If you want to play something like Super Mario Bros on the iPhone, a previously-banned app will let you. But why was it unbanned? CC-licensed photo by SobControllers on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about (surprise!) elections.
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.
WhatsApp tells Delhi High Court it will shut down in India if forced to break encryption • The Economic Times
Indu Bhan:
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WhatsApp LLC on Thursday told the Delhi High Court that the popular messaging platform will end if it is made to break encryption of messages.
“As a platform, we are saying, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes,” counsel Tejas Karia, appearing for WhatsApp, told a Division Bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora.
WhatsApp said that the contents of the exchanges shared on its platform cannot be traced by any party other than the sender and the receiver as it’s end-to-end encrypted in order to protect the privacy of the parties.
People use the messaging platform because of the privacy assured by it and also because messages are end-to-end encrypted, Karia added.
The HC was hearing a petition by WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook Inc (now Meta) challenging the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, which makes it obligatory for social media intermediaries requiring the messaging app to trace chats and make provisions to identify the first originator of information on the court’s order.
This, the messaging platform says, undermines encryption of content as well as the privacy of the users. It also violates fundamental rights of the users guaranteed under Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Constitution of India.
“There is no such rule anywhere else in the world. Not even in Brazil,” Karia said, adding that the requirement was against the privacy of users and the rule was introduced without any consultation.
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This is a colossal game of chicken. WhatsApp has hundreds of millions of users in India; it’s no exaggeration to say the country would stop functioning without it. OK, people might (miiiight) switch over to Signal, but that app would collapse without funding, and would make the same point: it can’t break encryption.
My money is on the Indian government finding some way to not be bothered about this. (Also written up at Rest Of World.)
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Apple banned this app for years. Now it’s America’s No. 1 iPhone app: why? • The Washington Post
Shira Ovide:
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The hottest iPhone app in America may owe its popularity to government crackdowns on Apple.
That app, Delta, lets you play old-school video games like “Super Mario Bros.” on an iPhone. [It’s an emulator – Overspill Ed.]
Apple had banned apps like it for years but un-banned them this month without much explanation. Delta’s creators say growing anti-monopoly pressures were responsible for Apple’s flip-flop.
I’m not into video games, and Delta isn’t for me. Even if you’re in the same boat, Delta shows the drawbacks of Apple’s 15 years of absolute power over iPhone apps.
Apple has made its official App Store an easy and mostly safe place for you to download apps and buy stuff from them. But Apple’s insistence on making all the rules about iPhone apps has also kept you from trying some imaginative technologies like Delta.
What else have you been missing?
That question is relevant now because courts and regulators, including in the United States, the European Union, South Korea, Britain and Japan, are trying to loosen Apple’s and Google’s control over apps to give you fresh ideas and reduce costs for in-app purchases.
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Specifically, this is because of the European Union and the Digital Markets Act. Because emulators can be offered via third-party app stores (in Europe), Apple wants to forestall demand for those, so allows them in Europe, but doesn’t want to have different rules for those sorts of apps in Europe v the rest of the world, so allows them.
In short: regulation works.
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The US may be missing human cases of bird flu, scientists say • NPR
Will Stone:
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Officially, there is only one documented case of bird flu spilling over from cows into humans during the current US outbreak.
But epidemiologist Gregory Gray suspects the true number is higher, based on what he heard from veterinarians, farm owners and the workers themselves as the virus hit their herds in his state.
“We know that some of the workers sought medical care for influenza-like illness and conjunctivitis at the same time the H5N1 was ravaging the dairy farms,” says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
“I don’t have a way to measure that, but it seems biologically quite plausible that they too, are suffering from the virus,” he says.
Gray has spent decades studying respiratory infections in people who work with animals, including dairy cattle. He points out that “clustering of flu-like illness and conjunctivitis” has been documented with previous outbreaks involving bird flu strains that are lethal for poultry like this current one.
Luckily, genetic sequencing of the virus doesn’t indicate it has evolved to easily spread among humans.
Still, epidemiologists say it’s critical to track any possible cases. They’re concerened some human infections could be flying under the radar, especially if they are mild and transient as was seen in the Texas dairy worker who caught the virus.
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Just a watching brief! (Side note: no doubt we’ll be told by some people that bird flu, should it appear in humans, actually came from a laboratory.)
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Who’s afraid of East Asian management culture? • Noahpinion
Noah Smith on the Rest Of World article about the culture clash at TSMC’s plant in Arizona:
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A smart young American can choose to learn how to build chips or how to write code; the talent required is not very different. And if they choose to write code, they will generally get paid more. A typical software engineer at Google will get paid around $300k-$400k; for Facebook it’s more like $300k-$500k. (Meanwhile, try naming a Taiwanese software company.)
And make no mistake: Top American performers often work very, very hard. High earners in America work hard in general, and many top people are putting in those 70-hour workweeks. Many young lawyers and doctors do this, as do employees at some tech companies like Tesla, and many company founders and startup employees. In its heyday under Andy Grove, Intel had an intense, punishing work culture not unlike TSMC. But they have to have some special motivation in order to do this — either the promise of a very high salary, or the promise of a big exit for their startup, or at least the pride of working as a doctor or for a prestigious company like Tesla. TSMC gets a lot of headlines, but it’s not prestigious in America the way it is in Taiwan.
Even Taiwanese workers in the US are tempted by the lure of better jobs elsewhere, as Zhou’s article notes:
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An engineer, who has worked at both Intel and TSMC, said Taiwanese colleagues had also asked him about vacancies at Intel, where they expected a better work-and-life balance.
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That’s what TSMC is really competing with at its Arizona fabs. It’s having to pay a multiple of what it would pay in Taiwan, for workers who are less elite and less passionately committed to the company. This is not an advantage of Taiwanese management or Taiwanese culture — it’s a function of the fact that Taiwan is a less wealthy country than America, and one that has chosen to throw many of its best people into a single national champion company. Compared to that, of course making chips in Arizona is going to be more expensive.
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Not a point I’d considered, but a good one.
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UK battery storage pipeline expands to over 95GW • BusinessGreen News
Michael Holder:
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New data from RenewableUK reveals how pipeline of battery storage projects either in operation, consented, in the planning system or under development has grown two-thirds in a year
The UK’s battery storage pipeline has grown by over two-thirds over the past year, with 95.6GW of projects now either operational, under construction, consented, or in the planning stages, according to new data from RenewableUK.
The trade association’s latest energy storage market report confirms the pipeline of battery storage projects nationwide has risen in capacity terms by 38.5GW over the past 12 months, marking a 67% increase on last year’s 57.1GW pipeline.
It marks the second consecutive 12-month period in which the battery storage pipeline has increased by over two thirds. If all the projects in the pipeline become operational they would provide enough power to charge more than 2.6m electric vehicles (EVs), according to RenewableUK.
The amount of operational battery storage capacity has reached 4.4GW across the UK in total, while projects comprising another 4.3GW are currently under construction, the report shows.
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All the gigawatts sounds great, though 2.6m EVs sounds like.. not that many somehow? I’d rather have it in households (which would be a lot more, for longer), or in terms of how often renewables generate enough surplus that they could start filling those batteries.
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Refusal to do Apple deal could have been “suicide” for Google, company lawyer says • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Halfway through the first day of closing arguments in the Department of Justice’s big antitrust trial against Google, US District Judge Amit Mehta posed the question that likely many Google users have pondered over years of DOJ claims that Google’s market dominance has harmed users.
“What should Google have done to remain outside the crosshairs of the DOJ?” Mehta asked plaintiffs halfway through the first of two full days of closing arguments.
According to the DOJ and state attorneys general suing, Google has diminished search quality everywhere online, primarily by locking rivals out of default positions on devices and in browsers. By paying billions for default placements that the government has argued allowed Google to hoard traffic and profits, Google allegedly made it nearly impossible for rivals to secure enough traffic to compete, ultimately decreasing competition and innovation in search by limiting the number of viable search engines in the market.
The DOJ’s lead litigator, Kenneth Dintzer, told Mehta that what Google should have done was acknowledge that the search giant had an enormous market share and consider its duties more carefully under antitrust law. Instead, Dintzer alleged, Google chose the route of “hiding” and “destroying documents” because it was aware of conflicts with antitrust law.
“What should Google have done?” Dintzer told Mehta. “They should have recognized that by demanding locking down every default that they were opening themselves up to a challenge on the conduct.”
The most controversial default agreement that Google has made is a 21-year deal with Apple that Mehta has described as the “heart” of the government’s case against Google. During the trial, a witness accidentally blurted out Google’s carefully guarded secret of just how highly it values the Apple deal, revealing that Google pays 36% of its search advertising revenue from Safari just to remain the default search tool in Apple’s browser. In 2022 alone, trial documents revealed that Google paid Apple $20 billion for the deal, Bloomberg reported.
…According to [Google lawyer John] Schmidtlein, Google could have crossed the line with the Apple deal, but it didn’t. “Google didn’t go on to say to Apple, if you don’t make us the default, no Google search on Apple devices at all,” Schmidtlein argued. “That would be suicide for Google.”
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Peloton CEO steps down as beleaguered company cuts 15% of workforce • The Guardian
Dominic Rushe and agencies:
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Barry McCarthy has stepped down as CEO of Peloton, the company said on Thursday, as it decided to cut 15% of its workforce to tackle a post-pandemic slump in demand for its connected fitness equipment.
In a note, McCarthy said: “Hard as the decision has been to make additional headcount cuts, Peloton simply had no other way to bring its spending in line with its revenue.” McCarthy said Peloton was now “on the right path”. “You have a GREAT lead team, and although the stock market hasn’t recognized this yet, they will. It’s simply a matter of time,” he wrote.
