Setting up third-party accessories on iOS could be as easy as with AirPods in iOS 18. CC-licensed photo by HS You 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. Smoothly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

I paid $365.63 to replace 404 Media with AI • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Over the last week I have published dozens of news articles and blogs about technology without lifting a finger on a news website called Prototype.Press. The articles are fairly short, but written in perfect English, and as far as I can tell, accurate. They are also very nicely laid out and categorized into “tech,” “science,” “AI,” and other sections, making it easier for visitors to navigate the cornucopia of content I publish on the site every day. On Monday, June 17, I published 53 articles on everything from the “Top Internet Service Providers in South Dakota” to how “AI-generated images in Google Search Results have provided access to an alternate reality.”

If that latter story sounds familiar that’s because it is a blatant, uncredited rip-off of a story I published on 404 Media the same day. I was able to publish it alongside 52 other articles that day all by myself because I created an entirely autonomous, ChatGPT-powered technology news site that steals other people’s original reporting for just $365.63.

It wasn’t hard to set up, and didn’t require one of the most advanced large language models in the world, but since this is the second technology news and investigations website I’m running these days, I outsourced its creation to a Fiverr freelancer in Turkey. I told him what I wanted, picked a layout, and two days later got a fully operational website.

What I learned from this experiment is that flooding the internet with an infinite amount of what could pass for journalism is cheap and even easier than I imagined, as long as I didn’t respect the craft, my audience, or myself.

I also learned that while AI has made all of this much easier, faster, and better, the advent of generative AI did not invent this practice—it’s simply adding to a vast infrastructure of tools and services built by companies like WordPress, Fiverr, and Google designed to convert clicks to dollars at the expense of quality journalism and information, polluting the internet we all use and live in every day.

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I think we knew that, to be honest. It’s why news organisations stopped doing full-text RSS feeds long ago, and why robots.txt (see below) has suddenly become important.
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Google: stop burning counterterrorism operations • Poppopret

Michael Coppola:

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In January 2021, Google’s Project Zero published a series of blog posts coined the In the Wild Series. Written in conjunction with Threat Analysis Group (TAG), this report detailed a set of zero-day vulnerabilities being actively exploited in the wild by a government actor.

The event was a bombshell story and provided a rare, exciting, and deeply technical look into the often secret world of nation-state computer hacking. The report dissected not only the state actor’s exploit code but detailed how the entire operation worked, including deployment configuration and a teardown of implant code and command-and-control communications.

Project Zero and TAG were not passive observers in their investigation. They actively probed the actor’s attack servers, extracted as many exploits as they were able to, and reverse engineered the capabilities. Yet despite performing this intimate level of analysis, one of TAG’s main work products – attribution of the attacker and parties being targeted – was conspicuously absent from the report.

What the Google teams omitted was that they had in fact exposed a nine-month-long counterterrorism operation being conducted by a US-allied Western government, and through their actions, Project Zero and TAG had unilaterally destroyed the capabilities and shut down the operation.

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There’s a lot more (non-specific) detail in here, but it does show how things like Project Zero can unthinkingly stumble like Mr Blobby into delicate operations on which real human lives depend.
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Why ‘intelligence’ exists only in the eye of the beholder • Aeon Essays

Abigail Desmond:

»

Absolute brain size, relative brain size, brain organisation, and neuronal density have all been used to predict where intelligence will emerge. Among living animals, Homo sapiens has the highest encephalisation quotient, meaning that our brains are much bigger than expected for our body size. This plays to our vanity, but some of the smartest creatures out there have brains quite unlike ours – cuttlefish, for example, rely on neurons in their arms for complex problem-solving. African grey parrots have the smarts of a human child, but much smaller brains than might be expected. Shrews, on the other hand, have some of the highest neuronal densities among mammals but, ironically, they aren’t terribly shrewd. Tiny-brained digger wasps use tools, and monarch butterflies perform continent-spanning annual migrations. Large brains are important for human intelligence, but life finds other ways to succeed.

Adding to the mire, intelligent behaviour in people is not always the result of conscious choice or rational strategy, but can arise from autonomic processes. The cognitive bubbling up of hunches, intuitions and gut feelings can often be credited to ‘lower-order’ systems such as the sympathetic nervous system or the amygdala, or manifest as subliminal or subconscious conditioned responses to environmental cues. In some contexts, the brain itself has been suggested as a poor candidate for the locus of intelligence. Supporters of swarm or collective intelligence tell us that the problem of problem-solving can be shared among a host of similar entities, as in a shoal of fish or a surge of grasshoppers.

Ants build boats, bridges and metropolises with populations in the millions, and yet their individual cerebral horsepower doesn’t amount to much. The boundaries of an interacting group – the nest, the shoal, the rational mind, the nation-state – all can be argued as the scale at which true intelligence arises. Paradoxically, we value intelligence as a marker of individual success, yet it exists both as a collective of our own neurons, and an aggregate of collective behaviour. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, we keep using this word, but perhaps it does not mean what we think it means.

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Jingle writers and singers feel impact of AI song technology • Billboard

Steve Knopper:

»

In the mid 1990s, Jason Paige, then a struggling singer trying to break with his rock band, could make a solid living by writing Mountain Dew, Taco Bell and Pepto Bismol earworms for jingle houses that dominated the music-in-advertising industry for decades. But during an interview a few weeks ago, Paige — who ultimately became most famous as the voice of the Pokemon theme song “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” — fires up an artificial-intelligence program. Within minutes, he emails eight studio-quality, terrifyingly catchy punk, hip-hop, EDM and klezmer MP3s centered on the reporter’s name, the word Billboard and the phrase “the jingle industry and how it’s changed so much over the years.”

The point is self-evident. “Yeah,” Paige says, about the industry that once sustained him. “It is dark.”

Today, the jingle business has evolved an assembly line of composers and performers competing to make the next “plop plop fizz fizz” into a more multifaceted relationship between artists and companies, involving brand relationships (like Taylor Swift’s long-standing Target deal); Super Bowl synchs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; production-house music allowing brands to pick from hundreds of thousands of pre-recorded tracks; and “sonic branding,” in which the Intel bong or Netflix’s tudum are used in a variety of marketing contexts. Performers and songwriters make plenty of revenue on this kind of commercial music, and they’re far more open to doing so than they were in the corporation-skeptical ‘90s. But AI, which allows machines to make all these sounds far more cheaply and quickly for brands than human musicians could ever do, remains a looming threat.

“It definitely has the potential to be disruptive,” says Zeno Harris, a creative and licensing manager for West One Music Group, an LA company that licenses its 85,000-song catalog of original music to brands. “If we could use it as a tool, instead of replacing [musicians], that’s where I see it heading. But money dictates where the industry goes, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

This vision of an AI-dominated future in a crucial revenue-producing business is as disturbing for singers and songwriters as it is for Hollywood screenwriters, radio DJs and voiceover actors.

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With the rise of AI, web crawlers are suddenly controversial • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

For three decades, a tiny text file has kept the internet from chaos. This text file has no particular legal or technical authority, and it’s not even particularly complicated. It represents a handshake deal between some of the earliest pioneers of the internet to respect each other’s wishes and build the internet in a way that benefitted everybody. It’s a mini constitution for the internet, written in code. 

It’s called robots.txt and is usually located at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. That file allows anyone who runs a website — big or small, cooking blog or multinational corporation — to tell the web who’s allowed in and who isn’t. Which search engines can index your site? What archival projects can grab a version of your page and save it? Can competitors keep tabs on your pages for their own files? You get to decide and declare that to the web.

It’s not a perfect system, but it works. Used to, anyway. For decades, the main focus of robots.txt was on search engines; you’d let them scrape your site and in exchange they’d promise to send people back to you. Now AI has changed the equation: companies around the web are using your site and its data to build massive sets of training data, in order to build models and products that may not acknowledge your existence at all. 

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Smart piece. Every leap in capability means we discover how much the internet relies on good faith. Newsgroup spam meant administrators taking on more and more powers to delete it (though they lost). Email spam meant not trusting other email servers. And now AI means we discover how robots.txt will have to be made into something stronger.
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Microsoft risks huge fine over “possibly abusive” bundling of Teams and Office • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Microsoft may be hit with a massive fine in the European Union for “possibly abusively” bundling Teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software suites for businesses.

On Tuesday, the European Commission (EC) announced preliminary findings of an investigation into whether Microsoft’s “suite-centric business model combining multiple types of software in a single offering” unfairly shut out rivals in the “software as a service” (SaaS) market.

“Since at least April 2019,” the EC found, Microsoft’s practice of “tying Teams with its core SaaS productivity applications” potentially restricted competition in the “market for communication and collaboration products.”

The EC is also “concerned” that the practice may have helped Microsoft defend its dominant market position by shutting out “competing suppliers of individual software” like Slack and German video-conferencing software Alfaview. Makers of those rival products had complained to the EC last year, setting off the ongoing probe into Microsoft’s bundling.

Customers should have choices, the EC said, and seemingly at every step, Microsoft sought instead to lock customers into using only its software.

“Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications,” the EC wrote. This alleged abusive practice “may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between Teams’ competitors and Microsoft’s offerings.”

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A claim brought by Slack, among others, but unless the fine is absolutely gigantic then it’s yet another case of firmly slamming the stable door shut when the horse has moved to the next town, raised some children and sent them off to school.
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iOS 18 brings AirPods setup experience to third-party accessories • 9 to 5 Mac

Filipe Espósito:

»

When Apple introduced AirPods in 2016, the company also unveiled a new, easy and intuitive way to pair wireless accessories to iPhone and iPad. Rather than having to go to Bluetooth settings and press buttons, the system identifies the accessory nearby and prompts the user to pair it. With iOS 18, this quick pairing process will be available for the first time to accessory makers.

Called AccessorySetupKit, the new API gives third-party accessories the same setup experience as Apple accessories such as AirPods and AirTag. As soon as the iPhone or iPad running iOS 18 with the right app detects a compatible accessory, it will show the user a popup to confirm pairing with that device.

With just a tap, the system will automatically handle all the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connectivity required by the accessory. This also means that users will no longer have to manually give Bluetooth and Wi-Fi permissions individually to that accessory’s app.

If the accessory requires a more complex pairing process, such as confirming a PIN code, the iOS 18 API can also ask the user for this information without the need to open an app. Once the accessory has been paired, more information about it can be found in a new Accessories menu within the Privacy settings.

«

Now, this is obviously intended to put third-party products on a par with Apple ones, but what are the chances that people will complain Apple is prioritising some products (which take the trouble to incorporate the API) over others?
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‘Weightless’ battery stores energy directly in carbon fibre structures • New Atlas

CC Weiss:

»

Imagine an electric car that isn’t weighed down by a huge, kilowatt-hour-stuffed battery. It wouldn’t need as much power to drive it forward and could rely on a smaller motor, saving yet more weight. Or imagine an eVTOL that could take off without lifting a lithium-ion anchor that requires it to be back on the ground within an hour for charging. Or a windmill with blades that work as their own batteries, storing energy during low demand periods for distribution at peak hours.

Sinonus hopes to write a future in which all those visions come true. It’s hard at work on a new breed of smart carbon fibre capable of serving as the electrodes of an integrated battery.

The Swedes have long been working on structural composites capable of storing electricity. We first heard tell of the work over a decade ago when Volvo publicized its participation in a research project it had undertaken in cooperation with a number of academic partners, including Chalmers [University of Technology].

A few years later, Chalmers had identified a specific subset of carbon fibres that could deliver just the right blend of electrical conductivity and structural stiffness. It eventually went on to develop a prototype “massless” carbon battery.

In 2022, the university and VC firm Chalmers Ventures spun off the project into its own company, Sinonus. The startup sums up its purpose as “multipurpose,” pursuing materials that serve two or more functions in an effort to conserve overall resources.

In an EV, for instance, its carbon fibre battery system would presumably [“presumably”? – Overspill Ed.] weigh the same as or less than traditional steel and aluminum structural components but with the advantage of storing its own power and eliminating the need for a large, heavy battery pack.

…“Storing electrical energy in carbon fibre may perhaps not become as efficient as traditional batteries, but since our carbon fiber solution also has a structural load-bearing capability, very large gains can be made at a system level,” [Sinonus CEO Markus] Zetterström explains.

«

Though in a car, wouldn’t storing energy in the frame mean any bump could be calamitous for the battery?
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Apple wasn’t interested in AI partnership with Meta due to privacy concerns • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple turned down an AI partnership with Facebook parent company Meta due to privacy concerns, according to a report from Bloomberg. Meta and Apple had a brief discussion about a possible partnership in March, but the talks did not progress and Apple does not plan to integrate Meta’s large language model (LLM) into iOS.

Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal suggested that Apple and Meta were in active discussions about integrating Llama, Facebook’s LLM, into iOS 18 as part of Apple Intelligence. The report suggested that the discussions were ongoing had not been finalized, but Bloomberg’s follow-up indicates Apple never seriously considered a partnership.

Preliminary talks happened at the same time that Apple began discussions with OpenAI and Google parent company Alphabet, but Apple decided not to move on to a more formal discussion because “it doesn’t see that company’s privacy practices as stringent enough.”

Apple did end up signing a deal with OpenAI, and ChatGPT will be integrated into iOS 18 , iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. Users can opt-in to ChatGPT, with Siri able to hand some requests off to the more sophisticated AI model.

