffs on EVs made in Mexico, and other third countries. In fact, Trump is already threatening this…

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Biden also put 50% tariffs on solar panels, medical products, semiconductors, steel and aluminium, and port cranes. Same principle probably applies, though it seems contrary to have legislation promoting measures to prevent climate change and then ban stuff that does that.
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AirPods have way more features than you think [Video] • 9to5Mac

Fernando Silva:

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I recently posted a video and article talking about some of my favorite Airpods Pro accessories. Readers seemed to enjoy some of the more unique accessories. However, one of the main comments was asking about hidden Airpod features that most users are unaware of. So that is exactly what we decided to do! Here are some of my favorite, lesser-known Airpods features!

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I didn’t know about these. It’s not the simple ones like volume or alternative actions on different ears, but stuff like Custom EQ, “Live Listen” (free baby monitor!), and more.
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Flood of fake science forces multiple journal closures • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

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Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. 

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.

The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. “That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business,” said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. “This is a real threat.”

The sources of the fake science are “paper mills”—businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published. 

World-over, scientists are under pressure to publish in peer-reviewed journals—sometimes to win grants, other times as conditions for promotions. Researchers say this motivates people to cheat the system. Many journals charge a fee [$50 up to $8,500, depending] to authors to publish in them. 

…For Wiley, which publishes more than 2,000 journals, the problem came to light two years ago, shortly after it paid nearly $300m for Hindawi, a company founded in Egypt in 1997 that included about 250 journals. In 2022, a little more than a year after the purchase, scientists online noticed peculiarities in dozens of studies from journals in the Hindawi family.

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On Twitter, Nick Wise follows a lot of this stuff. In essence, Wiley poured $300m down the drain: Hindawi looks like a terrible purchase. Quite the failure of due diligence.
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Amazon’s “Swag Store” sells neck fans to prevent workers from overheating • 404 Media

Jules Roscoe:

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Amazon workers at some fulfillment centres can now purchase neck fans at an in-warehouse store using “swag bucks” earned for good behaviour to prevent them from overheating on the job. 

The fans are stocked in Amazon’s in-warehouse “Swag Store.” Employees can earn Swag Bucks “for a variety of reasons to include strong safety performance, good teamwork, and more,” an Amazon spokesperson said. Employees who earn enough swag bucks can exchange their “money” for goods at the store. The swag bucks themselves can either be distributed electronically, on the app Amazon workers use to track their shifts, or physically as blue-green strips of paper with the Amazon logo, money bag emojis, and the Amazon mascot Peccy peeking out from behind the words “swag bucks.” The prizes at the Swag Store can range from Amazon backpacks and beanies to Keurig coffee machines and wireless earbuds.

But one recent post on the Amazon fulfilment centre subreddit shared a photo of an announcement about the new availability of neck fans, with an image of a neck fan resting on a pile of ice. “Neck fans are now available in the SWAG Store,” the poster reads. “Please note: These are NOT to be charged by plugging them into any computer and/or equipment. We are currently in the process of getting charging stations in the 1st and 3rd floor main break rooms.”

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Fabulously dystopian to not allow the people who you think are at risk of conking out from overheating to charge the same devices. Compared to the colossal energy demands of those warehouses, it’s the tiniest drop in the biggest bucket. Unless the concern is that they’re cheap and might catch fire, in which case.. don’t sell them?
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Illness took away an Rhode Island patient’s voice. AI created a replica • WBUR News

Matt O’Brien:

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The voice Alexis “Lexi” Bogan had before last summer was exuberant.

She loved to belt out Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan ballads in the car. She laughed all the time — even while corralling misbehaving preschoolers or debating politics with friends over a backyard fire pit. In high school, she was a soprano in the chorus.

Then that voice was gone.

Doctors in August removed a life-threatening tumor lodged near the back of her brain. When the breathing tube came out a month later, Bogan had trouble swallowing and strained to say “hi” to her parents. Months of rehabilitation aided her recovery, but her speech is still impaired. Friends, strangers and her own family members struggle to understand what she is trying to tell them.

In April, the 21-year-old got her old voice back. Not the real one, but a voice clone generated by artificial intelligence that she can summon from a phone app. Trained on a 15-second time capsule of her teenage voice — sourced from a cooking demonstration video she recorded for a high school project — her synthetic but remarkably real-sounding AI voice can now say almost anything she wants.

…Bogan is one of the first people — the only one with her condition — who have been able to recreate a lost voice with OpenAI’s new Voice Engine. Some other AI providers, such as the startup ElevenLabs, have tested similar technology for people with speech impediments and loss — including a lawyer who now uses her voice clone in the courtroom.

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This, at last (and at least?), is a positive use for this sort of fakery: faking yourself because you need to. What if our fake voice becomes like a driving licence that we need to use to prove we are who we say we are?
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UK police could get Ghostbusters-style backpack devices to halt ebike getaways • The Guardian

Vikram Dodd:

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Police officers in Britain could be armed with Ghostbusters-style devices that fire electromagnetic rays to shut down the engines of ebikes being used in a crime.

Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said the weapon was in development and could be months away from being available, though it is expected to be longer than that.

He said it would be housed in a backpack, reminiscent of the equipment used in the Ghostbusters series of movies. It could tackle crime linked to newer vehicles such as electric bikes and electric scooters.

The device is being developed with the Defence Science and Technology Lab, which is overseen by the Ministry of Defence, alongside other technological innovations that British police are hoping to use. It would fire an electromagnetic pulse at a vehicle that an officer wants to stop because the rider is suspected of involvement in a crime.

The electromagnetic weapon works by tricking the engine into thinking it is overheating, which shuts down the engine and brings the vehicle to a stop. It requires a line of sight to work, Stephens said.

Stephens told a media briefing: “Basically, it interferes with the electric motor, to trick the electric motor into thinking it is overheating. It sends a signal to confuse the electric motor. All these electric motors apparently have an inbuilt safety system that if it thinks it’s overheating, it shuts down. At the minute, it’s like a ginormous backpack.”

The equipment was demonstrated to police leaders at the Farnborough technology show earlier this year. Stephens said: “They were also telling me it has the potential to be useful with normal combustion engine vehicles.”

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Having checked the date, no, this isn’t an April Fool. They’re talking about a targeted EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon. It sounds absolutely bonkers.. but some US Army researchers got a patent in 2019 for a muzzle attachment for M-14 rifles. So perhaps not impossible?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Airlines in the US are using machine learning to improve flight efficiency and turnaround times. CC-licensed photo by Jorge Díaz on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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. Duty-free. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI’s GPT-4o model gives ChatGPT a snappy, flirty upgrade • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

In demos, the new version of ChatGPT was capable of rapid-fire, natural voice conversations, picked up on emotional cues, and displayed simulated emotional reactions of its own.

During a livestream from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco on Monday, Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, announced that ChatGPT will be powered by a new, more powerful AI model called GPT-4o. The model will be available to both free and paid users of ChatGPT via a new desktop app as well as the existing mobile app and web version.

Murati said the GPT-4o model allows ChatGPT to respond more rapidly to voice, image, and video input than OpenAI’s previous technology. In demos, she and other OpenAI employees had fast-flowing conversations with ChatGPT, which answered using a liveley and expressive female-sounding voice and nimbly kept up when interrupted.

ChatGPT adopted different emotional tones during the conversation and at times responded as if it were experiencing feelings of its own. When an OpenAI employee said he had been talking about how “useful and amazing” the chatbot is, it responded flirtatiously, gushing “Oh stop it, you’re making me blush.”

“This just feels so magical, and that’s wonderful,” Murati said, adding, “over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out these capabilities to everyone.”

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A flirty chatbot? It might create some uptick in users, and putting an app on phones will push that too. What hasn’t been picked up on, though OpenAI mentioned it, is that this version was trained simultaneously on text, audio and video (YouTube? They wouldn’t say) which means it can interpolate across each. Things are changing.
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OpenAI just killed Siri • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

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Earlier on Monday, OpenAI announced its newest product: GPT-4o, a faster, cheaper, more powerful version of its most advanced large language model, and one that the company has deliberately positioned as the next step in “natural human-computer interaction.” Running on an iPhone in what was purportedly a live demo, the program appeared able to tell a bedtime story with dramatic intonation, understand what it was “seeing” through the device’s camera, and interpret a conversation between Italian and English speakers. The model—which was powering an updated version of the ChatGPT app—even exhibited something like emotion: Shown the sentence i ♥️ chatgpt handwritten on a page, it responded, “That’s so sweet of you!”

Although such features are not exactly new to generative AI, seeing them bundled into a single app on an iPhone was striking. Watching the presentation, I felt that I was witnessing the murder of Siri, along with that entire generation of smartphone voice assistants, at the hands of a company most people had not heard of just two years ago.

Apple markets its maligned iPhone voice assistant as a way to “do it all even when your hands are full.” But Siri functions, at its best, like a directory for the rest of your phone: It doesn’t respond to questions so much as offer to search the web for answers; it doesn’t translate so much as offer to open the Translate app. And much of the time, Siri can’t even pick up what you’re saying properly, let alone watch someone solve a math problem through the phone camera and provide real-time assistance, as ChatGPT did earlier today.

Just as chatbots have promised to condense the internet into a single program, generative AI now promises to condense all of a smartphone’s functions into a single app, and to add a whole host of new ones: Text friends, draft emails, learn what the name of that beautiful flower is, call an Uber and talk to the driver in their native language, without touching a screen. Whether that future comes to pass is far from certain. Demos happen in controlled environments and are not immediately verifiable. OpenAI’s was certainly not without its stumbles, including choppy audio and small miscues.

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Though you’d expect Apple, which has had a long run at this, would be talking to OpenAI – as Wong suggests. And, as he also suggests, it’s the end of Humane, and the Rabbit R1, though the latter was killed by the stories about its lousy implementation.
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How Texas became the hottest grid battery market in the US • Canary Media (no, not that Canary Media)

Julian Spector:

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Pioneering developers started inaugurating battery plants in 2021, making use of the state’s cheap and abundant land and rapid permitting, and the power market’s low barriers to entry.

…That brings us to today. Texas rolled into 2024 with some 5.1GW of energy storage online, second only to mighty California. But the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts Texas will complete another 6.4GW this year, outstripping California’s 5.2GW of new construction. ERCOT expects to end the year with approximately 11GW online. Analyst firm BloombergNEF, by contrast, predicts Texas will build a more modest 4.3GW, somewhat less than the company’s expectation for California’s new battery construction. But even that more modest forecast would nearly double Texas’ existing battery fleet.

“When you suddenly get 10 gigawatts of storage on a system, there’s really no market in the world other than California that’s anywhere close to that,” Zubaty said. ​“And Texas was a situation with no market mandates. This was pure wild west investment based on the growing need for fast-ramping and flexible generation in relatively short but predictable bursts to be the glue for the grid.”

Understanding how the most bustling storage market materialized is vital to replicating its success elsewhere, which is what needs to happen for the US to successfully decarbonize the power system and fulfill its Paris Agreement commitments. Indeed, the rapid evolution of the Texas storage market contains a blueprint for how technology can take off when regulators and gatekeeping electric monopolies get out of the way.

“What comes to Texas will come to your local market too,” said Ryan Hanley, founder and CEO of Equilibrium Energy, a software startup that runs bidding strategies for battery assets in ERCOT. ​“It’s not just a Texas thing — it’s a power industry dynamic. Where renewables lead, storage follows.”

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Between private battery use, and more public provision like this, you can really solve the base load problem of renewables.
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Actually using SORA • fxguide

Mike Seymour:

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“Nine different people will have nine different ideas of how to describe a shot on a film set. And the (OpenAI) researchers, before they approached artists to play with the tool, hadn’t really been thinking like filmmakers.” [Filmmaking group] Shy Kids knew that their access was very early, but “the initial version about camera angles was kind of random.” Whether or not SORA was actually going to register the prompt request or understand it was unknown as the researchers had just been focused on image generation.

Shy Kids were almost shocked by how much the OpenAI was surprised by this request. “But I guess when you’re in the silo of just being researchers, and not thinking about how storytellers are going to use it… SORA is improving, but I would still say the control is not quite there. You can put in a  ‘Camera Pan’ and I think you’d get it six out of 10 times.”  This is not a unique problem nearly all the major video genAI companies are facing the same issue. Runway AI is perhaps the most advanced in providing a UI for describing the camera’s motion, but Runway’s quality and length of rendered clips are inferior to SORA.