…McCarthy is a former Netflix and Spotify executive and joined Peloton in February 2022, replacing co-founder John Foley. Under McCarthy, Peloton tried numerous tactics to revamp its business. The company ended its app’s free membership option, expanded into corporate wellness and brokered deals with brands including Lululemon and Hyatt hotels. As well as making big job cuts, Perloton has taken several other cost-cut measures such as changing bike prices, offering its products through third-party retailers and focusing on digital subscription plans.
But the losses have continued to mount. Peloton has not made a net profit since December 2020. On Thursday the company announced that revenues had fallen again in the last quarter, its ninth consecutive quarter of declining revenues.
Peloton said on Thursday it expects connected fitness members for the full year to be between 2.96 million and 2.98 million, lower by 30,000 members from prior forecast.
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Hard not to see this gradually falling away, shedding members until it hits whatever its baseline is – somewhere around half a million, based on what it was around the end of 2019.
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Rabbit R1 review: an unfinished, unhelpful AI gadget • The Verge
David Pierce:
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The most intriguing tech in the R1 is what Rabbit calls the “Large Action Model,” or LAM. Where a large language model, or LLM, is all about analyzing and creating text, the LAM is supposed to be about doing stuff. The model learns how an app works in order to be able to navigate it on your behalf. In a LAM-powered world, you’d use Photoshop just by saying “remove that lady from the background” or make a spreadsheet by telling your device to pull the last six quarters of earnings from the investor website.
There is basically no evidence of a LAM at work in the R1. The device only currently connects to four apps: Uber, DoorDash, Midjourney, and Spotify. You connect to them by opening up Rabbit’s web app, called Rabbithole, and logging in to each service individually. When you go to do so, Rabbit opens up a virtual browser inside the app and logs you in directly — you’re not logging in to a service provided by DoorDash but rather literally in to DoorDash’s website while Rabbit snoops on the process. Rabbit says it protects your credentials, but the process just feels icky and insecure.
…Spotify was the integration I was most interested in. I’ve used Spotify forever and was eager to try a dedicated device for listening to music and podcasts. I connected my Bluetooth headphones and dove in, but the Spotify connection is so hilariously inept that I gave up almost immediately. If I ask for specific songs or to just play songs by an artist, it mostly succeeds — though I do often get lullaby instrumental versions, covers, or other weirdness. When I say, “Play my Discover Weekly playlist,” it plays “Can You Discover?” by Discovery, which is apparently a song and band that exists but is definitely not what I’m looking for. When I ask for the Armchair Expert podcast, it plays “How Far I’ll Go” from the Moana soundtrack. Sometimes it plays a song called “Armchair Expert,” by the artist Voltorb.
Not only is this wrong — it’s actually dumber than I expected.
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This reminds me somewhat of the very early days of the Nokia smartphones, which connected over WAP (imagine 2G, but slower), where using them was like a punishment.
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Not a Genius move: pretending Alan Turing’s your ‘AI chief’ • The Register
Lindsay Clark:
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Genius Group has broken free of a crowded field to launch what can only be described as the most tasteless marketing campaign in tech history.
In a world where it is hard to imagine the IT industry hitting a new low, the chatbot slinger has outdone itself by needlessly co-opting the name and approximate image of Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computing who made a lifesaving contribution to the allied war effort only to die young under tragic circumstances.
Seemingly unaware of his own crassness, Genius Group CEO Roger James Hamilton took to Xitter yesterday to welcome the organization’s “new Chief AI Officer, Alan Turing – resurrected after 70 years.”
“I believe [Genius Group] is the 1st US public listed company to appoint an #AI to its C-Suite,” he boasted.
The whole thing is a bad-taste marketing gimmick designed promote a white paper allegedly written by the eponymous chatbot in which Genius talks about “Preparing for a Post Turing Test World.”
Disregarding the fact that the Turing Test has fallen out of favor as any kind of assessment of artificial intelligence, Genius calls its marketing pamphlet “a mind-blowing read with his new ‘Super Turing Test’ for AGI,” according to the company.
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No argument here. I saw the Genius thing the other day and was frankly amazed; but it’s so obviously a tasteless thirst move that I wasn’t going to link to it directly.
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Oh, the humanity of Vision Pro • Spyglass
MG Siegler:
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Arguing about the shipment projections for Apple’s Vision Pro is sort of like arguing about how many tickets were sold on the fateful Hindenburg journey. For one thing, we’re going to find out the number one way or another, eventually. For another, we’re sort of overlooking the massive airship exploding in the sky.
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This is a paid-subscriber post, and I’m not a paid subscriber so haven’t seen any more of it, but I think we can guess at the gist of the rest. There’s also the sub-headline: “Apple really should have released the Vision Pro as a dev kit”. Not sure you need any more.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 