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Hardly surprising that Apple would find Meta’s desire for personal information unwelcome. But OpenAI’s expectation that much revenue will flow its way from the tieup I find.. optimistic.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Are you ready to be an extreme passenger – as in, one who just sits there watching, eating and doing nothing? CC-licensed photo by Matthew Hurst 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. Chicken, please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US record labels are suing AI music generators, alleging copyright infringement • NBC News

Angela Yang:

»

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, among others, filed lawsuits Monday against Suno and Udio-maker Uncharted Labs, both of which recently released AI programs that enable users to generate songs from text prompts.

The proliferation of accessible AI tools capable of generating realistic music, including full songs using AI versions of real artists’ voices, has triggered a slew of legal and ethical questions for the music industry. Many artists have expressed concern over how generative AI technologies could undermine human work and compensation.

Coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America, the music recording industry’s largest trade organization, the lawsuits were filed in US federal courts for the District of Massachusetts and the Southern District of New York.

“The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us.”

“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” he added.

The music labels allege in the lawsuits that building services Suno or Udio requires “copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” in order to train their models, and that both AI companies have been “deliberately evasive” about what exactly they used.

But it’s “obvious” what their music generators were trained on, according to the lawsuits. Their models could only succeed in producing such realistic songs, the suits stated, if they had been trained on “vast quantities of sound recordings from artists across every genre, style, and era” — many of which remain copyrighted by these record labels.

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At 404 Media, you can hear the AI-generated songs that the labels claim are ripoffs. They’re very derivative. But infringing? Don’t bet against the RIAA.
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AI is getting better fast. Can you tell what’s real now? • The New York Times

Stuart Thompson:

»

Artificial intelligence tools can create lifelike faces and realistic photographs — and they are getting better all the time. The phony images now appear regularly on social media, with many users seeming to believe that the images are real. But there are still some telltale signs that an image was made by AI.

Can you tell the difference? Take our quiz.

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Entertaining. I got 9/10, frustratingly – had the right thoughts about the one I got wrong but changed my mind.
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Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas on plagiarism accusations • Fast Company

Mark Sullivan:

»

Wired, along with an independent researcher, says it has proof that Perplexity has been ignoring those [robot and crawler exclusion] codes and scraping content from off-limits sites anyway. 

“Perplexity is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol and then lying about it,” said Perplexity cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas in a phone interview Friday. “I think there is a basic misunderstanding of the way this works,” Srinivas said. “We don’t just rely on our own web crawlers, we rely on third-party web crawlers as well.”  

Srinivas said the mysterious web crawler that Wired identified was not owned by Perplexity, but by a third-party provider of web crawling and indexing services. Srinivas would not say the name of the third-party provider, citing a Nondisclosure Agreement. Asked if Perplexity immediately called the third-parter crawler to tell them to stop crawling Wired content, Srinivas was non-committal. “It’s complicated,” he said.

Srinivas also noted that the Robot Exclusion Protocol, which was first proposed in 1994, is “not a legal framework.” He suggested that the emergence of AI requires a new kind of working relationship between content creators, or publishers, and sites like his.

Wired also claims that it was able to get the Perplexity answer engine to closely paraphrase Wired articles by prompting the tool with the headlines or substance of Wired articles. At times Perplexity even paraphrased the Wired stories incorrectly. In one case, the Perplexity “answer” falsely claimed that a California police officer had committed a crime. 

Srinivas suggested that Wired used prompts designed to get the Perplexity tool to behave that way, and that normal users wouldn’t see those kinds of results. “We have never said that we have never hallucinated,” he added.

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Masterful misdirection. It’s not the hallucinations that have people up in arms.
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Why men are ‘rawdogging’ flights • GQ

Kate Lindsay:

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Everyone has their own tricks for staving off boredom on a long-haul flight. Some people load up on podcast episodes, others power through the available in-flight entertainment. But no one simply sits, staring silently at the real-time flight map on the screen in front of them, for the entirety of a trip. Right? Wrong. A small group of hardy men—the gender that brought you frat hazing and Logan Paul—are now doing exactly that, and for a variety of surprisingly solid reasons.

A 26-year-old Londoner named West (who asked to use only his first name) went viral in May when he posted about his decision to forgo any entertainment and pass a seven-hour trip watching the flight map. “Anyone else bareback flights?” he asked in the caption.

The concept—referred to in a vivid and perhaps unfortunate parlance as “rawdogging,” “flying raw,” and “bareback”—resonated with many in the comments on West’s TikTok page, @WestWasHere. “Yup, from London to Miami this week…pure bareback no food or water,” one wrote. “I swear barebacking flights make it go quicker,” another added.

“I’ve got DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights,’” West tells GQ.

“I am a nervous flier and generally cannot focus on anything on a plane—movies, TV shows, books, articles, whatever—with any success,” says Luke Winkie, a 33-year-old staff writer at Slate, who has used the flight map as his only in-flight entertainment for years. “For some reason I don’t like processing new information when I’m in the air. I want to stick to things that are predictable and safe.”

…West and others have also come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November, the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences.

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See? You don’t need the internet to be absolutely hatstand. The photo illustrating this article is Idris Elba in aircraft thriller Hijack. You’ll be able to spot the GQ readers on your next plane flight.
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Experts say Telegram’s ’30 engineers’ team is a security red flag • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

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Over the weekend, a clip from a recent interview with Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov went semi-viral on X (previously Twitter). In the video, Durov tells right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he is the only product manager at the company, and that he only employs “about 30 engineers.” 

Security experts say that while Durov was bragging about his Dubai-based company being “super efficient,” what he said was actually a red flag for users.

“Without end-to-end encryption, huge numbers of vulnerable targets, and servers located in the UAE? Seems like that would be a security nightmare,” Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, told TechCrunch.

Green was referring to the fact that — by default — chats on Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted like they are on Signal or WhatsApp. A Telegram user has to start a “Secret Chat” to switch on end-to-end encryption, making the messages unreadable to Telegram or anyone other than the intended recipient. Also, over the years, many people have cast doubt over the quality of Telegram’s encryption, given that the company uses its own proprietary encryption algorithm, created by Durov’s brother, as he said in an extended version of the Carlson interview.  

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a longtime expert in the security of at-risk users, said that it’s important to remember that Telegram, unlike Signal, is a lot more than just a messaging app. 

“What makes Telegram different (and much worse!) is that Telegram is not just a messaging app, it is also a social media platform. As a social media platform, it is sitting on an enormous amount of user data.”

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The expectation, if you use Telegram, is that everything is monitored, potentially by people you might not want it monitored by.
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US House of Representatives narrowly passes DJI drone ban bill • PetaPixel

David Crewe:

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DJI may have been right to be worried about its potential ban moving through the United States legislation as the Countering CCP Drone Act narrowly passed through the House of Representatives this past week.

There are multiple steps a bill like the Countering CCP Drones Act, which was initially introduced last April by Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), needs to take in order to become law. Beyond official submission, the bill has to pass both House and Senate committee votes followed by passage in both houses of congress, and finally it must be signed by the President. The first of those steps occurred in May as the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) and the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) both passed the bill easily.

The next major hurdle was jumped on Friday as the bill, which was bundled into the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, passed by a narrow margin of 217:199, Drone Life reports. Now the bill moves on to the Senate where it will be debated and possibly amended (bills out of the House rarely look the same once the Senate is done with them). If that bill isn’t identical to the one passed by the House, members of both wings of Congress will meet to reconcile the differences and both houses of congress will vote on the reconciled version. If both pass, the final step is for the President to approve and sign.

Gallagher and Stefanik (R-NY) argued that Chinese law allows the government there to compel DJI to participate in and assist in its “espionage activities” and as such, the company should be added to the FCC’s list of banned communications equipment and services in the United States.

“DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America,” Stefanik has said. “DJI drones pose the national security threat of TikTok, but with wings.”

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The paranoia is racking up in America. Of course China could change the clause compelling companies to do its bidding. But then, nobody would believe it anyway, would they?
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Has Facebook stopped trying? • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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In spring, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg invited more than a dozen professors and academics to a series of dinners at his home to discuss how Facebook could better keep its platforms safe from election disinformation, violent content, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech. Alongside these secret meetings, Facebook was regularly making pronouncements that it was spending hundreds of millions of dollars and hiring thousands of human content moderators to make its platforms safer. After Facebook was widely blamed for the rise of “fake news” that supposedly helped Trump win the 2016 election, Facebook repeatedly brought in reporters to examine its election “war room” and explained what it was doing to police its platform, which famously included a new “Oversight Board,” a sort of Supreme Court for hard Facebook decisions.

…Several years later, Facebook has been overrun by AI-generated spam and outright scams. Many of the “people” engaging with this content are bots who themselves spam the platform. Porn and nonconsensual imagery is easy to find on Facebook and Instagram. We have reported endlessly on the proliferation of paid advertisements for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, and ads for electricians and roofers who appear to be soliciting potential customers with sex work. Its own verified influencers have their bodies regularly stolen by “AI influencers” in the service of promoting OnlyFans pages also full of stolen content. 

Meta still regularly publishes updates that explain what it is doing to keep its platforms safe.

…But experts I spoke to who once had great insight into how Facebook makes its decisions say that they no longer know what is happening at the platform, and I’ve repeatedly found entire communities dedicated to posting porn, grotesque AI, spam, and scams operating openly on the platform.

Meta now at best inconsistently responds to our questions about these problems, and has declined repeated requests for on-the-record interviews for this and other investigations. Several of the professors who used to consult directly or indirectly with the company say they have not engaged with Meta in years.

Some of the people I spoke to said that they are unsure whether their previous contacts still work at the company or, if they do, what they are doing there. Others have switched their academic focus after years of feeling ignored or harassed by right-wing activists who have accused them of being people who just want to censor the internet.

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Too big to fail? Too big to control? Just failing silently? If Facebook is consumed from the inside out by AI slop, who will be left to monetise?
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Five hours a day on Facebook: how voters are keeping up with the election • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

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ix voters across the UK volunteered to let the research agency Revealing Reality spend three days recording what they saw on their phone screens as part of a study aimed at understanding what media people are consuming in the run-up to the election. These are their stories.

[Zoya, 28].. When she does want political information, she searches TikTok for summaries of party policies. She is mainly concerned about health and crime, but is opposed to proposals to send more money to Ukraine and wants it spent in the UK instead.

[Stacey, 36].. Her main exposure to election-related media on her phone was a paid-for Facebook advert by the local Labour party candidate. She stumbled across his video in her feed by chance

[Simon, 45].. has heard Conservative minister Grant Shapps’ warning of a Labour supermajority – which strengthened his desire to vote for the Scottish National party.

[Ava, 67].. Ava’s phone activity shows she has retreated from political news on social media. On Facebook, she has unfriended many “acquaintances” due to unpleasant political discussions during past elections. Instead, she has turned back to BBC TV news and the World Service.

[Finley, 19].. He trusts the BBC News brand, but never actively consumes any of its content. He also could not understand why older people posted political content under their own names on social media.

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Mixed up muddled up shook up world.
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Brussels accuses Apple of breaking EU ‘gatekeeper’ rules • FT

Javier Espinoza:

»

In preliminary findings issued on Monday, regulators in Brussels said they were concerned about restrictions Apple is imposing on developers’ ability to “freely steer their customers” by directing them to promotions outside the App Store.

Thierry Breton, the EU internal market commissioner, said: “Apple’s new slogan should be ‘act different’. Today we take further steps to ensure Apple complies with the DMA rules.”

If found guilty, the iPhone maker faces a penalty of up to 10% of its global annual revenue, meaning any fine could run into tens of billions of dollars. The fines can rise to 20% in the event the offence is repeated, the EU said. Apple said it was “confident” in its compliance.

Speaking at a conference on the DMA in Amsterdam on Monday, Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s executive vice-president in charge of digital policy, said: “We are dealing with the biggest and most valuable companies on the planet. The DMA is not an excessive ask. [It] is plain vanilla to ask for a fair, open and contestable marketplace.”

She added: “I find that it is surprising that some of the most valuable, respected big companies on this planet do not take compliance as a badge of honour.”

The commission’s preliminary findings have to be finalised within one year from the start of its official investigation in March. The move against Apple was first reported by the Financial Times this month.

The commission, the bloc’s executive arm, also announced on Monday that it was investigating whether Apple’s developer fees breached the EU’s rules.

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Has to be said that the DMA does not seem to be an easy law to comply with – at least if you, a platform owner, want to retain any integrity on your platform. The EU does seem to act as though being in control of a platform is a sort of accident of birth, rather that a multi-billion pound game that has to be played exactly right or everything is lost. BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Nokia all played, and lost it all.
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Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets • Righto

Ken Shirriff:

»

To use the Montreal subway (the Métro), you tap a paper ticket against the turnstile and it opens. The ticket works through a system called NFC, but what’s happening internally? How does the ticket work without a battery? How does it communicate with the turnstile? And how can it be so cheap that you can throw the ticket away after one use? To answer these questions, I opened up a ticket and examined the tiny chip inside.

…The chip uses NFC (Near-Field Communication). The idea behind NFC is that a reader (i.e. the turnstile) and an NFC tag (i.e. the ticket) communicate over a short distance through magnetic fields, allowing them to exchange data. The reader generates a magnetic field that both powers the tag and sends data to the tag. Both the reader and the tag have coil-like antennas so the reader’s magnetic field can be picked up by the tag. When you tap your ticket on the turnstile, the NFC communication happens in 35 milliseconds, faster than an eyeblink. The data provided by the NFC tag shows that you have a valid ticket and then you can enter the subway.