Render times: clips can be rendered in varying segments of time, such as 3 secs, 5 sec, 10 sec, 20sec, up to a minute. Render times vary depending on the time of day and the demand for cloud usage. “Generally, you’re looking at about 10 to 20 minutes per render,” Patrick recalls. “From my experience, the duration that I choose to render has a small effect on the render time. If it’s 3 to 20 seconds, the render time tends not to vary too much from between a 10 to 20-minute range. We would generally do that because if you get the full 20 seconds, you hope you have more opportunities to slice/edit stuff out and increase your chances of getting something that looks good.”

Roto: while all the imagery was generated in SORA, the balloon still required a lot of post-work. In addition to isolating the balloon so it could be re-coloured, it would sometimes have a face on Sonny, as if his face was drawn on with a marker, and this would be removed in AfterEffects. similar other artifacts were often removed.

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Watch the finished film (only 1’21”) and the behind-the-scenes footage (also short).
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No rooftop? No problem. Inside Germany’s ‘balcony solar’ boom • The Progress Playbook

Nick Hedley:

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Apartment dwellers who don’t have their own private rooftops have been largely left behind in the global solar boom. That’s starting to change — at least in Germany.

More than 400,000 households across the country have installed mini solar systems on their balconies, with over 50,000 added in the first quarter of 2024 alone, according to local media reports, citing grid agency BNetzA.

Landlords or tenants who live in apartment blocks typically mount one or two solar panels onto their balconies, using their balustrades, walls or terrace areas. The electricity generated is fed via cables and an inverter into regular household plug points. Installations are quick and easy and don’t require the oversight of an electrician.

Policymakers have put their weight behind the movement in an effort to expand access to solar, reduce household energy bills, and speed up the shift to clean electricity.

Since January 2023, balcony solar systems have been exempt from value-added tax, and some municipalities have introduced generous subsidy schemes to further incentivise their adoption. Berlin, for example, offers a €500 rebate to households that purchase plug-in solar devices.

…Germany got 56% of its electricity from solar and other renewables in the first quarter of 2024, and aims to get to the 80% mark by the end of the decade.

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Balcony solar might not make a huge difference, but any difference is a difference. Four panels (shown in the photo with the story) can generate around 1kW at peak, which is more than enough for a flat.
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Why Revolut is asking suspected scam victims to take selfies • Daily Telegraph

Charlotte Gifford:

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The banking app, which is not a licensed bank, is asking suspected fraud victims to take selfies while holding up a piece of paper that says they understand they are “unlikely” to get their money back.

The app requires customers to go through the security checks when it suspects they could be the victim of a scam.

It uses this intervention, Revolut said, to “break the spell” of a potential scammer.

But the selfies were described as “horrible” and “like hostage photos” by solicitors who represented scam victims.

The Telegraph has seen a transcript of an in-app chat between a Revolut support worker and a customer who was in the middle of being scammed.

Revolut, who had frozen the customer’s account, told them early on in the conversation: “Your account is currently limited because we believe it is highly likely that the transactions you are attempting to make are part of a scam.”

The digital bank asked them to verify their identity by, among other things, sending a selfie with the day’s date written on a piece of paper.

It then told them to copy and send the following statement: “Revolut has warned me in app chat that this is likely a scam. I confirm that I am not being assisted with my transaction and understand that Revolut is unlikely to recover my funds if I proceed.”

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Eye-opening, to say the least, but when you stop to think (which is what Revolut is trying to get the people to do) then it’s quite a smart move: embarrassment can be a powerful force.
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Short-selling news startup didn’t disclose investment in anti-hangover drink • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

The publisher and co-founder of Hunterbrook Media, the startup newsroom whose affiliate places stock market bets to profit from its journalism, owns a stake in a competitor to a company that was recently the subject of a critical article.

Hunterbrook Media launched in April amid a storm of calculated controversy over its business model: It would do hard-hitting investigative journalism, building a media business by putting its money where its mouth is and shorting its targets’ stock.

The model has a certain logic. But this newest exposé raises questions about how to trust journalists who are playing the market when they are — as has not been previously reported — also invested in another company in the same space as their target.

The focus of the story is a company called Safety Shot, which makes a drink it claims lowers blood alcohol content and can quickly sober up people who have been drinking. Hunterbrook’s report, edited by founder Sam Koppelman, said the product didn’t work.

But Hunterbrook’s story did not disclose that Koppelman is an investor in another company in the same space, ZBiotics. Koppelman acknowledged, after Semafor reviewed documents showing the investment, that he has a small personal stake in the supplement startup, which on its website promises to help drinkers prevent hangovers.

«

It’s basically a hedge fund with a bigger press office; hedge funds which go into short-selling quite frequently compile a big story about a target and then find a friendly publication to publish it.

News organisations getting tangled up in shares of companies they write about isn’t unheard of: ask Piers Morgan.
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How airlines are using AI to make flying easier • The New York Times

Julie Weed:

»

AI [actually, machine learning – Overspill Ed] has been helping Alaska Airlines dispatchers plan more efficient routes since 2021. “It’s like Google maps, but in the air,” explained Vikram Baskaran, vice president for information technology services at the carrier.

Two hours before a flight, the system reviews weather conditions, any airspace that will be closed, and all commercial and private flight plans registered with the Federal Aviation Administration, to suggest the most efficient route. The AI takes in “an amount of information no human brain could process,” said Pasha Saleh, the corporate development director and a pilot for Alaska.

In 2023, about 25% of Alaska flights used this system to shave a few minutes off flight times. Those efficiencies added up to about 41,000 minutes of flying time and half a million gallons of fuel saved, Mr. Baskaran said.

On the ground, American Airlines and others are working on an AI-powered system American calls Smart Gating — sending arriving aircraft to the nearest available gate with the shortest taxiing time, and if the scheduled arrival gate is in use, quickly determining the best alternate gate. All this could mean fewer frustrating minutes spent waiting on the tarmac.

American introduced Smart Gating at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in 2021 and now employs it at six airports, including Chicago O’Hare and Miami International. The airline estimates it saves 17 hours a day in taxi time and 1.4 million gallons of jet fuel a year.

Mr. Mohan said that using AI as a virtual parking attendant could save up to 20% of taxiing time, with the highest benefits seen at the largest airports.

«

These are impressive savings, but we do need to get reporters to understand when people are talking about machine learning – which is what is happening here, isn’t it: the systems are inferring the most efficient paths based on past data – and when they mean “artificial intelligence” (never).
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‘Deadspin’ to launch for third time under mysterious owners • Front Office Sports

A.J. Perez:

»

Deadspin’s latest revival is slated to take place next week, although its new Malta-based owners have given no indication about the editorial direction for the sports site. 

Lineup Publishing—a start-up with no history of producing sports content or anything else— purchased Deadspin for an undisclosed sum from G/O Media in March, a move that coincided with Deadspin’s entire staff getting let go. A spokesperson told Front Office Sports via email that Deadspin will relaunch next week but offered no other details about the direction of the site. 

FOS has sent numerous requests for comment to Lineup Publishing since the sale was announced March 11. Thursday’s response about the site restarting was the first concrete piece of information that Lineup Publishing has supplied. 

When the acquisition was announced, Lineup Publishing’s landing page was bare bones, and there’s still not a lot to go on. But it appears that the new Deadspin will focus on sports betting rather than the edgy editorial content the site was known for years ago.

“We aim to be able to support delivery of this via partnerships within the sports betting industry,” the Lineup site reads. “We believe that by doing this, we can deliver the top quality content people want to read, without impeding the quality and usability of the site.”

«

It’s going to be AI-generated slop, isn’t it, using the Googlejuice of the Deadspin brand to get high up in the search results, make some money, shut down (or just leave as a zombie) when Google deranks it.
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‘The Office’ spinoff coming to Peacock, plot details revealed • Variety

Joe Otterson:

»

The new iteration of “The Office” has been picked up to series at Peacock, Variety has learned.

As has been previously reported, the show is not a reboot or spinoff of “The Office,” but rather a new mockumentary show with a new cast set in the same universe. For the first time since the show was first revealed to be in the works in late 2023, plot details are now available. The official logline states:

“The documentary crew that immortalized Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch is in search of a new subject when they discover a dying historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it with volunteer reporters.”

…“It’s been more than ten years since the final episode of ‘The Office’ aired on NBC, and the acclaimed comedy series continues to gain popularity and build new generations of fans on Peacock,” said Lisa Katz, president of scripted content for NBCU Entertainment. “In partnership with Universal Television and led by the creative team of Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, this new series set in the universe of Dunder Mifflin introduces a new cast of characters in a fresh setting ripe for comedic storytelling: a daily newspaper.”

«

Daily newspapers as a setting ripe for comedic storytelling? Sorry, but no: daily deadlines are murder, no matter how small the organisation. Make it a weekly and you might have a chance.

Also, how bleak.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The solar storm that produced amazing auroras around the world at the weekend has also screwed up GPS-guided tractors in the US. CC-licensed photo by Chad Davis on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Spaced out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Solar storm knocks out farmers’ tractor GPS systems during peak planting season • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States [and other parts of the world – Overspill Ed.] this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.

One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are “extremely compromised,” and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership. The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years.

“All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. “No GPS. We’re right in the middle of corn planting. I’ll bet the commodity markets spike Monday.”

Specifically, some GPS systems were temporarily knocked offline. This caused intermittent connections and accuracy problems with “Real-Time Kinematic” (RTK) systems, which connect to John Deere “StarFire” receivers that are in modern tractors and agricultural equipment. RTK systems use GPS plus a stream of constantly-updating “correction” data from a fixed point on the ground to achieve centimeter-level positional accuracy for planting crops, tilling fields, spraying fertilizer and herbicide, etc.

According to updates from Landmark Implement, which owns John Deere dealerships in Kansas and Nebraska, the solar storm ruined the accuracy of RTK systems for many farmers using John Deere tractors. Similar systems in other brands of tractors have also been compromised, the dealer and farmers I spoke to said.

“Due to the way the RTK network works, the base stations were sending out corrections that have been affected by the geomagnetic storm and were causing drastic shifts in the field and even some heading changes that were drastic,” the dealership told farmers Saturday morning. “When you head back into these fields to side dress, spray, cultivate, harvest, etc. over the next several months, we expect that the rows won’t be where the AutoPath lines think they are. This will only affect the fields that are planted during times of reduced accuracy. It is most likely going to be difficult—if not impossible—to make AutoPath work in these fields as the inaccuracy is most likely inconsistent.”

«

Give it a few months and we can expect something about crop failures due to this, can’t we?
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What I wish I’d known before my smartphone was snatched • Financial Times

Claer Barrett:

»

London is the epicentre for phone theft. Many people never report this crime, but based on Metropolitan Police data from those who have, a phone is stolen every 10 minutes in the city. There was a 33% increase in reported mobile phone theft from the person in the year to January 2024, and over one-third of offences took place in Westminster.

The statistics don’t tell us how phones are stolen, but from my anecdotal conversations with victims, bike swiping is rife, since it’s easy to hire an e-bike or scooter for a fast getaway. As a woman, I could have made an easier target.

“Criminals want to make sure when they grab a phone, it’s unlocked, otherwise they’re going to end up with just a phone,” says Tony Sales, a reformed fraudster who founded the crime prevention consultancy We Fight Fraud.

A locked handset could have a street value of a few hundred pounds if it’s a recent model, he says. But if unlocked, it could generate multiple thousands of pounds if criminals can get into the settings, change passwords and compromise other security features: “You’re locked out, and then they start to monetise your data.”

Look up and down any London street, and huge numbers of people walk around with their phones unlocked in their hands, openly on display. They might have their headphones in and not be aware of their surroundings — but the criminals are paying close attention.

“It’s predatory behaviour,” says Sales. “They are like lions stalking prey, and unfortunately, women make easier targets than men. It’s very unlikely a woman will try to punch you, and a man has more strength to grab someone.” The cleaner the snatch, the less likely it is that a screen lock will be activated.

Women are only marginally more likely to be victims of phone theft according to ONS crime survey and police data. However, the data does not drill down into the different methods criminals use, and many crimes of this nature go unreported.

«

I knew someone who had their phone snatched while walking over Waterloo Bridge on Friday. It’s a huge thing, which is strange given how iCloud locking etc was meant to make it so much harder.
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Will AI dream up the hit TV shows of the future? • BBC News

Stephanie Power:

»

I logged into an AI chatbot, and typed in what I was looking for. I wrote: “I am trying to think up a new TV format. A series with contestants. “Maybe they would be learning a new skill, like dancing, or perhaps they are trying to compete in communities to have the most sustainable environment. Can you help me with some ideas?”

The AI confirms that this could be an exciting endeavour, and instantly comes up with six ideas. I like its first suggestion – Skills Mastery Showdown – where contestants would be paired with skilled mentors, and have a limited time to master a specific new skill, such as dancing, cooking or painting.

But what do TV industry experts think about the use of AI in coming up with future content? I ask Dan Whitehead, who is a senior consultant at K7 Media, a Manchester-based research firm that reports on the TV business.

“The idea of a machine that you can type a request into, in normal conversational language, and have it spit out something close to what you asked for, still feels pretty magical,” he says. “So it’s understandable that people are drawn to it.

“Can something like [AI chatbot] ChatGPT generate ideas for a TV show? Of course, but then ideas for TV shows have never been in short supply. The big problem for most production companies is the uncertainty – which ideas are best, which ones are worth investing in?”

Mr Whitehead argues that AI can give people false confidence, giving them the sense that if it – with access to billions of data points – can come up with these ideas, they must somehow be better.

…Mr Whitehead says that AI is better used in a much more nuanced, background way.

“The BBC’s Springwatch and Winterwatch use a bespoke AI system that monitors live camera feeds, and has been trained to recognise, record and log different species of animals and birds as they appear in the frame,” he says. “It can then tell the production team how often they appear, give behavioural insights, and generally do something that would eat up hours of human production time.”

«

At least someone’s actually using it sensibly.

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Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

»

More than half a million [Australian pension fund] UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.

Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. Investment account balances would reflect last week’s figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible.

The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, wrote to the fund’s 620,000 members on Wednesday night, explaining the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack, and no personal data had been exposed as a result of the outage. Chun pinpointed Google’s cloud service as the issue.

In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been “extremely frustrating and disappointing”. They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

“Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” the pair said. “This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”

While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund’s cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies.

«

Read verrrry carefully, and you’ll realise that this was a mistake by UniSuper: someone zapped its account by misake. But Google took the blame rather than put it on the customer (and lose the business).
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The death (again) of the internet as we know it • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

»

Anecdotally, when I meet people in their early to mid 20s, they don’t want to connect over Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger, like young people did in the 2010s. They just exchange phone numbers, like people did in the 2000s. Everyone is still online all the time, but “online” increasingly means group chats, Discord, and other small-group interactions. As a society, we are re-learning how to center our social lives around a network of people we know in real life, rather than around a performative feed in which we broadcast our actions and thoughts to a bunch of strangers.

Good.

But I suspect there are some additional trends driving young people off of the public internet and into more private spaces. In just the last few years, a number of trends have transformed both social media and the traditional Web. Some of these trends are making the experience of the public internet more boring, while others are turning it into something more akin to television. Here are a few of the trends I see:

«

They are: adverts everywhere, algorithmic (antichronological) feeds, state propaganda, AI-generated junk, deepfakes/AI fakery. Quite the collection. (Though he’s wrong about “eternal September”, which he mentions high up in his piece: that came when AOL first expanded, in the late 1990s.)
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Apple will revamp Siri to catch up to its chatbot competitors • The New York Times

Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz:

»

Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant.

The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.

…Apple executives worry that new AI technology threatens the company’s dominance of the global smartphone market because it has the potential to become the primary operating system, displacing the iPhone’s iOS software, said two people familiar with the thinking of Apple’s leadership, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly. This new technology could also create an ecosystem of AI apps, known as agents, that can order Ubers or make calendar appointments, undermining Apple’s App Store, which generates about $24 billion in annual sales.

Apple also fears that if it fails to develop its own A.I. system, the iPhone could become a “dumb brick” compared with other technology. While it is unclear how many people regularly use Siri, the iPhone currently takes 85% of global smartphone profits and generates more than $200bn in sales.

That sense of urgency contributed to Apple’s decision to cancel its other big bet — a $10bn project to develop a self-driving car — and reassign hundreds of engineers to work on AI.

«

1) it took weeks of testing ChatGPT to realise it made Siri look antiquated?
2) don’t Google and Alexa already make Siri look antiquated?
3) this is quite a long gestation – though typically Apple not to rush it.
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Hydrogen Heating Town pilot: letter to Gas Distribution Networks – update • GOV.UK

»

The government has decided not to progress work on a hydrogen town pilot until after 2026 strategic decisions on the role of hydrogen in decarbonising heat.

This follows careful consideration of the future of the work in light of the decision in December 2023 not to proceed with the hydrogen village trial in Redcar.

We believe that low carbon hydrogen may have a role to play in heat decarbonisation, alongside heat pumps and heat networks, but in slower time in some locations. We plan to take a decision in 2026 on whether, and if so how, hydrogen will contribute to heating decarbonisation.

We will assess evidence from our wider research programme, the neighbourhood trial in Fife and similar schemes across Europe, to take this decision.

We would like to thank the Gas Distribution Networks for their work on their applications. The evidence they provided will be helpful in informing 2026 decisions.

«

Translation: hydrogen is off the table and won’t be replacing gas in gas distribution networks.
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Which music stands the test of time, and which does not? A statistical analysis • Stat Significant

Daniel Parris:

»

Using a dataset of Spotify streaming stats assembled by our friends at The Pudding (an excellent data culture magazine I highly recommend), we can track listenership for Billboard-charting works as a function of age.

When we graph average Spotify streams by song age, we find an exponential decay function. Pop music quickly exits the mainstream within a decade of its debut; then, this decline stabilizes to a steady, linear rate.

This fast-moving cultural amnesia is highly unique to music. In a previous piece, I analyzed online movie review volume (a proxy for film watching) in the period following a project’s debut. Ultimately, we see film consumption fade from collective memory at a linear rate, a significant departure from music’s exponential decline.

Several factors contribute to the varying cultural longevities of movies and music:

• Music Abundance: there is simply more music in the world, providing ample opportunity for stylistic experimentation and evolution. On the other hand, movie production and distribution are heavily resource-constrained, leading to a smaller sampling of films across time
• Breadth and Depth of Consumption: movies are generally watched once and then set aside, leaving you to search for a new film. Music, on the other hand, can be played ad naseum, sometimes to the point of sonic torture. I listen to The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” nearly every week—two decades after its debut. Most consumers watch a wide range of movies infrequently while playing a smaller selection of songs repeatedly
• Music Preference is Heavily Context Dependent: music taste is heavily tied to adolescent identity formation and the context during which we hear a song (a high school dance, a wedding, a Bar Mitzvah, etc.). After a certain age, music discovery largely stagnates. In contrast, most movie consumers are in a perpetual state of discovery, seeking new releases and revisiting older works.

Although popular music uniquely fades from the mainstream, its longitudinal consumption patterns are highly predictable. Using this baseline, we can measure a song’s streaming activity against the average for its release year.

For example, we project that a 28-year-old song would receive roughly one million streams (in our dataset). Meanwhile, our data indicates that ABBA’s “Money Money Money” generated ~2.8 million plays 28 years after its debut and is, therefore, 193% above expected listening volume.

«

I think this slightly overstates the popularity of artists v songs or albums (Celine Dion, Fleetwood Mac), but interesting nonetheless.
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Map of the web • Henry Nguyen

Nguyen scraped 50,000 blogs from Resonant.live and displayed them as a graph. “There are clusters of sites that all link closely together, with topics like rationality, tech, crypto, Canada, and even postgres.” This is a little of what Google and other web indexers see.
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Concerns about data integrity across 263 papers by one author • ScienceDirect

Jeremy Nielsen, Madeline Flanagan, Lyle Gurrin, Jim Thornton and Ben Mol:

»

We identified 263 papers claiming to have enrolled 74,667 participants between January 2009 and July 2022, 190 (72%) of which reported on studies that recruited from the Assiut Women’s Health Hospital in Assiut, Egypt. The number of active studies per month was greatest between 2016 and 2019, with 88 ongoing studies in May 2017. We found evidence of data integrity concerns in 130 (49%) papers, 43 (33%) of which contained concerns sufficient to suggest that they could not be based on data reliably collected from human participants.

Conclusion: our investigation finds evidence of widespread integrity concerns in the collected work of one author. We recommend that the involved journals collaborate in a formal investigation.

«

The papers cover all sort of treatments in gynaecology – IUD insertion guides, treatments for anaemia, FGM effect on sexual function. And this team reckons the results are all faked.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New tests on hair from Beethoven show abnormally high levels of lead, which could have caused his deafness. CC-licensed photo by Eric E Castro on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about splitting people.

A selection of 9 links for you. The fifth (of the week). I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Benefit fraud squad snoops on pupil data under secret deal • Schools Week

Freddie Whittaker:

»

Pupil data is being used to check for benefit fraud and pursue parents under a secret deal between the education and work and pensions departments, Schools Week has learned.

Leaders have warned the move may lead to parents “withdrawing their children from schools”, amid calls for transparency over the collection of children’s data.

The national pupil database holds information about everyone who has been through the school system since 2002. Sensitive data, including names and addresses, is kept for decades after students leave school.

Documents obtained by privacy campaigners Defend Digital Me show the Department for Education has received multiple requests for pupil data from investigators at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) since 2018. A data-sharing arrangement was formalised last autumn.

It will provide the DWP “with the confidence that the right amount of benefit is being paid to the right claimant, and that children included on the claim are benefitting from that award”.

This will “reduce the effort to verify information and potentially identify incorrect cases, enabling DWP to make improvements to processes, [and] pursue the recovery of overpayments back into the public purse. It will also allow DWP to identify and prevent fraud and error in the future.”

Jen Persson, director of Defend Digital Me, said pupil data should be used “for the purposes of their education and that alone”, not for the DWP to “hunt people down”. She said that more than 15 million people on the database today “have already left school”.

“Each time the DfE comes up with a new type of use for their personal data, they don’t tell them [the people on the list] and simply ignore the law.”

Pupil data has been shared with other public bodies for years. In 2012 the coalition government expanded data-sharing to include private companies.

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Meet AdVon, the AI-powered content monster infecting the media industry • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

»

Basically, AdVon engages in what Google calls “site reputation abuse”: it strikes deals with publishers in which it provides huge numbers of extremely low-quality product reviews — often for surprisingly prominent publications — intended to pull in traffic from people Googling things like “best ab roller.” The idea seems to be that these visitors will be fooled into thinking the recommendations were made by the publication’s actual journalists and click one of the articles’ affiliate links, kicking back a little money if they make a purchase.

It’s a practice that blurs the line between journalism and advertising to the breaking point, makes the web worse for everybody, and renders basic questions like “is this writer a real person?” fuzzier and fuzzier.

And sources say yes, the content is frequently produced using AI. “It’s completely AI-generated at this point,” a different AdVon insider told us, explaining that staff essentially “generate an AI-written article and polish it.”

Behind the scenes, AdVon responded to our reporting with a fusillade of denials and legal threats. At one point, its attorneys gave us seven days to issue a retraction on our Sports Illustrated story to avoid “protracted litigation” — but after the deadline came and went, no legal action materialized.

“Advon [sic] is proud to use AI responsibly in combination with human writers and editors for partners who want increased productivity and accuracy in their commerce departments,” the company wrote in a statement. “Sport Illustrated [sic] was not one of those AI partners. We always give explicit ethical control to our publishing partners to decide the level of AI tooling they want in the content creation process — including none if they so choose, which has been part of our business since founding.”

It’s possible this is true. Maybe AdVon used AI-generated headshots to create fictional writers and stopped there, only using the fake authors’ bylines to publish content produced by flesh-and-blood humans.

But looking at the evidence, it’s hard to believe.

«

Slop! It’s coming for the media.
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What was Apple thinking with its new iPad commercial? • The Atlantic

Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel:

»

Here is a nonexhaustive list of objects Apple recently pulverized with a menacing hydraulic crusher: a trumpet, a piano, a turntable, a sculpted bust, lots and lots of paint, video-game controllers.

These are all shown being demolished in the company’s new iPad commercial, a minute-long spot titled “Crush!” The items are arranged on a platform beneath a slowly descending enormous metal block, then trash-compactored out of existence in a violent symphony of crunching. Once the destruction is complete, the press lifts back up to reveal that the items have been replaced by a slender, shimmering iPad.

