“Hey, Alexa, is it true that you’ve cost Amazon billions of pounds with no profit to show for it?” In fact: yes. CC-licensed photo by ajay_suresh 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 (probably) at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.
A selection of 9 links for you. Smart or not smart? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Inside the 78 minutes that took down millions of Windows machines • The Verge
Tom Warren:
»
At 12:09AM ET on July 19th, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released a faulty update to the Falcon security software it sells to help companies prevent malware, ransomware, and any other cyber threats from taking down their machines. It’s widely used by businesses for important Windows systems, which is why the impact of the bad update was so immediate and felt so broadly.
CrowdStrike’s update was supposed to be like any other silent update, automatically providing the very latest protections for its customers in a tiny file (just 40KB) that’s distributed over the web. CrowdStrike issues these regularly without incident, and they’re fairly common for security software. But this one was different. It exposed a massive flaw in the company’s cybersecurity product, a catastrophe that was only ever one bad update away — and one that could have been easily avoided.
…Kernel access makes it possible for the driver to create a memory corruption problem, which is what happened on Friday morning. “Where the crash was occurring was at an instruction where it was trying to access some memory that wasn’t valid,” Wardle says. “If you’re running in the kernel and you try to access invalid memory, it’s going to cause a fault and that’s going to cause the system to crash.”
CrowdStrike spotted the issues quickly, but the damage was already done. The company issued a fix 78 minutes after the original update went out. IT admins tried rebooting machines over and over and managed to get some back online if the network grabbed the update before CrowdStrike’s driver killed the server or PC, but for many support workers, the fix has involved manually visiting the affected machines and deleting CrowdStrike’s faulty content update.
While investigations into the CrowdStrike incident continue, the leading theory is that there was likely a bug in the driver that had been lying dormant for some time. It might not have been validating the data it was reading from the content update files properly, but that was never an issue until Friday’s problematic content update.
«
Lock down the kernel? Third-party companies complain. Don’t lock it down? Voila. A good point made by John Gruber: this might have only affected 1% of PCs, but it affected a lot more than 1% of people in the relevant countries.
unique link to this extract
Alexa is in millions of households—and Amazon is losing billions • WSJ
Dana Mattioli:
»
When Amazon launched the Echo smart home devices with its Alexa voice assistant in 2014, it pulled a page from shaving giant Gillette’s classic playbook: sell the razors for a pittance in the hope of making heaps of money on purchases of the refill blades.
A decade later, the payoff for Echo hasn’t arrived. While hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa-enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn’t take off.
Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee.
As a result, Amazon has lost tens of billions of dollars on its devices business, which includes Echos and other products such as Kindles, Fire TV Sticks and video doorbells, according to internal documents and people familiar with the business.
Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25bn in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.
It is a high-stakes miscalculation the tech giant made under founder Jeff Bezos that current CEO Jassy, who took the helm in 2021, is now trying to change. As part of a plan to reverse losses, Amazon is launching a paid tier of Alexa as soon as this month, a move even some engineers working on the project worry won’t work, according to people familiar with those efforts.
«
Hinges on a Bezos metric called “downstream impact” (DSI), dreamt up by economists, measuring how much time people spend inside Amazon’s ecosystem once they buy a product or service. Smart speakers: not much DSI.
unique link to this extract
OpenAI wants NYT to hand over journalistic notes in landmark case • Press Gazette
Charlotte Tobitt:
»
The New York Times has described an attempt by OpenAI to see its journalists’ confidential notes as “harassment and retaliation” for its decision to sue the tech company.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has asked a New York judge to force the NYT to hand over “underlying reporter’s notes, interview memos, records of materials cited, or other ‘files’” to prove its work can be classed as original works of authorship under US copyright law.
The New York Times said in response: “Permitting OpenAI to investigate The Times’s privileged newsgathering process would have serious negative and far-reaching consequences.
“It would entail the disclosure of The Times’s confidential reporters’ files on investigative reporting into highly sensitive matters, including those related to the defendants themselves.”
The NYT filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December after months of negotiations on a deal fell short, arguing the use of its content for the training of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT was “free-riding” on its own investment in journalism.
…“The Times can only assert infringement over those portions of the works that are (a) original to the author, and (b) owned or exclusively licensed to the Times,” OpenAI said.
In other words, according to OpenAI, the NYT should not be allowed to bring its case in relation to any of its reporting in which it “copied another’s work” or used “elements in the public domain”.
«
Not sure which is the braver gambit, but going to be fun to watch it play out. OpenAI is basically saying that the NYT’s journalists are just stenographers assembling bits and pieces from here and there, and that that’s what OpenAI does too. (Not correct in either case.)
unique link to this extract
The VR winter continues • Benedict Evans
»
It can feel a little odd to write about anything other than generative AI these days, but I sometimes remind people that all the things that we were talking about in October 2022 are still there. E-commerce is still growing (it’s now 40% of non-food retail in the UK!), Amazon has a $50bn ad business, peak TV is over, and Meta is still investing in VR and AR – at last $50bn so far.
There’s nothing new to say about this: Meta has a device at roughly the right price that isn’t good enough yet, and Apple has a device with a much better spec, at least on some measures, that isn’t cheap enough or light enough yet (I wrote about that here). And meanwhile, we don’t have product-market fit.
Some VR apps do well, but the platform at a whole is small, and not really growing either. Meta probably sold 1m of the Quest 3 (seen in the spike in Q4 2023, but compare with this data from Deloitte for the UK – the installed base is basically flat and only 20% of people who own one use it every day. That’s a 2% DAU [daily active user] penetration.