The photo [below in the post] shows the subway ticket, made of printed paper. At the right, the ticket appears to have golden smart-card contacts, like a credit card with an EMV chip. However, those contacts are completely fake, just printed onto the card with ink, and there is no chip there. Presumably, the makers thought that making the card look like a smart card would help people understand it. The card actually uses an entirely different technology.

Although the subway card is paper on the outside, its core is a thin plastic sheet, shown below [on the post]. The sheet has a coiled antenna made from a layer of metal foil. If you look closely, you can see the tiny NFC chip in the lower right, a black speck connected to two sides of the antenna wire.3 The diagonal metal stripe in the upper left makes the antenna into a loop; topologically, a spiral antenna won’t work on a 2-D sheet, so the diagonal bridge completes the circuit.

«

The working part is the size of a grain of salt; uses 180nm parts (which were old even in 2012); has about 45,000 transistors; a 12in wafer with 215,712 chips would cost about $19,000, so about 9c per chip. There’s plenty more in the blogpost: you can even examine tickets like this with an app on your phone.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you’ve used Google Maps recently, you’ve been using a motif from one of the very first arcade games. CC-licensed photo by Steven Miller 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 9 links for you. Blast it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Before smartphones, an army of real people helped you find stuff on Google • WIRED

Amelia Tait:

»

The internet first became available on cell phones in 1996, but before affordable data plans, accidentally clicking the browser icon on your flip phone would make you sweat. In the early 2000s, accessing a single website could cost you as much as a cheeseburger, so not many people bothered to Google on the go.

Instead, a variety of services sprang up offering mobile search without the internet. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans could call GOOG-411 to find local businesses, and between 2006 and 2016, you could text 242-242 to get any question answered by the company ChaCha. Brits could call 118 118 or text AQA on 63336 for similar services. Behind the scenes, there were no artificially intelligent robots answering these questions. Instead, thousands of people were once employed to be Google.

“Some guy phoned up and asked if Guinness was made in Ireland, people asked for the circumference of the world,” says Hayley Banfield, a 42-year-old from Wales who answered 118 118 calls from 2004 to 2005. The number was first launched in 2002 as a directory enquiries service—meaning people could call up to find out phone numbers and addresses (back then calls cost an average of 55 pence). In 2008, the business started offering to answer any questions. Although Banfield worked for 118 118 before this change, customers would ask her anything and everything regardless. “We had random things like ‘How many yellow cars are on the road?’”

While directory enquiry lines still exist, Banfield worked during their boom—she answered hundreds of calls in her 5:30 pm to 2 am shifts—and quickly noticed patterns in people’s queries. “Anything past 11 pm, that’s when the drunk calls would come in,” she says. People wanted taxis and kebab shops but were so inebriated that they’d forget to finish their sentences. Sometimes, callers found Banfield so helpful that they invited her to join them on their nights out. As the evening crept on, callers asked for massage parlors or saunas—then they would call back irate after Banfield recommended an establishment that didn’t meet their needs.

The “pizza hours” were 8 pm to 10 pm—everyone wanted the number for their local takeout. Banfield had a computer in front of her in the Cardiff call center, loaded with a simple database. She’d type in a postcode (she had memorized all of the UK’s as part of her training) and then use a shortcut such as “PIZ” for pizza or “TAX” for taxi. People sometimes accused Banfield of being psychic, but if the power had gone out in a certain area, she automatically knew that most callers wanted to know why.

«

It’s a lovely story of the days before mobile internet. Those companies made a killing, though. Insanely profitable, sky-high prices, only capped in 2019.
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Amid record high energy demand, America is running out of electricity • The Washington Post

Evan Halper:

»

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.

Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.

The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants.

“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”

«

Step forward, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and the rest. Plus all the other data centres.
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When you’re driving in Google Maps you’re re-enacting an ancient space combat sim • Interconnected

Matt Webb:

»

So, that dart-shaped arrow [used by a 1985 “computer navigation system for cars” called Etak] is also the arrow used in Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation to show your current location. You can see it if you use directions in the app today. You can see it in the Google Maps Navigation launch blog post from 2009.

And what [journalist Benj] Edwards spotted is that the same Google Maps arrow was used by Etak to show the current location of your car, way back then.

To give you an idea of how much 1985 was a different era: there were no GPS satellites. So you had to put magnetic sensors in your wheels to count rotations. Map data was stored on audio cassette tapes in the back of the car. The screen didn’t have pixels. It was a vector screen, with electron beams painting lines on directly on the phosphors, like an oscilloscope.

So check out his article [about Etak], because there’s a photo of the Etak Navigator, and you can see the dart-arrow, right there in the mirror. So is that the origin?

Edwards goes further. In a follow-up article, he figured out the connection:

»

To Etak’s benefit, Catalyst’s shared office building encouraged the cross-pollination of ideas between companies. Alcorn, while working at Cumma, recalls being fascinated by the activities at Etak. During development, he snuck into nearby Atari’s coin-op division building with Etak engineers to show them the hit 1979 arcade title Asteroids. The game used a vector display that produced fluid animations with low-cost hardware. It’s little surprise, then, that Etak’s final on-screen representation of the car in its shipping product was a vector triangle nearly identical to the ship from Asteroids.

– Benj Edwards, Fast Company, The Untold Story of Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell’s Visionary 1980s Tech Incubator (2017)

«

Asteroids? Asteroids (Wikipedia). The break-out coin-op arcade game. The dart-arrow is the spaceship: it’s right there!

«

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Solar power’s giants are providing more energy than big oil • Bloomberg via The Business Standard

David Fickling:

»

you can start by converting the barrels of crude and cubic meters of gas produced by the big petroleum companies into a measure of energy — exajoules. An exajoule of electricity would be able to power Australia, Italy or Taiwan for a year. And the big oil companies are making a lot of it: about 8.3 EJ annually for ExxonMobil and 6.2 EJ at Shell.

The vast majority of that is wasted, however. Only about a fifth of the chemical energy in freshly pumped crude ends up being turned into kinetic energy moving cars and trucks, because oil refineries and vehicle engines fritter most of it away as useless heat and noise. Gas turbines are a bit more efficient at turning methane into power, but still end up operating at about one-third efficiency once you account for losses from gas well to electrical socket. At a rough estimate, only about a quarter of the energy coming out of an oil company’s wells gets turned into useful power. 

We can do a similar transformation with solar. Companies such as [China’s] Tongwei, GCL or Xinte that produce the polysilicon raw material for solar panels measure their output capacity in metric tons per year. It’s a simple process to convert that into gigawatts of the solar cells made by Longi, Jinko and the like, and ultimately into the exajoules that the resulting panels will generate.

Put the two side by side, and the result is striking. The biggest polysilicon producers right now can go head-to-head with some of the biggest oil companies such as BP, Eni and ConocoPhillips — and panel makers aren’t far behind. Should Tongwei go ahead with plans announced in December to build a 400,000 ton polysilicon plant in Inner Mongolia, nearly doubling its current output, it might overtake even ExxonMobil

«

Someone described this transition thus: the fossil fuel age relies on commodities, the solar (and nuclear and wind) age relies on technologies. And the price of technologies plummets reliably – although in the case of nuclear, all the concerns around it have effectively halted it in the west.
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Death toll at Hajj pilgrimage rises to 1,300 amid extreme high temperatures • AP via CBS News

»

More than 1,300 people died during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as the faithful faced extreme high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in the desert kingdom, Saudi authorities announced Sunday.

Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel said that 83% of the 1,301 fatalities were unauthorized pilgrims who walked long distances in soaring temperatures to perform the Hajj rituals in and around the holy city of Mecca.

Speaking to state-owned television, the minister said 95 pilgrims were being treated in hospitals, some of whom were airlifted for treatment in the capital, Riyadh. He said the identification process was delayed because there were no identification documents with many of the dead pilgrims.

The fatalities included more than 660 Egyptians. All but 31 of them were unauthorized pilgrims, according to two officials in Cairo. Egypt has revoked the licenses of 16 travel agencies that helped unauthorized pilgrims travel to Saudi Arabia, authorities said.

…Saudi authorities cracked down on unauthorized pilgrims, expelling tens of thousands of people. But many, mostly Egyptians, managed to reach holy sites in and around Mecca, some on foot. Unlike authorized pilgrims, they had no hotels to return to to escape the scorching heat.

…During this year’s Hajj period, daily high temperatures ranged between 46ºC (117ºF) and 49ºC (120ºF) in Mecca and sacred sites in and around the city, according to the Saudi National Center for Meteorology.

«

Extreme heat, extreme deaths. But:

»

Islam follows a lunar calendar, so the Hajj comes around 11 days earlier each year. By 2029, the Hajj will occur in April, and for several years after that it will fall in the winter, when temperatures are milder.

«

A stampede in 2015 killed more people – over 2,400. But in a couple of decades, the Hajj will occur when it’s hottest, and temperatures will have risen even further.

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Linda Yaccarino shakes up X amid pressure from Elon Musk over costs • FT

Hannah Murphy and Daniel Thomas:

»

Linda Yaccarino has shaken up her inner circle at X as she faces pressure from Elon Musk to boost sales and cut costs, a year after she became chief executive.

Yaccarino fired her right-hand man and head of business operations and communications, Joe Benarroch, this month, said three people familiar with the matter.

Among other things, Yaccarino held Benarroch responsible for bungling the rollout of the platform’s new adult content policy by failing to tell clients of the changes before it became public, two X employees said.

Taking over Benarroch’s responsibilities will be global government affairs head Nick Pickles, whose role has temporarily been expanded to include directing all global communications, the people said.

This week, Pickles, one of the few top Twitter staffers who survived the billionaire’s takeover, also attended the Cannes advertising festival alongside Yaccarino and Musk for the first time, several people said.

The shake-up has been seen as a boon for British-born Pickles, who once ran for office as a Conservative MP in the UK, before rapidly rising up the ranks at the platform to oversee its public policy and relationships with governments.

The reshuffle comes amid growing tensions between Musk and Yaccarino, stemming from her struggle to steady X’s financial health a year after Musk poached her from NBCUniversal.

One X senior staffer said she had become increasingly nervous as Musk piled pressure on her to raise revenues and lower her expenses — for example cutting staff from the US and UK sales teams and reducing spending on items such as travel.

«

It’s an interesting progression for Pickles, who used to be at Big Brother Watch and is also a BBC Trustee. But this doesn’t look like a company sailing along happily.
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X still has a Verified bot problem; this time they came for TechCrunch writers • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

»

This week while scrolling on X, formerly Twitter, I noticed that I had reposted a series of TechCrunch articles. Except, wait, no, I hadn’t.

But someone else using my name had. I clicked on the profile, and there was another Rebecca Bellan, using the same default and header photos as my actual profile: me onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 and side-eye Chloe, respectively. The bio read, “@Techcrunch senior reporter | journalist,” and it had the location set to NY, where I am currently based. The account was created in May 2024.

Perhaps most surprising after realizing that someone — who? A bot?! — had created an impersonator account of me was the fact that they had ostensibly paid to do so, as evidenced by the little blue checkmark next to my name.

When X was still Twitter, the blue checkmark would let other users know that a profile had been verified as a person of note. But since Elon Musk’s hostile takeover, that checkmark now means that a user has paid at least $8 per month for a premium subscription that gets them access to longer posts, fewer ads, better algorithmic consideration and Grok. And while X changed tack in April and gave the verification badge back to some users based on number of followers, the blue checkmark could also mean someone is a fan of Musk. Don’t believe me? Just check all the zealous reply guys on any of Musk’s posts.

«

The purpose is unclear, but it probably just helps the bot accounts evade the spam filters. And what motive would eX-Twitter have to remove accounts which are paying it?
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Perplexity plagiarized our story about how Perplexity is a bullshit machine • WIRED

Tim Marchman:

»

Perplexity and its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, did not substantively dispute the specifics of WIRED’s reporting [last week]. “The questions from WIRED reflect a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the Internet work,” Srinivas said in a statement. Backed by Jeff Bezos’ family office and by Nvidia, among others, Perplexity has said it is worth a billion dollars based on its most recent fundraising round, and The Information reported last month that it was in talks for a new round that would value it at $3bn. (Bezos did not reply to an email; Nvidia declined to comment.)

After we published the story, I prompted three leading chatbots to tell me about the story. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude generated text offering hypotheses about the story’s subject but noted that they had no access to the article. The Perplexity chatbot produced a six-paragraph, 287-word text closely summarizing the conclusions of the story and the evidence used to reach them. (According to WIRED’s server logs, the same bot observed in our and Knight’s findings, which is almost certainly linked to Perplexity but is not in its publicly listed IP range, attempted to access the article the day it was published, but was met with a 404 response. The company doesn’t retain all its traffic logs, so this is not necessarily a complete picture of the bot’s activity, or that of other Perplexity agents.) The original story is linked at the top of the generated text, and a small gray circle links out to the original following each of the last five paragraphs. The last third of the fifth paragraph exactly reproduces a sentence from the original: “Instead, it invented a story about a young girl named Amelia who follows a trail of glowing mushrooms in a magical forest called Whisper Woods.”