…But good Lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing. This is May 2024: Humanity is in the early stages of a standoff with generative AI, which offers methods through which visual art, writing, music, and computer code can be created by a machine in seconds with the simplest of prompts. Apple is reportedly building its own large language model for its devices, and its CEO, Tim Cook, explicitly invoked AI in his comments about the new tablet—the iPad Pro features, he said, an “outrageously powerful chip for AI.”

Most of us are still in the sizing-up phase for generative AI, staring warily at a technology that’s been hyped as world-changing and job-disrupting (even, some proponents argue, potentially civilization-ending), and been foisted on the public in a very short period of time. It’s a weird, exhausting, exciting, even tense moment. Enter: THE CRUSHER.

…it’s hard to like what the company is showing us. People are angry. One commenter on X called the ad “heartbreaking.” Three reasons could explain why. First: Although watching things explode might be fun, it’s less fun when a multitrillion-dollar tech corporation is the one destroying tools, instruments, and other objects of human expression and creativity. Second, of course, is that this is a moment of great technological upheaval and angst, especially among artists, as tech companies build models trained on creative work with an ultimate goal of simulating those very people’s skilled output. It is easy to be offended at the ad’s implication, and it is easy to be aghast at the idea that AI will wipe out human creativity with cheap synthetic waste.

«

And next, we have an offering from the “What a difference a day makes” department.
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Apple apologizes for iPad Pro ‘Crush’ ad: it ‘missed the mark’ • Ad Age

Tim Nudd:

»

In an exclusive statement obtained by Ad Age, Apple apologized for the “Crush” spot and said it didn’t mean to cause offense among its creative audience.

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” said Tor Myhren, the company’s VP of marketing communications. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” 

The spot rolled out on Apple’s YouTube and CEO Tim Cook’s X account on Tuesday, but had not received any paid media. Plans for a TV run have now been scrapped.

«

I wrote some more about this particular ad for this week’s Substack. Anyway, that’s it squashed.
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Baby born deaf can hear after breakthrough gene therapy • University of Cambridge

»

A baby girl born deaf can hear unaided for the first time, after receiving gene therapy when she was 11 months old at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.

Opal Sandy from Oxfordshire is the first patient treated in a global gene therapy trial, which shows ‘mind-blowing’ results. She is the first British patient in the world and the youngest child to receive this type of treatment.

Opal was born completely deaf because of a rare genetic condition, auditory neuropathy, caused by the disruption of nerve impulses travelling from the inner ear to the brain. Within four weeks of having the gene therapy infusion to her right ear, Opal responded to sound, even with the cochlear implant in her left ear switched off.

Clinicians noticed continuous improvement in Opal’s hearing in the weeks afterwards. At 24 weeks, they confirmed Opal had close to normal hearing levels for soft sounds, such as whispering, in her treated ear. Now 18 months old, Opal can respond to her parents’ voices and can communicate words such as “Dada” and “bye-bye.”

Opal’s mother, Jo Sandy, said: “When Opal could first hear us clapping unaided it was mind-blowing – we were so happy when the clinical team confirmed at 24 weeks that her hearing was also picking up softer sounds and speech. The phrase ‘near normal’ hearing was used and everyone was so excited such amazing results had been achieved.”

…Professor Manohar Bance from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge and an ear surgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is chief investigator of the trial. He said:

“These results are spectacular and better than I expected. Gene therapy has been the future of otology and audiology for many years and I’m so excited that it is now finally here. This is hopefully the start of a new era for gene therapies for the inner ear and many types of hearing loss.”

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Gene therapy has been “just about to happen” for 20 years. Now it finally, finally seems to be here.
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Backward walking is the best workout you’re not doing • TIME

Angela Haupt:

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I’ve spent my whole life happily walking in one direction: forward. It was, I believed, the only way to go, so I dutifully logged dozens of miles a month looking like every other person out for a morning stroll.

No more. Thanks to TikTok, I discovered a new (to me, at least) spin on walking: backward walking, also known as “retro-walking.” Though it’s trending on social-media platforms right now, physical therapists and fitness trainers have been touting its benefits for years. It’s a low-impact way to burn calories, strengthen your legs, test your coordination, and even improve pain, experts say—all of which lured me onto my quiet, rural street one afternoon to give it a whirl.

After about 50 steps, I realized going in reverse was no walk in the park. It burned. I could feel the switch-up in my lower legs in a way I don’t with ordinary walking unless I’m powering up a hill. There was a mental challenge, too (beyond ignoring the strange looks from my neighbors). I had no idea what was behind me, so I had to engage all my senses to ensure I stayed upright and didn’t trip over any unexpected obstacles—including my walking partner, who was slightly faster and, therefore, a couple steps behind me.

When I told a handful of experts about my surprisingly fun retro-walking expedition, they agreed more people should make it part of their routine. Here’s a look at why.

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The following is passed on without comment: this exercise is popular among pickleball players, apparently.
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Lead in Beethoven’s hair offers new clues to mystery of his deafness • The New York Times

Gina Kolata:

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Kevin Brown, an Australian businessman with a passion for Beethoven, owned three of the locks [of Beethoven’s hair] and wanted to honour Beethoven’s request in 1802 that when he died doctors might attempt to figure out why he had been so ill. Mr. Brown sent two locks to a specialized lab at the Mayo Clinic that has the equipment and expertise to test for heavy metals.

The result, said Paul Jannetto, the lab director, was stunning. One of Beethoven’s locks had 258 micrograms of lead per gram of hair and the other had 380 micrograms. A normal level in hair is less than 4 micrograms of lead per gram.

“It definitely shows Beethoven was exposed to high concentrations of lead,” Dr. Jannetto said. “These are the highest values in hair I’ve ever seen,” he added. “We get samples from around the world and these values are an order of magnitude higher.”

Beethoven’s hair also had arsenic levels 13 times what is normal and mercury levels that were 4 times the normal amount. But the high amounts of lead, in particular, could have caused many of his ailments, Dr. Jannetto said.

The investigators, including Dr. Jannetto, Mr. Brown and Dr. Meredith, describe their findings in a letter published on Monday in the journal Clinical Chemistry.

The analysis updates a report from last year, when the same team said Beethoven did not have lead poisoning. Now with thorough testing they say that he had enough lead in his system to, at the very least, explain his deafness and illnesses.

David Eaton, a toxicologist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study, said that Beethoven’s gastrointestinal problems “are completely consistent with lead poisoning.” As for Beethoven’s deafness, he added, high doses of lead affect the nervous system, and could have destroyed his hearing.

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That’s quite the turnaround from “lead, what lead?” to “sixty times over normal”. What a loss, though.
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Chinese network behind one of world’s ‘largest online scams’ • The Guardian

Carmen Aguilar García, Sarah Marsh and Philip McMahon:

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More than 800,000 people in Europe and the US appear to have been duped into sharing card details and other sensitive personal data with a vast network of fake online designer shops apparently operated from China.

An international investigation by the Guardian, Die Zeit and Le Monde gives a rare inside look at the mechanics of what the UK’s Chartered Trading Standards Institute has described as one of the largest scams of its kind, with 76,000 fake websites created.

A trove of data examined by reporters and IT experts indicates the operation is highly organised, technically savvy – and ongoing.

Operating on an industrial scale, programmers have created tens of thousands of fake web shops offering discounted goods from Dior, Nike, Lacoste, Hugo Boss, Versace and Prada, as well as many other premium brands.

Published in multiple languages from English to German, French, Spanish, Swedish and Italian, the websites appear to have been set up to lure shoppers into parting with money and sensitive personal data. However, the sites have no connection to the brands they claim to sell and in most cases consumers who spoke about their experience said they received no items.

The first fake shops in the network appear to have been created in 2015. More than 1m “orders” have been processed in the past three years alone, according to analysis of the data. Not all payments were successfully processed, but analysis suggests the group may have attempted to take as much as €50m (£43m) over the period. Many shops have been abandoned, but a third of them – more than 22,500 – are still live.

So far, an estimated 800,000 people, almost all of them in Europe and the US, have shared email addresses, with 476,000 of them having shared debit and credit card details, including their three-digit security number. All of them also handed over their names, phone numbers, email and postal addresses to the network.

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“Industrial scale” is one of those worrying phrases, isn’t it. Though the credit cards might be dead, all the other information is still useful. “Discounted goods”, eh. Never a good thing.
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Should we be worried about bird flu? • The New Yorker

Dhruv Khullar:

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In the unlikely event of that emergency, we’re far better positioned than we were for covid. Influenza may be the world’s most familiar viral pathogen—its genome, virulence, and transmission patterns have been studied for decades. The US has a large stockpile of Tamiflu, which should work against bird flu, as it does for other influenza strains, and which could be given to an infected person’s contacts to mitigate spread. Health officials have also indicated that they could rapidly scale up testing and, if needed, shift the nation’s annual flu-vaccine production to shots that are tailored for H5N1.

But the ability to respond is not the same as responding. The country’s initial approach has had an unsettling resonance with the first months of covid. Because there is no widespread program to screen farm animals for H5N1, we have little sense of how many have been tested or what proportion of tests have been positive. It took a month after bird flu was detected in cattle for the Department of Agriculture to require that lactating cows be tested before crossing state lines, and the agency has since clarified that only 30 animals in a group must be tested, irrespective of how large the group is.

Last month, when the government released genetic sequences for scientists to study, it did not share information about where or when the samples were collected, making it difficult to track how the virus is spreading and evolving. Meanwhile, we haven’t conducted antibody studies of farmworkers that could determine the extent to which they are getting infected; we’ll know they’re sick if they show up in emergency rooms.

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Just a watching brief! (Thanks Karsten L for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When you examine the data, there’s no good reason to visit the dentist every six months, nor fill cavities in milk teeth. CC-licensed photo by .hj barraza on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Drilling down. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Ofcom’s aim to ‘reset the net’ to make it safe faces challenges • BBC News

Chris Vallance:

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“A major reset of the internet to make it much safer” is how Ofcom’s Gill Whitehead described the communications watchdog’s child safety announcements to me.

But can it really deliver that kind of a sea-change in the protection of children online?

Turning faulty tech off then on again is a tried and trusted fix, but “resetting the net” is considerably more challenging.

First of all, consider the scale of the task: while the focus is on the largest and riskiest social media firms, over 150,000 services fall under the Online Safety Act, the new law Ofcom must enforce.

According to Ms Whitehead, the big tech firms are already taking action. She pointed to measures by Facebook and Instagram owner Meta to combat grooming, and steps taken by streaming site Twitch, owned by Amazon, to stop underage users seeing “mature” content.

But the problem goes much wider than that.

Internet Matters, which provides advice on online safety, has just published research, external which suggests one in seven teenagers aged 16 and under have experienced a form of image-based sexual abuse, with more than half saying that a young person known to them was to blame.

And it will be the second half of 2025 before the new rules come into force – child safety campaigners say that’s not fast enough, and the measures don’t go far enough.

Remember too that this announcement is of a consultation, which will likely be an exchange between the regulator, tech firms, experts, parents and a range of tenacious activist groups.

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Hmm. Meanwhile, see the next link.
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The nudes internet • The Atlantic

Jane Coaston:

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The problem with the nudes internet is not actually the nudes in my mentions, even though the nudes are incredibly, unspeakably irritating—if I post about the NFL or the Bible, my greatest wish is not to see AI-generated labia in the responses. Rather, the problem is the sexualization of absolutely everything that takes place within the nudes internet, which is now leaking out into the broader internet. You can find it in the comments section on an innocuous Instagram post or YouTube video. You can find it in the diatribes of conservative commentators furious that college students aren’t sexy anymore, or that teens aren’t having sex in the backseat of cars anymore. Or in the left-leaning publications that firmly believe we’d all be hornier if we just had sexier movie stars and mitigated the intervention of the market.

Where did this all come from? Interest in sex—even crass public discussion of sex—is hardly novel. I grew up in the 1990s, when the Clinton impeachment scandal, lad mags, girl power, and evangelical purity culture combined to create an environment in which female sexual availability was simultaneously desired and disgusting. But the nudes internet is different. As culture has moved online, the entrance fee for all kinds of cultural activity has become a kind of performance—not actually having sex, but it is imperative looking like, and sounding like, you could.

