It’s not unseemly haste, but the removals van will be in Downing Street by Friday. CC-licensed photo by Andy Thornley on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Boxed in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Japan wins two-year “war on floppy disks,” kills regulations requiring old tech • Ars Technica
Scharon Harding:
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About two years after the country’s digital minister publicly declared a “war on floppy discs,” Japan reportedly stopped using floppy disks in governmental systems as of June 28.
Per a Reuters report on Wednesday, Japan’s government “eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems.” The report notes that by mid-June, Japan’s Digital Agency (a body set up during the COVID-19 pandemic and aimed at updating government technology) had “scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.” That suggests that there’s up to one government use that could still turn to floppy disks, though more details weren’t available.
Digital Minister Taro Kono, the politician behind the modernization of the Japanese government’s tech, has made his distaste for floppy disks and other old office tech, like fax machines, quite public. Kono, who’s reportedly considering a second presidential run, told Reuters in a statement today: We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!
Although Kono only announced plans to eradicate floppy disks from the government two years ago, it’s been 20 years since floppy disks were in their prime and 53 years since they debuted. It was only in January 2024 that the Japanese government stopped requiring physical media, like floppy disks and CD-ROMs, for 1,900 types of submissions to the government, such as business filings and submission forms for citizens.
The timeline may be surprising, considering that the last company to make floppy disks, Sony, stopped doing so in 2011. As a storage medium, of course, floppies can’t compete with today’s options since most floppies max out at 1.44MB (2.88MB floppies were also available). And you’ll be hard-pressed to find a modern system that can still read the disks. There are also basic concerns around the old storage format, such as Tokyo police reportedly losing a pair of floppy disks with information on dozens of public housing applicants in 2021.
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At last their long national nightmare is over. Wonder how it will affect “the last person standing” in the floppy disk business (last seen September 2022).
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China is building a mammoth 8GW solar farm • Electrek
Michelle Lewis:
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State-owned power company China Three Gorges Renewables Group will build an 8 GW solar farm as part of a nearly $11bn integrated energy project.
To put the sheer size of the 8 GW solar farm in perspective, the three largest solar farms in the world by capacity are China’s Ningxia Tenggeli and Golmud Wutumeiren solar farms, with a capacity of 3MW each, and a 3.5GW solar farm outside Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital.
In addition to the massive solar farm, the $10.99bn project will also consist of 4GW of wind, 5GWh of energy storage capacity, 200 MW of solar thermal, and (disappointingly) 4 GW of coal-fired power. It will be sited in Ordos, in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region, the Shanghai-listed company said in a stock filing.
China Three Gorges says that the enormous integrated energy site’s power will be dispatched to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster in northern China via an ultra-high voltage power transmission line.
The project will break ground in September and is expected to come online by June 2027.
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Three and a half years for that amount of capacity. Not feasible with nuclear, of course; only with renewables that can be built in parallel. (Though the coal-fire station is big for such rapid deployment.) One can only hope that the coal capacity will not be needed once the rest comes online.
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US approves new offshore wind project bringing total to 13GW • Energy Watch
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The US Department of the Interior approved another offshore wind project on Tuesday, bringing the total approved offshore wind capacity to over 13 gigawatts (GW).
On Tuesday, the ninth project was given the green light by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Department of the Interior.
”The Biden-Harris Administration is building momentum every day for a clean energy future. Today’s milestone is another step toward our ambitious goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore energy by 2030,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
The new offshore wind farm is the Atlantic Shores South Wind project, which consists of two offshore wind farms – 1 and 2 – and associated export cables that are expected to generate up to 2,800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power close to one million homes with renewable energy.
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Impressive, very nice. For comparison, the UK’s installed wind capacity in 2023 was 30GW: 15GW onshore, 15GW offshore. The aim is to get to 50GW offshore by 2030.
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AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked in LAION-5B, a popular AI dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. Now, she has released a second report, flagging 190 photos of children from all of Australia’s states and territories, including indigenous children who may be particularly vulnerable to harms.
These photos are linked in the dataset “without the knowledge or consent of the children or their families.” They span the entirety of childhood, making it possible for AI image generators to generate realistic deepfakes of real Australian children, Han’s report said. Perhaps even more concerning, the URLs in the dataset sometimes reveal identifying information about children, including their names and locations where photos were shot, making it easy to track down children whose images might not otherwise be discoverable online.
That puts children in danger of privacy and safety risks, Han said, and some parents thinking they’ve protected their kids’ privacy online may not realize that these risks exist.
From a single link to one photo that showed “two boys, ages 3 and 4, grinning from ear to ear as they hold paintbrushes in front of a colorful mural,” Han could trace “both children’s full names and ages, and the name of the preschool they attend in Perth, in Western Australia.” And perhaps most disturbingly, “information about these children does not appear to exist anywhere else on the Internet”—suggesting that families were particularly cautious in shielding these boys’ identities online.
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Worrying that those photos are held in the database. Though that’s very impressive detective work in its own right to figure out where they came from originally.
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Meta’s Threads hits 175 million users one year after launch • The Verge
Alex Heath:
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A year and a half ago, Threads was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.
Now, the rival to Elon Musk’s X has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, the Meta CEO announced on Wednesday.
His announcement comes as Threads is about to hit its one-year anniversary. Back when it arrived in the App Store on July 5th, 2023, Musk was taking a wrecking ball to the service formerly called Twitter and goading Zuckerberg into a literal cage match that never happened. A year later, Threads is still growing at a steady clip — albeit not as quickly as its huge launch — while Musk hasn’t shared comparable metrics for X since he took over.
…It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet. That omission suggests Threads is still getting a lot of flyby traffic from people who have yet to become regular users.
I’ve heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app’s growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram. Both apps share the same account system, which isn’t expected to change.
Even still, 175 million monthly users for a one-year app is nothing to turn your nose up at, especially given Meta’s spotty track record of launching standalone app experiments over the years. Zuckerberg has been open to me and others that he thinks Threads has a real shot at being the company’s next billion-user app.
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Cloudflare offers 1-click block against web-scraping AI bots • The Register
Thomas Claburn:
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Cloudflare on Wednesday offered web hosting customers a way to block AI bots from scraping website content and using the data without permission to train machine learning models.
It did so based on customer loathing of AI bots and, “to help preserve a safe internet for content creators,” it said in a statement.
“We hear clearly that customers don’t want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we’ve added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots.”
There’s already a somewhat effective method to block bots that’s widely available to website owners, the robots.txt file. When placed in a website’s root directory, automated web crawlers are expected to notice and comply with directives in the file that tell them to stay out.
Given the widespread belief that generative AI is based on theft, and the many lawsuits attempting to hold AI companies accountable, firms trafficking in laundered content have graciously allowed web publishers to opt-out of the pilfering.
…The internet is “now flooded with these AI bots,” Cloudflare said, which visit about 39% of the top one million web properties served by Cloudflare.
The problem is that robots.txt, like the Do Not Track header implemented in browsers fifteen years ago to declare a preference for privacy, can be ignored, generally without consequences.
And recent reports suggest AI bots do just that. Amazon last week said it was looking into evidence that bots working on behalf of AI search outfit Perplexity, an AWS client, had crawled websites, including news sites, and reproduced their content without suitable credit or permission.
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How handovers work: John Major’s final hours in No.10 • The House Magazine
Robert Hutton:
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For the first time since 1997, Britain is approaching an election where no one doubts that power is about to change hands. And by happy coincidence, last Christmas saw the release of a memo spelling out how Downing Street prepared for the moment last time around.
A feature of our democracy is the brutal swiftness with which a defeated leader is removed: John Major was on his way to resign to the Queen within hours of losing the election. But he wasn’t just leaving his office: he was leaving his home. Few of us could pack for a holiday in the time in which he and his wife Norma were supposed to empty their Downing Street flat.
“This was obviously delicate,” Major’s principal private secretary Alex Allan recalled in a 2000 note to Jeremy Heywood explaining how the couple had made sure they were ready, now available at the National Archives in Kew. He said he had sat down with them to discuss what would happen, after which Norma “discreetly moved quite a lot of clothes etc out of Downing Street during the weeks running up to the election”. She took the view, he said, that “if they had won, bringing clothes and other possessions back would have been a pleasure!”
He also secured a room in the Cabinet Office for them to store larger items so that they could be moved after the election: “They were (understandably) keen to avoid having a removal van seen in or near Downing Street.” This plan was thwarted on polling day “when I got a panicked call from the press office to say that there was a removal van in Downing Street.” It turned out that another group of civil servants had decided it would be a nice quiet day to shift furniture in Whitehall.
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Best-laid plans, and all that. Friday morning should be fun.
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US pays Moderna $176m to develop bird-flu vaccine • BBC News
Michelle Roberts:
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The US government has given Moderna $176m (£139m) to develop a messenger-ribonucleic-acid-based (mRNA) pandemic influenza vaccine that would work against bird flu.
It says it wants to be “better prepared” for public-health crises, having learned lessons from Covid.
Bird flu is not a big threat to people, despite outbreaks in poultry and cattle. But experts want a working vaccine that could be quickly rolled out, in case the virus mutates and becomes a problem.
Vaccines using mRNA technology – which the Moderna’s Covid jab is also based on – can be produced more quickly. And the US government says adding this technology to its pandemic-flu toolkit enhances its ability to be “nimble and quick” against bird flu.
The $176m, from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, will be used to complete late-stage development and testing of Moderna’s vaccine against H5N1 avian influenza.
This strain has been around for years in birds – but some other animals, including cattle, have become infected in recent outbreaks. Some believe the virus might one day change and start spreading easily among humans, with potentially serious consequences.
So far, there is no sign of this.
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Watching brief, totally just a watching brief. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Election 2024 Results and Predictions: Introduction • Jon Skeet
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This site is intended to be interesting during election night (July 4th-5th 2024) and potentially shortly afterwards, for those wishing to get an at-a-glance view of the state of play as the night goes on, and also to compare reality with the various predictions over the course of the campaign. The “2019 notional results” are the 2019 election results, redistributed to the new constituency boundaries for 2024 as calculated by Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings, as listed on Wikipedia. A very few aspects of the site are down to the judgement of the author (Jon Skeet) – I’m not a political analyst by any stretch of the imagination:
Which candidates are “notable” (i.e. ones where I believe many people are likely to be interested in the result) – mostly cabinet and shadow cabinet members, and party leaders.
How to rank “contentious” constituencies and “surprising” results.
How to bucket predictions with only majorities or probabilities into “tossup / lean / likely / safe”.
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Multiple views including a live view which will auto-refresh through the night and into the morning. Enjoy!
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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 