This struck me and my colleagues as plagiarism.

«

The evidence against Perplexity is piling up very quickly, and if the Sauron’s Eye of the big publishers turns to focus on it, there might be trouble.
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Tory MPs paid £100,000 of public funds to party’s in-house web designers • The Guardian

Jessica Elgot:

»

More than 120 Conservative MPs, including Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Sajid Javid and Gillian Keegan, paid £100,000 of taxpayers’ money to the Conservatives’ in-house web design services, it can be revealed.

The MPs used the Bluetree website service to design their websites. When billed by Bluetree, they would pay for the sites then claim back the costs from the public purse via expenses, prompting a complaint to parliament’s expenses watchdog about the practice.

Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) has denied Bluetree is wholly owned by the party and says it is a separate organisation, but repeatedly refused to deny the party receives income from the company, saying it has “commercial arrangements with CCHQ”.

Records show more than 330 invoices from Bluetree to Conservative MPs, including Hunt, Truss, Javid and Keegan, for web design services. Other high-profile Conservatives who have expensed services from Bluetree include Ben Wallace, Tobias Ellwood, Mark Francois and Helen Whately.

The company – which describes itself as the “Conservative party UK official website platform” and says it is run “inside the party” – has an address that is the same office as CCHQ and has been paid £100,695 in taxpayers’ money since 2019.

«

It’s just amazing: as though the Tories are trying to achieve some sort of Grand Slam of corruption.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Warning labels on social media, like on tobacco cigarettes, face a lot of opposition. CC-licensed photo by Brian Johnson & Dane Kantner 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.

A selection of 9 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.

Instagram recommends sexual videos to accounts for 13-year-olds, tests show • WSJ

Jeff Horwitz:

»

Instagram regularly recommends sexual videos to accounts for teenagers that appear interested in racy content, and does so within minutes of when they first log in, according to tests by The Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher.

The tests, run over seven months ending in June, show that the social-media service has continued pushing adult-oriented content to minors after parent Meta Platforms said in January that it was giving teens a more age-appropriate experience by restricting what it calls sensitive content including sexually suggestive material.

Separate testing by the Journal and Laura Edelson, a computer-science professor at Northeastern University, used similar methodology, involving setting up new accounts with ages listed as 13. The accounts then watched Instagram’s curated video stream, known as Reels.

Instagram served a mix of videos that, from the start, included moderately racy content such as women dancing seductively or posing in positions that emphasized their breasts. When the accounts skipped past other clips but watched those racy videos to completion, Reels recommended edgier content. 

Adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in as little as three minutes. After less than 20 minutes watching Reels, the test accounts’ feeds were dominated by promotions for such creators, some offering to send nude photos to users who engaged with their posts.

«

It feels as though we’re back here, in one form or another, again and again and again.
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The Surgeon General is wrong. Social media doesn’t need warning labels • Daily Beast

Mike Masnick:

»

Warning: reading this article may cause you to question the Surgeon General’s reliance on feelings over science.

In 1982, then-U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop said video games could be hazardous to children and warned of kids becoming “addicted” to them, causing problems for their “body and soul.” This warning was not based on any actual science or evidence, but it kicked off decades of moral panic and fearmongering over the supposed risks of video games and children. This culminated in the Supreme Court rejecting a California law to require labeling of video games and restrict kids’ access to them, deeming it unconstitutional.

Studies have repeatedly debunked the claim that video games make kids more violent. Indeed, a recent Stanford meta-study of dozens of previous studies on kids and video games found no evidence of a connection between video games and violence. The researchers noted that if there was any correlation, it seemed to come from the public believing the unproven claims of a connection because politicians kept insisting it must be there.

History repeats itself. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy has decided to call on Congress to put warning labels on social media sites, similar to those found on cigarettes. He claims this is necessary because “the mental health crisis among young people is an emergency—and social media has emerged as an important contributor.”

While Dr. Murthy admits at the very beginning of his plea that he does not have “perfect information,” he suggests that it’s important to use his “best judgment” and “act quickly.”

The major problem is that, as with Dr. Koop and video games, the evidence supports little more than the fact that politicians jumping on the moral panic bandwagon has resulted in many people falsely believing that social media is harmful to kids.

«

As ever, Masnick pulls no punches.
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Biden bans US sales of Kaspersky software over Russia ties • Reuters

Alexandra Alper:

»

The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to bar the sale of antivirus software made by Russia’s Kaspersky Lab in the United States, citing the firm’s large U.S. customers, including critical infrastructure providers and state and local governments.

Moscow’s influence over the company was found to pose a significant risk, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a briefing call with reporters on Thursday. The software’s privileged access to a computer’s systems could allow it to steal sensitive information from American computers or install malware and withhold critical updates, enhancing the threat, a source added.

“Russia has shown it has the capacity and… the intent to exploit Russian companies like Kaspersky to collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans and that is why we are compelled to take the action that we are taking today,” Raimondo said on the call.

Kaspersky Lab and the Russian Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, Kaspersky has said that it is a privately managed company with no ties to the Russian government.

The sweeping new rule, using broad powers created by the Trump administration, will be coupled with another move to add three units of the company to a trade restriction list, Raimondo said, dealing a blow to the firm’s reputation that could hammer its overseas sales.

The plan to add the cybersecurity company to the entity list, which effectively bars a company’s U.S. suppliers from selling to it, and the timing and details of the software sales prohibition were first reported by Reuters.

«

The fine detail is that US customers can keep on using Kaspersky software, but resellers (and Kaspersky) can’t sell it in the US after July 20, and after September 29 Kaspersky can’t update software on the machines of US customers. (Not clear if that includes machines of US customers in countries outside the US.)
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Elon Musk pitches advertisers on a return to X, months after telling some to ‘F’ themselves • WSJ

Megan Graham:

»

Seven months after declaring that advertisers pulling their ads from his social-media platform X could “go f— yourself,” Elon Musk took a more congenial tone onstage at the advertising industry’s most important annual festival.

Musk joined Mark Read, chief executive of ad giant WPP, in a session Wednesday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France, a five-day event that draws thousands of the industry’s chief marketing officers, tech leaders, creative workers and others from around the world. 

“Back in November, you had a message to us. You told us to go f— ourselves,” Read said. “Why did you say that? And what did you mean by that?”

Musk said that he had not intended the message for advertisers as a whole. 

“It was with respect to freedom of speech,” he said. “Advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands. That’s totally fine…What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform.” 

X in November was grappling with the departure of several large advertisers in the wake of a post by the billionaire describing a post that espoused an antisemitic conspiracy theory as “the actual truth.”

Musk later that month called the advertisers’ response “blackmail” and said the advertising boycott was “going to kill the company.” He also said he had tried to clarify after his post that he hadn’t meant anything antisemitic

In Cannes on Wednesday, Musk also said that the company has worked to overhaul its abilities to match its users with ads using AI.

For advertisers who haven’t been on the platform but might be mulling a return, Musk said he believed it was “worth trying out.” 

«

A filing elsewhere showed that eX-Twitter’s revenues for the first six months of 2023 were half what they were in 2022. Sterling job, sir.
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Astronomers see a massive black hole awaken in real time • ESO United Kingdom

»

In late 2019 the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 suddenly started shining brighter than ever before. To understand why, astronomers have used data from several space and ground-based observatories, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), to track how the galaxy’s brightness has varied. In a study out today, they conclude that they are witnessing changes never seen before in a galaxy — likely the result of the sudden awakening of the massive black hole at its core.

“Imagine you’ve been observing a distant galaxy for years, and it always seemed calm and inactive,” says Paula Sánchez Sáez, an astronomer at ESO in Germany and lead author of the study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “Suddenly, its [core] starts showing dramatic changes in brightness, unlike any typical events we’ve seen before.” This is what happened to SDSS1335+0728, which is now classified as having an ‘active galactic nucleus’ (AGN) — a bright compact region powered by a massive black hole — after it brightened dramatically in December 2019.

Some phenomena, like supernova explosions or tidal disruption events — when a star gets too close to a black hole and is torn apart — can make galaxies suddenly light up. But these brightness variations typically last only a few dozen or, at most, a few hundreds of days. SDSS1335+0728 is still growing brighter today, more than four years after it was first seen to ‘switch on’. Moreover, the variations detected in the galaxy, which is located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, are unlike any seen before, pointing astronomers towards a different explanation.

«

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Neo-Nazis are all-in on AI • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

Extremists across the US have weaponized artificial intelligence tools to help them spread hate speech more efficiently, recruit new members, and radicalize online supporters at an unprecedented speed and scale, according to a new report from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an American non-profit press monitoring organization.

The report found that AI-generated content is now a mainstay of extremists’ output: They are developing their own extremist-infused AI models, and are already experimenting with novel ways to leverage the technology, including producing blueprints for 3D weapons and recipes for making bombs.

Researchers at the Domestic Terrorism Threat Monitor, a group within the institute which specifically tracks US-based extremists, lay out in stark detail the scale and scope of the use of AI among domestic actors, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and anti-government extremists.

“There initially was a bit of hesitation around this technology and we saw a lot of debate and discussion among [extremists] online about whether this technology could be used for their purposes,” Simon Purdue, director of the Domestic Terrorism Threat Monitor at MEMRI, told reporters in a briefing earlier this week. “In the last few years we’ve gone from seeing occasional AI content to AI being a significant portion of hateful propaganda content online, particularly when it comes to video and visual propaganda. So as this technology develops, we’ll see extremists use it more.”

As the US election approaches, Purdue’s team is tracking a number of troubling developments in extremists’ use of AI technology, including the widespread adoption of AI video tools.

«

Don’t worry, there are all sorts of disinformation centres which–oh maybe not. (Thanks G for the link.)
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What the web looked like in 1994, the year it became the internet • Fast Company

Alex Pasternack:

»

What was the World Wide Web like at the start? Long before it became the place we think and work and talk, the air that we (and the bots) now breathe no matter how polluted it’s become? So much of the old web has rotted away that it can be hard to say; even the great Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine only goes back to 1996. But try browsing farther back in time, and you can start to see in those weird, formative years some surprising signs of what the web would be, and what it could be.

In 1994, the modern Internet (which you always capitalized and sometimes called just “Internet”) was itself only 11 years old, mostly the domain of researchers and hobbyists and hackers and geeks, who used an array of globe-spanning services for communicating (email and Usenet newsgroups, in addition to local BBS and IRC) and for downloading files via FTP and for searching for documents and texts with services like Gopher and WAIS.

The Web was a relatively new addition to the mix that tied a few of these systems together, with a twist. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN in Geneva, had built it in 1989 to organize the lab’s sprawling pool of physics research by combining three technologies he’d invented: a language (HTML), a protocol (HTTP), and a way to locate things on the network (URLs). Now, the Web was growing rapidly, in part because it was free. In April 1993, shortly after the University of Minnesota decided to charge licensing fees for servers that used its Gopher protocol, managers at CERN chose to put the Web’s source code in the public domain and make it available on a royalty-free basis. That opened it to anyone who wanted to set up their own server.

«

My principal memory of the internet in 1994, confirmed by these screenshots, is that the typography was terrible.
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Miami is entering a state of unreality • The Atlantic

Mario Alejandro Ariza:

»

Hank Perez, 72, was trying to get home to North Miami Beach on Wednesday afternoon last week, but the rain had other plans. Floodwaters as high as the hood of Perez’s gray Toyota Yaris stalled the car; he pulled onto the median and called for roadside assistance, but it never came. Thousands of other commuters found themselves in similar straits: About a foot and a half of water had fallen across South Florida—not the product of a hurricane or a tropical storm but of a rainstorm, dubbed Invest 90L, a deluge that meteorologists are calling a once-in-200-years event. It was the fourth such massive rainfall to smite southeastern Florida in as many years.

…the amount of rain that did fall last week is the sort of extreme-weather event that infrastructure planners don’t design for, if only because it would be too expensive to construct stormwater systems capable of moving that much water that quickly. “Nowhere can withstand this much rain,” Bryan McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, told me. At his home in Biscayne Park, he slept uneasily on Wednesday night after nine inches of rain fell in just 11 hours. “That’s definitely more than what my area can ingest,” he said on Friday. Just a few more inches of rain would have meant water coming up through his floorboards.

The state government isn’t exactly ignoring the rising water. Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration have attempted to address the havoc caused by the changing climate with his $1.8bn Resilient Florida Program, an initiative to help communities adapt to sea-level rise and more intense flooding. But the governor has also signed a bill into law that would make the term climate change largely verboten in state statutes. That same bill effectively boosted the use of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in Florida by reducing regulations on gas pipelines and increasing protections on gas stoves.

«

The Long Goodbye has already begun.
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Unusual burst of bets preceded Rishi Sunak’s election announcement • FT

Chris Cook, Lucy Fisher and Rafe Uddin:

»

An unusual burst of bets on a July poll preceded Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement of the UK general election, according to an analysis of public market data by the Financial Times.

The data from Betfair Exchange adds to concerns about political insiders gambling on the timing of the July 4 poll. It excludes wagers made through other bookmakers.

The bets included several thousand pounds wagered on the day before the May 22 announcement, when the odds implied a less than 25% chance of an election being called for July.

Sunak for months said he expected the election to take place in the second half of 2024, but had not specified a date. Most political observers assumed he would opt to call an election in the autumn.