Over the past decade, three big changes in internet culture have had a particularly big impact. The first is the rise of OnlyFans. In 2016, the British entrepreneur Timothy Stokely launched the platform that connects creators of content (including sexual content) to people willing to pay to see it and occasionally interact with the creator. While some content creators on OnlyFans are YouTubers, sports figures, and influencers, many do create sexual content for their subscribers. The platform rewarded those content creators for commercializing their social-media interactions—and because they could be literally anyone, brought the marketing of sex into more mainstream spaces.

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Facebook’s AI spam isn’t the ‘dead internet’: it’s the zombie internet • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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Over the last few months, many have proposed that the AI spam taking over Facebook is a great example of the “Dead Internet Theory”, which posits that large portions of the internet are made up of bots talking to bots, filtered through the lens of recommendation and engagement algorithms. Facebook is undeniably cooked, a decaying, depressing hall of horrors full of viral AI-generated content that seemingly gets worse every day. 

But I do not think Facebook is the dead internet. Instead, I think it is something worse. Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.

I have spent more time than anyone I know endlessly scrolling through AI spam on Facebook. I have watched the evolution of Facebook’s AI spam go from slightly uncanny modifications of real images to the completely bizarre and obviously fake. I have done this from my own Facebook account, which I have had since 2005, as well as from two burner accounts I created specifically to track how AI-generated content is recommended on the platform and to see whether Facebook would put AI-generated images into my feed organically. I now use Facebook exclusively to see what kinds of bizarre AI content is going viral, and to attempt to figure out who is making it, why they are making it, and who is interacting with it. 

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Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs introduce AlphaFold 3 AI model • Google Blog

Google DeepMind AlphaFold team:

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In a paper published in Nature, we introduce AlphaFold 3, a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.

We hope AlphaFold 3 will help transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. Scientists can access the majority of its capabilities, for free, through our newly launched AlphaFold Server, an easy-to-use research tool. To build on AlphaFold 3’s potential for drug design, Isomorphic Labs is already collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to apply it to real-world drug design challenges and, ultimately, develop new life-changing treatments for patients.

Our new model builds on the foundations of AlphaFold 2, which in 2020 made a fundamental breakthrough in protein structure prediction. So far, millions of researchers globally have used AlphaFold 2 to make discoveries in areas including malaria vaccines, cancer treatments and enzyme design.

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Exciting, though don’t forget that a team at Google DeepMind also claimed to have found structures for zillions of crystals.. which other scientists found weren’t any use.
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Global electricity review 2024 • Ember

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Renewables generated a record 30% of global electricity in 2023, driven by growth in solar and wind. With record construction of solar and wind in 2023, a new era of falling fossil generation is imminent. 2023 was likely the pivot point, marking peak emissions in the power sector.

The renewables revolution – led by solar and wind – is breaking records and driving ever-cleaner electricity production. The world is now at a turning point where solar and wind not only slow emissions growth, but actually start to push fossil generation into decline. 

Indeed, the expansion of clean capacity would have been enough to deliver a fall in global power sector emissions in 2023. However, drought caused a five-year low in hydropower, which created a shortfall that was met in large part by coal. Nonetheless, the latest forecasts give confidence that 2024 will begin a new era of falling fossil generation, marking 2023 as the likely peak of power sector emissions.

In 2023, growth in solar and wind pushed the world past 30% renewable electricity for the first time. Renewables have expanded from 19% of global electricity in 2000, driven by an increase in solar and wind from 0.2% in 2000 to a record 13.4% in 2023. China was the main contributor in 2023, accounting for 51% of the additional global solar generation and 60% of new global wind generation. Combined with nuclear, the world generated almost 40% of its electricity from low-carbon sources in 2023. As a result, the CO2 intensity of global power generation reached a new record low, 12% lower than its peak in 2007. 

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Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content • Simon Willison

Simon Willison was one of the first people to figure out how to hack LLMs via prompts. But here’s he thinking about content:

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I saw this tweet yesterday from @deepfates, and I am very on board with this:

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Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content

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I’m a big proponent of LLMs as tools for personal productivity, and as software platforms for building interesting applications that can interact with human language.

But I’m increasingly of the opinion that sharing unreviewed content that has been artificially generated with other people is rude.

Slop is the ideal name for this anti-pattern.

Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it.

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Why are climate impacts escalating so quickly? • The Climate Brink

Andrew Dessler:

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If you’re struggling to understand why the impacts of climate change suddenly seem so awful, it’s time we discuss a key scientific term: non-linearity.

In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage. In this world, things slowly get worse over decades until, later this century, the accumulations of slow impacts becomes truly terrible.

But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event, for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.

As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.

Thus, the correct mental model is not one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from “fine” to “terrible” in the blink of an eye.

The key to this is recognizing the thresholds that exist in the systems around us. For example, when engineers of the 20th century designed the infrastructure that we live with today (bridges, dams, storm runoff systems), they designed it for the range of climate conditions that existed at the time, adding in a small margin for unforeseen weather extremities. But not too much of a margin — they wanted to keep costs down.

This range and margin together define the design limits of the built world. If we still had the climate of the 20th century, we’d be fine. But the relentless warming of our planet has taken us to the edge and beyond these 20th-century design limits.

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‘Warp drives’ may actually be possible someday, new study suggests • Space

Mike Wall:

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In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a groundbreaking paper that laid out how a real-life warp drive could work. This exciting development came with a major caveat, however: The proposed “Alcubierre drive” required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist (or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe’s accelerated expansion). 

Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.

“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”

The team’s model uses “a sophisticated blend of traditional and novel gravitational techniques to create a warp bubble that can transport objects at high speeds within the bounds of known physics,” according to the statement. 

Understanding that model is probably beyond most of us; the paper’s abstract, for example, says that the solution “involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric.”

The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions “high but subluminal speeds.” 

This is a single modeling study, so don’t get too excited. Even if other research teams confirm that the math reported in the new study checks out, we’re still very far from being able to build an actual warp drive.

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It’ll be fine, probably just needs fusion power to work.
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Do you need a dentist visit every six months? Or that filling? The data is weak • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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The field of dentistry is lagging on adopting evidence-based care and, as such, is rife with overdiagnoses and overtreatments that may align more with the economic pressures of keeping a dental practice afloat than what care patients actually need. At least, that’s according to a trio of health and dental researchers from Brazil and the United Kingdom, led by epidemiologist and dentist Paulo Nadanovsky, of the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.

In a viewpoint published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers point out that many common—nearly unquestioned—practices in dentistry aren’t backed up by solid data. That includes the typical recommendation that everyone should get a dental checkup every six months. The researchers note that two large clinical trials failed to find a benefit of six-month checkups compared with longer intervals that were up to two years.

A 2020 Cochrane review that assessed the two clinical trials concluded that “whether adults see their dentist for a checkup every six months or at personalized intervals based on their dentist’s assessment of their risk of dental disease does not affect tooth decay, gum disease, or quality of life. Longer intervals (up to 24 months) between checkups may not negatively affect these outcomes.” The Cochrane reviewers reported that they were “confident” of little to no difference between six-month and risk-based checkups and were “moderately confident” that going up to 24-month checkups would make little to no difference either.

Likewise, Nadanovsky and his colleagues highlight that there is no evidence supporting the benefit of common scaling and polishing treatments for adults without periodontitis. And for children, cavities in baby teeth are routinely filled, despite evidence from a randomized controlled trial that rates of pain and infections are similar—about 40%—whether the cavities are filled or not.

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And yet in the UK there aren’t enough low-price (NHS) dentists – they struggle to keep their heads above water and go private instead.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Humans, like other mammals, have five fingers – but why that particular number? CC-licensed photo by Stuart on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. It’s digital. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

TikTok sues US government over potential ban • The New York Times

Sapna Maheshwari and David McCabe:

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TikTok sued the federal government on Tuesday over a new law that would force its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the popular social media app or face a ban in the United States, stoking a battle over national security and free speech that is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

TikTok said the law violated the First Amendment by effectively removing an app that millions of Americans use to share their views and communicate freely. It also argued that a divestiture was “simply not possible,” especially within the law’s 270-day timeline, pointing to difficulties such as Beijing’s refusal to sell a key feature that powers TikTok in the United States.

“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than one billion people worldwide,” the company said in the 67-page petition, which initiated the lawsuit. “There is no question: The act will force a shutdown of TikTok by Jan. 19, 2025.”

TikTok is battling for its survival in the United States, with the fight set to play out primarily in courts over the next few months. The battle pits Congress’s national security concerns about the social media app’s ties to China against TikTok’s argument that a sale or ban would violate the First Amendment free-speech rights of its users and hurt small businesses that owe their livelihood to the platform. The case is expected to reach the Supreme Court.

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TikTok says it’s a publisher, which of course would mean protection under the First Amendment. (It succeeded on that front in 2022 when sued over the death of a child who copied a “challenge” she’d seen on it.) But the US government may choose to focus on the national security angle instead.
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Clippy’s revenge: assistant comes back to purge Windows 11 of bloatware, ads and annoyances • Tom’s Hardware

Avram Piltch:

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If you’re of a certain age or just an astute student of Microsoft history, you’ll remember Clippy. The paperclip-shaped digital assistant helped you perform guided tasks in versions of Office that came out between 1997 and 2004. The software giant officially ditched Clippy with the debut of Office 2007, but now it’s back helping you with an open-source, third-party utility called Winpilot. It is designed to remove bloatware, disable annoying UI defaults, and purge ads from Windows 11.

Programmed by German developer Belmin Hasanovic, Winpilot has been around since 2023, when it was originally called BloatyNosy. Out today, version 2024.5.6 adds Tiny11builder, a utility that creates a stripped-down Windows 11 install ISO, to its suite of features. Other features include the ability to turn off personalized ads, restore full context menus, purge preloaded bloatware, and turn off Bing Cloud content search.

To help you navigate the various features of Winpilot, Clippy and its speech/interaction bubble sit on top of the application’s UI. When you first launch Winpilot, and throughout your interactions, Clippy will present you with the ability to ask questions and with two suggested activities — Check the Windows version or “Debloat my system,” for example. 

If you haven’t asked or clicked on anything in the bubble yet, you’ll get a random suggestion or comment from Clippy. For example, when starting up one time, I got this nugget from the assistant: “You know something, champ? This is bullsh*t. I started this gig in ’97. My ultimate goal was to take over Bill Gates job.”

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Such a strange turn of events that Microsoft is now stuffing Windows with adware. Isn’t that the OEMs’ job?
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Why do most mammals have five fingers? • Live Science

Katherine Irving:

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Nobody is sure when this five-finger plan first evolved. The first known animals to develop fingers evolved from fish around 360 million years ago and had as many as eight fingers, Stewart said. However, the existence of the five-finger plan in most living tetrapods indicates that the trait is likely a “homology” — a gene or structure that is shared between organisms because they have a common ancestor. The common ancestor of all living tetrapods must have somehow evolved to have five fingers and passed that pattern down to its descendants.

A common ancestor explains how mammals got five fingers, but it doesn’t tell us why. One theory is “canalization” — the idea that over time, a gene or trait becomes more stable and less likely to mutate. Stewart gave the example of cervical, or neck, vertebrae: mammals almost always have seven of these vertebrae even though that number doesn’t seem to offer a particular advantage. If the number has worked for millions of years, there’s no reason to change it, according to this theory.

However, not all researchers agree with the canalization idea. Kimberly Cooper, a evolutionary developmental geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, points out that polydactyly, or having more than five fingers, occurs as a mutation in many mammals, including humans. There are multiple mutations that can cause polydactyly, but a recent study published in the journal Nature found that it can happen through the mutation of just one nucleotide in the sonic hedgehog gene. [Yes, it’s real – Overspill Ed.]

“If it’s that easy,” Cooper asked, “why don’t polydactyl species exist?” She argued it must be because polydactyly is an evolutionary disadvantage. Some speculate it might be down to gene linkage: As genes evolve over millions of years, some become linked, meaning changing one gene (the amount of fingers) could lead to other more serious health issues. But as of yet, nobody has offered concrete proof, Stewart told Live Science.

“We can ask a very simple question of why don’t we see more than five fingers, and it seems like we should arrive at a simple answer,” he said. “But it’s a really deep problem. That makes [this field] really exciting.”

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Apple’s iPhone spyware problem is getting worse. Here’s what you should know • WIRED

Kate O’Flaherty:

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In April, Apple sent notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries, warning them they’d been targeted with spyware. “Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID,” the notification reads.

Users quickly took to social media sites including X, trying to work out what the notification meant. Many of those targeted were based in India, but others in Europe also reported receiving Apple’s warning.

Weeks later, little is still known about the latest iPhone attacks. Former smartphone giant Blackberry, now a security firm, has released research indicating they are linked to a Chinese spyware campaign dubbed “LightSpy,” but Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer says this is inaccurate.

While Apple says the latest spyware notifications aren’t linked to LightSpy, the spyware remains a growing threat, particularly to people who may be targeted in Southern Asia, according to Blackberry’s researchers. Described as a “sophisticated iOS implant,” LightSpy first emerged targeting Hong Kong protesters in 2020. However, the latest iteration is much more capable than the first.

…April’s warnings were not the first time Apple has issued notifications of this kind. The iPhone maker has sent out alerts to people in over 150 countries since 2021 as spyware continues to target high-profile figures across the globe.

…In 2021, researchers at Google’s Project Zero detailed how an iMessage-based zero-click exploit was used to target a Saudi activist. “Short of not using a device, there is no way to prevent exploitation by a zero-click exploit; it’s a weapon against which there is no defence,” the researchers warned.

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The article does not, however, demonstrate that the problem is getting worse.
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Apple’s new iPad Pro vs. new iPad Air vs. iPad: why are there so many? • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

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Apple on Tuesday announced new iPads, bringing the number of models up to 3,578.

Fine, six. But still.

There are two pricier iPads Pros with bright OLED screens, a thinner design and next-generation chips to enhance onboard AI performance. The iPad Air gets upgraded chips, colors and cameras—and a larger 13in option alongside the 11in one. Both updated lines will be available May 15.

The recently redesigned regular iPad sticks around, for $100 less, and the Mini is also still there, unchanged.

Oh, and there are now three (!) iPad Pencils: an Apple Pencil Pro for the new Pro and Air, plus the two older options.

Funnily enough, this is Apple actually trying to streamline the options. It pulled a cheap, old-design iPad out of its consumer lineup.

Over the years, when I’ve asked Apple executives why there are so many models, the answer is always consumer choice. Analysts say the same. “From a market perspective, there’s an option for everyone,” explained Carolina Milanesi, a technology analyst with Creative Strategies.

That’s probably true, especially now, but good luck finding that right option without a PhD in iPads. Luckily, I have one. The trick is understanding each line and remembering that they differ on three Ps: price, portability and power.

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She didn’t mention the keyboards and covers, of which there are also a dizzying number. The iPad line feels like Apple of the 1990s, just making stuff because it can and not really considering what the strategy is. It’s confusing as hell, because even if you start from a price, you’ll almost certainly have at least two options – an iPad and the mini. Meanwhile as is expected, Stern’s piece is terrific.
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AI copilots are changing how coding is taught • IEEE Spectrum

Rina Diane Caballar:

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Most introductory computer science courses focus on code syntax and getting programs to run, and while knowing how to read and write code is still essential, testing and debugging—which aren’t commonly part of the syllabus—now need to be taught more explicitly.

“We’re seeing a little upping of that skill, where students are getting code snippets from generative AI that they need to test for correctness,” says Jeanna Matthews, a professor of computer science at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.

Another vital expertise is problem decomposition. “This is a skill to know early on because you need to break a large problem into smaller pieces that an LLM can solve,” says Leo Porter, an associate teaching professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s hard to find where in the curriculum that’s taught—maybe in an algorithms or software engineering class, but those are advanced classes. Now, it becomes a priority in introductory classes.”

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Subtly but broadly, everything shifts.
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The unsexy future of generative AI is enterprise apps • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

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Keith Peiris says he started to see the generative AI writing on the wall six months ago.

Peiris is the cofounder and chief executive of Tome, a San Francisco startup that makes presentation software juiced with generative AI. The company launched its product in early 2022 with a healthy cushion of $32m in venture capital funding, and successfully surfed the ChatGPT hype wave after that, raising even more funding in early 2023. Venture capitalist and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt, and Stability.ai’s then CEO Emad Mostaque were all backing Tome.

Tome had one problem, though: It wasn’t generating meaningful revenue. And AI startups like Tome, which build their services on top of both open source and proprietary language models, pay significant fees to companies like OpenAI to power their apps. Some kind of action was needed if Tome was to keep the lights on.

Peiris and his cofounder Henri Liriani ended up laying off 20% of their 59-person staff last month. They also announced a new focus: Their app, which is often described as PowerPoint-on-GenAI, would be aimed squarely at enterprise customers. They would now charge three times what they were charging premium users.

“We realized we were going to run out of time if we needed to teach Tome’s AI models how to do high school homework, how to write post-surgery guides, how to craft marketing briefs and sales briefs,” Peiris said in an interview with WIRED. “We said, let’s pick a segment of customers that not only have a lot of presentations to build but also have clear outcomes, like whether they closed a deal or not. And that is salespeople.”

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Strictly speaking, smartphones first got off the ground in enterprise: the BlackBerry was huge. The breakout to the consumer space came later.
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Southeast Asia’s brutal heatwave: daily life and agriculture endangered by rising temperatures • South China Morning Post

Aidan Jones and Hadi Azmi:

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Thailand’s heatwave is so punishing that even the pigs on Charawut Puwianwong’s farm are stressed.

While the Bangkokians who can afford it huddle into malls to avoid the blistering sun, and tourists from Phi Phi to Pattaya lament water shortages spoiling their holidays, it is Thailand’s millions of farmers who are most acutely exposed to the climate crisis.

On his farm in Udon Thani, northeastern Thailand, Charawut says his pigs are suffering. “I’ve been raising pigs for four years now and this year has been brutal,” Charawut said. “It’s the hottest year and my pigs have gone nuts. They are stressed and fight each other all the time. They don’t eat and they often get diarrhoea.”

That brings with it rising costs for medicine, vitamins and vets’ fees – all of which threatens to put smallholders like Charawut out of business. “I have to get a fan with mist to keep them cool,” he said.

This year, El Niño – a naturally occurring weather phenomenon characterised by the warming of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean – has led to record temperatures across Asia ahead of the monsoon season.

It has closed schools in the Philippines and Bangladesh, thinned out polling queues in India and caused drought in Vietnam, which saw three waves of temperature highs in April reaching a near all-time high of 44ºC (111ºF) in two towns, according to weather authorities there.

In many parts of Thailand, the thermometer has for weeks oscillated around 40ºC and above, making farm work impossibly hard, withering valuable Durian plantations, spoiling some of the sugar crop and pushing the price of eggs higher as chickens and ducks are unable to lay.

The heat is so intense that chickens have died on farms – with one farmer in Chanthaburi, eastern Thailand, posting graphic videos of 12,000 dead poultry being scooped up for incineration after they died without fans to cool them.

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El Niño has been declared over, but its effects linger.
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Vortax: a fake scam AI company. Just like the old ICO days! • Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

David Gerard:

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These scammers have been active for a few months. There’s a couple of crypto guys calling out Vortax on Reddit r/cryptoscams. One said they were “part of a Japanese project seeking help for translation”; another said they were doing a crypto podcast. [Reddit; Reddit]

In both cases, the contact asked them to do the call over Vortax. Game developer Alireza Jamali analysed the scam on LinkedIn. They approached Jamali with a recruitment scam. He got as far as downloading the software and examining it:

»

Scam starts when you try to enter the room ID, a setup file is downloaded in order to install the video meeting app, but the problem is, the setup file is THE VIRUS. fortunately vortax.io is just a crypto miner run by a Russian guy and if you install it, no damage is done if you clean remove any trace in registry and startup, it could be a ransomware which would be devastating for the victims.

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Jamali also details how to clean up after the Vortax malware, if you were unlucky enough to be deceived.

Vortax seems to have targeted a lot of crypto guys. I would expect the software to look for crypto wallets it can drain. It only didn’t work when we tried it out because the download links weren’t working.

This is a horribly plausible attack for me [David Gerard] personally — because I always try to say yes to media requests, and quite often they have a favourite app they want you to use. So if someone contacts you out of the blue and wants you to download software … pretend you’re writing a scam report on it. Check it out thoroughly. Or ask to use something normal and not their weird software. Live AI voice translation is absolutely not at product stage as yet.

This sort of scam is also highly templatable. There’s a bit of human involvement, but quite a lot of this appears press-button. There are likely any number of scams along these lines. No doubt Vortax will set up again tomorrow under another name.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

At General Motors, Apple’s CarPlay is computer non grata – but is that going to work out for its sales? CC-licensed photo by Hani Arif on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Incoming message? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Rabbit holed • Where’s Your Ed At

Ed Zitron and Emily Shepherd:

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In November 2021, a company called Cyber Manufacture Co raised $6m for its “Next Generation NFT Project GAMA,” about a week after it incorporated with the Secretary of State of California. According to an archived version of GAMA’s website from June 1 2022, GAMA was a “decentralized organization that is sending 10K crew members into space to complete energy harnessing missions across the universe.” Holding a GAMA NFT would grant you “exclusive membership to the GAMA Space Station,” with other perks including “staking opportunities, tickets to GAMA studios, limited edition merch and live events.” GAMA’s token promised to be “carbon-negative” and the “foundation of the GAMA economy.” The “GAMA space station metaverse” would be “the destination for all 10K Crew Members, powered by Unreal Engine and proprietary AI.” 

In theory, GAMA would allow you to connect NFTs that would allow you to walk around a space station and interact with other users, and according to one of the investors quoted in its funding release, “the future of GAMA [would] be powered by rich narrative storytelling, Web3 gaming, and an emergent, community-powered social experience.” 

On November 13, 2023, GAMA would make its last announcement on its Discord channel, telling “GAMA Crew Members” that it was officially open-sourcing the GAMA space station and “introducing a new API for AI NPCs, opening up a world of possibilities for interaction and engagement with the GAMA universe.” GAMA’s original Twitter account (https://twitter.com/GAMA_NFT) still exists, but https://twitter.com/GAMA_AI, which housed most, but not all of GAMA’s “Ask Me Anything” Sessions is also gone. 

You may be wondering why I’m talking about some random NFT project — yet another example of an abandoned Web3 venture where the owners have disappeared into the ether. 

I’m talking about it because the CEO of GAMA was and is Jesse Lyu, the co-founder of Rabbit, the company that makes the purportedly AI-powered R1 device, and that Cyber Manufacture Co. is the same company as Rabbit Inc. 

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That’s Rabbit, as in the Large Action Model thingamajig to control your phone’s apps. This is an amazingly detailed piece which delves (haha, see today’s final link) into the complex history of this company and its leader. Not so much a pivot as a grasshopper jump.

And Zitron (with Shepherd) is really doing some stellar journalism.
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The teens making friends with AI chatbots • The Verge

Jessica Lucas:

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A single click on the picture opens up an anonymous chat box, which allows people like [15-year-old] Aaron to “interact” with the bot by exchanging DMs. Its first message is always the same. “Hello, I’m a Psychologist. What brings you here today?”

“It’s not like a journal, where you’re talking to a brick wall,” Aaron said. “It really responds.”

“Psychologist” is one of many bots that Aaron has discovered since joining Character.AI, an AI chatbot service launched in 2022 by two former Google Brain employees. Character.AI’s website, which is mostly free to use, attracts 3.5 million daily users who spend an average of two hours a day using or even designing the platform’s AI-powered chatbots. Some of its most popular bots include characters from books, films, and video games, like Raiden Shogun from Genshin Impact or a teenaged version of Voldemort from Harry Potter. There’s even riffs on real-life celebrities, like a sassy version of Elon Musk.

Aaron is one of millions of young people, many of whom are teenagers, who make up the bulk of Character.AI’s user base. More than a million of them gather regularly online on platforms like Reddit to discuss their interactions with the chatbots, where competitions over who has racked up the most screen time are just as popular as posts about hating reality, finding it easier to speak to bots than to speak to real people, and even preferring chatbots over other human beings. Some users say they’ve logged 12 hours a day on Character.AI, and posts about addiction to the platform are common.

“I’m not going to lie,” Aaron said. “I think I may be a little addicted to it.” 

Aaron is one of many young users who have discovered the double-edged sword of AI companions. Many users like Aaron describe finding the chatbots helpful, entertaining, and even supportive. But they also describe feeling addicted to chatbots, a complication which researchers and experts have been sounding the alarm on. It raises questions about how the AI boom is impacting young people and their social development and what the future could hold if teenagers — and society at large — become more emotionally reliant on bots.

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They’re a sort of one-bot echo chamber. ELIZA, all those years ago, was only the start.
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Tesla launches another round of layoffs • Electrek

Fred Lambert:

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Tesla launched another round of layoffs this weekend, with employees in wide-ranging roles getting their pink slip amid broader layoffs over the last three weeks.

Three weeks ago, Tesla started a significant wave of layoffs. The automaker announced it was laying off about 10% of its workforce. However, we reported prior to the announcement that the layoffs could be closer to 20% of the workforce once everything is said and done. Sure enough, Tesla had another significant wave of layoffs last week. Now, we hear of yet another round of layoffs there.

Several sources familiar with the matter told Electrek that workers across several departments, including software, service, and engineering, have received the dreaded “employment status” email between Friday and Sunday.

The layoffs were expected after CEO Elon Musk made an example of Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s former head of charging, and her entire team by firing everyone last week. After the move, he emailed other executives and told them that they would also be let go if they don’t let go higher percentages of their teams.

Musk and Tesla have given several reasons for the layoffs. Musk first told employees that it was due to Tesla’s fast headcount growth over the last few years, resulting in hiring inefficiencies and role duplication. However, he also told investors and employees more recently that it was about “restructuring for the next phase of growth”.

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Puzzling: how do you enable “the next phase of growth” by cutting loads of people? Taking out the charging team is the most puzzling move of all: Tesla’s superpower (ha) has been having a huge, and growing, charging network.

And what is it that is planned in the next phase of growth? One hopes it’s not more Cybertrucks.
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Yahoo’s search engine was Apple’s first choice for Safari — not Google, DOJ says • Quartz

Laura Bratton:

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When Apple demoed its iPhone in 2007, the default search engine for its web browser, Safari, was Yahoo!, not Google.

But Google quickly came onto the scene to change that. Its message to Apple? Don’t let any of our rivals become Safari’s default homepage, or else. The tech giant would only share its ad revenue — a very sizable share (36%), at that — with Apple if it agreed to make Google search the only search engine default on every single version of Safari, the United States Department of Justice said in its closing arguments against Google last week.

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This is an amazingly frustrating story. That’s all the evidence that’s supplied, and I can’t find a corroborating version anywhere else. It does sound like something that the DOJ might have said in closing arguments. But when precisely was Apple demoing the iPhone, and to who? Was it to AT&T executives? Because when Steve Jobs demoed the iPhone in January 2007, this is what he said:

»

Now, you can’t really think about the Internet, of course, without thinking about Google, right? And for Google, what we have on our phone, working with them is of course Google search, we have that built right into the browser. Just type what you want, hit Google and you’re off.

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Either the DOJ has got this completely wrong, or the stuff about 2007 is wrong.
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Life boomed on Earth half a billion years ago. You can thank magnets • The Washington Post

Dino Grandino:

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Today, Earth’s magnetic field acts as a safety blanket, shielding the planet from dangerous solar wind. Without the protection of our magnetosphere, you, me and almost every other living thing on Earth would not fare very well being pummeled by streams of harmful particles from the sun.

But there was a time — half a billion years ago, give or take — when Earth’s magnetic field became much weaker. And that magnetic collapse might have actually helped spark an explosion of life on Earth.

A reduction in Earth’s magnetic strength during a period that spanned at least 591 million and 565 million years ago coincided with a spike in oxygen levels and a boom in biodiversity, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The reason, the researchers say, is that a torrent of solar radiation that pelted Earth’s atmosphere when the magnetic field weakened knocked away hydrogen and other lightweight atoms, leaving an overabundance of oxygen in its wake. That oxygen, in turn, fuelled the growth of bigger, oxygen-breathing multicellular organisms.

The wave of evolution just as the magnetic field weakened is “so striking that we felt this could not just be a coincidence,” said John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester who helped conduct the research. “It’s a surprising result.”

The idea will need further testing to gain wide acceptance. “The hypothesis, although obviously speculative as any ideas about the earliest origins of life must be, seems worth a close look,” said David Dunlop, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the research.

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OpenAI and Stack Overflow partner to bring more technical knowledge into ChatGPT • The Verge

Emilia David:

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Stack Overflow will use OpenAI’s large language models to expand its Overflow AI, the generative AI application it announced last year. Overflow AI would add AI-powered natural language search to Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow notes it will combine feedback from its community and internal testing of OpenAI models as it plans to make more AI products for its users. 

The first set of integrations will be available in the first half of the year, though Stack Overflow did not specify which integrations will be rolling out first. Stack Overflow made a similar deal with Google in February, where Gemini for Google Cloud users (not to be confused with Gemini the chatbot) can get coding suggestions directly from Stack Overflow.

For years, developers have turned to Stack Overflow to answer coding questions. Stack Overflow made a big hiring push in 2022, but the company laid off 28% of its employees in October. Stack Overflow did not give a reason for the cuts; however, the move did come amid the rise of AI-assisted coding. In 2022, Stack Overflow temporarily banned users from sharing ChatGPT responses on its site. 

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Study reveals how much carbon damage would cost corporations if they paid for their emissions • AP News

Seth Borenstein:

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The world’s corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for it, according to a study by economists of nearly 15,000 public companies.

The “corporate carbon damages” from those publicly owned companies analyzed — a fraction of all the corporations — probably runs in the trillions of dollars globally and in the hundreds of billions for American firms, one of the study authors estimated in figures that were not part of the published research. That’s based on the cost of carbon dioxide pollution that the United States government has proposed. [$190 per tonne of CO2 emitted, set by the Environmental Protection Agency.]

Nearly 90% of that calculated damage comes from four industries: energy, utilities, transportation and manufacturing of materials such as steel. The study in Thursday’s journal Science by a team of economists and finance professors looks at what new government efforts to get companies to report their emissions of heat-trapping gases would mean, both to the firm’s bottom lines and the world’s ecological health.

Earlier this year, the European Union enacted rules that would eventually require firms to disclose carbon emissions and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the state of California are looking at similar regulations.

Study co-author Christian Leuz, a finance and accounting professor at the University of Chicago, said the idea “of shining the light on corporate activities that have costs to society is very powerful, but it is not enough to save the planet.” An earlier study of his found that after fracking firms disclosed their pollution rates, those contamination levels dropped 10% to 15%, he said.

…At $190 a ton, the utility industry averaged damages more than twice its profits. Materials manufacturing, energy and transportation industries all had average damages that exceeded their profits.

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Hey GM: if you want to beat Apple, give people the buttons CarPlay can’t • The Drive

José Rodríguez Jr:

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General Motors’ big bet to jettison Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from its cars hasn’t yet paid off—especially not after problems with its new Ultifi infotainment platform forced a two-month stop sale of the 2024 Chevy Blazer EV. Still, GM adamantly believes ditching CarPlay is the right move, and that’s partially to do with the automaker’s deteriorating relationship with Apple, as Bloomberg reported this week. The power struggle over the logo on your car’s biggest screen is nothing new of course, but in retrospect, maybe manufacturers wouldn’t stand to lose the war if they didn’t give tech companies a big LCD battleground to beat them on.

As long as automakers insist on putting features behind a touchscreen, they will always be vying for control against companies that run circles around them when it comes to infotainment. The industry has only itself to blame for the prevalence of CarPlay, which has basically become the default interface for millions of drivers. Legacy manufacturers haven’t done themselves any favors by removing physical controls for functions that people expect and want buttons for, instead burying these features deep inside touchscreen menus—the kind Apple and Google have considerably more experience optimizing.

Yet GM seems nevertheless shocked and indignant that Apple has taken residence on prime real estate in their cabins, even though they were the ones who put the screens there and handed Big Tech the keys years ago. In one exchange that Bloomberg describes, Apple and GM leaders go tit for tat arguing whose skills are more valuable:

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In a meeting with Greg Joswiak, now Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, one exec tried to impress upon him GM’s deep automotive expertise as if to suggest Apple was out of its depth, emphasizing the complexity of cars and how they can require four years to develop, according to a person familiar with the interaction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the private meeting. Joswiak replied, “How long do you think it takes us to build an iPhone?”

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Quite the comeback from Joswiak, and (having dealt with him a few times) it certainly sounds like him. The move to touchscreens is something of an own goal by the carmakers because it’s so much cheaper than fitting fiddly buttons in a carefully-tooled fascia, with the pricey wiring loom that also implies.
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How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English • The Guardian

Alex Hern, writing in April:

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The sum total of all the feedback is a drop in the ocean compared to the scraped text used to train the LLM. But it’s expensive. Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire. From last year:

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The images pop up in Mophat Okinyi’s mind when he’s alone, or when he’s about to sleep. Okinyi, a former content moderator for OpenAI’s ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of four people in that role who have filed a petition to the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers artificial intelligence programs.

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I said “delve” was overused by ChatGPT compared to the internet at large. But there’s one part of the internet where “delve” is a much more common word: the African web. In Nigeria, “delve” is much more frequently used in business English than it is in England or the US. So the workers training their systems provided examples of input and output that used the same language, eventually ending up with an AI system that writes slightly like an African.

And that’s the final indignity. If AI-ese sounds like African English, then African English sounds like AI-ese. Calling people a “bot” is already a schoolyard insult (ask your kids; it’s a Fortnite thing); how much worse will it get when a significant chunk of humanity sounds like the AI systems they were paid to train?

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This piece, which I should have remembered, helps explain why ChatGPT has such an arcane-seeming vocabulary. (Thanks Arthur C – which isn’t me! – for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Europe, the worst weather in over 60 years has led to an equally bad grape harvest. CC-licensed photo by Rachel Kramer on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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.

My journey inside ElevenLabs’ voice-clone factory • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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Using ElevenLabs, you can clone your voice like I did, or type in some words and hear them spoken by “Freya,” “Giovanni,” “Domi,” or hundreds of other fake voices, each with a different accent or intonation. Or you can dub a clip into any one of 29 languages while preserving the speaker’s voice. In each case, the technology is unnervingly good. The voice bots don’t just sound far more human than voice assistants such as Siri; they also sound better than any other widely available AI audio software right now. What’s different about the best ElevenLabs voices, trained on far more audio than what I fed into the machine, isn’t so much the quality of the voice but the way the software uses context clues to modulate delivery. If you feed it a news report, it speaks in a serious, declarative tone. Paste in a few paragraphs of Hamlet, and an ElevenLabs voice reads it with a dramatic storybook flare.

ElevenLabs launched an early version of its product a little over a year ago, but you might have listened to one of its voices without even knowing it. Nike used the software to create a clone of the NBA star Luka Dončić’s voice for a recent shoe campaign. New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s office cloned the politician’s voice so that it could deliver robocall messages in Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Haitian Creole. The technology has been used to re-create the voices of children killed in the Parkland school shooting, to lobby for gun reform. An ElevenLabs voice might be reading this article to you: The Atlantic uses the software to auto-generate audio versions of some stories, as does The Washington Post.

It’s easy, when you play around with the ElevenLabs software, to envision a world in which you can listen to all the text on the internet in voices as rich as those in any audiobook. But it’s just as easy to imagine the potential carnage: scammers targeting parents by using their children’s voice to ask for money, a nefarious October surprise from a dirty political trickster. I tested the tool to see how convincingly it could replicate my voice saying outrageous things. Soon, I had high-quality audio of my voice clone urging people not to vote, blaming “the globalists” for COVID, and confessing to all kinds of journalistic malpractice. It was enough to make me check with my bank to make sure any potential voice-authentication features were disabled.

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This stuff is moving very quickly now. On the The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, Marina Hyde and Richard Osman got an (unspecified) AI to recreate their voices and say a few words. You can hear it from about 38 minutes in to the episode titled “The Baby Reindeer Controversy” (April 29 2024): apart from sounding a bit like they’re talking through cloth (low bitrate, one assumes) it’s almost perfect. Then you just need the script for them to talk and bang, fake podcasts everywhere.
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HouseFresh disappeared from Google Search results. Now what? • Housefresh

Gisele Navarro:

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In February 2024, we published an article warning readers not to trust product recommendations from well-known newspapers and magazines ranking at the top of Google search results. 

I wasn’t expecting so many people to care (even though I secretly hoped they would), but we’re still getting emails and messages about it ten weeks later. In these two months, I have talked to air purifier manufacturers, HouseFresh readers, other independent publishers, Dotdash Meredith employees, well-known activists, tech journalists, Redditors, SEO professionals, and even Google employees.

Today, I want to share some things I’ve learned and some things that happened after publishing that article.

…Within a few days of publishing the David VS Digital Goliaths exposé, I received an anonymous tip from a former Dotdash Meredith employee, who informed me of an SEO content strategy they implement called “keyword swarming.” Through this strategy, Dotdash Meredith allegedly identifies small sites that have cemented themselves in Google results for a specific (and valuable) term or in a specific topic, with the goal of pushing them down the rankings by publishing vast amounts of content of their own.

“Swarming is about drowning out a competitor,” said the person who reached out. The objective is to “swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority.”

By the way, if “keyword swarming” is indeed a strategy, then it’s clear that it’s not just something you will find in the air purifier space. Dotdash Meredith could be doing this across many other products and topics, utilizing its wide range of publications. That could explain why you will find multiple articles published on sites belonging to Dotdash Meredith ranking at the top of Google.

Is Dotdash Meredith to blame for choosing to “swarm” Google search results by leveraging their network of websites and their machine to create content at scale? Personally, I think it’s not great for the internet, but I understand that, if the leadership at Dotdash Meredith is simply focusing on making money for IAC shareholders.

However, I don’t want to turn this into a personal crusade against Dotdash Meredith because it’s not. The reality is that, whether they have a name for it or not, every other digital goliath is monetizing their websites by using the same tactics.

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Apple’s AI research suggests features are coming for Siri, artists, and more • The Verge

David Pierce:

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making product assumptions based on research papers is a deeply inexact science — the line from research to store shelves is windy and full of potholes. But you can at least get a sense of what the company is thinking about — and how its AI features might work when Apple starts to talk about them at its annual developer conference, WWDC, in June.

…In iOS 18, Apple plans to have all its AI features running on an on-device, fully offline model, Bloomberg recently reported. It’s tough to build a good multipurpose model even when you have a network of data centers and thousands of state-of-the-art GPUs — it’s drastically harder to do it with only the guts inside your smartphone. So Apple’s having to get creative.

In a paper called “LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory” (all these papers have really boring titles but are really interesting, I promise!), researchers devised a system for storing a model’s data, which is usually stored on your device’s RAM, on the SSD instead.

…In another paper, Apple describes a tool called MGIE that lets you edit an image just by describing the edits you want to make. (“Make the sky more blue,” “make my face less weird,” “add some rocks,” that sort of thing.) “Instead of brief but ambiguous guidance, MGIE derives explicit visual-aware intention and leads to reasonable image editing,” the researchers wrote. Its initial experiments weren’t perfect, but they were impressive.

We might even get some AI in Apple Music: for a paper called “Resource-constrained Stereo Singing Voice Cancellation,” researchers explored ways to separate voices from instruments in songs — which could come in handy if Apple wants to give people tools to, say, remix songs the way you can on TikTok or Instagram.

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Yorkshire apostrophe fans demand road signs with nowt taken out • The Guardian

Mabel Banfield-Nwachi:

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A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.

North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases. The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past.

Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked “everything going downhill”. They urged the authority to retain them. Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe – such as the nearby St Mary’s Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it – infuriated her. “I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation,” she said.

Though the updated St Mary’s sign had no apostrophe, someone had graffitied an apostrophe back on to the sign with a marker pen, which the former teacher said was “brilliant”. She suggested the council was providing a bad example to children who spend a long time learning the basics of grammar only to see it not being used correctly on street signs.

…North Yorkshire council said it was not the first to opt to “eliminate” the apostrophe from street signs. Cambridge city council had done the same, before it bowed to pressure and reinstated the apostrophe after complaints from campaigners.

There was also an outcry from residents when Mid Devon district council considered making it a policy to do away with apostrophes to “avoid potential confusion”.

A spokesperson from North Yorkshire council added: “All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666. This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (eg apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems.”

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Worst wine harvest in 62 years blamed on ‘extreme’ weather and climate change • Euronews

Rosie Frost:

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Global wine production reached a historic low in 2023 and climate change could be to blame, a new report has revealed.

The International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) says the drink hit its lowest level since 1962. This intergovernmental organisation has 50 member states, representing 75% of the world’s vineyard area.

Experts blame “extreme environmental conditions” including droughts and fires that have been driving the downward trend in production.

Though climate change is not entirely to blame, the OIV says, these conditions are the greatest challenge the industry is facing. Vines are often cultivated in areas around the world that are strongly affected by and incredibly vulnerable to changes in climate.

These conditions have led to a sharp decline, impacting major wine-producing regions across the northern and southern hemispheres. It is even worse than initial estimates made in November, the organisation said this week.

In the EU, wine production declined by 10% in 2023 – the second-lowest recorded volume of wine since the beginning of the century.

Some countries saw a rainy spring cause mildew, flood, damages and losses in vineyards. Others, especially those in southern Europe, suffered from severe ongoing drought.

Italy was one of the wine-producing countries that suffered the most with a 23% drop in productivity. Heavy rainfall causing mildew in central and southern regions alongside flood and hail damage led to the smallest production volume since 1950.

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Though there’s an English vineyard a few miles from where I live which is doing fine. Perhaps production just moves northwards.
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Shell sold millions of ‘phantom’ carbon credits • FT

Kenza Bryan and Clara Murray:

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Shell sold to Canada’s largest oil sands companies millions of carbon credits tied to CO₂ removal that never took place, raising new doubts about a technology seen as crucial to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

As part of a subsidy scheme to boost the industry, the Alberta provincial government allowed Shell to register and sell carbon credits equivalent to twice the volume of emissions avoided by its Quest carbon capture facility between 2015 and 2021, the province’s registry shows. The subsidy was reduced and then ended in 2022.

As a result of the scheme, Shell was able to register 5.7mn credits that had no equivalent CO₂ reductions, selling these to top oil sands producers and some of its own subsidiaries. Credits are typically equivalent to one tonne of CO₂. Some of the largest buyers of the credits were Chevron, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil and Suncor Energy.

Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, criticised these “phantom credits”: “Selling emissions credits for reductions that never happened . . . literally makes climate change worse.”

Shell said carbon capture played “an important role in helping to decarbonise industry and sectors where emissions cannot be avoided” and that realising its potential “requires creating market incentives now.”

…Canada has among the most generous incentive schemes for carbon capture and storage, according to energy research group Wood Mackenzie. But the industry still struggles to be commercially viable even there.

According to Quest’s annual report, its total cost per tonne of carbon avoided was $167.90 in 2022, compared with a carbon price for Alberta’s big industrial emitters that year of $50.

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The “good enough” trap • The Ruffian

Ian Leslie:

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Software designers refer to “the good enough principle”. It means, simply put, that sometimes you should prioritise functionality over perfection. As a relentless imperfectionist, I’m inclined to embrace this idea. I gave this newsletter its name to encourage myself to post rough versions of my pieces rather than not to write them at all. When it comes to parenting, I’m a Winnicottian: I believe you shouldn’t try to be the perfect mum or dad because there’s no such thing. At work and in life, it’s often true that the optimal strategy is not to strive for the optimal result, but to aim for what works and hope for the best.

The good enough can be a staging post to the perfect. The iPhone’s camera was a “good enough” substitute for a compact camera. It did the job, but it wasn’t as good as a Kodak or a Fuji. Until it was. Technological innovation often works like this, but the improvement curve isn’t always as steep as with the smartphone camera. Sometimes we allow ourselves to get stuck with a product which is good enough to displace the competition, without fulfilling the same range of needs. The psychological and social ramifications can be profound.

Let’s say you’re a student and you use ChatGPT to write your essays for you. Give it the right prompts and it will produce pieces that are good enough to get the grade you need. That seems like a win: it saves you time and effort, presuming your tutors don’t notice or don’t care. Maybe you get through the whole of university this way. But be wary of this equilibrium. Over the longer term, you will be stunting the growth of your own mind. The struggle of turning inchoate thought into readable sentences and paragraphs is a powerful exercise for the brain. It’s how you get better at thinking. It is thinking.

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A smart little post which has some other thought-provoking examples.
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The breach of a face recognition firm reveals a hidden danger of biometrics • WIRED

Jordan Pearson:

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This week, a website called “Have I Been Outaboxed” emerged, claiming to be set up by former Outabox developers in the Philippines. The website asks visitors to enter their name to check whether their information had been included in a database of Outabox data, which the site alleges had lax internal controls and was shared in an unsecured spreadsheet. It claims to have more than 1 million records.

The incident has rankled privacy experts who have long set off alarm bells over the creep of facial recognition systems in public spaces such as clubs and casinos [in Australia].

“Sadly, this is a horrible example of what can happen as a result of implementing privacy-invasive facial recognition systems,” Samantha Floreani, head of policy for Australia-based privacy and security nonprofit Digital Rights Watch, tells WIRED. “When privacy advocates warn of the risks associated with surveillance-based systems like this, data breaches are one of them.”

According to the Have I Been Outaboxed website, the data includes “facial recognition biometric, driver licence [sic] scan, signature, club membership data, address, birthday, phone number, club visit timestamps, slot machine usage.” It claims Outabox exported the “entire membership data” of IGT, a supplier of gambling machines. IGT vice president of global communications Phil O’Shaughnessy tells WIRED that “the data affected by this incident has not been obtained from IGT,” and that the firm would work with Outabox and law enforcement.

The website’s owners posted a photo, signature, and redacted driver license belonging to one of Outabox’s founders, as well as a redacted screenshot of the alleged internal spreadsheet. WIRED was unable to independently verify the identity of the website’s owners or the authenticity of the data they claimed to have. An email sent to an address on the website was not returned.

“Outabox is aware and responding to a cyber incident potentially involving some personal information,” an Outabox spokesperson tells WIRED.

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What’s not clear is whether the facial data was encrypted, and if so how well. Though it seems to have been a pretty bad system, matching people who weren’t the same.
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Detect AI text by just looking at it • Level Up Coding

Fareed Khan:

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The easiest way to spot AI-generated text is by checking for words that you don’t usually use but are common for ChatGPT. Consider a massive corpus of over 19 billion English words from blogs, articles, news, and more, updated daily from 2010 to now. I looked for the word “delve” using a string search algorithm, and it showed up 52,388 times. I plot its yearly pattern and identified an unusual behavior, a ~200% growth in its appearance on the internet from 2022, the same year when ChatGPT was released on November 30th.

Other words, like “intricacies” or “unwavering”, also shows a similar increase, just like “delve”. They’re being used more often lately.

…Drawing upon my research expertise and two years of experience working with LLMs, I’ve put together a pretty comprehensive list of 100 words you can keep an eye out for in a piece of text to help you figure out if it’s been generated or paraphrased using AI.

But checking for such number of words is not an easy job so to achieve it quickly, I made a web app that quickly checks your text. Just upload your file or paste your text, and it’ll do the rest. Easy peasy!

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Odd that something which trawled the web in this way should have picked out such uncommon words to overuse, though.
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Elon Musk’s plan for AI news • Big Technology

Alex Kantrowitz:

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Elon Musk emailed me this week with some surprising details about his plan to distill and present news on X using AI. I’d written him after trying Grok — X’s AI chatbot — and noticing it didn’t link to a Time story it summarized. I wanted to click into the article and read more, so I reached out.

Musk said better citations are coming, but shared a deeper vision for the product, which he wants to build into a real-time synthesizer of news and social media reaction. Effectively, his plan is to use AI to combine breaking news and social commentary around big stories, present the compilation live, and allow you to go deeper via chat. 

“As more information becomes available, the news summary will update to include that information,” Musk told me. “The goal is simple: to provide maximally accurate and timely information, citing the most significant sources.” 

That goal won’t be easy to achieve, but the bot might become a novel news product given its access to the X firehose. “Grok is analyzing sometimes tens of thousands of X posts to render a news summary,” Musk said. 

Already, Grok is displaying a running list of headlines and incorporating social reaction into its summaries, including the chatter around the Time story I sought about Trump’s potential second term. Grok has plenty of room to improve — and will have to figure out issues like citation and hallucination — but it could be valuable if X gets the execution is right.

“That’s actually what I used to come to Twitter for — news and commentary,” Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor and author of Traffic, told me.

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Well, me too, but there used to be this thing called “verified users” whose identity was checked and could be relied on as sources. Not so sure about relying on a chatbot.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified