Sales of Apple’s Vision Pro headset still haven’t broken 100,000, says IDC. The VR boom is delayed, again. CC-licensed photo by Phillip Pessar on Flickr.
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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.
Astronomers discover technique to spot AI fakes using galaxy-measurement tools • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
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In 2024, it’s almost trivial to create realistic AI-generated images of people, which has led to fears about how these deceptive images might be detected. Researchers at the University of Hull recently unveiled a novel method for detecting AI-generated deepfake images by analyzing reflections in human eyes. The technique, presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting last week, adapts tools used by astronomers to study galaxies for scrutinizing the consistency of light reflections in eyeballs.
Adejumoke Owolabi, an MSc student at the University of Hull, headed the research under the guidance of Dr. Kevin Pimbblet, professor of astrophysics.
Their detection technique is based on a simple principle: a pair of eyes being illuminated by the same set of light sources will typically have a similarly shaped set of light reflections in each eyeball. Many AI-generated images created to date don’t take eyeball reflections into account, so the simulated light reflections are often inconsistent between each eye.
In some ways, the astronomy angle isn’t always necessary for this kind of deepfake detection because a quick glance at a pair of eyes in a photo can reveal reflection inconsistencies, which is something artists who paint portraits have to keep in mind. But the application of astronomy tools to automatically measure and quantify eye reflections in deepfakes is a novel development.
In a Royal Astronomical Society blog post, Pimbblet explained that Owolabi developed a technique to detect eyeball reflections automatically and ran the reflections’ morphological features through indices to compare similarity between left and right eyeballs. Their findings revealed that deepfakes often exhibit differences between the pair of eyes.
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It’s the same way that galaxy shape is measured. A very neat application from a different discipline, and very easy to implement in software. (Which, OK, might mean that more sophisticated AI face generators will have a final pass to implement equal reflections in the eyes.)
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DHS has a DoS robot to disable internet of things “booby traps” inside homes • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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The Department of Homeland Security bought a dog-like robot that it has modified with an “antenna array” that gives law enforcement the ability to overload people’s home networks in an attempt to disable any internet of things devices they have, according to the transcript of a speech given by a DHS official at a border security conference for cops obtained by 404 Media.
The DHS has also built an “Internet of Things” house to train officers on how to raid homes that suspects may have “booby trapped” using smart home devices, the official said.
The robot, called “NEO,” is a modified version of the “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHS’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), told police at the 2024 Border Security Expo in Texas that DHS is increasingly worried about criminals setting “booby traps” with internet of things and smart home devices, and that NEO allows DHS to remotely disable the home networks of a home or building law enforcement is raiding.
The Border Security Expo is open only to law enforcement and defense contractors. A transcript of Huffman’s speech was obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Dave Maass using a Freedom of Information Act request and was shared with 404 Media.
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This is clever thinking. The really grand way to do it would be an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) knocking out absolutely everything for some radius, but that might be very unpopular in blocks of flats.
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Kenya’s protests played out on walkie-talkie app Zello • Rest of World
Stephanie Wangari:
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Betty had never heard of the Zello app until June 18.
But as she participated in Kenya’s “GenZ protests” that month — one of the biggest in the country’s history — the app became her savior.
On Zello, “we were getting updates and also updating others on where the tear-gas canisters were being lobbed and which streets had been cordoned off,” Betty, 27, told Rest of World, requesting to be identified by a pseudonym as she feared backlash from the police. “At one point, I also alerted the group [about] suspected undercover investigative officers who were wearing balaclavas.”
Nairobi witnessed massive protests in June as thousands of young Kenyans came out on the streets against a proposed bill that would increase taxes on staple foods and other essential goods and services. At least 39 people were killed, 361 were injured, and more than 335 were arrested by the police during the protests, according to human rights groups.
Amid the mayhem, Zello, an app developed by US engineer Alexey Gavrilov in 2007, became the primary tool for protestors to communicate, mobilize crowds, and coordinate logistics. Six protesters told Rest of World that Zello, which allows smartphones to be used as walkie-talkies, helped them find meeting points, evade the police, and alert each other to potential dangers.
Digital services experts and political analysts said the app helped the protests become one of the most effective in the country’s history.
According to Herman Manyora, a political analyst and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, mobilization had always been the greatest challenge in organizing previous protests in Kenya. The ability to turn their “phones into walkie-talkies” made the difference for protesters, he told Rest of World.
“The government realized that the young people were able to navigate technological challenges. You switch off one app, such as [X], they move to another,” Manyora said.
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We’ve come a long way since a revolution was fomented in the Philippines by text message.
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Apple’s Vision Pro won’t cross 500,000 sales this year, IDC says • Bloomberg via Yahoo
Vlad Savov:
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The $3,500 Vision Pro mixed-reality headset has yet to sell 100,000 units in a quarter since its launch in the US in February, and it faces a 75% drop in domestic sales in the current quarter, according to market tracker IDC.
The gadget’s international launch at the end of June will offset weakness in the US. A more affordable edition — which IDC estimates would cost roughly half as much — should rekindle interest in 2025, but sales may not rise meaningfully over the coming year, IDC said.
“The Vision Pro’s success, regardless of its price, will ultimately depend on the available content,” said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president at IDC. “As Apple expands the product to international markets, it’s crucial that local content is also made available.”
The early response to Apple’s headset has been mixed. Many reviewers and early adopters have praised its advanced technology, however some of Apple’s biggest fans are now returning the device. Its weight and paucity of tailored apps and video content are among the chief reasons people are turning away from the gadget. The Vision Pro made no tangible improvement to Apple’s quarterly earnings after its debut.
The unimpressive start has spurred a rethink among Apple’s management, with the company planning a more budget-friendly version of the device. IDC’s Jeronimo anticipates that will more than double sales when it arrives in the latter half of next year.
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I cannot work out whether Apple is just getting an absolute ton of immersive sports content ready for a Christmas blitz on sales, or whether it thinks that it needs to have more units out there before it commits to the content side. If the latter, that’s a serious mistake. You need something for people to watch: most won’t use it for content creation as if it were a desktop. Just look around at how people use iPads: mostly, consumption.
But as Marco Arment pointed out on the ATP podcast the other week, this is now heading into “flop” territory.
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Letter: why markets are stacked against clean energy • FT
Professor Martin Grubb is at the Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London:
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There are at least five reasons why global energy markets are loaded against adequate action. [An opinion piece by Martin Wolf] highlights two: that the damage from greenhouse gas emissions is inadequately (if at all) priced in markets, and the “failure of capital markets to price the future appropriately”.
Accelerating global action to tackle the crisis needs to acknowledge three others as well.
First is that most international fossil fuel transactions, both investments and sales, are in dollars: thus they face no exchange rate risks. Most renewable energy investments, in contrast, generate electricity, sold in local currency. The developing countries that most need foreign investment thus face a premium on cost of international capital to account for currency risk on renewables, but not for fossil fuels.
Second, many electricity systems have moved from long-term contracts to markets in which the “marginal” generator — the most expensive one needed to meet demand, based on the existing stock — sets the price for all. This means that fossil fuel plants, inevitably more expensive to run than wind or solar, are largely “self-hedged” — the wholesale market reflects their input costs (and indeed, they would pass on carbon costs). Purely market-based investment in renewables, however, would ironically bear all the price uncertainties arising from fossil fuel price volatility, again driving up their cost of capital.
Third is that investment in newer technologies typically brings greater innovation than expenditure on incumbents. The technological progress from investment in clean energy over the past 15 years has indeed been extraordinary, with radical and transformative breakthroughs. But these benefits are economy-wide, and ultimately global; individual investors can only capture a small fraction of the benefits.
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In brief: market failure, because it doesn’t have efficient pricing mechanisms to reflect that technology beats commodities.
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Fake Harris audio spreads like wildfire on TikTok after Biden’s announcement • Media Matters for America
Olivia Little:
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Incoherent audio wrongly attributed to Vice President Kamala Harris is going viral among right-wing accounts on TikTok following President Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race.
“Today is today and yesterday was today yesterday,” says a slurring, digitally altered Harris. “Tomorrow will be today tomorrow, so live today so the future today will be as the past today as it is tomorrow.”
This audio originates from a manipulated video of Harris’ 2023 speech at Howard University. Over 2,300 individual TikTok posts have used this sound, meaning it plays in the background of each video.
After Biden’s announcement, many users wrongly attributed the audio to Harris and used it to attack her.
“After hearing this speech from Kamala Harris, I’m definitely voting,” says the overlaid text of one user’s video. The video’s caption also reads, “Don’t vote for her just because shes a woman” with the hashtags “#trump2024” and “#trumptrain.” The video has already racked up over 350,000 views.
Update (7/22/24): TikTok has removed the fake Harris audio and stated that it is “actively and aggressively removing this content which violates our rules.”
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Expect more of this sort of low-grade stuff, but perhaps some higher-quality stuff. The real question is whether any of the news networks pick it up: that’s what would be the spark igniting the flame.
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Silicon Valley donors bailed on Biden. Kamala Harris is winning them back • WIRED
Makena Kelly and Lauren Goode:
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Hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Democratic megadonors in Silicon Valley were already lining up to support Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of their party’s ticket.
“This is what’s right for our country—and our democratic future,” wrote Reid Hoffman, cofounder and executive chair of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, on X. Last week, Hoffman had endorsed a call between 300 democratic donors and Harris and encouraged members of his network to join the call, according to The New York Times.
“Kamala Harris is the American dream personified, daughter of immigrants who met at Cal. She is also toughness personified, rising from my hometown of Oakland, California, to become the top prosecutor of the state,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, Hoffman’s former political adviser, tells WIRED. “With Scranton Joe stepping back, I cannot wait to help elect President Harris.”
Aaron Levie, the chief executive of multibillion-dollar cloud storage company Box and a Democratic donor who hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015, reposted Biden’s resignation letter on X and said, “Wow. Amazing leadership. Now let’s go!”
“The tech community must come together to defeat Donald Trump and save our democracy by uniting behind Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for President,” Ron Conway, the founder and managing partner of SV Angel, tells WIRED.
…“David [Sacks] has been a Republican for a long time,” Keith Rabois, investor and top Republican donor, wrote in an email to WIRED earlier this month, saying he didn’t know how many new Republicans there actually were in Silicon Valley.
“It’s so shameful,” says Yekutiel about the increasingly vocal group of tech executives backing Trump. “It represents so much of what’s wrong in this country, so much pessimism, and it’s such a far cry from the tech community that is supposedly creating a world that is better and more connected.”
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The dream of solving the Israel-Palestine conflict through letting them connect on Facebook has long been subsumed by the desire not to be regulated in any way at all and keep all the money.
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USC study confirms the rotation of Earth’s inner core has slowed • University of South California
David Medzerian:
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Movement of the inner core has been debated by the scientific community for two decades, with some research indicating that the inner core rotates faster than the planet’s surface. The new USC study provides unambiguous evidence that the inner core began to decrease its speed around 2010, moving slower than the Earth’s surface.
“When I first saw the seismograms that hinted at this change, I was stumped,” said John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “But when we found two dozen more observations signaling the same pattern, the result was inescapable. The inner core had slowed down for the first time in many decades. Other scientists have recently argued for similar and different models, but our latest study provides the most convincing resolution.”
The inner core is considered to be reversing and backtracking relative to the planet’s surface due to moving slightly slower instead of faster than the Earth’s mantle for the first time in approximately 40 years. Relative to its speed in previous decades, the inner core is slowing down.
The inner core is a solid iron-nickel sphere surrounded by the liquid iron-nickel outer core. Roughly the size of the moon, the inner core sits more than 3,000 miles under our feet and presents a challenge to researchers: It can’t be visited or viewed. Scientists must use the seismic waves of earthquakes to create renderings of the inner core’s movement.
…The implications of this change in the inner core’s movement for Earth’s surface can only be speculated. Vidale said the backtracking of the inner core may alter the length of a day by fractions of a second: “It’s very hard to notice, on the order of a thousandth of a second, almost lost in the noise of the churning oceans and atmosphere.”
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Strange that it doesn’t have more effect, really. I though it was all to do with the magnetic field.
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‘It affects everything’: why is Hollywood so scared to tackle the climate crisis? • The Guardian
David Smith:
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[The director of Don’t Look Up, Adam] McKay says: “There is no one way to make films, shows, music or write books about something as violently and globally transformative as climate breakdown. So I’m always wary of ‘this is how you do it’ approaches.
“We’re talking about 8 billion people reacting to oil companies destroying the entire livable climate. We need stories in hundreds of different languages, reflecting a thousand times more cultures experiencing varying degrees of awareness and emotional processing.”
He adds: “But if a film-maker is reluctant to let climate be in some way a part of their movie, I always tell them that it’s a guarantee within the next five years their film will play as irrelevant as movies do today about how noble the war against the ‘American Indians’ was.”
Yet references to the climate crisis continue to be scarce. Why is the topic so elusive? Part of the explanation may be a current backlash against perceived political messaging in films, exemplified by criticism of Disney for going “woke”. Climate stories in particular may also be difficult to pitch to producers.
Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington, says: “Climate change affects everything so it’s a piece of any story that we tell, but it also can be anxiety-provoking and depressing for people.
“I’m not surprised that Hollywood hasn’t included many climate stories. They want to sell films. People want to escape and be entertained in films, and climate change is a harder sell. I can tell you anecdotally I have met and spoken to screenwriters who want to increase the number of scripts that include climate change, and are working to help other writers to incorporate it.
“Coming up with a storyline that has climate at its centre is difficult to do, so they all expressed frustration and disappointment at the lack of interest in these storylines. But at least in my experience, there are a group of writers out there that want to do more. It’s just a matter of finding somebody who’s interested in producing the film.”
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There have been plenty of stories with climate at the centre – it’s just they’re not at the slow pace that it happens. Day After Tomorrow, for example. And it’s often metaphorical (Don’t Look Up).
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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. |
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