The betting scandal enveloping Sunak’s struggling campaign intensified on Thursday when the party confirmed Tony Lee, the Conservative director of campaigning, had taken a leave of absence.

The Gambling Commission is investigating Lee over betting on the timing of the election, said a person familiar with the situation. His wife Laura Saunders, the Tory candidate for Bristol North West, is also under investigation by the commission.

Lee did not respond to a request for comment. A solicitor for Saunders said: “Ms Saunders will be co-operating with the Gambling Commission.”

«

There’s an amazing hockey-stick graph here of the value of bets placed on the July 4 date, where the spike is on the day before the announcement. One has to wonder how stupid you must be to make such a bet and not expect it to be flagged: we’re in the age of electronic oversight. But of course, the Tories have never had to consider the possibility of consequences for their actions. (A police officer has also been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office: believed to be a personal protection officer from inside No.10.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The chemical used to make chrome in cars turns out to be a potent carcinogen – so some are ending its use. CC-licensed photo by pony rojo 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. Less shiny. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Qualcomm reaches $75m settlement over sales and licensing practices • Reuters

Jonathan Stempel:

»

Qualcomm agreed to pay $75m to resolve a lawsuit in which shareholders accused the chipmaker of defrauding them by hiding its anticompetitive sales and licensing practices.

A preliminary all-cash settlement was filed on Tuesday with the federal court in San Diego. It requires approval by U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta, who certified the lawsuit as a class action in March 2023.

Qualcomm and six individual defendants, including former chief executives Paul Jacobs and Steven Mollenkopf, denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle. The San Diego-based company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shareholders accused Qualcomm of artificially inflating its share price between February 2012 and January 2017 by repeatedly describing its chip sales and technology licensing as separate businesses, when in fact Qualcomm bundled them to stifle competition.

In January 2017, the Federal Trade Commission, opens new tab and Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tabsued, opens new tab Qualcomm separately in connection with its alleged efforts to monopolize the market for baseband processors, a type of chip used in cellphones.

Apple said Qualcomm used its monopoly position to overcharge for chips, and seek onerous and costly terms for technology licenses.

Qualcomm called the claims baseless, but its share price fell 13% on the first full trading day after Apple sued.

«

Meet the company that Microsoft has chosen to be its super new partner to provide the CPUs for its swishy new ARM-based PCs. Something something leopard spots.
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Stellantis is plotting the ‘death of chrome’ because it causes cancer • The Drive

Nico DeMattia:

»

Get ready for some Doomer Facebook posts about the extermination of car chrome (and freedom, somehow) as major American automaker Stellantis is done with the shiny stuff. Chrome has long been a staple of luxury and prestige vibes on cars and motorcycles. It was, of course, big in the days of American land yachts but still decorates certain vehicles. However, it turns out that chrome is also quite toxic. So much so that Stellantis is ditching it in its new era, what its head of design Ralph Gilles calls the “Death of Chrome.”

The type of chromium typically used in automobile chrome trim, to provide that signature shininess, is called hexavalent chromium (or chromium 6) and it’s an aggressive carcinogen. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) told CNN “It is 500 times more toxic than diesel exhaust and has no known safe level of exposure.” Yikes.

Fear not, the chrome trim on your car isn’t going to make you sick. Hexavalent chromium is only dangerous during the electroplating process. During that process, workers can be exposed to the stuff, and it can even be released into the atmosphere. While chrome platers have vapor capture methods to make sure chromium 6 doesn’t make its way into the air, Stellantis wants to stop using it entirely.

There are some hexavalent chrome alternatives, such as trivalent chrome, but Gilles says they aren’t as pretty. “The problem is the luster isn’t as good. It has a more yellow kind of finish,” he told CNN.

«

Yes, I know – my first reaction on reading the headline, but not the source, was “Google’s browser is WHAT?”
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Apple reportedly gives up on Vision Pro 2, focusing on cheaper model instead • Mashable

Stan Schroeder:

»

As the rumor mill surrounding Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro heated up last year, we’ve repeatedly heard that Apple plans to follow up with two headsets: an even more powerful, next-generation version, and a cheaper variant that could get more user adoption.

Now, according to a report from The Information, Apple has ditched plans to launch the more powerful device of the two, instead focusing solely on the cheaper version.

According to the report, this new, more affordable Vision headset (perhaps not a Pro by name) could come before the end of 2025, with fewer features.

This new Vision headset would reportedly still have the high-res displays that the made the original Vision Pro so enjoyable to use, but some (unnamed) features will be missing, and the headset will be at least a third lighter than the original. It would also be cheaper; we’ve previously heard that Apple discussed prices ranging from $1,500 to $2,500.

The Vision Pro is by all accounts a very powerful, and often impressive device. It also has a fair share of issues, ranging from the extremely high price, some user interface bugs, and the fact that it’s just too heavy for some heads.

There are also reports that the interest in the Vision Pro has died down, both in terms of online chatter and sales.

«

Apple has really got this backwards. It needs to push the content, to create a desire for the device, so you can view the content. But instead it seems to be doing the opposite, pushing the device while offering no content for it. What there has been so far doesn’t get close to its potential shown off at launch, apparently.
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Bad news: many of today’s top passwords can be brute force cracked in less than an hour • TechRadar

Sead Fadilpašić:

»

If you are not using random, computer-generated passwords, or one of the best password generators, chances are your logins can be cracked within an hour, research has warned.

A report on password strength conducted recently by Kaspersky noted  the advancements in computer processing power made cracking passwords significantly easier. 

In their experiment, the researchers used a database of 193 million passwords, obtained from the dark web. These were hashed and salted, meaning they still needed to guess them.

The researchers then used an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU and tried to estimate the time needed to crack the passwords using different algorithms.

The gist of the research is that some eight-character passwords can be cracked as fast as 17 seconds. These passwords were composed of same-case English letters and digits, or 36 combinable characters. Looking at the entire database, it took the researchers less than an hour to crack more than half (59%) of the passwords. 

The researchers tried out different algorithms, including the vastly popular brute force attack. This method tries all possible password combinations, and while it’s less effective for longer passwords, and those with diverse character types, it was still able to crack many short and simple passwords easily. Then, they tried to improve on brute force, by having it consider certain character combinations, words, names, dates, and sequences.

«

Then again: sometimes complex password generators don’t recognise the site when you come to log in. Also, sometimes you don’t care that a password isn’t strong because you’re being forced to register on the 500th website in a row.
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Abusing weight-loss jabs could kill. So why are they so easy to get? • The Times

Eleanor Hayward:

»

Last Thursday I attended an NHS conference where doctors warned of a wave of young women being admitted to A&E after buying Ozempic or Wegovy online. Some are trying to get “beach body ready”, others have eating disorders and are using the appetite-suppressing drugs as a new way to starve themselves. Without urgent action to tighten restrictions on the sale of weight-loss injections, doctors fear one of these “young, beautiful girls” is going to die.

Listening to their stark warnings, I thought it surely couldn’t be that easy to get hold of the powerful medication if you are a healthy weight — and decided to put the system to the test. Less than 24 hours later, Boots had issued me with a prescription for one month’s supply of Wegovy.

The whole process was frighteningly simple: I lied about my weight on an online form, submitted a photograph wearing baggy clothes and then collected the injection — filled with four weekly doses — from my local Boots shop in south London. At no point did a single doctor or pharmacist examine me in person, check my weight or ask why I wanted the drug.

Boots is one of numerous pharmacies to have joined the weight-loss drug gold rush, offering prescriptions via its Online Doctor service for £199 a month. Superdrug Online Doctor, its main competitor, also prescribed Wegovy to me without any in-person checks, charging £195 for a month’s supply.

Wegovy is a brand name for semaglutide, the same drug sold as Ozempic when it is used to treat type 2 diabetes. It is intended only for obese patients with a body mass index (BMI) over 30. To buy it from Boots and Superdrug, I added 19kg (3st) to my real weight while completing an online form — tipping my BMI to just above the obese threshold. Doctors in A&E report seeing a stream of patients who have tricked online pharmacies in the same way.

«

Complications include pancreatic inflammation; apparently the trials in humans have only been on overweight people.
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I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again • Ludicity

Nikhil Suresh:

»

it is with great regret that I announce that the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne, i.e, I am going to fucking break your neck. I am truly, deeply, sorry.

I. But We Will Realize Untold Efficiencies With Machine L-

What the fuck did I just say?

I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.

The money was phenomenal, but I nonetheless fled for the safer waters of data and software engineering. You see, while hype is nice, it’s only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call ‘politics’. That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can’t actually deliver is highly transferable.

«

This is a wonderful (but also excellently detailed) rant. However there may be a couple of mentions of AI still coming. (Thanks Wendy G for the link.)
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UMG offers voice-clone tech to artists with SoundLabs partnership • Rolling Stone

Ethan Millman:

»

Universal Music Group announced a partnership with an AI music tech startup called SoundLabs on Tuesday, with the largest music company in the world set to use the deal to offer AI voice model tech to its roster in the coming months.

UMG’s artists and record producers will be able to use SoundLabs’ upcoming feature called MicDrop starting later this summer, and as the companies said in their announcement, the platform allows the artists to make voice models of their own using data the artists provide. SoundLabs gives the artists control over the ownership and use of the voice models, the companies said, and the voice clones won’t be made accessible to the general public.

Aside from merely making a copy of a voice, MicDrop purports to offer a voice-to-instrument function, similar to the features that can make keyboards sound like a guitar or drum. MicDrop also offers language transposition, the company said, which could help artists release songs around the world without a language barrier.

AI voice clones have become perhaps the most well-known — and often the most controversial — use of artificial intelligence in the music business. Viral tracks with AI vocals have spurred legislation to protect artists’ virtual likenesses and rights of publicity.

Last year, an anonymous songwriter named Ghostwriter went viral with his song “Heart On My Sleeve,” which featured AI-generated vocals of UMG artists Drake and The Weeknd. The song was pulled from streaming services days later following mounting pressure from the record company.

«

As Ryan Broderick points out at Garbage Day, this is going to go from occasional to total overdrive very rapidly, as autotune did for vocals. And, if you remember, as harmonic distortion pedals did for guitars.
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Perplexity is a bullshit machine • WIRED

Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman:

»

Considering Perplexity’s bold ambition and the investment it’s taken from Jeff Bezos’ family fund, Nvidia, and famed investor Balaji Srinivasan, among others, it’s surprisingly unclear what the AI search startup actually is.

Earlier this year, speaking to WIRED, Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, described his product—a chatbot that gives natural-language answers to prompts and can, the company says, access the internet in real time—as an “answer engine.” A few weeks later, shortly before a funding round valuing the company at a billion dollars was announced, he told Forbes, “It’s almost like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid.” More recently, after Forbes accused Perplexity of plagiarizing its content, Srinivas told the AP it was a mere “aggregator of information.”

The Perplexity chatbot itself is more specific. Prompted to describe what Perplexity is, it provides text that reads, “Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine that combines features of traditional search engines and chatbots. It provides concise, real-time answers to user queries by pulling information from recent articles and indexing the web daily.”

A WIRED analysis and one carried out by developer Robb Knight suggest that Perplexity is able to achieve this partly through apparently ignoring a widely accepted web standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol to surreptitiously scrape areas of websites that operators do not want accessed by bots, despite claiming that it won’t. WIRED observed a machine tied to Perplexity—more specifically, one on an Amazon server and almost certainly operated by Perplexity—doing this on WIRED.com and across other Condé Nast publications.

«

Peter Kafka has pointed out that Perplexity has simply lied about what it’s doing, and he – and other journalists – are very angry about it. Perplexity isn’t going to thrive in the face of sustained coverage like this.
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TV just had its worst quarter ever – including YouTube TV • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

»

The first three months of 2024 were the worst the pay-TV business has ever seen, according to analysts at MoffettNathanson. They estimated that the industry lost a record 2.37 million subscribers — a drop of 6.9%.

A few years ago, optimists in the industry thought that growing digital pay-TV services, like YouTube TV, would help make up for the decline of conventional pay-TV providers like Comcast.

But that hasn’t panned out. And worse than that — those digital TV-subscription services are also starting to wobble.

Hulu + Live TV, Fubo, and Sling also lost subscribers in the first quarter, MoffettNathanson estimated.

Most startling is that even YouTube TV, which had been growing steadily over the past few years, shrank last quarter — the first time that’s ever happened. MoffettNathanson estimated that Google’s pay-TV service lost 150,000 subscribers in the first quarter.

For context: YouTube reported that it had more than 8 million subscribers back in February. I’ve asked YouTube for comment.

The most obvious rationale for the loss: People who were using YouTube TV to watch the NFL — the most powerful draw on TV — canceled the service once the season ended. If that’s true, then the glass-half-full perspective is that those subscribers will return this fall when the season starts up again.

«

Is anybody winning from the streaming wars? Oh yes, Netflix.
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Ex CDC director predicts bird flu pandemic: What to know

Devan Markham and Safia Samee Ali:

»

Is a bird flu pandemic imminent? Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield seems to think so, he says it’s just a matter of when that will be.

In the last two years, bird flu has been blamed for the deaths of millions of wild and domestic birds worldwide. However, it seems to have hardly touched people.

Redfield told NewsNation’s Brian Entin on Friday that he believes “bird flu will enter humans” and that it could have “significant mortality.”

