Mercurial chief Elon Musk says he will move the headquarters of Twitter (X) and SpaceX from California to Texas. CC-licensed photo by Guilhem Vellut 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. Gradually, then suddenly.. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk says he will move X, SpaceX headquarters from California to Texas • WSJ

Joseph Pisani, Alexa Corse and Micah Maidenberg:

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Elon Musk is fed up with California.

The billionaire entrepreneur said he is moving the headquarters of two of his companies, X Corp. and SpaceX, to Texas from California. His disclosures, on X, came after California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a new law Monday aiming to prevent schools from informing families if their children identify as gay or transgender.

“This is the final straw,” Musk wrote on X, the social-media platform he owns. He cited the law as well as “many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies.”

The California law prohibits school districts from requiring employees to disclose information about a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity without the student’s consent. Proponents of the law say it protects children from being forced into being outed and creates a safe place for them in school. Critics say it infringes on the rights of parents to be informed.

Musk said his rocket company, SpaceX, would move its headquarters from Hawthorne, Calif., to Texas, where SpaceX has been expanding its Starbase manufacturing and launch site near Brownsville, in the southeast corner of the state.

He said X, the social-media platform, would move its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, Texas.

“Have had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building,” he said about X’s current digs in San Francisco.

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The story is basically written around a few tweets from Musk – it’s the modern way – but I think the problems of getting in and out of the X buildings, and environs, is probably a bigger factor. Though with Musk, who knows.
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Taboola to sell ads for Apple • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios.

The deal provides new validation for Taboola’s business, which has ballooned to over $1.4 billion in annual revenue as of 2023. Taboola’s effort to build trust with Apple across its various teams and stakeholders was “a multiyear process,'” Singolda said. The deal is also a recognition from Apple that growing its ad business will require a serious sales operation — one that, if Apple doesn’t build internally, will need to be outsourced.

Marketing analytics company eMarketer estimates that Apple’s worldwide ad revenues will total $10.34bn this year.

Apple doesn’t disclose how many people use its apps but said last year that it sold more than 1 billion subscriptions to its paid apps, which includes Apple News and Apple Stocks.

As an authorized advertising reseller for Apple News and Apple Stocks, Taboola will power native advertising placements within those two apps in every market available.

Both apps are accessible in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia and are built in on every iPhone, iPad and Mac. Taboola can sell ads within the main feeds and articles for select publishers across both apps.

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Taboola is a “chumbox” company – the ridiculous ads that sit at the bottom of or halfway through stories with ads such as “This grandma is making skincare specialists mad.”

Apple partnering with it is a bad, bad move.
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AI, lawyers, and Jevon’s Paradox • Nonobvious

Evan Zimmerman:

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The rise of AI is predicated on increased efficiency, but some lawyers fear what this means for their bottom line in the world of billable hours. Some are even predicting the death of the billable hour, and even saying that it might be a good thing. The fear is a decrease in overall profitability due to a decrease in revenue because AI promises efficiency, and in a charge-per-hour industry, time is cost but also revenue. In fact, one partner at Perkins Coie predicted a decrease in profitability of 13% across the industry.

The legal industry is a trillion-dollar, competitive industry, so if AI can introduce real efficiencies it is coming, like it or not. However, there is an interesting economics principle that suggests that it might not be all doom and gloom if AI can bring efficiency to the legal profession. In fact, according to this principle, lower billable hours per matter may mean more billable hours overall. How? The answer has to do with highways and traffic. Enter Jevon’s Paradox.

…When the “price elasticity” is high—meaning that if you cut the cost of something by $1, you get more than $1 of demand—you end up unlocking more hidden demand than you eliminated through efficiency. That is the beating heart of Jevon’s paradox. You can see the connection to legal work. While the cost of a service may go down, if there is enough “hidden demand” for legal work, the overall spending will go up because there will be more matters to handle, even if the cost per matter decreases due to efficiency.

We have seen examples of this in the legal world in the past decade. Two from corporate work are Stripe Atlas and Clerky. Stripe Atlas handles incorporation matters for startups in a cookie-cutter manner for a flat fee. Previously, startups would be charged $10,000-20,000 for formation matters. Now, they can use Atlas and get access to Goodwin-drafted documents alongside process automation and deals on startup services, like bank accounts from Mercury and credit cards from Brex. Similarly, Clerky generates certain types of standard form contract drafted by Orrick, like NDAs and SAFEs. For a one-time flat fee, startups can get access to these documents and use them as many times as they like. These standard documents would often cost thousands of dollars from a good firm. And they weren’t even that profitable; they were tedious jobs that lawyers disliked doing and distracted from higher-order matters.

Stripe Atlas and Clerky have had an effect on the legal profession’s pricing power for these services. White shoe firms will now offer a $5,000 package to get startups on board that is similar to Stripe Atlas. Similarly, prices for standard agreements have gone down. Edge is represented by well-heeled counsel and was advised to not bother using a form offer letter from them. But business overall is up.

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HeHealth’s AI app that screened ‘dick pics’ for STIs has shut down • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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HeHealth’s AI-powered Calmara app claimed, “Our innovative AI technology offers rapid, confidential, and scientifically validated sexual health screening, giving you peace of mind before diving into intimate encounters,” but now it’s shut down after an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The app prompted daters to submit dick pics to check for sexually transmitted infections, promising “clear, science-backed answers about your partner’s sexual health status,” according to an FTC letter dated July 11th. The letter lays out some of the agency’s concerns with the information HeHealth relied on for its claims, including one saying that it could detect more than 10 sexually transmitted infections with up to 94% accuracy.

The FTC notes that HeHealth paid several study authors, that the main study cited by the company only assessed four kinds of STIs rather than 10, and data used to train the AI model included images from users who never got a diagnostic test to confirm the results.

Given that most STIs are asymptomatic, according to the World Health Organization, medical professionals have questioned the reliability of the app’s tactics. One Los Angeles Times investigation found that Calmara couldn’t even discern inanimate objects and failed to identify “textbook images” of STIs. YouTube videos also show that Calmara marketed itself to women to vet their dates, creating obvious questions about consent, although a March press release insists the app required “explicit consent.”

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Astonishing that anyone would sit around a table and decide “yes, this definitely works and it’s not at all creepy”.
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US detected Iranian plot to kill Trump separate from last weekend’s shooting • The New York Times

Peter Baker and Julian Barnes:

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U.S. intelligence agencies were tracking what they considered a potential Iranian assassination plot against former President Donald J. Trump in the weeks before a gunman opened fire last weekend, several officials said on Tuesday, but they added that they did not believe the threat was related to the shooting that wounded Mr. Trump.

The intelligence had prompted the Secret Service to enhance security for the former president before his outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, officials said. Yet whatever additional measures were taken did not stop a 20-year-old local man from clambering on top of a nearby warehouse roof to shoot at Mr. Trump, grazing his right ear and coming close to killing him.

The Trump campaign was told about the threat not long before Saturday’s shooting, according to a person briefed on the situation.

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And even so! The most astonishing thing about the attempt is that if Trump hadn’t tilted his head to the side slightly in the middle of the sentence he was speaking, he’d now be dead or seriously disabled.
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Google Search ending ‘Notes’ experiment • 9to5Google

Abner Li:

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Back in November, Google Search Labs launched a Notes experiment and it’s now coming to an end with the feature ultimately not launching.

Notes in Search Labs was a cross between forums/Reddit, X Community Notes, and a comments section with a story-esque format. The idea was to let people leave “helpful tips about an article” in Search results or Discover. 

If you signed up for the experiment, you saw “Add note” and “Notes” buttons everywhere, with the latter letting you view what people shared. It opened a grid of stories. You could Like, Share, and Save for later, with Google leveraging algorithmic protections and human review. 

In ending the experiment, Google says “people want to hear from others like them and Notes was an exploration of how to help people share their knowledge right on Search.” Broadly, not all ideas in Search Labs are expected to launch, but Google made a big deal about Notes at the time, and heavily encouraged people to share them.

Notes will be available until the end of July.

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What’s the betting this was getting spammed to death, and hardly used by ordinary people. You’d think by now Google would be familiar with how an empty text field on the internet gets abused.
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Kaspersky Lab closing US division; laying off workers • Zetter-Zeroday

Kim Zetter:

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Russian cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab, has told workers in its U.S.-based division that they are being laid off this week and that it is closing its U.S. business, according to several sources. The sudden move comes after the U.S. Commerce Department announced last month that it was banning the sale of Kaspersky software in the U.S. beginning July 20. The company has been selling its software here since 2005.

Kaspersky confirmed the news to Zero Day, saying that beginning July 20 it will “gradually wind down” its U.S. operations and eliminate U.S.-based positions as a result of the new ban, despite initially vowing to fight the ban in court.

“The company has carefully examined and evaluated the impact of the U.S. legal requirements and made this sad and difficult decision as business opportunities in the country are no longer viable,” the company said in a statement. Kaspersky did not say how many workers in the U.S. division were being let go except to say “it affects less than 50 employees in the U.S.” Workers have told Zero Day that they are receiving severances but declined to discuss the nature of the severances.

The U.S. Commerce Department announced the ban in June after what it said was an “extremely thorough investigation.” Commerce officials did not elaborate on the nature of the investigation or what it uncovered, but officials cited national security concerns that Kaspersky or the Russian government could use its software to spy on American customers or sabotage systems.

…Asked if officials had evidence that the Russian government was using Kaspersky software to spy on customers, Raimondo and other government officials declined to say.

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That last bit seems a little like “no”, doesn’t it.
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FlowGPT, an AI artist, used Bad Bunny’s voice and shot to fame • Rest of World

Charis McGowan:

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When Mauricio Bustos, 30, created the song “NostalgIA” in his humble apartment in downtown Santiago, he never expected that the Puerto Rican reggaeton and trap superstar Bad Bunny would actually pay it any mind. It was October 2023 and Bustos was publishing tracks on his YouTube channel, where he’d developed a modest fanbase that supported his career as an unsigned artist.

But “NostalgIA” hit different, and exploded on social media. Within a month, the song had struck viral gold, racking up half a million TikTok views and nearly a million Spotify streams. It even made it to the top 20 of Spain’s Spotify streaming charts.

For fans of the Latin Urban genre, the song was a dream collaboration: Justin Bieber sings the chorus in fluent Spanish, while Bad Bunny raps alongside retired old-school legend Daddy Yankee. 

If that sounds like an impossible supergroup, that’s because it is: None of these artists were involved in creating the track. Rather, their contributions were made using AI voice cloning tools. The song’s name is a wink to the Spanish acronym for artificial intelligence, and Bustos released it under the moniker FlowGPT — a riff on ChatGPT that he says stands for Generador Preentrenado de Temazos, or “Pretrained Hit Generator.” 

FlowGPT is also helmed by a visual character — think the cartoon characters from the band Gorillaz — as a complement to its futuristic vision of music: a humanoid with a white robot mask that speaks to viewers through TikTok and YouTube videos. 

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Indonesia’s ‘Strava jockey’ trend goes viral, but buying exercise achievements comes with potential pitfalls, say experts • CNA

Amanda Oon and Kiki Siregar:

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Newly graduated from high school and waiting for an entrance test to join the police in September, Jakarta teenager Wahyu Wicaksono found a way to make some money from his love of running.

He became a “Strava jockey”, clocking up running achievements for others on the popular exercise tracking app for a fee.

“I am active on (the social media platform) X and it (the Strava jockey trend) is booming there,” said Wahyu, 17, who started advertising his Strava jockey services almost two weeks ago. 

“My hobby is to run so I thought I should take advantage of the situation and make it a business.” 

His fledgling venture bagged eight clients in the first six days.

Wahyu charges 10,000 rupiah (US$0.62) per km to run at “Pace 4” (1km in four minutes). For every km run at “Pace 8” (1km in eight minutes), he charges 5,000 rupiah. 

Clients pay up before he starts running and he runs using either his own Strava account, or login details they have given him. 

His most lucrative job so far, he said, has earned him 100,000 rupiah. 

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That seems like a low price. Filed along with the marathon cheaters.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Apollo astronauts didn’t stay long, but could a newly discovered cave on the Moon provide long-term shelter for humans? CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons 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. Any bears? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why melting ice sheets are making our days longer • The Washington Post

Kasha Patel:

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As temperatures rise globally, Earth’s polar regions have felt the brunt of the heat added since the 20th century. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets account for nearly one-third of global sea level rise since the early 1990s. But the melting is not affecting just sea levels.

As the polar ice melts, the water moves from the poles toward the equator — making our Earth rotate slower as it gets bulkier. Think of a figure skater who spins slower when her arms are stretched out compared to tucked into her body. The same applies to Earth’s rotation, said Benedikt Soja, a co-author and professor at ETH Zürich.

Soja and the team showed in findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday that recent, rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice has increased the length of our days. Using past observations and projection models, they found the ice loss added time to Earth’s day between 0.3 to 1 milliseconds%ury through the 20th century. But since 2000, the rate has accelerated to 1.33 milliseconds%ury.

For billions of years, the speed of our planet’s rotation has dominantly been influenced by our moon. The moon yanks on the planet’s oceans and causes the tides to bulge, creating drag and slowing down Earth’s spin. Earth’s rotation has been predictably and consistently slowing down because of the moon’s gravitational forces — around 2.40 milliseconds%ury, according to the study’s authors.

But the study “shows what we as humans can really impact in terms of changing Earth’s behavior and dynamics.”

Some scientists were not surprised by the study’s link to climate change. Richard Peltier, a physicist at the University of Toronto, published a study more than a decade ago stating “the changes in Earth rotation documented were caused by the global warming process.” Another recent study showed how this climate induced-day lengthening is affecting our timekeeping and delaying the leap second.

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The first AI-powered storytelling teddy bear is here. I gave it to my kids to test • CNET

Bridget Carey:

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Poe, a stuffed plush that’s powered by four AA batteries, needs an app to generate new stories. The audio files created are sent to the bear via a Bluetooth connection, and his mouth moves to “talk” when playing the audio. But Poe doesn’t always need the app to play a story. You can save your favorite stories on the bear and play it back at any time by pressing its ears. 

The app has a simple design. It walks a child through a series of pictures, representing characters, objects and setting, to choose the ingredients of their story. The options go beyond what’s found in a typical fairy tale. Take, for example, the choice of characters: You can blend a story with a witch, social media influencer, alien warlord, zombie and archeologist. The more that’s added to the story stew, the stranger it gets. 

…To me, the stories it generates exist in a literary uncanny valley, with stories taking random turns to fit all the parameters of the prompt. It was sometimes difficult to follow every line of a story when the vocabulary felt out of place for a children’s story, like the ChatGPT AI was overusing a thesaurus.

Take this moment from a scary time-travel story we made about a princess, a prince, and a thief:

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The once vibrant kingdom had fallen under a dark curse by the evil Prince Barron. His sorcery summoned shadowy wraiths to haunt the land, chilling the hearts of Allara’s people.

A ghastly apparition materialized beside her, the vengeful spirit of Queen Avelina, Allara’s ancestor from centuries past. “The phantom hour draws near,” Avelina’s raspy voice warned. “The stars aligned to undo this ancient wrong.”

Before Allara could respond, the sinister cackle of the thief Kiros echoed through the chamber. With a poof of smoke, he appeared clutching Avelina’s chronosphere, a mystical orb used for chronological travel.

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Google now defaults to not indexing your content • Vincent Schmalbach

Schmalbach is an “SEO expert”:

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put yourself in Google’s shoes. You’re facing a future where AI can generate infinite amounts of human-like content. What do you do?

Google’s response was twofold:
• Promote the vague concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). In practice, this translates to favoring well-known brands and established websites
• Abandon the mission of indexing everything. Instead, become selective. Very selective.

This brings us to the current state of affairs: Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn’t about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it’s a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine.

From my experience, Google now seems to operate on a “default to not index” basis. It only includes content in its index when it perceives a genuine need. This decision appears to be based on various factors:

• Extreme content uniqueness: It’s not enough to write about something that isn’t extensively covered. Google seems to require content to be genuinely novel or fill a significant gap in its index
• Perceived authority: Sites that Google considers highly authoritative in their niche may have more content indexed, but even then, it’s not guaranteed
• Brand recognition: Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity
• Temporary indexing and de-indexing: In practice, Google often indexes new content quite quickly, likely to avoid missing out on breaking news or important updates. Soon after, Google may de-index the content, and it remains de-indexed thereafter. So getting initially indexed isn’t necessarily a sign that Google considers your content valuable.

I’ve observed this shift firsthand. In the past, when I set up a new domain, it would be indexed within an hour or faster, sometimes in seconds. This was true even for brand new domains with no mentions anywhere and no backlinks. When I searched for the title of one of those brand new blog posts or some unique sentence from the article, it would be right there on the first Google page.

Now, for each piece of content, Google decides if it’s worth indexing, and more often than not, the answer seems to be “no.”

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This is quite a shift. Google used to be very proud of the speed of its indexing and updates. But how does it decide “genuinely novel”?
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The watchOS 11 beta slowed me down, in a good way • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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One thing always irked me about the Apple Watch. Rain or shine, in sickness and in health, it pushed me to close my rings. Never mind if I had Covid-19, shin splints, or was mentally in a dark place. It nudged me to be a “better” version of myself, so long as better didn’t involve a day off. But with watchOS 11 — the public beta of which arrived on Monday — it feels like my Apple Watch is finally cutting me some slack.

This is largely due to a trio of new features: the new Vitals app, Training Load feature, and the ability to pause your Activity Rings. I waxed lyrical about the latter right after WWDC, but after spending some time with the developer beta, I’m convinced these are the smartest fitness updates Apple’s rolled out in years.

The Vitals app and Training Load feature are technically two separate things, but in practice, they very much go hand in hand. The Vitals app contextualizes a set of metrics: heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. These are all recovery metrics, most commonly packaged in other apps as a readiness score, except Apple’s version doesn’t give you a single score. Rather, it shows you whether your metrics are “typical” or an “outlier.” If two or more metrics are out of range, you’ll get a notification and some possibilities as to why certain metrics are out of whack.

The Training Load feature is also straightforward. It compares and visualizes your seven-day versus 28-day exercise load. Based on that, you can see whether you’re well below, below, steady, above, or well above your usual activity levels. It breaks this down not only by overall activity but also by individual activity types (i.e., running, pilates, cycling, etc.). After a workout, you can also rate your perceived effort level. For popular workouts, like running, it’ll automatically set your effort level. (You can manually edit it if you disagree, which I occasionally did, though it’s broadly accurate.)

…Apple isn’t doing anything here that we haven’t seen from Garmin, Polar, Oura, Fitbit, Whoop, or any other health and fitness tracker in the past five years. Rather, Apple’s version makes these concepts easily digestible for beginners. It’s also less data overload for burnt-out athletes. Combined with the ability to pause rings or customize your goals based on the day of the week, you’ve got a much more flexible fitness tracking experience on the world’s most popular smartwatch. That’s a huge deal.

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This is a big point: Apple might not be (often isn’t) first with a feature, but it brings it more simply to more people. Personally, I tend to know whether I’ve done a lot or a little exercise in the past month.
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How conspiracy theories swirled after Donald Trump shooting • BBC News

Marianna Spring:

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What unfolded on X was straight out of the pages of the conspiracy theory playbook, honed on social media by committed activists who deny the reality of almost everything, including the Covid pandemic, wars, mass shootings and terror attacks.

One post from a US-based account with a track record of sharing unfounded claims like this wrote: “This is price you pay when you take down the elite satanic paedophiles.”

They were alluding to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which suggests Trump is waging a secret war against a deep state – a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services, hidden from plain sight, looking to thwart his every move.

Without any evidence to support the idea, they then went on to suggest the “order” for the assassination “likely came from the CIA” and accused Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence of being involved. There is no evidence to support any of that – but the post has been seen 4.7 million times.

It’s a familiar pattern, but the real change here is how this kind of lingo is being widely used by the average social media users. That’s not only people who don’t like Trump suggesting this was staged, but also ones who support him alleging this is part of a sprawling conspiracy theory.

Elected politicians have also got involved. Congressman Mike Collins, a Republican in Georgia, posted that “Joe Biden sent the orders”. He referenced a comment President Biden had made earlier in the week about putting “Trump in a bullseye”, referring to their election battle.

There are legitimate questions being asked about some of the language used to describe Trump by other politicians and the media, as well as online, which some of Trump’s supporters argue has inflamed tensions and contributed to this assassination attempt. But to suggest this was ordered by President Biden is an entirely different proposition all together.

Collins’ post has more than six million views on X – but has since been labelled with a Community Note, which says there is no evidence Mr Biden was involved in any way. It added that his “bullseye” remark has been taken out of context.

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Ironic how it was just last week that the EU was complaining about Musk’s decision to make “verified” users just paid-for, rather than putatively authoritative.
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Elon Musk is making a bad situation worse • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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For a long time, scientists have hypothesized that exposure to lead causes a measurable drop in IQ. I am beginning to think the same is true of X.

The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is undoubtedly a clever man, but in search of attention and notoriety online, he has become—or is pretending to be—very dumb indeed. How else to explain his half-baked media criticisms after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump?

In the minutes after the shooting in Pennsylvania, news outlets did what they should do: They scrambled to sort fact from speculation. Reporters quickly uncovered the shooter’s identity and complicated political affiliations, informing the discussion of his possible motives. Photo agencies distributed high-quality and widely praised images of the incident, something they could do because they routinely send experienced photographers to cover rallies across the political spectrum. The British Broadcasting Corporation secured a crucial interview with a witness who claimed to have seen the shooter climbing a roof with a rifle—a statement that will force the Secret Service to answer tough questions about its competence.

None of that mattered to Elon Musk. Instead, he drew attention to the very first headlines from The Washington Post, ABC, and USA Today. These were cautious, reporting only that Trump was removed from the stage by the Secret Service following “popping noises” or “loud noises.” (For a time, CNN misleadingly asserted that Trump “falls at rally.”) In most cases, they were updated within minutes, first to “apparent gunshots” and then “gunshots,” as more information became available. All of the above outlets have since given blanket coverage to the shooting.

As I write this, CNN has 10 articles about the shooting on its homepage, and the lead headline describes what happened as an “assassination attempt.” Yet Musk’s posts encouraged the suggestion that the media were downplaying the shooting to deny Trump his moment of heroic bravery. A user called DogeDesigner had compiled all the early headlines into a collage, which Musk reposted, adding approvingly: “The legacy media is a pure propaganda machine. X is the voice of the people.”

Why were the early headlines like that? The term fog of war exists for a reason.

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The phrase “more money than sense” does too, and Lewis doesn’t hold back in this excoriating piece.
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Moon cave discovery could redirect lunar colony and startup plays • TechCrunch

Devin Coldewey:

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Scientists have identified what they believe is an accessible tunnel or cave on the moon. Such a feature, if real, may well define years of development by startups, governments and space companies aiming to create a lasting lunar colony.

Italian astronomers led by Leonardo Carrer and Lorenzo Bruzzone, working with Capella Space and JHUAPL, analyzed data collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010. Specifically, its radar imagery of the surface, which in one place the team proposes was reflected in such a way that implies the presence of “a subsurface cave tens of meters long” — but potentially much larger.

It’s still at the bottom of a pit around 100 meters deep, but we’ll figure that part out later. What matters here is that we appear to have discovered a highly stable (otherwise it would have collapsed some time in the last few million years) moon cave that could serve as a base for lunar operations. Their findings are published in Nature Astronomy.

You may well ask: why hide in some ancient lava tunnel? Don’t we want to just make a surface habitat?

That’s certainly what we envision from science fiction, yes, but the reality is that the moon’s surface is quite an inhospitable place. With no ionosphere, it has no protection from solar or cosmic radiation, and its pocked surface shows how frequently it is bombarded by meteorites large and small, which are not slowed or burned up in an atmosphere. The temperature also varies from deep-space low to dangerously hot.

These and other factors mean that any surface dwelling would need to be extremely robust, and even so it would face serious risk over time. For this reason lunar cave systems have often been proposed as alternatives to building the whole thing ourselves.

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Great! Although the impossibility of living for long periods on the Moon due to the nanoscale dust is still not solved by having found a cave.
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Promised cures, tainted cells: how cord blood banks mislead parents • The New York Times

Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi:

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Millions of pregnant women get the pitch through their OB-GYN [obstetrician/gynaecologist – honestly, Americans, can’t you use real words?]: Put a bit of your newborn’s umbilical cord on ice, as a biological insurance policy. If your child one day faces cancer, diabetes or even autism, the precious stem cells in the cord blood could become a tailor-made cure.

Many families are happy to pay for the assurance of a healthy future. More than two million umbilical cord samples sit in a handful of suburban warehouses across the country. It’s a lucrative business, with companies charging several thousand dollars upfront plus hundreds more every year thereafter. The industry has grown rapidly, bolstered by investments from medical device companies, hospital partnerships and endorsements from celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Chrissy Teigen.

But the leading banks have consistently misled customers and doctors about the technology’s promise, an investigation by The New York Times found. Doctors rarely use cord blood anymore, thanks to advances that have made it easier to transplant adult stem cells. And the few parents who try to withdraw cord blood samples often find that they are unusable — either because their volume is too low or they have been contaminated with microbes.

… Just 19 stem-cell transplants using a child’s own cord blood have been reported since 2010, according to the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research. Newer research has led many doctors to abandon cord blood in favor of adult stem cells.

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Quickly becomes clear that it’s an industry peddling a cure that doesn’t work which has to keep going because the alternative is, to that industry, unthinkable.
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Four Colorado poultry workers diagnosed with bird flu • Associated Press via The Guardian

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Four poultry workers in Colorado have been diagnosed with bird flu, health officials have confirmed.

The new cases bring the US total to nine since the first human case of the current outbreak was detected in 2022, also in a Colorado poultry worker. Eight of the nine were reported this year.

Their illnesses were relatively mild – reddened and irritated eyes and common respiratory infection symptoms such as fever, chills, coughing, sore throat and runny nose. None were hospitalized, officials said.

The other US cases have also been mild.

A fifth person with symptoms is undergoing testing, but those results are not back yet, officials said. The workers were culling poultry at a farm in north-east Colorado, according to state health officials. All had direct contact with infected birds.

A bird flu virus has been spreading since 2020 among mammals – including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises – in scores of countries. Earlier this year the virus, known as H5N1, was detected in US livestock, and is now circulating in cattle in several states.

Health officials continue to characterize the threat to the general public as low, and the virus has not spread between people. But officials are keeping careful watch because earlier versions of the same virus have been deadly to people.

«

Besides the watching brief, note that CBS News has a story from a day earlier which says there are five poultry workers infected. (Thanks Joe S for the latter.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Unfortunately it has become necessary to explain once more that solar farms can coexist with farmland. CC-licensed photo by Solar Trade Association 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. Explain it again? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Why an ‘AI health coach’ won’t solve the world’s chronic disease problems • The Conversation

Jathan Sadowski: is a research fellow at Monash University:

»

Whether you are “a busy professional with diabetes” or somebody without “access to trainers, chefs and life coaches” — the only two user profiles the pair [Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington] mention — the Thrive AI Health coach aims to use behavioural data to create “personalised nudges and real-time recommendations” to change your daily habits.

Soon, supposedly, everybody will have access to the “life-saving benefits” of a mobile app that tells you — in a precisely targeted way — to sleep more, eat better, exercise regularly, be less stressed and go touch grass with friends. These “superhuman” technologies, combined with the “superpowers” of incentives, will change the world by changing our “tiny daily acts”.

Despite claims that AI has unlocked yet another innovation, when I read Altman and Huffington’s announcement I was struck by a sense of déjà vu.

Why did Thrive AI Health and the logic behind it sound so familiar? Because it’s a kind of thinking we are seeing more and more in the insurance industry.

In fact, in an article published last year I suggested we might soon see “total life insurance” bundled with “a personalised AI life coach”, which would combine data from various sources in our daily lives to target us with prompts for how to behave in healthier, less risky ways. It would of course take notes and report back to our insurers and doctors when we do not follow these recommendations.

…Altman and Huffington say AI-enabled “hyper-personalisation” means this time will be different.

Are they right? I don’t think so. The first problem is there is no guarantee the AI will work as promised. There is no reason to think it won’t be plagued by the problems of bias, hallucination and errors we see in cutting-edge AI models like ChatGPT.

However, even if it does, it will still miss the mark because the idea of hyper-personalisation is based on a flawed theory of how change happens.

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As Apple’s VR headset reaches Europe, will VR ever hit the mainstream? • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

»

Up until now, the Vision Pro has only been on sale in the US – research firm IDC predicts it will shift fewer than 500,000 units this year. Meta, which has been in the market longer, does not release sales data for the Quest either but it’s thought to have sold around 20 million worldwide.

VR headsets are nowhere near as ubiquitous as tablets, let alone mobile phones. And it gets worse – George Jijiashvili, analyst at market research firm Omdia, said of those devices sold, many are abandoned.

“This is largely due to the limited in-flow of compelling content to keep up engagement,” he said.
But of course lack of content leads to reduced interest – and a reduced incentive for developers to make that content in the first place. It’s a chicken and egg situation,” Mr Jijiashvili told the BBC.

Alan Boyce, the founder of mixed reality studio DragonfiAR, warned that early adopters of the Vision Pro would have to “be patient” while more content arrived.

That’s where the Quest 3 wins out for him – it already has a “robust library” of games, and it can perform virtual desktop tasks just like the Vision Pro.

And IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo says we should not be too quick to write off a slow start for Apple’s new product.

“There’s always the expectation that Apple with every single product will sell in the millions straight away, there’s always the comparison with the iPhone,” he said.

But the reality is even the iPhone took time to find its feet – and a huge number of buyers. According to Melissa Otto from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the iPhone only became mainstream when the App Store “started to explode with apps that added value to our lives”.

“When people start to feel their lives are becoming better and more convenient, that’s when they’re willing to take the leap,” she said.

«

The longer it takes Apple to come up with compelling content for this, the closer it comes to dying.
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Factcheck, August 2022: is solar power a ‘threat’ to UK farmland? • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

»

ground-mounted solar panels currently cover just 0.1% of all land in the UK.

Even government plans to significantly scale up solar in line with its net-zero target are expected to bring this up to just 0.3% of the UK land area. This is the equivalent to around 0.5% of the land currently used for farming – and roughly half of the space taken up by golf courses.

In this factcheck, Carbon Brief assesses some of the statements made by UK politicians about solar power in recent months, how land is used in the UK and the concept of “agrivoltaics” – systems in which farmland is effectively combined with solar power.

«

This has become relevant because the new (Labour) secretary of state for Net Zero has overruled objections and granted permission for three big new solar farms. This has led to wails from former MPs and current Tory MPs, which means that.. nothing. The plans will go ahead.
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European Union says X’s blue checks are deceptive ‘dark patterns’ that breach its social media laws • Associated Press

Kelvin Chan:

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The European Union said Friday that blue checkmarks from Elon Musk’s X are deceptive and that the online platform falls short on transparency and accountability requirements, the first charges against a tech company since the bloc’s new social media regulations took effect.

The European Commission outlined the preliminary findings from its investigation into X, formerly known as Twitter, under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA is a sweeping set of regulations that requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting their European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, under threat of hefty fines.

Regulators took aim at X’s blue checks, saying they constitute “dark patterns” that are not in line with industry best practice and can be used by malicious actors to deceive users.

Before Musk’s acquisition, the checkmarks mirrored verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts. After Musk bought the site in 2022, it started issuing them to anyone who paid $8 per month for one.

European Union accuses Facebook owner Meta of breaking digital rules with paid ad-free option
“Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a ‘verified” status’ it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with,” the commission said.

«

The complaint has three points – “verified users” are just paying users, there isn’t the required transparency on advertising, and there isn’t access to public data for researchers. The “verified users” point seems weak, but the other two are solid.
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China’s Transsion sued by Qualcomm and Philips as IP woes mount • FT

Josh Gabert-Doyon and James Kynge:

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Shenzhen-listed Transsion, the world’s fourth-largest smartphone maker, is being sued by Qualcomm and Philips for alleged intellectual property violations.

Transsion, which has a 48% market share for smartphones in the African continent and is rapidly expanding across the global south, is facing intensifying legal and commercial pressures from large US and European technology companies.

Qualcomm filed a lawsuit against Transsion, the manufacturer behind the Tecno, Itel and Infinix brands, in India earlier this week and has filed claims in Europe and China over alleged patent infringement. Philips has also sued Transsion in India, according to court filings.

Nokia, the Finnish telecoms company, is also pressuring the Chinese company to start making payments for patented technologies used in Transsion phones, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ann Chaplin, Qualcomm’s general counsel, told the Financial Times on Friday: “Transsion […] has declined to accept a licence from Qualcomm for the majority of its mobile products, so we are pursuing litigation to enforce our rights”.

«

Either Transsion’s profits are going to drop substantially or the price of its phones is going to rise. What fun that smartphone patent litigation is still a thing.
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Would you survive 378 days of team bonding? Nasa takes the test • FT

Emma Jacobs:

»

The end of a journey can be the hardest part. Researchers who study long voyages in space and at sea have described a third-quarter phenomenon in which workers feel their mood lowering as they pass the halfway mark — something I experienced in only week two of the Covid lockdown. 

Lengthy missions are interesting because they show how people cope with working in extreme conditions — which is crucial in preventing accidents. But they also illuminate the universal features of work, including petty irritations with colleagues.

Kate Greene, a science journalist, wrote of living in a white geodesic dome on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa in 2013 as part of the first Hi-Seas project, which recreated some conditions of a Mars mission. “The cadence of a crewmate’s hard-soled sandals galloping down the stairs, remarkably consistent and always so loud. I also wondered why one of my crewmates kept swinging her crossed leg under the table at every meal so as to ever-so-gently tap me in the shin with her fuzzy slipper.” A fellow inhabitant “complained of another’s frequent throat clearing”.

In another year-long Hi-Seas mission in 2015, Sheyna Gifford, the health science officer, described the way her shrunken world became stridently utilitarian: “There is neither money nor anywhere to spend it, value is based almost solely on usefulness.”

Extreme colleaguing experiments show that success depends not just on talent and effort but also on good workplace relations. Planetary exploration might require scientific expertise but knowing when to zone out of a co-worker’s interminable anecdote must count for something.

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Bird flu presumed in three Colorado poultry workers, CDC says • The Washington Post

Justine McDaniel:

»

Three people who worked with infected poultry in Colorado are believed to have contracted avian influenza, state health officials said Friday, potentially bringing the number of U.S. cases identified in humans since April to seven.

The workers contracted mild symptoms after culling infected poultry at a farm with a commercial egg operation and tested presumptive-positive for the flu, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in a statement.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will confirm the testing and will send a team to Colorado to investigate how the workers might have contracted the virus, the agency said Friday. The CDC will also analyze the virus sequences to determine whether the virus has mutated.

The virus — which has caused outbreaks in dairy cattle and poultry this spring and summer — has posed a low risk to the general public because it’s unlikely to be spread from person to person. It could pose a higher risk if it mutates to spread easily between people, however, so the virus has a “pandemic potential” that makes human cases concerning, the CDC said.

«

*strained voice* Just a watching brief. (Thanks to Joe S for the link.)
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Further thoughts on Lucy Letby • The Snowdon Substack

Christopher Snowdon:

»

Letby’s defenders are not all headbangers and I can understand why they have their doubts about the conviction. Her text messages at the time and her statements under interrogation are all consistent with her being a conscientious and caring nurse. Even the “I killed them on purpose” note has to be read in the context of her other notes protesting her innocence and her deteriorating mental health. It would not be the most surprising thing in the world if she turns out to have been the victim of an extraordinary set of circumstances.

Nevertheless, it would be quite surprising, and if you’re going to spend your time trying to free her, I beseech you to familiarise yourself with the case. Part of the problem is that there is no easy way to fact check the various claims and counter-claims. When I said in the previous post that I have not read the 7,000 page court transcripts, some people took it as a self-own, but the transcripts are not available online and, as far as I know, never have been (the author of the New Yorker article claims to have read them but I am not sure how). The transcript of the appeals court judgement is available online and should be read by anyone who is interested in the case. It gives a very different impression to that given by the three articles [New Yorker, Guardian, Telegraph] mentioned above.

«

This is a good followup to an earlier piece which explains, with detail from the doctors, why Letby became a suspect, and why there isn’t good reason to doubt her convictions: you’d need to believe an utterly incredible set of coincidences.
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Joe Biden’s cynical turn against the press • The New Yorker

Jay Caspian Kang:

»

The reason that so many politicians—not to mention athletes, business leaders, and movie stars—blame the media for everything nowadays, as though journalists can change the course of history and the hearts of every person in the country with a few headlines, is precisely because we can’t do any of that. You don’t fight the media and call the press a bunch of fake-news losers when the media is strong, and can shape opinion in a meaningful or threatening way. You attack when it’s weak.

…On the political beat, the news that does get broken by dedicated reporters tends to be the sorts of scoops that people will only tell reporters anonymously, which is why so many of today’s big political stories involve unnamed sources and officials. This makes those stories particularly vulnerable to attack. The past decade or so has seen the rise of a shambolic and democratic but ultimately cloistered form of media criticism that feeds off screenshots of headlines, the pathologizing of reporters, and constant accusations of corruption.

The intense scrutiny that the social-media commentariat places upon every headline and paragraph of every story, combined with the shrinking and increasingly compromised leverage that journalists can place upon people in power, has turned the media into a convenient whipping boy for anyone getting bad press. In an emergency, just say some version of “fake news,” point out that all the sources are unnamed and therefore probably made up—or, at the very least, feckless and self-interested—and cite the litany of things that the media has got wrong in the past.

«

An excellent analysis of the current state of affairs: the media is the whipping boy, even when it tells the truth and correctly points out failings. Though talking about Biden all feels a bit redundant now, doesn’t it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Surprise – roundabouts are proving their safety in Minnesota. CC-licensed photo by Salim Virji 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.

The $11bn marketplace enabling the crypto scam economy • WIRED

Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman:

»

As the crypto scam commonly known as “pig butchering” has exploded into a full-blown criminal industry that steals tens of billions of dollars a year, an entire ecosystem has formed around it. That sub-industry offers tools and data for finding and tricking targets, money laundering services to help liquidate stolen funds—even detention tools to imprison and coerce the human trafficking victims enslaved to work in scam operations.

New research now shows how all of those secondary services enabling the global scourge of pig butchering can be found on a single Cambodian online platform—part of a company linked to the Cambodian ruling family—known as Huione Guarantee.

On Wednesday, crypto-tracing firm Elliptic published a report that delves into crypto scammers’ extensive use of Huione Guarantee, a deposit and escrow service for peer-to-peer transactions that lets users buy and sell over the Telegram messaging service with the cryptocurrency Tether while preventing them from defrauding each other. By analyzing listings on the platform, engaging with sellers—sometimes undercover—and following funds across Tether’s blockchain sent to those sellers’ addresses, Elliptic was able to trace $11bn in total transactions in just the three years since Huione Guarantee launched, including $3.4bn so far this year.

Elliptic estimates, based largely on public Chinese-language advertisements for the products and services available on Huione Guarantee, that the majority of those transactions were in service of pig butchering. “I’m not sure whether Huione Guarantee was originally established with this in mind, but it’s certainly become primarily a marketplace for online scammers,” says Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s cofounder and chief scientist.

Robinson says Elliptic knows of around 10 platforms like Huione Guarantee that are used by crypto scammers, but none that are nearly so big. “This is the largest public guarantee platform for illicit crypto transactions that we’re aware of,” he says.

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Apple’s payments offer ends EU antitrust probe • POLITICO

Aoife White and Edith Hancock:

»

Apple settled a European Union investigation into its Apple Pay service, ending one antitrust case as it battles EU regulators on other fronts.

“I do not consider it a peace deal,” Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told a press conference. “I considered it a solution on a very specific problem that you do not have choice when it comes to what wallet you want to use” on Apple devices.

Apple will allow payment rivals to access the technology that Apple uses for its own “tap and go” payments. Banks and other payment providers have long complained that the tech giant hampered them from using the iPhone’s near-field (NFC) communication chip.

In return, the European Commission will end a four-year investigation without imposing a fine. Apple can be fined if it breaches any of the commitments it made as part of the settlement.

Vestager told reporters that “we have not seen a change in behaviour on Apple’s side” and it remains to be seen how other cases into Apple’s potential non-compliance with digital rules will go.

Today’s settlement prevents Apple from excluding other mobile wallets from the iPhone’s ecosystem, the Commission said in an email statement. That should allow payment providers to compete with Apple Pay for mobile payments made via Apple’s iPhone. It won’t cover Apple Watch which only “a rather small number of people” use for payments, Vestager said.

Apple’s pledge will for 10 years allow payment providers access to NFC on Apple devices free of charge without having to use Apple Pay or Apple Wallet. This will be done via host card emulation mode that can secure payment credentials. Payment rivals can also authenticate transactions via FaceID facial recognition service, the double click, touch ID or a passcode.

«

What this seems to mean is that other providers will be able to use the NFC chip for vehicle keys, hotel keys, work access badges, concert tickets and so on. Nokia used to use NFC to connect to wireless speakers but maybe that’s an outdated use now.
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86% of Americans now work from home because roundabouts are replacing traffic signals • Urbanism Speakeasy

Andy Boenau:

»

Minnesota has about 200 roundabouts, and like any other group of skeptics, they’ve been documenting the results.

[Screenshot from the report shows
• an 86% reduction in fatal crash rate at intersections where roundabouts have been installed, for all roundabout types;
• 83% reduction in serious injury rate;
• 69% reduction in right-angle crash rate;
• 83% reduction in left-turning crash rate;
• 61% reduction in injury crash rate for single-lane roundabouts;
• 42% reduction in injury crash rate for all roundabouts..]

Another gripe about roundabouts is how pedestrians and bicyclists are treated. A quick internet search will point you to a ton of local, state, and federal research on this. Bottom line, roundabouts (when designed properly!) are safer for all road users because they (1) reduce the number of conflict points, and (2) slow down the cars. 

Sticking with the Minnesota example, here’s the result of their before-and-after analysis of roundabouts:

»

roundabouts are not presenting an overall greater risk to pedestrians and bicyclists in regards to collisions with motor vehicles.

…roundabouts may be offering an overall higher performance of pedestrian safety.

«

One of the roundabout’s virtues is short crossing distances for people walking combined with the slow vehicles at those conflict points. There are fewer places for cars hitting people, and in those instances that it does happen, it’s a much faster path to recovery.

You don’t get the standard red-light/green-light behavior of drivers between lights. As the Beastie Boys and I say, “Slow and low—that is the tempo.”

Roundabouts have a phenomenal life-saving track record. I’ll leave you with some helpful Federal Highway Administration resources. Maybe you’ll become a roundabout advocate or maybe you won’t. But if you’re on a mission to create happy, healthy communities, please take a serious look at their potential.

«

Gradually, gradually, the US might get there. Instead of its terrifying four-way intersections at the meeting of straight intersecting roads. (The post title is a joke.)
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When scientific citations go rogue: Uncovering ‘sneaked references’ • The Conversation

Lonni Besançon, Guillaume Cabanac and Thierry Viéville:

»

Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher’s own work.

But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article by our team of academic sleuths—which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician—has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.

People are becoming more aware of scientific publications and how they work, including their potential flaws. Just last year more than 10,000 scientific articles were retracted. The issues around citation gaming and the harm it causes the scientific community, including damaging its credibility, are well documented.

Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article’s text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI—a unique identifier for each scientific publication.

References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science.

However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles’ metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.

«

All the tricks you see to spam Google are used in citation systems, because they’re the same system. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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AI is effectively ‘useless’—and it’s created a ‘fake it till you make it’ bubble that could end in disaster, veteran market watcher warns • Fortune via Yahoo

Will Daniel:

»

James Ferguson, founding partner of the UK-based macroeconomic research firm MacroStrategy Partnership, fears investors’ AI exuberance has created a concentrated market bubble that’s reminiscent of the dot-com era.

“These historically end badly,” Ferguson told Bloomberg’s Merryn Somerset Webb in the latest episode of the Merryn Talks Money podcast. “So anyone who’s sort of a bit long in the tooth and has seen this sort of thing before is tempted to believe it’ll end badly.”

The veteran analyst argued that hallucinations—large language models’ (LLMs) tendency to invent facts, sources, and more—may prove a more intractable problem than initially anticipated, leading AI to have far fewer viable applications.

“AI still remains, I would argue, completely unproven. And fake it till you make it may work in Silicon Valley, but for the rest of us, I think once bitten twice shy may be more appropriate for AI,” he said. “If AI cannot be trusted…then AI is effectively, in my mind, useless.”

Ferguson also noted AI may end up being too “energy hungry” to be a cost effective tool for many businesses. To his point, a recent study from the Amsterdam School of Business and Economics found that AI applications alone could use as much power as the Netherlands by 2027.

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Samsung launches Galaxy smart ring to track sleep and periods • BBC News

Liv McMahon & Imran Rahman-Jones:

»

Samsung is hoping to lure fitness and health-tracking technology lovers with its newest wearable device – the Galaxy Ring.

It launched the device at its Galaxy Unpacked event on Wednesday as the latest addition to its ecosystem of devices it says it is “supercharging” with artificial intelligence (AI).

Smart rings, which use tiny sensors to monitor various health metrics, have up to now been a niche product – though their recent use by the England men’s football team made headlines.

It seems Samsung is attempting to change that, becoming the largest tech company yet to enter the smart ring market. Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight, says the product choice is an “interesting bet” for Samsung, with his company estimating that there will be a total global market of around four million smart rings in 2025.

“That is a rounding error when compared with 250 million smartwatches that are also expected to be sold,” he told the BBC.

But others suggest Samsung may help make smart rings more mainstream. “For most consumers, the smart ring from Samsung will be the first contact they will have in the smart ring, and that top of mind awareness makes a huge difference in the long term,” says Francisco Jeronimo, analyst for market research firm IDC.

James Kitto, vice president and head of Samsung’s mobile division in the UK & Ireland, heralded the ring’s launch as a “huge moment” for the company.

Smart rings can track health indicators such as your heart rate, sleep and menstrual cycle. The market is currently dominated by Finnish health tech firm, Oura. In recent years the rings have become a fitness tech fashion staple for celebrities such as Kim Kardashian.

With their small size and sleeker appearance, analysts say they could become the successor to smart watches like the Apple Watch and Google Pixel Watch.

«

Narrator’s voice: in fact they were not the successor to smart watches, for reasons that are obvious once you imagine trying to read a message written around your finger. In addition, I have yet to be given any reason why I should want to “track” my sleep.
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Angry and stunned Democrats blame Biden’s closest advisers for shielding public from full extent of president’s decline • CNN Politics

MJ Lee, Jeff Zeleny, Kayla Tausche and Jamie Gangel:

»

At a star-studded fundraiser for President Joe Biden in Los Angeles last month, George Clooney wasn’t the only one who came away concerned about the president.

Even before Biden made remarks that night, whispers of concern rippled through the audience at the Peacock Theater about the president who had just arrived from a long flight from Italy. Some of the biggest donors at the $30m fundraising event, who had waited in line to take pictures with Biden, expressed unease at how the president looked and carried himself.

“He was less cogent than usual,” said one attendee, who was surprised that during a smaller meeting with donors before the main event, Biden barely spoke. Instead, this person said, he left virtually all of the talking to former President Barack Obama, which struck some guests as unusual for a loquacious politician like Biden.

Biden’s appearance in California struck attendees as starkly different from a fundraising gala he attended in March at Radio City Music Hall in New York, one Democrat guest told CNN, when Biden appeared on stage with Obama and former President Bill Clinton.

“There is a marked difference in the president from the spring to the summer,” a senior Democrat told CNN. “He’s just not the same.”

Back in Washington, there have been clear signs throughout his term of Biden being increasingly stage-managed, with lists of talking points, names of questioners and drawings of where he should walk presented to him by aides. Ahead of closed-door Cabinet meetings that Biden attends, it is customary for Cabinet officials to submit questions and key talking points that they plan to present in front of Biden ahead of time to White House aides, two sources with direct knowledge told CNN.

“The entire display is kind of an act,” one of those sources told CNN. “They would come and say, ‘Hey, the president is going to call on you about 25 minutes in, and ask this question. What are the bullet points you’ll respond with?’”

«

After the debate, I thought Biden would be gone by now, but underestimated how he would cling on, and how scared people in his party would be to act. Perhaps I’m just too used to the UK, where dumping party leaders is a very well-practised process.

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Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified • The Verge

Jay PEters and Sean Hollister:

»

An old Apple blog and the blog’s former authors have become the latest victims of AI-written sludge. TUAW (“The Unofficial Apple Weblog”) was shut down by AOL in 2015, but this past year, a new owner scooped up the domain and began posting articles under the bylines of former writers who haven’t worked there for over a decade. And that new owner, which also appears to run other AI sludge websites, seems to be trying to hide.

Christina Warren, who left a long career in tech journalism to join Microsoft and later GitHub as a developer advocate, shared screenshots of what was happening on Tuesday. In the images, you can see that Warren has apparently been writing new posts as of this July — even though she hasn’t worked at TUAW since 2009, she confirms to The Verge.

Another screenshot showed Warren’s name listed next to what appears to be an AI-generated photo and a generic bio, alongside a list of other former TUAW writers, including Brett Terpstra, Chris Rawson, and Chris Ullrich. All of the listed authors have had their photos replaced with AI-generated images, 404 Media reports, and many tell 404 that they have no involvement with the new website. AppleInsider confirmed that its author William Gallagher’s name was inappropriately attached to content by TUAW’s new owner as well.

What’s more, it appears the new TUAW is using generative AI to sloppily recreate the work of its former writers.

According to TUAW’s “About Us” page, TUAW is now apparently owned by Web Orange Limited, which bought the website “without its original content” from “Yahoo IP Holdings LLC” earlier this year.

«

“If you want a picture of the future of the web, imagine sites being filled over with AI slop — for ever.”
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Why it was easier to be skinny in the 1980s • The Atlantic

Olga Khazan:

»

There’s a meme aimed at Millennial catharsis called “Old Economy Steve.” It’s a series of pictures of a late-’70s teenager, who presumably is now a middle-aged man, that mocks some of the messages Millennials say they hear from older generations—and shows why they’re deeply janky. Old Economy Steve graduates and gets a job right away. Old Economy Steve “worked his way through college” because tuition was $400. And so forth.

We can now add another one to that list: Old Economy Steve ate at McDonald’s almost every day, and he still somehow had a 32-inch waist.

A study published recently in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise.

The authors examined the dietary data of 36,400 Americans from 1971 to 2008 and the physical-activity data of 14,419 people from 1988 to 2006. They grouped the data sets together by the amount of food and activity, age, and BMI.

They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10% heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.

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The suggestions for what’s causing this are intriguing: chemical exposure, use of prescription drugs, and perhaps a change in Americans’ gut microbiomes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New cars sold in Europe (and the UK) now have automatic speed limiters, but they can be turned off – for now. CC-licensed photo by John Briody 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. Scream if you want to go faster. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Big Tech feels the heat over AI concerns • FT

Darren Dodd:

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Microsoft has given up its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, following noises from regulators about Big Tech’s plans. Apple, which plans to integrate ChatGPT into its devices, has done likewise.

Jonathan Kanter, the top US antitrust enforcer, told the Financial Times last month that he was examining “monopoly choke points and the competitive landscape” on concerns that the already dominant tech giants would take control of the market. The biggest example to date has been Microsoft’s $13bn investment in OpenAI, which came with rights to the start-up’s intellectual property and a share of its profits, although stopped short of an outright acquisition.

Chipmakers are also being hit by US export controls on selling AI processors to Chinese customers. Such is the demand however, that even if companies such as Nvidia are not allowed to sell their high-end chips, huge amounts of sales can still be made from products that fall outside of the restrictions.

Big Tech is also turning its attention to the problems caused by the huge power demands of AI as the industry struggles to keep its climate promises. Microsoft yesterday announced a carbon credit deal with Occidental Petroleum that would allow it to offset emissions by paying Occidental to have the carbon removed from the atmosphere and stored underground. 

Microsoft said in May that its emissions had risen by almost a third since 2020, mainly from the construction of data centres, while Google last week admitted that its emissions had increased by almost half since 2019 from the building of power-intensive infrastructure to support AI.

In the meantime, the flurry of AI deal activity continues. AMD today announced the $665m acquisition of Finnish startup Silo AI as the US chipmaker tries to keep up with market leader Nvidia.

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Both Apple and Microsoft giving up board seats as observers at OpenAI is a quite the move: there’s a quiet implication that OpenAI may be toxic. Of course Microsoft says, in its letter giving up its seat, that it’s because OpenAI is fine and stable and doesn’t need looking after. Somehow that’s not persuasive.
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AI finds that AI is great in new garbage research from Tony Blair Institute • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, presented yesterday by the former Prime Minister himself, predicts that more than 40% of tasks performed by public-sector workers could be partly automated, saving a fifth of their time in aggregate, and potentially leading to a huge reduction in workforce and costs for the government.

The problem with this prediction, which was picked up by Politico, Techradar, Forbes, and others, is that it was made by ChatGPT after the authors of the paper admitted that making a prediction based on interviews with experts would be too hard. Basically, the finding that AI could replace humans at their jobs and radically change how the government works was itself largely made by AI.

“This is absurd—they might as well be shaking at Magic 8 ball and writing down the answers it displays,” Emily Bender, a professor and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at University of Washington, told me.

To make their assessment, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) researchers pulled data on 20,000 tasks performed by workers from O*NET, a database developed by the U.S Department of Labor which contains hundreds of standardized and occupation-specific descriptors on almost 1,000 occupations in the U.S. economy. The database includes “a rich set of variables that describe work and worker characteristics, including skill requirements,” according to its official site.

The researchers then wanted to assess which of these tasks, which are also performed by public sector workers in the UK, could be performed by AI, given the technology’s current capabilities.

Amazingly, the researchers concede that answering that question by talking to actual human experts across different fields would be hard, so they just asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 to answer the question instead. 

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This is my extremely pained face that someone would think untrammeled generative AI gives answers to important questions.
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Conspiracy theory and nationalist groups embraced Reform UK at general election • Sky News

Tom Cheshire:

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Nigel Farage and Reform UK attracted a surge of election interest among conspiracy theory and nationalist groups, which have more than 15 million followers between them, on messaging app Telegram.

Some groups looked to sow the seeds of a “stolen election” narrative, similar to events in the US after Donald Trump’s defeat, and also attempted to recruit Reform UK voters to their cause.

And after the election, prominent accounts have continued to state there was “election interference” and that “Labour cheated”. Sky News asked Reform UK for a response but did not receive a reply before publication.

Sky News worked with Prose, an open source intelligence company, which analysed data from 10,000 Telegram accounts that regularly post conspiracist and extremist content, to identify accounts posting about the UK general election.

Compared to Labour and the Conservatives, Mr Farage’s return as leader of Reform UK appears to have attracted conspiracist groups, leading to a sharp and sustained surge of interest – with Mr Farage and Reform UK dominating the conversation.

In total, Prose found 938 unique Telegram chats, with 15.6 million followers between them, which posted 14,758 messages related to the UK election up until 25 June, of which 542 chats posted 5,239 messages about Mr Farage/Reform UK – more than any other party.

However, the true figure of actual users will be fewer, as this does not account for people who are members of multiple chats (if an account is a member of two chat groups it will be counted twice); some accounts will also be bots and some will also be based abroad.

Those groups were broadly supportive of Mr Farage and Reform UK.

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The difficulty is proving that these are voters, rather than just random people around the world – or Russian bots.
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Did Rishi Sunak’s green U-turn cost the Tories seats in Middle England? • Daily Mail Online

David Wilcock:

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The Tories leaked election votes to the left because of Rishi Sunak’s watering down of green measures introduced by Boris Johnson, a new poll suggested today.

Climate change was one of the top three reasons Labour and Lib Dem voters gave for supporting the parties on July 4, above housing and crime. And the analysis by More in Common found that even those who viewed it as less important also linked increasing generation of renewable energy to reducing the cost of living, the biggest factor driving voting at the election.

And in a sign of how green the country is, more than 70% of those polled backed Labour’s plans for GB Energy, a state-run company designed to fund the move to green power.

A majority of Tory and Reform voters (56% and 59% respectively) also said the state-run firm would be good for the country. It came as green Tories urged whoever replaces Mr Sunak as permanent Conservative leader later this year tacks back towards leading on environmental measures.

The Tories lost more than 30 seats to the Liberal Democrats in the so-called Blue Wall heartlands in the south, and also came second in Waveney Valley in Cambridgeshire behind the Greens.

Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, said the election result had been “devastating and painful” and the party needed to work out where it had gone wrong.

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It’s very hard to imagine that touting green policies would have worked for the Tories: they had been screwing things up (rivers, energy) for so long that people would surely have seen through any lip service paid to more green policies. Labour was able to change the policy restricting onshore wind farms (which are popular with people, when asked) by changing one footnote on its first morning in power. What kept the Tories from doing that? Nothing.
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PC recovery continues as the market grows 3% in the second quarter • IDC

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The PC market delivered its second quarter of growth following seven consecutive quarters of decline. According to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, worldwide shipments reached 64.9m units in the second quarter of 2024 (2Q24), representing year-over-year growth of 3.0%. While the overall market benefited from favorable comparisons to 2023, weak results in China continued to hold the market back. Excluding China, worldwide shipments grew more than 5% year over year.

“Make no mistake, the PC market just like other technology markets faces challenges in the near term due to maturity and headwinds,” said Ryan Reith, group vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Device Trackers. “However, two consecutive quarters of growth, combined with plenty of market hype around AI PCs and a less sexy but arguably more important commercial refresh cycle, seems to be what the PC market needed. The buzz is clearly around AI, but a lot is happening with non-AI PC purchasing to make this mature market show signs of positivity.”

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Intrigued by this splitting of the market into the “traditional” and “AI” PCs. Trouble is, the market is still down, and it’s hard to think that “AI PCs” are going to make a big difference. It’s still the same names on top: Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple and either Acer or Asus in fifth place.
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Inside the ‘nightmare’ health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town • TIME

Andrew Chow:

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On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. “It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,” she says. “That pain was worse than childbirth.”

Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s five-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a “red beam behind her eardrums.”

It didn’t occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. A mother said her eight-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit.

None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area—and was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.

Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least ten people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms.

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Speed limiters are now mandatory, but you can turn them off • evo

Sam Jenkins:

»

Arriving alongside a range of new safety features destined for all new cars, mandatory speed limiters have come as part of the General Safety Regulation proposed by the European Commission, approved in 2019 by the European Parliament and all EU member states. While the UK is no longer in the EU, it is very likely that all UK cars will now receive the technology regardless, and it comes into force this month. 

Dubbed Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA), the limiters will use GPS data and/or traffic sign recognition cameras to determine the speed limit of the road a vehicle is travelling on. Engine power will then be limited to match this following an audible warning, preventing the car from exceeding the speed limit. It will be possible to override the system for the current journey by pushing hard on the throttle, however the system will be re-engaged every time a car is started.

If you think you can simply keep pressing a little harder on the throttle to break through the system, think again. ETSC also states that: ‘If the driver continues to drive above the speed limit for several seconds, the system should sound a warning for a few seconds and display a visual warning until the vehicle is operating at or below the speed limit again.’ 

A feature already seen on all new Volvos and models such as the Ford Focus, the speed limiters are also set to come alongside data loggers, autonomous emergency braking systems, lane keep assist, driver fatigue detection systems and other safety measures. It’s not all quite as bad as you may think, though, as the European Transport and Safety Council admits the system will come with an on/off switch initially. This is only ‘to aid public acceptance at introduction’ however, and so it’s likely that it intends to push for even stricter rules in the future, meaning a permanent system may come into force.

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Wonder how long that “public acceptance” phase will last. Five years? Ten? Forever? Less?
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You can track any flight directly from your iPhone’s text messages • CNET

Nelson Aguilar and Blake Stimac:

»

The summer travel season here, and even if you’re not hopping on a plane, you probably know someone who is. And if they’re visiting you, it’s really important for you to keep track of their flight.

You need to know if the flight is expected to arrive early, or if it’s canceled entirely, especially if you’re picking someone up at the airport. You can obviously check out this information from an airline’s app or website, but there’s another way to track a flight without even having to leave the Messages app on your iPhone.

That’s right. There’s a hidden flight tracker built right into iMessage that you probably would have never noticed unless you threw in the right combination of details within a message. 

It’s easy to check the status of the flight, and you can easily share the info with anyone else that needs to know.

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This is due to something that’s been in iOS since 2015, called Data Detectors. John Gruber has a good expansion of what this is about and, importantly, how it works (or doesn’t).

But then again, there are apps which will do this reliably. So it’s a nice quirk, but no more.
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Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra hands-on: ultra déjà vu • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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Look, it’s that Apple Watch Ultra but in an Android-friendly font.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing! There hasn’t really been a 1-to-1 equivalent for the Apple Watch Ultra in the Android space. Garmins are great, but they’re lacking in the smart features and third-party app department. Samsung is just filling a niche. Also, it’s $150 cheaper. Can’t argue with that.

It’s also not totally fair to call this an Apple Watch Ultra knockoff. Samsung does bring its own flavor. The 47mm titanium case is a squircle shape. Next to the Apple Watch Ultra 2, the squircle shape was chonkier overall. I had mixed feelings as to the style — I miss the rotating bezel! Yet it does look distinct and is wearable even on my smaller wrist. Furthermore, while there’s no physical rotating bezel, Samsung did include its signature digital touch bezel. That’s a good thing, as while the Quick Button looks and rotates like a digital crown, it doesn’t actually scroll. That threw me for a loop, but I imagine it’s simply something to get used to.

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The principal difference seems to be that the Samsung model has a round rather than rounded square face. And works on Android. But really, it is shameless to use the “Ultra” name and take the orange highlighting. One or the other might be admissible, but to use both is just shameless; it suggests you’ve got no marketing heft of your own.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Air conditioning is great, until the power is knocked out by excessive heat. CC-licensed photo by Schezar 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. Cool it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The UK politician accused of being AI is actually a real person • The Verge

Mia Sato:

»

Mark Matlock, a political candidate for the right-wing Reform UK party, clarified in The Independent that he is a real person, not an AI bot, as some suspected.

Perhaps it was the glossy, hyper-smooth skin in a campaign image or the fact that Matlock had apparently missed events like the election count — but earlier this week, a thread on X questioned whether Matlock existed at all. “We might be on the verge of a HUGE SCANDAL,” the post read.

An AI-generated political candidate isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility: during this election, an executive at an AI company used an AI persona to run for Parliament in the UK. He lost, obviously, getting just 179 votes.

Matlock, however, is a human candidate who apparently was very ill during the election.

“I got pneumonia three days before election night I was exercising taking vitamins so I could attend but it was just not viable. On election night I couldn’t even stand,” he told The Independent. Matlock also provided the outlet with the original photo that drew attention, saying the background was removed and the color of his tie was changed. The photo does have that rubbery, uncanny look to it that’s come to be associated with AI, though —particularly Matlock’s hair and skin. This seems like a good lesson for all elected officials: don’t edit your pictures in a way that looks like a Midjourney result for the prompt “youthful, nonthreatening-looking politician.”

The 2024 elections in the US and abroad are already feeling the effects of the proliferation of AI tools, though, for now, we still haven’t seen an AI bot replace a human politician. (To be fair, some people would probably prefer that.)

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Touchscreen-ready interface hidden in tvOS amid HomePod rumours • 9 to 5 Mac

Filipe Espósito:

»

We’ve seen a lot of evidence pointing to a new Apple home accessory (like a HomePod with a display) in recent months. And to corroborate all these rumors, the latest beta version of tvOS 18 available to developers has a new hidden interface that is touchscreen-ready.

The new tvOS interface, or system shell, is internally called “PlasterBoard.” Similar to SpringBoard (the iOS system shell), it provides some core interface elements for the system. 9to5Mac was able to confirm the existence of the new interface through the tvOS 18 beta 3 code.

Of course, this interface wasn’t meant to be seen by the public, but we found a way to access it. For instance, the new tvOS PlasterBoard interface has a Lock Screen with a passcode keypad very similar to the one on the iPhone and iPad. The PlasterBoard interface seems to be at an early stage of development, so there’s not much to see beyond basic Lock Screen controls.

Code and how the interface behaves strongly suggest that it was made for touchscreens and not for regular TVs. It’s also worth noting that there’s no option to lock Apple TV with a passcode, which only makes sense for more personal devices.

Last week, backend code revealed the existence of an unreleased “HomeAccessory17,1” device. There are currently no Apple products under this identifier category, but it’s very similar to the “AudioAccessory” identifier used for HomePods. Just like HomePods, this device also runs tvOS – but is based on the yet-to-be-announced A18 chip.

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Nobody has any idea what this will look like (the mockups are bizarre, like the first iPhone guesses which stuck an iPod click wheel on a phone). Might sell more than the Vision Pro though.
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China outspends the US on fusion in the race for energy’s holy grail • WSJ

Jennifer Hiller and Sha Hua:

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A high-tech race is under way between the US and China as both countries chase an elusive energy source: fusion. 

China is outspending the US, completing a massive fusion technology campus and launching a national fusion consortium that includes some of its largest industrial companies.

Crews in China work in three shifts, essentially around the clock, to complete fusion projects. And the Asian superpower has ten times as many Ph.D.s in fusion science and engineering as the US. 

The result is an increasing worry among American officials and scientists that an early US lead is slipping away.

JP Allain, who heads the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, said China is spending around $1.5bn a year on fusion, nearly twice the U.S. government’s fusion budget. What’s more, China appears to be following a program similar to the road map that hundreds of US fusion scientists and engineers first published in 2020 in hopes of making commercial fusion energy.

“They’re building our long-range plan,” Allain said. “That’s very frustrating, as you can imagine.”

Scientists familiar with China’s fusion facilities said that if the country continues its current pace of spending and development, it will surpass the U.S. and Europe’s magnetic fusion capabilities in three or four years.

Fusion has long been a clean-energy dream. The process of combining atoms is the same process that powers the sun, and scientists hope to harness it to deliver almost-limitless energy. The technology faces daunting scientific and engineering hurdles, and some experts consider it a mirage that will remain out of reach.

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The USSR economy was wrecked by trying to keep up with the imagined spending on the US’s (impossible) Star Wars defence programme. I wonder if fusion will do something similar for China’s.
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Growth stalls at Elon Musk’s X • FT

Clara Murray and Cristina Criddle:

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X has been hit by stalling user growth, as the social media platform’s owner Elon Musk divides audiences and it faces new competition from the rise of Meta’s rival platform Threads.

In previously unreleased figures, X said its number of global daily active users in the second quarter of this year was 251mn, a rise of 1.6% from the same period the year before.

This contrasts with the double-digit growth experienced in the years leading up to the acquisition by Musk, who took the listed company private for $44bn in October 2022.

Musk has proved a divisive leader of X, which he rebranded shortly after the takeover. The group has shed advertisers since Musk’s takeover partly due to his stance as a “free speech absolutist”, and his decision to remove most of the platform’s content moderators.

Critics argue this has led to a more toxic experience, but Musk claimed “drastic action” was needed to stem mounting financial losses.

His social media platform is also facing new competition for attention. Facebook owner Meta launched rival platform Threads a year ago in an effort to challenge X. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed it had grown to 175m monthly active users. This compares with 600m monthly users claimed by X.

However, analytics company Sensor Tower estimates Threads has only 38m daily users — people who open the app at least once a day — suggesting users are using it less frequently than other social media platforms.

…A recent Ofcom survey found 17% of UK adults use X as a news source. However, engagement on the platform has been sliding during national election campaigns in the US, UK and France, Similarweb data showed.

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I know: eX-Twitter had growth? But that Threads number is interesting. It isn’t that sticky.
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The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct · Chris Said

Said is a data scientist at Propel:

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In 2006, Sylvain Lesné published an influential Nature paper showing how amyloid oligomers could cause Alzheimer’s disease. With over 2,300 citations, the study was the 4th most cited paper in Alzheimer’s basic research since 2006, helping spur up to $287 million of research into the oligomer hypothesis, according to the NIH.

Sixteen years later, Science reported that key images of the paper were faked, almost certainly by Lesné himself, and all co-authors except him have agreed to retract the paper. The oligomer hypothesis has failed every clinical trial.

Lesné’s alleged misconduct misled a field for over a decade. We don’t know how much it has delayed an eventual treatment for Alzheimer’s, and it was not the only paper supporting the oligomer hypothesis. But if it delayed a successful treatment by just 1 year, I estimate that it would have caused the loss of 36 million QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years), which is more than the QALYs lost by Americans in World War II. (See my notebook for an explanation.)

Lesné is not alone. This year we learned of rampant image manipulation at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, including in multiple papers published by the institute’s CEO and COO. So far 6 papers have been retracted and 31 corrected. The 6 retracted papers alone have 1,400 citations and have surely polluted the field and slowed down progress. If they delayed a successful cancer drug by just 1 year, I estimate they would have caused the loss of 15 million QALYs, or twice the number of QALYs lost by Americans in World War I.

To put it bluntly, scientists who commit research misconduct extract money from a trusting public so that they may enrich themselves and gain prestige. Along the way they knowingly pollute future research, undermine the credibility of science, and may cause the deaths of millions of people.

And yet, researchers who commit misconduct rarely face any consequences. The vast majority are never caught. Sylvain Lesné, the lead author on the Alzheimer’s paper, remains a professor at the University of Minnesota and still receives NIH funding. Despite clear evidence of image manipulation and all co-authors agreeing to a retraction, the university “has closed this review with no findings of research misconduct pertaining to these figures.”

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Heat waves are why your AC can’t save you anymore • CNN

Laura Paddison:

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When Hurricane Ida battered Louisiana with catastrophic flooding and powerful winds in August 2021, more than 1 million people lost power. Then came the heat wave. Temperatures rose above 90ºF — a sucker punch to those sweltering in their homes, unable to turn on air conditioning as power outages stretched on for days.

It was the heat that proved deadliest in New Orleans, responsible for at least nine of the city’s 14 hurricane-related deaths.

The combination of a hurricane, heat wave and a multi-day power outage is a nightmare scenario, but it’s one set to become more common as humans continue to warm the planet, fueling devastating extreme weather. And it reveals an uncomfortable truth about the vulnerability of humanity’s ultimate protection against heat: air conditioning (AC).

Air conditioning is far from perfect. It gobbles up energy, most of which still comes from planet-heating fossil fuels, meaning it exacerbates the very problem it’s used to mitigate. Plus, it’s only available to those who can afford it, further widening social inequality.

But it is also a lifeline against increasingly brutal heat, the deadliest type of extreme weather. It allows people to live in places where temperatures push close to the limits of survivability and where extreme heat persists even at night.

Demand for AC is exploding, expected to triple worldwide by 2050, as global temperatures soar and incomes grow. The problem is that without electricity, access to air conditioning is lost. And many electrical grids are being pushed to a breaking point due to increasingly frequent extreme weather and soaring demand for cooling.

Weather accounted for 80% of major power outages across the US between 2000 and 2023, according to a report from Climate Central, a nonprofit research group.

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New study sparks debate about whether H5N1 virus in cows is adapted to better infect humans • STAT

Megan Molteni:

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A study published Monday provides new evidence that the H5N1 virus currently causing an outbreak of bird flu in U.S. dairy cattle may be adapted to better infecting humans than other circulating strains of the virus, a result that is already courting controversy among the world’s leading flu researchers.

Across the globe, different influenza viruses are constantly circulating in many different kinds of animals. One of the things that determines what kind of animal a given flu virus can infect is the type of receptors present on the outside of tissues that virus comes in contact with. Flu viruses that typically infect birds have an affinity for latching on to the particular shape of a receptor commonly found in the guts of avian species. Human influenza viruses, on the other hand, prefer the shape of a receptor that lines our upper respiratory tracts.

The new work, published in Nature, showed that the bovine H5N1 virus could bind to both receptors.

“There is an ability to bind to human-type receptors,” the study’s lead author, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, told STAT in an interview. But he cautioned that it’s too soon to say whether this ability means the recently emerged bovine branch of the H5N1 evolutionary tree has increased potential to become a significant human pathogen. “Binding to human-type receptors is not the only factor that is required for an avian flu virus to replicate well in humans,” said Kawaoka, a leading influenza virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied H5N1 for decades.

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Just a watching brief, don’t worry, nothing to see here.
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Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence • The Guardian

Felicity Lawrence:

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Throughout the trial period, and much of the preceding six years when Cheshire police were investigating a cluster of baby deaths at the Countess of Chester (CoC) hospital and had arrested Letby, laws intended to ensure juries are not influenced by stories in the press meant British journalists reported only what was said in court.

Outside court, however, there has been a growing chorus of voices raising questions about some of the key evidence presented in the trial.

There was no forensic evidence to prove her guilt and no one saw Letby – who continues to maintain her innocence – causing harm.

That also applied to the retrial that reached a guilty verdict last week. Although one of the doctors concluded that she must have tampered with the breathing tube of a baby on three occasions, he did not actually see her doing it.

The prosecution’s case instead drew on accounts from doctors and nurses on the hospital’s neonatal unit and relied heavily on statistical evidence and expert opinion on complex medical points, some of which took days to explain to the lay jury. It is these opinions that some clinicians claim do not stand up to scrutiny.

The case was high-profile and emotionally charged. Successive juries and the families of the babies who died are convinced Letby was responsible. While few of the experts the Guardian spoke to went as far as to say they believed Letby was innocent, the questions about the evidence called into doubt, they said, the safety of the convictions.

A Guardian investigation has interviewed dozens of these experts and seen further evidence from emails and documents. Those raising concerns include several leading consultant neonatologists, some with current or recent leadership roles, and several senior neonatal nurses. Others are public health professionals, GPs, biochemists, a leading government microbiologist, and lawyers. Several of those still working in the NHS have asked to remain anonymous, fearing the impact if they are named.

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I honestly cannot decide on the Letby case. The alternatives are: an apparently nondescript nurse killed or tried to kill more than a dozen babies. Or a colossal coincidence of failure. Both are incredibly unlikely. But only one is true.
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A Pigouvian pollution tax on ChatGPT • ratpie

The eponymous, anonymous “ratpie” back in January 2023:

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If one had to characterise the state of mind among knowledge and creative workers, musicians included, in 2022, worries about meeting demand for quantity or variety of content would not figure high. Misinformation, provenance, and the difficulties of making a living, yes. Being short a few million blog posts, product reviews, or new music tracks, no.

So it was perhaps a bit surprising when the appearance of a flock of AI engines, and their ubermensch ChatGPT, an easy to use interface to a new text AI, generated (pun intended) wild enthusiasm, along with some doomsterism, and of course digital reams of new content as the commentariat contemplated their own industry’s potential demise.

…Some activities create costs that are borne by people who don’t share in the gains of those undertaking them. Congested roads, smoke from factory chimneys, and unusual demands on publicly funded health services are examples. Economists think of these as costs external to the economic activity associated with producing things, driving somewhere, or smoking tobacco. There are rare cases of external gains too; think of how good state-funded schools inflate property prices in their catchment areas.

The external costs from ChatGPT are the teachers’ time and effort, and pupils’ lack of learning caused by cheating at school, incorrect Stack Overflow advice followed, as well as revenue extracted from copyright markets and the extra efforts human creators need to put in to compete. Arthur Pigou himself, Cambridge Professor of Economics in the first half of the C20th, was deeply interested in welfare. He argued that tax was the simplest and most effective way to deal with gains and losses that fell to those outside of a transaction.

As well as being a redress for harmful activity, Pigouvian taxes can provide funding for more of what we do want. This is important – interventions need to have broad popular understanding and support. In this case the harms fall on education and the arts, two  significant absorbers of taxpayers money which could be supplemented or offset.

I asked ChatGPT if it thought it should be taxed; it denied any knowledge of itself. It might not yet write a decent poem, but AI has clearly got its head around tax evasion.

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Neat. Reminds me of the line from Veep, when the fictional vice-president goes to Silicon Valley to pump some tech companies for money, only to be told: “we like to think of ourselves as post-tax.”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hackers have figured out how to create tickets that can be transferred – even when Ticketmaster doesn’t want them to outside its resale sites. CC-licensed photo by nerdy girl on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. How much?! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Scalpers work with hackers to liberate Ticketmaster’s ‘non-transferable’ tickets • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

A lawsuit filed in California by concert giant AXS has revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS, in which scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS. 

In the lawsuit, AXS said brokers are delivering “counterfeit” tickets to “unsuspecting consumers,” and that they are “created, in whole or in part by one or more of the Defendants illicitly accessing and then mimicking, emulating, or copying tickets from the AXS Platform.” The lawsuit accuses these services of hacking and states that AXS does not know how they are doing it. But the tickets themselves are often not counterfeit at all, and in the vast majority of cases, they scan as genuine.

Two security researchers we spoke to reverse engineered how Ticketmaster generates ticket barcodes and showed how scalpers can generate genuine tickets for concerts themselves. The system that works for Ticketmaster is also likely to work for AXS tickets, which use similar “rotating barcodes” that change every few seconds. After one of the researchers published their findings in February, brokers tried to hire the researcher to build ticket transfer services for them. 

«

On this one, I’m all for the hackers: Ticketmaster (and AXS) are evil monopolies which rip off their customers in every and each way that they can. (Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which had an operating income of $367m on revenue of $3.8bn in the most recent reporter quarter. Concerts are barely profitable; ticketing has 40% operating income margins.
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French elections: political cyber attacks and Internet traffic shifts • Cloudflare

João Tomé:

»

As we highlighted last week, the first round of the French elections saw specific DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks targeting French political party websites. While online attacks are common and not always election-related, recent activities in France, the Netherlands, and the UK confirm that DDoS attacks frequently target political parties during election periods.

Two French political parties were attacked shortly before the first round of elections, and a third party was targeted on June 30. This third party, indicated in green on the chart below, faced attacks on the evening of June 29. Several attempts were thwarted by Cloudflare throughout election day, from 10:00 to 23:00 UTC (12:00 to 01:00 local time). The most intense attack occurred at 19:00 UTC (21:00 local time), reaching nearly 40,000 requests per second, with a total of 620 million DDoS requests recorded on that day (June 29).

Our data indicates that the most significant attack Cloudflare intercepted targeted a party shown in yellow on the chart above. The party had already been attacked on June 23, 2024, and this subsequent attack happened on July 3 at 21:36 UTC (23:36 local time), lasting four minutes and peaking at 151,000 requests per second (rps), making it the second-largest attack we’ve observed on political parties recently. This was comparable in intensity and duration to another attack on a UK political party right after their election.

On the runoff election day, July 7, the party represented by the blue line was again a target, having been attacked previously on June 24, 27, and 29. The most severe of these occurred on June 27, with attacks reaching 118,000 rps during a day that totaled 610 million daily DDoS requests. On July 7, the attacks resumed, with the first starting at 09:55 UTC (11:55 local time) and continuing sporadically until 23:18 UTC (01:18 local time on July 8). The peak of these attacks came at 11:40 UTC (13:40 local time), reaching 96,000 rps.

«

Here’s what I find puzzling: what’s the point? Why DDOS a party’s website? Who the hell goes there to find out anything at all?
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Google Maps tests new pop-up ads that give you an unnecessary detour

Pranab Mehrotra:

»

Google Maps is testing a new ad format that could cause distractions while driving. It brings up a pop-up notification during navigation that covers the bottom half of the screen with an unnecessary detour suggestion.

Anthony Higman on X (formerly Twitter) recently spotted the new ad format during their commute. According to Higman, the ad popped up while passing a Royal Farms gas station, even though they did not search for a gas station or convenience store while setting their destination.

The ad has a Sponsored tag at the top of the card, followed by the name of the location, its review rating, and the estimated arrival time. It also includes two buttons to add it as a stop or cancel the suggestion.

Google appears to have borrowed this ad format from Waze, which has delivered similar ads for quite some time. User reports dating back to 2018 reveal that the banner ads in Waze popped up at the top of the screen while driving, but some say the ads only appeared while they were stationary.

«

This is just bonkers. Given how easy it is to distract drivers, and how they often have their phone in sight if they’re using it for navigation, this is dangerous.
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Earth surpasses 1.5ºC of warming for twelve consecutive months • Los Angeles Times

Hayley Smith:

»

In a troubling milestone, June marked Earth’s 12th consecutive month of global warming at or above 1.5º Celsius — the internationally accepted threshold for avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

A stifling month marked by heat waves and heat deaths, June was also about a quarter of a degree warmer than the previous hottest June on record in 2023, according to a report from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. It is the 13th straight month to break its own monthly heat record.

The planet’s persistent soaring temperature is “more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a large and continuing shift in our climate,” Copernicus’ director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.

“Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm,” he said. “This is inevitable, unless we stop adding [greenhouse gases] into the atmosphere and the oceans.”

The 1.5ºC threshold, about 2.7º Fahrenheit, was established under the 2015 Paris agreement. Under that accord, the United States and nearly 200 other nations agreed to limit the global average temperature increase to a maximum of 2ºC over pre-industrial levels — and preferably below 1.5ºC — in order to reduce the worst effects of climate change.

…The unprecedented year-long stretch is “very noteworthy and disturbing,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national nonprofit organization.

«

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In India, buyers want refunds for 2016 Tesla car deposits • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

»

When Tesla allowed Indians to get their hands on its wildly popular electric cars for the first time, Vishal Gondal was among the first to grab the opportunity.

Within hours after the company opened its pre-booking portal for India in April 2016, Gondal, a fan of Elon Musk and Tesla, paid $1,000 (then 66,237 rupees) to pre-book the Tesla Model 3. At the time, there was no clarity on what the car would eventually cost in India or when the company would start delivering the vehicle to the country. But Gondal, who had driven a Tesla in the U.S. earlier, was swept with excitement.

For almost seven years after that, Gondal, founder and CEO of health-tech startup GoQii, patiently waited for his Model 3. By 2023, when there was still no sign of the car, he decided to cancel his booking — and that was the start of another ordeal.

Gondal had to chase Tesla’s India executive over emails for six months before he received his refund in June 2023. “There was no communication, no emails. And even years later, there was no apology [from the company],” he told Rest of World.

Tesla still does not sell its cars in India — the third-largest auto market in the world.

«

Seven years? That’s a lot of patience. But surely that’s tanked Tesla’s reputation in the country.
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The climate is falling apart. Prepare for the push alerts • The Atlantic

Zoë Schlanger:

»

Last July, I was living in Montreal when an emergency push alert from Canada’s environmental agency popped up on my phone, accompanied by a loud alarm. It had been raining ferociously that afternoon, and the wind was picking up. The alert warned of something worse—a marine tornado, which “are often wrapped in rain and may not be visible”—and ordered, “Take cover immediately if threatening weather approaches.”

I looked outside. The wind was howling louder now, and the sky was a strange gray. Radio signal was dipping in and out. I knocked on the ground-floor neighbor’s door to shelter there. This particular tornado spared Montreal, touching down about 30 miles northwest of the city. But the alert worked: We took measures to protect ourselves.

I took a screenshot of that push alert—a memento from this moment in which extreme weather is increasing. Climate change is here; these are the emergencies that come with it. Each push alert marks the distance we’re closing between the previous range of normal activity and the future that scientists warned us of.

I got another push alert this June, now living in a different city: “New York City USA Heat Wave: Please Take Precautions.” This one came from an air-quality-monitoring app I’d downloaded—not from any governmental agency. A colleague got a similar alert from the National Weather Service through his Alexa app warning about degraded air quality, the result of ground-level ozone, which commonly forms in overheated cities. We both took a screenshot of the message we received. They still feel novel, for now.

But as climate change progresses and extreme events mount, these alerts will keep coming. Eventually, certain climate-related extreme weather events may become so repetitive that their danger—though no less threatening—might cease to feel exceptional. Some call this human quirk “shifting baseline syndrome.” Emergency managers call it “alert fatigue.” It may be one of the biggest problems facing their field as climate disasters mount.

«

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Apple reverses course to approve Epic Games Store in EU • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

Apple performed an abrupt U-turn over the weekend to approve the Epic Games Store in the European Union.

The volte-face came after a lengthy tirade from Epic at the end of last week. The company stated that its Epic Games Store notarization had been twice rejected by Apple amid claims that the company’s “Install” button looked a bit too much like Apple’s “Get” button and the in-app purchases label was too close to Apple’s own.

Epic Games said: “Apple’s rejection is arbitrary, obstructive, and in violation of the DMA, and we’ve shared our concerns with the European Commission.”

The European Commission recently launched a fresh probe into the fees and terms that Apple imposes on developers as part of its efforts to comply with the European Digital Markets Act (DMA).

If Apple fails to comply with the DMA, it could face fines of up to 10% of its global annual revenue.

However, the situation is murky. While Epic Games was quick to boast that its store notarization submission had now been accepted, it took issue with claims that Apple still wanted it to change its user interface in a future version, presumably to deal with those pesky buttons.

«

They’re just never going to be on each other’s Christmas card list, are they.
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Why are US city housing costs so high? The elevator can explain why • The New York Times

Stephen Smith:

»

My mission to understand the American elevator began in 2021 when I came down with a crippling post-viral illness. The stairs to my third-floor Brooklyn walk-up apartment would leave me dizzy and winded, my ears ringing, heart beating out of my chest. At 32, I’d joined the 12% of Americans who report “serious difficulty” with stairs. On bad days, I became a prisoner in my own home.

A few months later, visiting Bucharest, I rode the elevator in my mother’s five-story building. A developer in a much poorer Eastern European country could afford to include an elevator, but the developer of my luxury five-story building in Brooklyn, built 25 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, could not? I quit my job in real estate and started a nonprofit focused on building codes and construction policy.

Through my research on elevators, I got a glimpse into why so little new housing is built in America, and why what is built is often of such low quality and at high cost. The problem with elevators is a microcosm of the challenges of the broader construction industry — from labor to building codes to a sheer lack of political will. These challenges are at the root of a mounting housing crisis that has spread to nearly every part of the country and is damaging our economic productivity and our environment.

Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labour that the construction industry desperately needs.

«

It’s a fascinating rant about how regulation and NIH (not invented here) has strangled the life out of the business.
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Voter ID rule may have stopped 400,000 taking part in UK election, poll suggests • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

»

More than 400,000 people may have been prevented from voting in the general election because they lacked the necessary ID, with those from minority ethnic communities more than twice as likely to have experienced this, polling has suggested.

Of those surveyed by More In Common, 3.2% said they were turned away at least once last Thursday, which if reflected across the UK would equate to more than 850,000 people. Of these, more than half said they either did not return or came back and were still unable to vote.

Among people turned away at least once, about a third had ID that was not on the relatively narrow list of permitted documents; about a quarter said the name on their ID was different to that on the electoral register; and 12% said they were told the picture on the ID did not match their appearance.

The poll of more than 2,000 people across Great Britain, coordinated by the campaign group Hope Not Hate, also indicated that the voter ID rules, used last week for the first time at a general election, disproportionately affected minority ethnic people.

It found that 6.5% of voters of colour were turned away from a polling booth at least once, compared with 2.5% of white voters.

The rule that voters must show photo ID was introduced by the Conservative government as part of its 2022 Elections Act, despite minimal evidence that in-person voter fraud was a significant problem.

…The polling found that 6% of people said the ID requirements had affected their decision on whether or not to vote and that they then did not vote, which if reflected nationally could mean up to 2.8 million people not voting when they might otherwise have done.

«

Turnout was down at just under 60%; a total of 28.8m votes, from a registered population of 48.2m.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The podcaster who was sued by Craig Wright over the invention of bitcoin has won an order to recover millions in libel costs. CC-licensed photo by Elliott Brown 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. Let it go. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A top Tory donor’s tangled web presence • Financial Times

Cynthia O’Murchu:

»

Search engines results are the frontline in the battle for reputations. And most Google users don’t look further than the first page, so what’s on top matters.

Herrera Velutini has had a friendly web presence for many years — notably the low-key JulioMHerreravelutini.com, which for a time was registered to a reputation management company and his London-based business Britannia Financial Group. But since the indictment, there has been an apparent surge in transparently supportive content across an array of new websites.

As a result, these contrasting narratives have for months battled for the top slots in search engine results — the grandiose articles extolling Herrera Velutini’s status as a financial titan sometimes crowding out less flattering ones. An ordinary person seeking information about Herrera Velutini would have found themselves thrown into a digital hall of mirrors.

In all, FT Alphaville reviewed multiple dozen websites that had published gushing content about Herrera Velutini, with names such as arizona-republic (not to be confused with the legitimate, Gannett-owned Arizona Republic), Washington News (where “every article is a brushstroke in the canvas of truth and information”), or Philadaphia [sic] Inquirer, which, rather incongruently, mostly published stories about London.

The “Street Journal Tribune”, for example, dubbed Herrera Velutini the ‘Prince of Latam’. That site informed readers that: 

»

His impeccable fashion sense and his persona as a fashionable banker harmonize with his reputation as an art enthusiast, champion of animal rights, and notably, as the financial mogul who altruistically aided the British Government throughout the Coronavirus pandemic.

«

Not convinced? How about “The London Outlook”, which said:

»

Julio’s profound commitment to the British monarchy and longstanding relationship with the Royal Family was evident as worked [sic] tirelessly alongside Buckingham Palace officials to craft an extravagant spectacle in commemoration of the Queen’s platinum jubilee.

«

Asked about the reported aid to the British government during the Covid pandemic, Schillings referred us to the donations to the Tory party by London-based financial services company Britannia Financial Group, which was then still owned by Herrera Velutini. No word on the “aid” to the British government. And when FTAV asked Buckingham Palace which individuals the palace worked closely with on the Jubilee, Mr Herrera Velutini was not on the list.

«

I did not come out of this story thinking that Velutini was being described accurately by the websites that nobody has ever heard of. As the article also points out, “The vast mesh of fake news outlets masquerading as legitimate journalism, often funded by partisan interests, has been given a suitably icky moniker: ‘pink slime’.”
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ITER fusion reactor to see further delays, with operations pushed to 2034 • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

On Tuesday, the people managing the ITER experimental fusion reactor announced that a combination of delays and altered priorities meant that its first-of-its-kind hardware wouldn’t see plasma until 2036, with the full-energy deuterium-tritium fusion pushed back to 2039. The latter represents a four-year delay relative to the previous roadmap. While the former is also a delay, it’s due in part to changing priorities.

…The latest delays are due to more prosaic reasons. One of them is the product of the international nature of the collaboration, which sees individual components built by different partner organizations before assembly at the reactor site in France. The pandemic, unsurprisingly, severely disrupted the production of a lot of these components, and the project’s structure meant that alternate suppliers couldn’t be used (assuming alternate suppliers of one-of-a-kind hardware existed in the first place).

The second problem relates to the location of the reactor in France. The country’s nuclear safety regulator had concerns about the assembly of some of the components and halted construction on the reactor.

«

Ah, fusion – always reliably late. The regulator’s concerns were more about the potential for the structure to collapse than anything about its radiation.
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The rooftop solution to keeping streets cool: white paint • The Times

Adam Vaughan:

»

Painting roofs white to reflect the sun’s energy would be more effective at cooling London’s streets than covering them with plants, new research suggests.

The overheating of cities as a result of climate change has become a growing concern. Heathrow hit an unprecedented 40.2ºC amid a heatwave two years ago, and London authorities have even created “cool spaces” in the capital for people to escape high temperatures and overheating buildings

To find out the best way to cool temperatures at street level, researchers used a computer model to estimate the effect of nine different measures on two very hot days in London in July 2018.

They found that white roofs were the most effective method, lowering the surrounding temperature by 1.2ºC. Solar panels came next, with a 0.5ºC reduction, while street-level trees and other vegetation had a 0.3ºC cooling effect.

By contrast, “green roofs” with grass, moss and wildflowers on average had no cooling or warming effect. While they did decrease maximum temperatures, the effect was partly cancelled out because they also increase minimum temperature due to evapotranspiration — where heated water evaporates from from plants and re-enters the atmosphere.

Air conditioning would raise temperatures for pedestrians and cyclists by about 0.15ºC, as units pump out warm air, the modelling suggested.

“The main message for any of us living in London or at similar latitudes to England, is ‘why don’t we put that up [white roofs] and see?’ It’s cheap. You don’t have the problems of structural load. You can always put a green roof on afterwards,” said Dr Oscar Brousse at University College London, an author of the study.

«

Indeed, why not? I think that many British town planners would have a fit if you want to them and said you intended to paint your roof white. Yet it is effective. Really it should be mandated. Though it’s odd that solar panels are effective at reducing temperatures. The full research is at Geophysical Research Letters.
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A historic heat wave is making much of the country feel like Death Valley • Frequent Business Traveler

Paul Riegler:

»

The weather outside is frightening as an historic and dangerous heat wave spreads across a large swatch of the United States.

“Extremely dangerous heat continues in the Western US into next week, with heat persisting today from New York to the Gulf before gradually subsiding with time into next week,” the National Weather Service said in a midday statement on Saturday, adding that “[E]xcessive heat may bring heat-related illness.”

In California, high temperatures are predicted to reach at least 100°F (37.7°C)  to 120° F (49°C)  throughout the state, except right along the coast.

Meteorologists expect record high temperatures to be broken in multiple cities..

Las Vegas could hit or even break its all-time hottest temperature of 117°F (47°C) on Sunday and Death Valley could hit 129°F (54°C), just 5ºF shy of the all-time hottest temperature recorded on Earth.

«

Though this is dry heat – survivable, even if incredibly uncomfortable. The dangerous form is “wet bulb heat”, when the air is so humid that you can’t dissipate body heat by sweat evaporation. That kills.
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Scientists claim crypto owners are likely to be narcissistic, psychopathic or sadists • The Independent

Andrew Griffin:

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Investors in digital currencies are also more likely to be men, rely on fringe social media sources, believe in conspiracy theories and feel victimised.

That is according to new research that polled 2,001 American adults on whether they owned or had owned cryptocurrency. Around 30% of them said that they had.

It then asked about important demographic information, as well as other questions aimed at revealing their political, psychological and social traits.

The researchers then took that data and attempted to work out what characteristics were the best predictors of whether someone had bought cryptocurrency.

They found that among other important characteristics, those who had bought them were more likely to report that they had personality traits aligned with the “dark tetrad”. That is made up of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.

The dark tetrad is a psychological theory that builds on the more famous dark triad, and adds sadism. The triad was first proposed at the beginning of the century, and researchers have said that those with the behaviour are more likely to be disruptive employees, commit crimes or cause other issues.

But the most strong predictor of whether someone had owned cryptocurrency was whether they relied on fringe social media sources for news, the researchers said.

They also pointed to other important characteristics: maleness, argumentativeness, higher income, and feelings of victimhood.

«

This is the research – which was actually carried out in 2022. Though it probably still holds true. Speaking of cryptocurrency…
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Worldwide freezing order granted over Craig Wright libel claim ‘founded on a lie’ • Law Gazette

Michael Cross:

»

A podcaster who had faced a costs bill running into millions of pounds over a libel claim brought by the fraudster posing as the inventor of bitcoin today secured the court’s help to recover his own costs in the case. Mr Justice Mellor, who earlier this year declared Dr Craig Wright’s ‘Satoshi’ claim to be based on forgeries and lies granted a worldwide freezing order (WFO) against Wright, who is understood to be in East Asia. 

The order is the latest fallout from the ruling in COPA v Wright, an action brought by a group of software developers over Wright’s claims, which he enforced with litigation in at least three jurisdictions. In one case, Wright successfully sued podcaster Peter McCormack over social media posts and videos claiming Wright was a fraudster. While the damages were reduced to £1 because of Wright’s conduct, which included putting forward deliberately false evidence, McCormack was ordered to pay part of Wright’s costs. 

Ruling today in Craig Wright v Peter McCormack, Mr Justice Mellor stated that the defamation claim had been part of a ‘mendacious overall campaign’ to lay a false claim to bitcoin assets ‘worth many billions’. Wright was using the law of defamation to silence anyone who questioned his claim. ‘The power of the cause of action in defamation is exponentially increased in the hands of someone like Dr Wright… who signals his intent to spend disproportionate sums in litigation,’ the judge said. The costs budgets approved in the case added up to £3.92m, plus VAT. [About £4.7m, or $6m.]

The judge found that McCormack, who was represented by international firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, ‘has a good arguable case (indeed a very strong case) for recovery of costs in the sum of £1.548m’.

…Granting the freezing order – the latest of several applying to Wright – Mellor said: ‘The defamation claim should never have been threatened, commenced or pursued. In these circumstances, our law would be in a sorry and sad state if a litigant in the position of Mr McCormack is not able to recover his costs of having to fight that type of litigation.’

«

If it should never have been threatened, commenced or pursued, was there no judge or similar who could have called a halt much earlier? I wonder if Wright will be labelled a vexatious litigant in future.
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Dog accidentally turns on stove and sets fire to home • BBC News

»

Colorado Springs Fire Department has released video footage [included in the story] of the moment a curious dog started a house fire by accidentally switching on a stovetop.

The fire was extinguished by the homeowner before crews arrived after being alerted by their HomePod device which sent them a “High Heat” notice.

The homeowner was treated for smoke inhalation, but no other injuries to people or pets were reported.

«

Naughty doggo, though the HomePod certainly earned its keep there. Though I can’t find any description of whether a “high heat” notice is automatic; all I can find is one that will send an alert to your phone if it hears a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm going off.
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For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta’s electricity is coal free • The Globe and Mail

Chris Severson-Baker:

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The Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based clean-energy think tank [of which Severson-Baker is the executive director], first intervened in a coal plant regulatory process in the late 1990s and, in 2009, published the first major proposal that showed the province could move to an unabated coal-free grid by 2030. Our research was ahead of its time and criticized as idealistic.

Coal accounted for 80% of Alberta’s electricity grid in the early 2000s and it still amounted to 60% just 10 years ago. When phasing out coal was just an idea being batted around, many said it couldn’t be done. This is not dissimilar to the rhetoric today around decarbonizing the grid. But Alberta’s experience phasing out coal shows environmental progress of this magnitude is possible.

In 2012, then-prime minister Stephen Harper mandated a nationwide phase-out of coal by 2061. A far-off target date that, nonetheless, provided certainty to the provinces and got the ball rolling. In Alberta, the Wildrose Party, then led by now United Conservative Party Premier Danielle Smith, included a coal phase-out commitment in its 2012 election platform.

When the New Democratic Party came to power after the 2015 provincial election, they got to work delivering on a plan to accelerate the elimination of coal. This included strengthening Alberta’s industrial carbon pricing system, a commitment to 30%o renewables by 2030 and a target date for phasing out coal by 2030 – a target built through consultation with experts and industry. The current federal government made a similar national commitment in 2016.

At the time, there were concerns about the impact this would have on jobs. We learned that workers benefit from new investments in cleaner electricity – if included in strategic planning from the start. Federal and provincial programs to support workers during this transition were made available, while community economic diversification and growth in jobs in other sectors have helped to offset some of this change. Research also shows there are opportunities in clean energy, such as from increased land revenues and municipal taxes.

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Really interesting long read about how Alberta has got rid of coal. Echoes of the wailing about oil licences in Scotland.
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Pentagon says it’s impossible to ditch Huawei telecom gear — officials beg Congress for waiver from Chinese sanctions • Tom’s Hardware

Jeff Butts:

»

Since 2019, the US Department of Defense has been asking for a waiver from legislation barring it from doing business with companies reliant on telecommunications equipment manufactured by Huawei. With increased tensions between the US and China and an ongoing chip war, that waiver may be harder to obtain. Still, Pentagon officials insist it would be impossible to lock Huawei out of all of the department’s operations.

The prohibition was signed into law as part of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. Under Section 889 of that act, government agencies are barred from entering into or renewing contracts with any country or company that uses Huawei telecommunications equipment.

The problem is that Huawei is the largest telecom provider in the world. According to Fortune, the Chinese company accounts for nearly one-third of all telecommunications equipment revenue globally. Many nations cannot shy away from the Chinese firm. Huawei’s products are often much less expensive than competing ones, and gutting an entire telecoms network to switch manufacturers would be a costly undertaking.

Former Defense Department official and founder of 5M Strategies Brennan Grignon said, “There are certain parts of the world where you literally cannot get away from Huawei.” She said that while the original legislation had good intentions, she doesn’t believe it was thought through very well.

…Pentagon officials insist that granting the waiver authority is essential. They say it would enable important resupply missions in various parts of the world and maintain national security. US military personnel often depend on Huawei networks, whether they are special operators on missions in the Indo-Pacific region or senior officers representing the US at international air shows.

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The DoD has a pretty good point here: how do you avoid every company reliant on Huawei? It’s almost a physical impossibility unless you get those companies to rip out their systems. But if you suspect Huawei of Evil Deeds no matter where its kit is, then you’ll be paranoid all the way.
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Wi-Fi scam: Perth man charged over evil twin fake Wi-Fi scam • escape.com.au

Hannah Moore:

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A man has been charged over an “evil twin” scam that used fake free wi-fi networks to steal the personal data of unsuspecting users.
Police allege the man, 42, used a device in a number of locations, including airports in Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide, and on domestic flights, to create “evil twin” copies of legitimate wi-fi networks.

When users tried to connect their devices to the networks, they were allegedly taken to a fake web page and required to sign in using their email or social media logins.

Those details were then allegedly saved to the man’s devices, and could be used to access more personal information, including a victim’s online communications, stored images and videos or bank details, police said.

The alleged scam was reported to police by an airline in April, after its employees identified a suspicious wi-fi network during a domestic flight.

AFP investigators searched the man’s baggage when he returned to Perth Airport on an interstate flight on April 19, and seized a portable wireless access device, a laptop and a mobile phone from his hand luggage.

Officers also raided his home in Palmyra, near Fremantle.

«

And to those saying “this is why you want a VPN!”, haveibeenpwned expert Troy Hunt points out that that wouldn’t have helped, because this gets your credentials while you’re still operating en clair. This is why I keep well clear of public Wi-Fi spots that require any ID, to be honest: this scam still works.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The old fossils are on the way out. No, not just them, but also the coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar. CC-licensed photo by Molesworth II 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. Up in smoke. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google: AI potentially breaking reality is a feature not a bug • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Generative AI could “distort collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus,” and in many cases is already doing that, according to a new research paper from Google, one of the biggest companies in the world building, deploying, and promoting generative AI.

The paper, “Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data,” was co-authored by researchers at Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory DeepMind, its security think tank Jigsaw, and its charitable arm Google.org, and aims to classify the different ways generative AI tools are being misused by analyzing about 200 incidents of misuse as reported in the media and research papers between January 2023 and March 2024.

Unlike self-serving warnings from Open AI CEO Sam Altman or Elon Musk about the “existential risk” artificial general intelligence poses to humanity, Google’s research focuses on real harm that generative AI is currently causing and could get worse in the future. Namely, that generative AI makes it very easy for anyone to flood the internet with generated text, audio, images, and videos.  

Much like another Google research paper about the dangers of generative AI I covered recently, Google’s methodology here likely undercounts instances of AI-generated harm. But the most interesting observation in the paper is that the vast majority of these harms and how they “undermine public trust,” as the researchers say, are often “neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ content policies or terms of service.” In other words, that type of content is a feature, not a bug. 

…This observation lines up with the reporting we’ve done at 404 Media for the past year and prior. People who are using AI to impersonate others, sockpuppet, scale and amplify bad content, or create nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), are mostly not hacking or manipulating the generative AI tools they’re using. They’re using them as intended.

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Kenya protesters us AI in anti-government battle • Semafor

Martin Siele:

»

Kenya’s government has raised concerns about risks associated with use of artificial intelligence (AI) as youth-led, anti-government protests continue across the nation. Protesters have deployed creative uses of AI and digital tools to take on the political establishment over the past few weeks as part of the nationwide demonstrations, which were triggered by the now-scrapped Finance Bill 2024 containing a raft of unpopular tax hikes.

Among widely shared AI tools created in support of the protests include the Corrupt Politicians GPT, a chatbot which reveals corruption cases involving Kenyan politicians. Another is the Finance Bill GPT, which helps break down the controversial bill and its potential impact on prices The chatbot also shares lawmakers’ phone numbers for their constituents to share their concerns.

Protesters also contributed to and shared databases of businesses owned by politicians, which have faced boycotts and attacks, and created another chatbot featuring their contributions to parliamentary debates.

The mostly Gen Z and millennial protesters, who are now pushing for the president’s resignation, began organizing against the Finance Bill on TikTok and X before taking to the streets. They continue to use the social media apps’ features, including spaces and live-streams, to coordinate protests and mobilize.

The protesters have also used these platforms to crowdfund medical bill payments and funeral costs for injured and killed protesters. At least 39 people have been killed in the protests since mid-June, according to a government-funded human rights organization. An online fundraiser managed by activist and journalist Hanifa Farsafi, one of the protest’s key figures, had raised 29.8 million Kenyan shillings ($231,906) from over 34,000 people as of Wednesday evening.

«

So it’s actually a very modern and targeted use of ChatGPT to create something trained on a very specific set of data to give accurate answers: when chatbots work on a small knowledge set (but not language set) they are very informative.

Though one has to wonder how much time people are spending quizzing chatbots about this sort of thing. I suspect a small group of people will, and then screenshots will get shared far and wide.
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Leak confirms Apple’s work on ‘home accessory’ • MacRumors

Aaron Perris:

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Code discovered on Apple’s backend by MacRumors confirms Apple is indeed working on a long-rumored home accessory in addition to the HomePod and Apple TV.

The code references a device with the identifier “HomeAccessory17,1,” which is a new identifier category. The name is similar to the HomePod ‘s “AudioAccessory” identifier.

Interestingly, the 17,1 in the identifier name suggests that this device may receive Apple’s upcoming A18 chip, which will be used in all four iPhone 16 models later this year. With the A18 chip, the HomeAccessory device would have the power for Apple Intelligence.

The code also indicates that this “home accessory” will be running a software variant of tvOS, much like the HomePod . Earlier this year, MacRumors found evidence of Apple’s work on homeOS, which could be the firmware running on this device.

«

One has to wonder about how much backing this will actually get. Apple, weirdly, just can’t imagine the home beyond computers; the Apple TV has never had much pizazz, and the HomePod line came too late compared to other home “assistants” and didn’t get much support either. Arguably, nobody has figured out “what do you need in the home?” For me, it’s smart (programmable) lights and a programmable thermostat, but beyond that, not much else.
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The conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden • NY Mag

Olivia Nuzzi:

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Under vines of white moonflowers on the governor’s patio, I watched as the president neared the end of his ten-minute speech [to reassure donors after his calamitous debate performance]. If a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth, he was still making them. The truth he told now was this: “I’ve got a helluva lot of plans for the next four years — God willing, as my father used to say.”

In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?

Uniformly, these people were of a similar social strata. They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

«

Of course Nuzzi is being monstered for this piece, by people asking both “why didn’t you write this in January?” and “why are you writing this now?” The former, she explains, is because she needed to firm up the findings; the latter, well, it’s like comedy. All about the timing.
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So it’s bye bye to the ERG, Spud-u-hate, five families and the 1922 Committee • The Times

Matt Chorley:

»

After the humiliation will come something much worse: irrelevance. It is impossible to overstate just how totally irrelevant the Conservatives are about to become. There is no easy way to say this, but nobody will be filling in their wall charts with the runners and riders for the Tory leadership. The tight timetabling for elections to the 1922 Committee matters not. Senior Tory sources will be left to scream into the void.

The alphabet spaghetti leftovers will be scraped into the bin: ERG, CCHQ, IEA, IDS. Bye bye to the banging of tables. Farewell to the star chambers. Arrivederci to the Five Families [of right-wing Tories] — they will struggle to muster one.

Nobody will care who Penny Mordaunt has unfollowed on Twitter. Or about the sandwiches at Tom Tugendhat’s launch. Or what Latin phrase Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has had mowed into his front lawn. Or anything that is said in all those WhatsApp groups. Step away from Nadine Dorries’s column, Lee Anderson’s GB News show, Dominic Cummings’s Substack. Think how much free time you’ll now have.

We will all have to adjust. Just at the moment when someone (not me) has added Andrew Bridgen to my Wikipedia page in a section marked “feuds”, it’s all over. Spud-u-hate, like the rest of them, has had his chips.

«

Ah, the Five Families, more accurately described by James O’Brien as “the Gammonbinos”. These will all be lost, like tears in the rain, and we won’t care any more.
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British Airways owner IAG warns airfares must rise to fund carbon cuts • FT

Philip Georgiadis:

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Airlines in Europe will be forced to raise prices to fund the cost of cutting carbon emissions, the boss of British Airways owner IAG said.

Luis Gallego told the Financial Times that switching to cleaner, more expensive sustainable fuel would “have a big impact” on the industry and put some people off flying.

“Flying is going to be more expensive. That is an issue, we are trying to improve efficiency to mitigate that, but it will have an impact on demand,” he said.

He added that European airlines could become less competitive because of the bloc’s tough net zero targets, which include a requirement for 6% of jet fuel to be from sustainable sources by 2030.

“We agree with decarbonisation . . . but I think we need to do it in a consistent way worldwide not to jeopardise European aviation,” Gallego said.

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is made from a range of non-fossil fuel sources, from waste cooking oil to crops, and can emit 70% less carbon dioxide than traditional jet fuel.

But very little of it is being produced — less than 1% of total aviation fuel consumption last year was from sustainable sources — meaning it is far more expensive than jet fuel.

IAG itself used 12% of the world’s SAF last year across its five airlines, which include British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus.

«

So IAG used 12% of 1%? It’s not a lot, is it. This feels like something that’s more of an ambition than a target, but it’s a great way to push up airline prices and blame someone else.
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The EU got more than 50% of its electricity from renewables in first half of 2024 • The Progress Playbook

Nick Hedley:

»

Renewables accounted for 50.4% of the European Union’s electricity generation in the first six months of 2024, data from industry association Eurelectric shows.

That’s a sharp increase from calendar year 2023, when renewables comprised 44.7% of the bloc’s mix, according to Eurostat.

“The pace of change is impressive,” Eurelectric secretary general Kristian Ruby said in a statement.

When including nuclear, 74% of the EU’s power came from low-carbon sources in the first half — up from 68% in 2023.

Yes, but: The association said demand continues to decline, reflecting sluggish economic growth, warmer temperatures, energy savings, and industry relocating abroad.

This trend must be reversed “to provide the necessary investment signals for clean generation,” Ruby said.

With this in mind, Eurelectric wants the new European Commission to propose an Electrification Action Plan that seeks to boost the share of electricity in final energy consumption to 35% by 2030. This would entail a faster shift to electric vehicles, heat pumps, and industrial decarbonisation technologies, among other things.

«

Impressive.
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The UK’s last coal fired power plant takes final delivery of old fossils • RenewEconomy

Joshua Hill:

»

The last coal-fired power station in the UK, the 2GW Ratcliffe-on-Soar facility in the East Midlands, is entering its final days and has received its last load of coal ahead of its planned closure on September 30.

The Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station is operated by German multinational energy company Uniper began operations in 1967 and claims to produce enough electricity to make more than one billion cups of tea a day, or more then 21 trillion overall – a truly British analogy.

“The last coal delivery will be a significant moment and one that heralds the end of the story for the power station,” said Mike Lockett, Uniper UK country chair.

“However, it’s not the end for the site, as we look towards a future where it could become a zero-carbon technology and energy hub for the East Midlands.”

Uniper is looking at various options for the Ratcliffe site, including green hydrogen production and green manufacturing. Uniper aims to be completely carbon-neutral by 2040.

In May, just 0.4% of the UK’s power supply came from coal, with wind and solar providing 27% and nuclear 17%. Fossil gas and imports accounted for most of the rest. A decade ago, it provided 40% of the power supply, according to Ember.

«

They’re burning Tory party members? Oh, a different sort of old fossil. Amazing transformation of energy supply, though. The Labour Party’s 2008 Climate Change Act actually worked.
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Fourth US dairy worker tests positive for H5N1 bird flu • Daily Telegraph via MSN News

Maeve Cullinan:

»

A fourth dairy worker has tested positive for H5N1 bird flu in the US, as the virus continues to infect herds of cattle across the country.

The unnamed farm worker from Colorado had close contact with sick cows and suffered a mild illness reporting only conjunctivitis-like symptoms, according to state health officials.

H5N1 – which has killed millions of animals since it began re-circulating in 2020 – has so far spread to 139 cattle herds in 12 US states, 27 of which are in Colorado. 

Just this week the U.S. government announced a $176 million investment in Moderna to advance the development of its mRNA bird flu vaccine in a bid to prepare for an H5N1 pandemic as scientists become increasingly concerned that the virus will mutate and gain the ability to spread among people.

H5N1 can be lethal, with a death rate of around 50% since it was first detected in humans in the late 1990s – although all four of the recent human cases in the US have been extremely mild. 

«

Just a watching brief! Though I’m sure Sir Keir Starmer will sort this out.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It’s not unseemly haste, but the removals van will be in Downing Street by Friday. CC-licensed photo by Andy Thornley 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. 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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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

»

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified