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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 