As I’ve written a few times before, it’s obvious that the devices will get better, lighter and cheaper, but much less obvious whether that’s enough. How many people will care?
«
And that is the critical question. Over the past 30 years, VR has come around again and again, and each time the market has rebuffed it.
unique link to this extract
Apple tries to rein in Hollywood spending after years of losses • Bloomberg
Lucas Shaw:
»
After spending more than $20bn to produce original TV shows and movies that not a lot of people watch, Apple is starting to refine its strategy in Hollywood.
Based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including former employees, current employees and business partners, Apple services boss Eddy Cue has been having regular meetings with studio chiefs Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht to go over budgets, pushing them to exert more control over spending on projects. Van Amburg and Erlicht have told some of their top creative partners that they want to change their reputation as the biggest spender in town, according to these people.
Apple doesn’t buy the most projects in Hollywood — that is still Netflix. But it splurges on individual titles. The studio spent more than $500m combined on movies from directors Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Matthew Vaughn, and upward of $250m on the World War II miniseries Masters of the Air, one of more than a dozen new series released this year.
Those pictures were all disappointments at the box office, and only Killers of the Flower Moon registered in Nielsen’s rankings of the most-popular streaming titles. Masters of the Air delivered a smaller US audience than House of Ninjas, a Netflix show in Japanese, according to Nielsen. Even so, it’s the only new Apple show this year to appear in Nielsen’s rankings.
Apple is spending billions of dollars a year on original programming that has received strong reviews and many awards nominations. But its streaming service is attracting just 0.2% of TV viewing in the US. Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.
“Subscriber growth has been weak, with the platform’s original content a fraction of what rivals offer,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Geetha Ranganathan and Kevin Near wrote in a recent note.
Apple has largely escaped scrutiny from the press and Wall Street. The company discloses no data about its spending or the financial performance of its Hollywood operation. Investors are more focused on iPhone sales.
Yet as studios and streaming services across Hollywood cut back after years of record spending and record losses, Apple is also looking to make its streaming business more sustainable.
«
I’d suggest not wasting it on the big feature films, and keeping with the good small series. But 0.2% of US TV viewing? That’s an incredible way to burn money. It makes Americas Cup racing look like a sensible economy.
unique link to this extract
China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week • ABC News
James Purtill:
»
While Australia debates the merits of going nuclear and frustration grows over the slower-than-needed rollout of solar and wind power, China is going all in on renewables.
New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.
A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.
It’s installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight.
By comparison, experts have said the Coalition’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants would add fewer than 10GW of generation capacity to the grid sometime after 2035.
Energy experts are looking to China, the world’s largest emitter, once seen as a climate villain, for lessons on how to go green, fast.
“We’ve seen America under President Biden throw a trillion dollars on the table [for clean energy],” CEF director Tim Buckley said. “China’s response to that has been to double down and go twice as fast.”
«
Australia is presently having complete conniptions about nuclear power, which it wants to include as a “renewable”, except it isn’t, and will take longer to install than any renewable. Meanwhile China gets on and just does it. Speaking of which…
unique link to this extract
China has created the first ever meltdown-proof nuclear reactor • IFLScience
Russell Moul:
»
One new(ish) kind of reactor design, known as a pebble-bed reactor (PBR), may have solutions to the issues inherent in older designs. These reactors are “passively” safe, whereby they can shut down on their own if there is any issue with the cooling system.
Unlike other reactors that rely on highly energy-dense fuel rods, PBRs use smaller, low-energy-density fuel “pebbles” in greater numbers. Although they contain less uranium than traditional fuel rods, there are more of them. They are also surrounded by graphite, which is used to moderate the amount of neutron activity in the core. This helps slow down nuclear reactions, resulting in less heat.
As such, lower energy density means excess heat can be spread out across the pebbles and can be more easily transferred away.
This may sound good, but until recently the only PBR reactors in existence were prototypes in Germany and China. However, China has now constructed a full-scale Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Pebble-Bed Module (HTR-PM) in Shandong, which became commercially operational in December 2023 and is equipped with these systems.
In order to test them, engineers turned off both modules of HTR-PM at a time when they were operating at full power.
“To confirm the presence of inherent safe reactors on a commercial scale, two natural cooling tests were performed on the #1 reactor module on August 13, 2023 and the #2 reactor module on September 1, 2023,” the researchers write. “During the entirety of the tests, the reactor modules were naturally cooled down without emergency core cooling systems or any cooling system driven by power.”
The results, which have just been published, show that HTR-PM cooled itself, reaching a stable temperature within 35 hours of its power being cut.
«
Not great, not terrible. (Chernobyl joke.)
unique link to this extract
𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘆Pod
»
What goes around, comes around! Rediscover the delight of tactile scrolling with tinyPod’s physical scroll wheel. And yes, it actually scrolls.
«
A brilliant idea (and a pretty neat web page for it). What if you.. took your Apple Watch and put it into a hand-sized iPod case? Obviously you’d need a mobile-connected Watch for this to be perfect, but it’s a nice idea which will surely and deservedly sell a few thousand.
unique link to this extract
Your Body’s Updated Terms of Service • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
Chas Gillespie:
»
We are writing to inform you that Your Body (“you,” “yourself,” “your aging body”) has updated its terms of service, which apply to the use of all your Parts and Areas. These terms will apply only to Your Once-Useful Body and may differ from Other People’s Bodies, Which Are Still Normal.
We encourage you to review the updated Terms before you attempt any dangerous activity, such as playing with your dog or walking uphill. Our other legal policies are available in our Depressing Policy Center.
«
Depressingly true, and of course there’s no way not to accept them. (Via John Naughton.)
unique link to this extract
| • 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 