He also discussed the growing concern for bird flu, as the virus has been detected in dozens of cattle across the country, and the World Health Organization identified the first human death in Mexico.

“I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic,” Redfield said.

He also noted that bird flu has a “significant mortality” when it enters humans compared to COVID-19. Redfield predicts the mortality is “probably somewhere between 25 and 50% mortality.” NewsNation noted that the death rate for COVID-19 was 0.6%. [😬 – Overspill Ed.]

…Redfield said he knows exactly what has to happen for the bird flu virus to get to the point where it will spread to humans because he’s done lab research on it.

Scientists have found that five amino acids must change in the key receptor for bird flu to gain a propensity to bind to a human receptor “and then be able to go human-to-human” as COVID-19 did, Redfield said.

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Just five amino acids. Not clear how many genes that would be – also five, if they’re coding genes? Nor how many DNA bases that would be, nor whether each amino acid mutation confers an advantage (and so is conserved).

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

The stock market valuation for Nvidia has passed Microsoft to hit $3 trillion – in theory, the total of all the profits it will ever make. CC-licensed photo by Chris Yarzab 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. Graphically. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Nvidia passes Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company • The Washington Post

Gerrit De Vynck and Rachel Lerman:

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Nvidia, the computer chip maker at the center of the artificial intelligence boom, continued its spectacular stock market rise Tuesday, eclipsing Microsoft and Apple to become the world’s most valuable public company.

Nvidia’s shares rose more than 3% Tuesday, giving the company an overall market valuation of $3.34 trillion. Apple and Microsoft, which for years have swapped positions as the world’s most valuable company, were worth slightly less — around $3.29 trillion and $3.31 trillion, respectively, at the end of trading.

Nvidia’s computer chips and software are crucial to training the AI algorithms behind image generators and chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As the tech and business worlds throw themselves into the AI boom, demand for the chips has skyrocketed, pushing Nvidia’s revenue up to $26bn in the first quarter of this year, up from just $7.2bn a year ago.

The AI boom has been reshuffling the world’s biggest companies in the past two years. In January, Microsoft surged past Apple to become the world’s most valuable company as investors have poured money into the hot technology.

Nvidia, which was already a large company, has had the “most remarkable growth story,” in tech, said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management.

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What’s notable here is Nvidia’s PER (price earnings ratio – the cost of its share relative to its earnings, ie how many years it would take for the share to earn back its price. (Nvidia does pay dividends.) Nvidia’s PER is 79.7 on its current price, and would get higher as its price rises. Microsoft’s: 38.7. Apple’s: 33.4. Google’s, back at a valuation of “only” 2.2 trillion, has a 27.0 PER.

Also, in theory the stock market valuation is the net present value of all the profits (not revenues!) the company will make in its lifetime. Which implies a lot for Nvidia. And Apple and Microsoft, of course. Google stock looks like a relatively good purchase. (This is not a recommendation.)

It’s going to be quite the spectacle seeing whether Nvidia can justify that lofty valuation. Always good to be selling shovels in a gold rush. But gold rushes end – though, that said, Nvidia has managed to jump from gaming to crypto to, now, the much much bigger goldmine of AI. Can it last?
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As China’s internet disappears, ‘we lose parts of our collective memory’ • The New York Times

Li Yuan:

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Chinese people know their country’s internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation.

They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it. Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet — and collective online memory — is disappearing in chunks.

A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available. “The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,” the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored.

“We used to believe that the internet had a memory,” He Jiayan, a blogger who writes about successful businesspeople, wrote in the post. “But we didn’t realize that this memory is like that of a goldfish.”

It’s impossible to determine exactly how much and what content has disappeared. But I did a test. I used China’s top search engine, Baidu, to look up some of the examples cited in Mr. He’s post, focusing on about the same time frame between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s.

I started with Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tencent’s Pony Ma, two of China’s most successful internet entrepreneurs, both of whom Mr. He had searched for. I also searched for Liu Chuanzhi, known as the godfather of Chinese entrepreneurs: He made headlines when his company, Lenovo, acquired IBM’s personal computer business in 2005.

…I got no results when I searched for Ma Yun, which is Jack Ma’s name in Chinese. I found three entries for Ma Huateng, which is Pony Ma’s name. A search for Liu Chuanzhi turned up seven entries.

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It’s very 1984, memory hole and all.
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Ashton Kutcher: AI will soon create full movies, raise bar in Hollywood • Variety

Ethan Shanfeld:

»

Ashton Kutcher looks at OpenAI’s generative video tool, Sora, as the future of filmmaking.

“I have a beta version of it and it’s pretty amazing,” Kutcher said of the platform in a recent conversation with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Berggruen Salon in Los Angeles.

He added, “You can generate any footage that you want. You can create good 10, 15-second videos that look very real. It still makes mistakes. It still doesn’t quite understand physics. … But if you look at the generation of this that existed one year ago as compared to Sora, it’s leaps and bounds. In fact, there’s footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show.”

“Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100? To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars,” Kutcher said. “Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it [with AI].”

Kutcher added that, while playing around with the software, he prompted Sora to create footage of a runner trying to escape a desert sandstorm. “I didn’t have to hire a CGI department to do it,” Kutcher said. “I, in five minutes, rendered a video of an ultramarathoner running across the desert being chased by a sandstorm. And it looks exactly like that.”

«

There isn’t really going to be any stopping this, is there – though at present it’s still, for me, at the level of dreams.
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China’s nuclear power development is almost 15 years ahead of the US • Fast Company

Reuters:

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The US is as much as 15 years behind China on developing high-tech nuclear power as Beijing’s state-backed technology approach and extensive financing give it the edge, a report said on Monday.

China has 27 nuclear reactors under construction with average construction timelines of about seven years, far faster than other countries, said the study by Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute.

“China’s rapid deployment of ever-more modern nuclear power plants over time produces significant scale economies and learning-by-doing effects, and this suggests that Chinese enterprises will gain an advantage at incremental innovation in this sector going forward,” the report said.

The US has the world’s largest fleet of nuclear power plants and President Joe Biden’s administration considers the virtually emissions-free electricity source to be critical in curbing climate change.

But after two large plants in Georgia came online in 2023 and 2024 billions of dollars over budget and delayed by years, no US nuclear reactors are being built. A high-tech plant that had been planned to be built at a US lab was cancelled last year.

China’s state-owned banks can offer loans as low as 1.4%, far lower than available in Western economies.

«

Planning laws have become a weird hydra which (to mix metaphors) strangle these big projects at birth. China, meanwhile, has no such concerns and steamrolls over objections. One feels there should be a happier medium.
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Microsoft postpones Windows Recall after major backlash — will launch Copilot+ PCs without headlining AI feature • Windows Central

Zac Bowden:

»

In an unprecedented move, Microsoft has announced that its big Copilot+ PC initiative that was unveiled last month will launch without its headlining “Windows Recall” AI feature next week on June 18. The feature, which captures snapshots of your screen every few seconds, was revealed to store sensitive user data in an unencrypted state, raising serious concerns among security researchers and experts. 

Last week, Microsoft addressed these concerns by announcing that it would make changes to Windows Recall to ensure the feature handles data securely on device. At that time, the company insisted that Windows Recall would launch alongside Copilot+ PCs on June 18, with an update being made available at launch to address the concerns with Windows Recall.

Now, Microsoft is saying Windows Recall will launch at a later date, beyond the general availability of Copilot+ PCs. This means these new devices will be missing their headlining AI feature at launch, as Windows Recall is now delayed indefinitely. The company says Windows Recall will be added in a future Windows update, but has not given a timeframe for when this will be.

The company does say that Windows Recall will be made available to test in the Windows Insider Program for users with Copilot+ PCs “in the coming weeks.”

«

You do have to wonder very, very hard about how this got greenlit internally. Truly, we all thought Microsoft had long since got past this sort of screwup, which feels like something from the Ballmer days.
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Spotify has an AI music problem—but bots love it • WIRED

Amanda Hoover:

»

IF A SONG is created by artificial intelligence and listened to by a bot, was it even heard at all? It’s a problem music-streaming companies now face as generative AI is rapidly making it easier for anyone to churn out songs with a few clicks, and then send bots to stream them for cash. 

“It’s a floodgate,” says Tony Rigg, a lecturer in music industry management at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. He’s talking about the arrival of AI-generated music. And that torrent of new music amplifies the issue of fake listening, giving people a simple way to get streams on low-quality tracks. 

Artificial streaming, or bot listening, isn’t new. Some turn to third-party companies promising to boost streams, which then enlist bot-made accounts to listen to the same playlists on repeat. It’s a problem because streaming companies divide up royalty payments from a limited pool of cash—the more a song plays, the more its creator earns. So, more money for songs listened to by bots can mean that less is sent to those with human fans. Human artists have already been caught up in artificial streaming scandals, but AI is adding a new element. 

The first major test case came last week when Spotify reportedly removed tens of thousands of songs created and uploaded to Spotify by AI music generator Boomy. These made up a small percentage of total Boomy creations, but did include songs that were suspected of being streamed by bots, according to the Financial Times. Spotify did not respond to a request for comment to confirm the removal, but the platform does have policies against fake streaming.

«

This is from a month or so back, but still relevant: how is Spotify going to keep ahead of the tsunami that has previously overwhelmed sci-fi book submission sites, and Amazon’s Kindle bookstore? One has to suspect that it won’t be able to unless it moves to a “trusted sources” model. Which reverts the music business back to what it was for a long time before.
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How the fridge changed flavour • The New Yorker

Nicola Twilley:

»

In 2010, the open‐data activist Waldo Jaquith decided to make a cheeseburger from scratch, using only agrarian methods. He and his wife had just built a home in the woods of Virginia, where they raised chickens and tended to an extensive vegetable garden. Flush with pride in his self-sufficiency, Jaquith outlined the steps required: bake buns, mince beef, make cheese, harvest lettuce, tomatoes, and onion. Then he realized that he wasn’t nearly committed enough. To really make a cheeseburger from scratch, he would also need to plant, harvest, and grind his own wheat, and raise at least two cows, one for the dairy and another to be slaughtered for the meat.

At this point, Jaquith gave up. The problem wasn’t labor but timing. His tomatoes were in season in late summer, his lettuce ready to harvest in spring and fall. According to the seasonal, pre-refrigeration calendar he was trying to follow, Jaquith would have needed to make his cheese in the springtime, after his dairy cow had given birth: her calf would be slaughtered for the rennet, and the milk intended to feed it repurposed. But the cow that provided his beef wouldn’t be killed until the autumn, when the weather started to get cold. If Jaquith turned the tomatoes into ketchup and aged his cheese in a cellar for six months, until the meat, lettuce, and wheat bun were ready, he could maybe, possibly, make a cheeseburger from scratch. But practically speaking, he concluded, “the cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago.”

And, in fact, it did not. The cheeseburger is just one of many sensory pleasures made possible by a highly industrialized and refrigerated food system. More obvious ones include the delightful anticipation of pouring a crisp beer at the end of the day, the refreshing clink of ice cubes in a soft drink or a cocktail, and, of course, the joy of licking an ice-cream cone in summer.

«

The fact that we aren’t really self-sufficient any more, and would struggle if we had to be, only emphasises how technology (here, the fridge) has really changed our lives immeasurably over the past millennia.
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The Substack boom is creating parasocial relationships right in our email inbox • Slate

Sonia Weiser:

»

On one hand, what newsletter creator wouldn’t want their work to resonate with their audience so much that it drives them to reach out? On the other, how does a creator navigate the responsibilities and expectations of a parasocial relationship that formed without their buy-in? Is it now their obligation to not just provide customer service, but be a “good friend”?

“If someone takes the time to cross the digital void, the least I can do is respond,” Ryan Broderick, the creator of Garbage Day, a newsletter devoted to web culture and technology with over 70,000 subscribers, told me. He explains that even if someone writes something mean, the fact that they took the time to write anything at all, and write it privately, is an honor.

Writing an email “isn’t performative,” he continued. “I find the incentives of sending someone an email to be much different than the incentives of tweeting or making a TikTok about someone, because they’re not doing it for any attention other than for your attention.”

Once maligned as teenybopper, kiss-your-Elvis-photo-goodnight foolishness, parasocial relationships have gained credibility as a valid psychological phenomenon. The first time I heard about them was after news of John Mulaney’s divorce hit the internet. On a date soon after, the guy I was with railed against the comedian’s behavior as if he, a social worker in Brooklyn, had a personal stake in the matter.

«

This is not, she suggests, always that good for the newsletter author: the parasocial effect is that people feel that because you’ve been welcome in their inbox for ages, therefore you should welcome them when they rock up.
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The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas • The Verge

David Pierce competed (not really) in the Excel World Championship:

»

At 6PM on the dot, Andrew Grigolyunovich, the founder and CEO of the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organization hosting these championships, takes the modular stage in the ballroom. He loads an unlisted YouTube link, which begins explaining today’s challenge, known as a “case.” It’s a puzzle called “Potions Master,” and it goes roughly like this: You’re training to be a potions master in Excelburg, but you’re terrible at it. You have a number of ingredients, each of which has a certain number of associated points; your goal is to get the most points in each potion before it explodes, which it does based on how much of a white ingredient you’ve added.

The Potions Master case, like so many of the puzzles conquered by these competitive Excelers, is not particularly complicated. This is a flashier, faster, deliberately more arcade-y version of spreadsheeting, more like trying to win 10 simultaneous games of chess on easy mode rather than painstakingly taking on a grandmaster. If you like, you can solve the whole thing manually: figure out when the white number gets too high, count the total points until that spot, then double-check it because it’s a lot of numbers, and eventually answer the first question. That’s my strategy, and I think I get it right. Now there are 119 more, worth a total of 1,500 points, and it’s quickly clear I’m not going to finish in the 30 minutes we’ve been allotted.

While I’m squinting into my 13-inch screen and carefully adding 1s and 3s, the other 26 contestants are whirring through their spreadsheets, using Excel’s built-in formula and data visualization tools to organize and query all that data. Everyone in the room seems to have their own way to chew through the ingredient lists and spends the first few minutes turning a mess of numbers and letters into real, proper capital-d Data. They start answering questions a half-dozen at a time, while I’m still checking my mental math.

«

Wonderful piece of colour writing. Everything’s a game. Even Excel.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Canvassers in the UK general election are having to cope with the new generation of smart doorbells. CC-licensed photo by slgckgc 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.

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

Canvassing to empty houses: knocking on doors in the smart doorbell era • The Guardian

Raphael Boyd:

»

Canvassers from all major political parties have been warned about how careful they must be while knocking on doors. One campaign manager went as far as warning staff that they were being recorded at all times, in order to avoid the type of controversy that enveloped a Tory caught removing opposition leaflets from a home in May.

Danny Chambers, a Liberal Democrat candidate in Winchester, said there were benefits to smart doorbells for canvassers, including not just being able to talk to someone when they’re in the next room but when they are 1,000 miles away.

“I knocked on this door a few weeks ago but got no response. I tried their Ring doorbell and the man who lived there answered.” Chambers said he engaged the man in small talk, asking where he was, thinking he was perhaps just in the next room or sitting in his back garden. “He wasn’t even just out of the house, he was out of the country. He was sitting on a beach in Spain. He called his wife over and they both chatted to me for five minutes. They were lovely, and I think I got their vote.”

Chambers has found that the presence of doorbell cameras has also given some candidates a higher chance of knocking on a door they would otherwise have avoided.

“I went round a house but saw anti-canvassing ‘don’t knock here’ signs on the windows so I just left some leaflets. I was nearly out of the gate when the lady who lived there called me back, having seen me on her ring doorbell. Instead of abuse for leaving the leaflets, she asked me why I didn’t want to talk to her, and told me that the no-canvassing signs were to keep Tories away and she was more than happy to chat to me.”

The sense that smart doorbells are opening doors that may otherwise remain closed has been felt across the campaign trail.

«

Terrific piece of journalism, spotting how a piece of technology has changed a social practice that we thought was completely embedded and beyond disruption. (There’s a nice story somewhere of a candidate who carried a brown parcel, pretending they had a delivery, to beat this defence.)
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This London non-profit is now one of the biggest backers of geoengineering research • MIT Technology Review

James Temple:

»

A London-based nonprofit is poised to become one of the world’s largest financial backers of solar geoengineering research. And it’s just one of a growing number of foundations eager to support scientists exploring whether the world could ease climate change by reflecting away more sunlight.

Quadrature Climate Foundation, established in 2019 and funded through the proceeds of the investment fund Quadrature Capital, plans to provide $40m for work in this field over the next three years, Greg De Temmerman, the organization’s chief science officer, told MIT Technology Review. 

That’s a big number for this subject—double what all foundations and wealthy individuals provided from 2008 through 2018 and roughly on par with what the US government has offered to date. 

“We think we can have a very strong impact in accelerating research, making sure it’s happening, and trying to unlock some public money at some point,” De Temmerman says.

Other nonprofits are set to provide tens of millions of dollars’ worth of additional grants to solar geoengineering research or related government advocacy work in the coming months and years. The uptick in funding will offer scientists in the controversial field far more support than they’ve enjoyed in the past and allow them to pursue a wider array of lab work, modeling, and potentially even outdoor experiments that could improve our understanding of the benefits and risks of such interventions. 

“It just feels like a new world, really different from last year,” says David Keith, a prominent geoengineering researcher and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago.

«

Another topic where one just wants to keep a weather (haha) eye on what’s happening. We know, in effect, how to reflect more sunlight; the problem is not doing too much, and how to do it in a way that is, if not reversible, then stoppable. But that amount of money won’t pose any risk of villainy, for now.
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US Surgeon General: social media platforms need a health warning • The New York Times

Vivek Murthy really is the US surgeon general:

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It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe. Evidence from tobacco studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior. When asked if a warning from the surgeon general would prompt them to limit or monitor their children’s social media use, 76% of people in one recent survey of Latino parents said yes.

To be clear, a warning label would not, on its own, make social media safe for young people. The advisory I issued a year ago about social media and young people’s mental health included specific recommendations for policymakers, platforms and the public to make social media safer for kids. Such measures, which already have strong bipartisan support, remain the priority.

Legislation from Congress should shield young people from online harassment, abuse and exploitation and from exposure to extreme violence and sexual content that too often appears in algorithm-driven feeds. The measures should prevent platforms from collecting sensitive data from children and should restrict the use of features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use.

Additionally, companies must be required to share all of their data on health effects with independent scientists and the public — currently they do not — and allow independent safety audits. While the platforms claim they are making their products safer, Americans need more than words. We need proof.

«

That last paragraph there suggests that he’s putting the cart before the horse. The evidence still points in both directions at once: towards it being bad, yet also towards it being good.

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Adobe’s hidden cancellation fee is unlawful, FTC suit says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Adobe prioritized profits while spending years ignoring numerous complaints from users struggling to cancel costly subscriptions without incurring hefty hidden fees, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged in a lawsuit Monday.

According to the FTC, Adobe knew that canceling subscriptions was hard but determined that it would hurt revenue to make canceling any easier, so Adobe never changed the “convoluted” process. Even when the FTC launched a probe in 2022 specifically indicating that Adobe’s practices may be illegal, Adobe did nothing to address the alleged harm to consumers, the FTC complaint noted. Adobe also “provides no refunds or only partial refunds to some subscribers who incur charges after an attempted, unsuccessful cancellation.”

Adobe “repeatedly decided against rectifying some of Adobe’s unlawful practices because of the revenue implications,” the FTC alleged, asking a jury to permanently block Adobe from continuing the seemingly deceptive practices.

Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel and chief trust officer, provided a statement confirming to Ars that Adobe plans to defend its business practices against the FTC’s claims.

…To lock subscribers into recurring monthly payments, Adobe would typically pre-select by default its most popular “annual paid monthly” plan, the FTC alleged. That subscription option locked users into an annual plan despite paying month to month. If they canceled after a two-week period, they’d owe Adobe an early termination fee (ETF) that costs 50% of their remaining annual subscription. The “material terms” of this fee are hidden during enrollment, the FTC claimed, only appearing in “disclosures that are designed to go unnoticed and that most consumers never see.”

For individual users, accessing Adobe’s suite of apps can cost more than $700 annually, Bloomberg reported. For many users suddenly faced with paying an ETF worth hundreds while losing access to services instantly, the decision to cancel is not as straightforward as it might be without the hidden fee. the FTC alleged.

Because Adobe allegedly only alerted users to the ETF in fine print—by hovering over a small icon or clicking a hyperlink in small text—while the company’s cancellation flows made it hard to end recurring payments, the FTC is suing and accusing Adobe of deceptive practices under the FTC Act.

«

Popcorn time. And of course there will be class action suits to follow, because the FTC isn’t going to dole out recompense to those who have suffered.
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The Encyclopedia Project, or how to know things in the Age of AI • Public Books

Megan Cummins:

»

It all started with Kung Fu Panda. As the final line of credits crawled up the screen, the kids bounced excitedly on the couch. With their heads full of the impossibilities of talking pandas and dragons common to today’s cartoons, my youngest asked a fair question: “Is kung fu really real?”

“I wanna know the history of kung fu,” the eldest chimed sagely. This was music to my husband’s ears, who was waiting for an entrée to introduce them to martial arts. “Yes, kung fu is real,” he explained. “And it has a long history. Let’s look it up.”

And that’s when our family movie night took a turn toward dystopia.

Our kids aren’t allowed to just look things up online themselves. Like many parents, we guide them through trying to find something trustworthy, so as to avoid online sludge. We have an especially draconian approach to YouTube. We search through multiple layers of proxies, private browsers, and peer sites, so that Google can’t infer who we are or our preferences. So when my husband typed in a few search terms and scrubbed through several clips before settling on one, we had some confidence in our due diligence. It certainly looked like a comprehensive introduction to kung fu.

At first, a male voice droned over a flurry of images. Thirty seconds in, my husband whispered, “I think this text is AI generated.” Fifteen seconds later, I whispered back, puzzled, “I think the voice is AI generated too.” Then, in the foreground, we spotted six fingers on a character.

«

You might be able to guess what happened next. Hard to know how many other families will follow, but it would be quite a revival, on a par with vinyl. Though I don’t know why they didn’t just look up Wikipedia.
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AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human • BBC Future

Thomas Germain:

»

Writer Benjamin Miller – not his real name – was thriving in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors, publishing blog posts and articles to promote a tech company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to used cars. “It was really engaging work,” Miller says, a chance to flex his creativity and collaborate with experts on a variety of subjects. But one day, Miller’s manager told him about a new project. “They wanted to use AI to cut down on costs,” he says. (Miller signed a non-disclosure agreement, and asked the BBC to withhold his and the company’s name.)

A month later, the business introduced an automated system. Miller’s manager would plug a headline for an article into an online form, an AI model would generate an outline based on that title, and Miller would get an alert on his computer. Instead of coming up with their own ideas, his writers would create articles around those outlines, and Miller would do a final edit before the stories were published. Miller only had a few months to adapt before he got news of a second layer of automation. Going forward, ChatGPT would write the articles in their entirety, and most of his team was fired. The few people remaining were left with an even less creative task: editing ChatGPT’s subpar text to make it sound more human.

By 2024, the company laid off the rest of Miller’s team, and he was alone. “All of a sudden I was just doing everyone’s job,” Miller says. Every day, he’d open the AI-written documents to fix the robot’s formulaic mistakes, churning out the work that used to employ dozens of people.

«

Germain has been busy looking at what AI is doing to writing jobs. And the next…
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AI detectors get it wrong. Writers are being fired anyway • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

»

Kimberly Gasuras doesn’t use AI. “I don’t need it,” she said. “I’ve been a news reporter for 24 years. How do you think I did all that work?” That logic wasn’t enough to save her job.

As a local journalist in Bucyrus, Ohio, Gasuras relies on side hustles to pay the bills. For a while, she made good money on a freelance writing platform called WritersAccess, where she wrote blogs and other content for small and midsize companies. But halfway through 2023, the income plummeted as some clients switched to ChatGPT for their writing needs. It was already a difficult time. Then the email came.

“I only got one warning,” Gasuras said. “I got this message saying they’d flagged my work as AI using a tool called ‘Originality.’” She was dumbfounded. Gasuras wrote back to defend her innocence, but she never got a response. Originality costs money, but Gasuras started running her work through other AI detectors before submitting to make sure she wasn’t getting dinged by mistake. A few months later, WritersAccess kicked her off the platform anyway. “They said my account was suspended due to excessive use of AI. I couldn’t believe it,” Gasuras said. WritersAccess did not respond to a request for comment.

«

The arms race will, of course, have collateral damage. The question is what the scale of that collateral damage is, and we don’t actually have any way of knowing that.
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What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? • Stephen Wolfram Writings

Stephen Wolfram excels at explaining complicated topics in comprehensible ways, so if you want to be able to explain it to other mortals, here’s your guide:

»

That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text. I should say at the outset that I’m going to focus on the big picture of what’s going on—and while I’ll mention some engineering details, I won’t get deeply into them. (And the essence of what I’ll say applies just as well to other current “large language models” [LLMs] as to ChatGPT.)

«

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Will I need to spend a lot insulating my home to get a heat pump? • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

»

Independent experts argue that households don’t need nearly as much insulation as they might think for a heat pump.

A study of almost 750 UK homes previously referenced in this series by the independent research and technology organisation the Energy Systems Catapult (ESC), found that 85% of homes – from south-east Scotland and Newcastle to south-east England – did not require any extra insulation to have a heat pump successfully installed.

About 15% of properties required some energy efficiency upgrades – but in the majority of cases this was loft insulation, which costs less than £1,000 and can be done with minimal disruption. Only “a few” properties required cavity wall insulation – which carries a cost of about £2,700 – or the replacing of old doors.

This finding is backed up by UK data collected by Heat Geek, a startup that trains specialist heat pump installers and helps to match them with potential customers. From a dataset of more than 100 properties it found that heat pumps were still able to warm uninsulated homes more efficiently than gas boilers.

In one example, a mid-century, mid-terrace house with uninsulated cavity walls recorded a heat pump efficiency score of 4.99 (a score of 3 or above means the device is cheaper to run than a gas boiler). Heat Geek found even a detached home built before 1900 with uninsulated solid walls recorded an efficiency of 4.24. Both homes had loft insulation.

Andrew Sissons, a deputy director at Nesta, a charity which undertakes research into home heating innovation, said: “Insulation is a good thing to do in its own right – but your home doesn’t need to be insulated to get a heat pump.”

A well-insulated home can make heat pumps run more efficiently but it is more important to make sure that the correct size heat pump and radiators are installed, he said.

«

It’s that last bit which makes one squint a bit. Upgrading radiators isn’t cheap. Also, if you live in a flat, where does it draw air from, and where does it sit?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Closure of many streets in Paris ahead of the Olympics has significantly reduced pollution. CC-licensed photo by Conall 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. I’m back, you’re back, let’s do news. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

The Stanford Internet Observatory, which published some of the most influential analysis of the spread of false information on social media during elections, has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation.

Just three staffers remain at the Observatory, and they will either leave or find roles at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, which is absorbing what remains of the program, according to eight people familiar with the developments, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The Election Integrity Partnership, a prominent consortium run by the Observatory and a University of Washington team to identify viral falsehoods about election procedures and outcomes in real time, has updated its webpage to say its work has concluded.

Two ongoing lawsuits and two congressional inquiries into the Observatory have cost Stanford millions of dollars in legal fees, one of the people told The Washington Post. Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda.

Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who founded the Observatory five years ago, moved into an advisory role in November. Observatory research manager Renée DiResta’s contract was not renewed in recent weeks.

…It follows Harvard’s dismissal of misinformation expert Joan Donovan, who in a December whistleblower complaint alleged that the university’s close and lucrative ties with Facebook parent Meta led the university to clamp down on her work, which was highly critical of the social media giant’s practices.

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Both of these losses are very bad at this time, when election disinformation is already a thing in the UK (bot TikTok accounts run by Russians boosting Reform) and the US elections are in the offing.
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Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen employees for faking work using mouse jigglers and keyboard simulation • Tom’s Hardware

Jeff Butts:

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the terminated employees worked in Wells Fargo’s wealth- and investment-management unit. They used special but easily obtainable tools to create the impression the staffers were busily working. In truth, the allegations state these employees weren’t even at their computers. A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”

Software and hardware that make it seem like someone is moving their mouse or typing on their keyboard are readily available. Tips for using them are easy to find on social media sites like Reddit and TikTok. The devices themselves are available on Amazon for less than $20. You can even build your own using a Raspberry Pi and some electronic components.

These inexpensive and widely available devices prevent computers from entering sleep mode when the PC isn’t in use. They don’t move the mouse or type on the keyboard but trick screen monitoring software into thinking the user is active when they are not. 

Such apps and equipment became increasingly popular during the pandemic’s work-from-home era. According to Bloomberg, Wells Fargo’s disclosures to Finra don’t clarify whether the discharged employees worked from home or the office. 

The finance industry quickly and aggressively brought its employees back into the office. However, Wells Fargo waited longer than most of its rivals to make that move. It didn’t start requiring employees to return to the office until early 2022 under a “hybrid flexible model.” The company now requires most employees to be in the office at least three days a week.

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Though this also says something about how boring the work must have been. Use AI to make the fakery more realistic next time!
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Paris Olympics visitors will see a city moving away from cars to reduce air pollution • NBC News

Mike Gagliardi:

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The 15 million people expected to swarm Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympics will visit a city far different than it was a decade ago.

That’s because a campaign to make Paris greener, primarily by reducing its dependence on cars, has transformed it into a shining example of what many environmental activists, city planners and transit advocates say ought to be the future of cities worldwide.

Paris has closed more than 100 streets to motor vehicles, tripled parking fees for SUVs, removed roughly 50,000 parking spots, and constructed more than 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) of bike lanes since Mayor Anne Hidalgo took office in 2014.

Those changes have contributed to a 40% decline in air pollution, according to city officials.

“How did we achieve this?” Hidalgo said in a statement in March. “By assuming a major and radical rupture: the end of car-dependence.”

Paris and other European cities have for years been at the forefront of efforts to reduce car use, though their successes have not come without challenges. The U.S., on the other hand, has been slower to adopt similar reforms.

“For 100 years in the U.S., we have built streets, neighborhoods and cities around cars, and as a result most people live in auto-dependent neighborhoods, and it’s very hard to undo that,” said Nicholas Klein, professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University.

Paris’ new urban landscape will be on display at a challenging time for Hidalgo, who has faced declining approval ratings and a failed presidential run. Still, a 2023 poll showed a majority of Parisians approve of her environmental reforms.

Louise Claustre, a resident of the 12th arrondissement and an avid cyclist, told NBC News she’s “100%” in favor of Hidalgo’s anti-car policies.

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Just goes to show: these things are possible. It only needs sufficient incentive. Wars may be taking it to an extreme, but pandemics (also extreme), or quadrennial events (Olympics) will suffice.
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Texas lawmakers sour on bitcoin mining, fearing large power needs • Houston Chronicle

Claire Hao:

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Spooked by projections of how much electricity Texas could need by 2030, lawmakers have soured on the growth of cryptocurrency mining after years of welcoming the industry to the state.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, said in April that Texas could need 152 gigawatts of electricity by the end of the decade, compared with a record 85.5 gigawatts set by the grid last summer. This forecast is approximately 40 gigawatts greater than what ERCOT expected last year, with around 60% of that new demand coming from potential cryptocurrency mines and data centers, regulators told lawmakers this week during legislative hearings about the power grid.

The Permian Basin alone is expected to see 24GW of added power demand, about half from electrification of oil and gas operations and half from data centers and cryptocurrency mines, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas told lawmakers.

…José Menéndez, D-San Antonio, said he didn’t want Texans, especially those on fixed incomes, to absorb the cost of grid upgrades needed for businesses like bitcoin miners.

“I see something inherently unjust in the fact that we’re asking everyday Texans who’re making tough decisions — costs, grocery stores — to be paying for the ability for other people to make even greater profit, especially if they’re moving from place to place to place and taking advantage of the low cost of Texas energy,” Menéndez said.

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Bitcoin miners still causing trouble. And you thought they’d all gone away.
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Survey finds payoff from AI projects is ‘dismal’ • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Businesses have become more cautious about investing in artificial intelligence tools due to concerns about cost, data security, and safety, according to a study conducted by Lucidworks, a provider of e-commerce search and customer service applications.

“The honeymoon phase of generative AI is over,” the company said in its 2024 Generative AI Global Benchmark Study, released on Tuesday. “While leaders remain enthusiastic about its potential to transform businesses, the initial euphoria has given way to a more measured approach.”

Between April and May 2024, Lucidworks conducted a survey of business leaders involved in AI adoption in North America, EMEA, and the APAC region. The respondents, it’s claimed, were drawn from 1,000 companies with 100 or more employees across 14 industries, all of which are said to have active AI initiatives underway.

About 23% are executives and about 50% are managers, with 86% involved in technology decision making. Of participants, 39% hailed from North America, with 36% from EMEA, and 24% from the APAC region.

According to the results of the survey, 63% of global companies plan to increase spending on AI in the next twelve months, compared to 93% in 2023 when Lucidworks conducted its first investigation.

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I still think it’s a little early to make judgements like this. The caution is a completely normal process. And look at the number who are going to increase their spending. They’re just trying to find where it fits.
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A peek behind a dark curtain • Hi, I’m Heather Burns

Heather Burns was between jobs when..:

»

The tl;dr is that I was approached to be the public face of a privately funded advocacy campaign on a big tech crusade. Their proposal would have paid me very well to do a few hours of work, at most, a month. But that job would not have involved any actual work, or any of the, you know, stuff I’ve actually spent my life doing.

Rather, my role would have been to play a quasi-fictional composite character. They wanted me to be the campaign’s public face, media spokesperson, and rent-a-human behind the team of desk jockeys doing the actual crusading work. The role would have required me to define my public identity around a manufactured sob story of how I was a victimised victim of big tech, and to appear on the front pages of the broadsheets and broadcast media as the personification of the campaign.

Regardless of the fact that the thing I was to be the victimised victim of hadn’t actually happened to me – it happened to other people.

And regardless of the fact that anyone who’s done more than two minutes of research on me – reading this blog, for example – knows that I care not a jot for the obsession with Big Tech and its celebrities. My work is about the little tech and everyday people who are being swept up and condemned as collateral damage in the big tech crusade. This is not news, people.

Those who know me personally will also be amused to imagine me defining myself as the victim of anything, much less being a paid professional one.

But still, this group, in its London luvvie wisdom, approached me with the offer. An offer, I must add, which kissed my Scottish arse, hard.

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She doesn’t know who they found to do that job, which I find intriguing because surely she knew what the campaign was, so would have seen who took the place and did it. Unless it didn’t get taken on.
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Publishers around the world hit by Facebook labelling news as spam • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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International publishers from the US and Europe have all had Facebook posts unexpectedly flagged as spam and removed, Press Gazette has learned.

The issues newly shared with Press Gazette match those experienced by UK independent local publishers as described in our initial story below. The posts all featured links to typical website articles and the editors involved have been unable to speak to anyone at Meta about it.

The Record-Argus, a small independent newspaper in Pennsylvania in the US, has had several posts with story links in the past few weeks marked as spam and deleted. They have requested a review on each one and not heard back on any, Press Gazette was told. Sebastian Matyszczak, editor-in-chief of Polish local news website wlkp24.info, told Press Gazette he has seen the issue for several weeks.

…In the UK, Birkenhead News editor David Humphreys estimated that more than 20 posts have been removed since 25 May.

On Monday evening he shared the latest to be removed: a story about “all the candidates standing for Wirral seats in the general election”. The Facebook notification told him: “It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way” and added: “Your post goes against our Community Standards on spam.”

Humphreys said Birkenhead News, an independent site that launched in 2020, does not “have the resources to battle these deletions” and but they are impactful because a “significant portion” of readers get to the site through links posted on Facebook.

Paul Winspear, who edits the Bishop’s Stortford Independent which is part of Iliffe Media, saw three Facebook posts relating to two election stories removed within 24 hours last week. Both, he said, were diary-style pieces that showed the local Conservative candidate “in a poor light”.

Winspear has also had one further removal but has struggled to work out which post was affected as clicking the “We’ve had to remove content” notification did not give the full information.

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Facebook has completely lost interest in news. As to some extent so has Google, which is trying to replace links to news with its AI answers.
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iOS and iPadOS 18: the MacStories overview • MacStories

Federico Viticci:

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From a renewed focus on Home Screen customization and redesigned Control Center to a new design for tab bars on iPad and expanded Tapbacks in Messages, Apple has showed that, while they can follow the rest of the tech industry in rethinking how AI can enhance how we use our devices, they can continue shipping other functionalities for iPhone and iPad, too. Or, at the very least, they certainly can for the iPhone and iOS.

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Knock yourself out if you want to find out about the (coming) changes. Nothing particularly stood out for me, but that’s been the case for a few years.
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How I found a 55 year old bug in the first lunar lander game • Martin C. Martin

Martin is a retired software engineer:

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Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student in Massachusetts, wrote the first Lunar Landing game. By 1973, it had become “by far and away the single most popular computer game.” A simple text game, you pilot a moon lander, aiming for a gentle touch down on the moon. All motion is vertical and you decide every 10 simulated seconds how much fuel to burn.

I recently explored the optimal fuel burn schedule to land as gently as possible and with maximum remaining fuel. Surprisingly, the theoretical best strategy didn’t work. The game falsely thinks the lander doesn’t touch down on the surface when in fact it does. Digging in, I was amazed by the sophisticated physics and numerical computing in the game. Eventually I found a bug: a missing “divide by two” that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years.

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There’s also a good writeup by Benj Edwards, who interviewed the original program author back in 2009. As he points out, the real Apollo code didn’t make this mistake.
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Google, Cloudflare and Cisco must poison DNS to stop piracy block circumvention in France • TorrentFreak

Andy Maxwell:

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In 2023, Canal+ went to court in France to tackle pirate sports streaming sites including Footybite.co, Streamcheck.link, SportBay.sx, TVFutbol.info, and Catchystream.com. The broadcaster said that since subscribers of local ISPs were accessing the pirate sites using their services, the ISPs should prevent them from doing so.

When the decision went in favor of Canal+, ISPs including Orange, SFR, OutreMer Télécom, Free, and Bouygues Télécom, were required to implement technical measures. Since the ISPs have their own DNS resolvers for use by their own customers, these were configured to provide non-authentic responses to deny access to the sites in question.

In response, increasingly savvy internet users that hadn’t already done so, simply changed their settings to use different DNS providers – Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco – whose resolvers hadn’t been tampered with; at least not yet.

Use of third-party DNS providers to circumvent blocking isn’t uncommon so last year Canal+ took legal action against three popular public DNS providers – Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google (8.8.8.8), and Cisco (208.69.38.205), demanding measures similar to those implemented by French ISPs.

Tampering with public DNS is a step too far for many internet advocates but for major rightsholders, if the law can be shaped to allow it, that’s what will happen. In this case, Article L333-10 of the French Sports Code (active Jan 2022) seems capable of accommodating almost anything.

…Two decisions were handed down by the Paris judicial court last month; one concerning Premier League matches and the other the Champions League. The orders instruct Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to implement measures similar to those in place at local ISPs. To protect the rights of Canal+, the companies must prevent French internet users from using their services to access around 117 pirate domains.

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I didn’t know that Cisco had a DNS service. Or that Torrentfreak had started using names on bylines. But it’s hard to argue that internet services, including DNS, should never obey local laws.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified