The number of times you see a flurry of insects around a night light is dwindling, as they do. CC-licensed photo by Enoch Leung on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Flying past. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Russian lawmakers hit back at arrest of Telegram chief Pavel Durov in France • FT
Hannah Murphy, Anastasia Stognei and Adrienne Klasa:
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Russian lawmakers have hit back at the arrest of Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov in France for failing to adequately moderate criminal activity on his messaging platform.
The Russia-born billionaire was arrested at the Paris-Le Bourget airport when he arrived in the country on his private jet from Azerbaijan on Saturday evening, according to French broadcaster TF1 and news agency AFP.
The deputy speaker of the state Duma, Vladislav Davankov, said he had called on Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to secure Durov’s release. “The arrest of [Durov] could have political motives and be a means of obtaining the personal data of Telegram users. We must not allow this,” he said on his Telegram channel.
Andrey Klishas, head of Russia’s Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Law, described France’s actions as a “fight for freedom of speech and European values” in a sarcastic post on his Telegram channel.
Durov had a warrant out for his arrest in France after authorities in the country began a preliminary investigation into whether a lack of moderation on the Dubai-headquartered platform had facilitated illegal activity including terrorism, drug peddling, money laundering, fraud and child exploitation, according to reports. He is expected to appear in court on Sunday.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed there was an active investigation into Durov, but would not comment further. The interior ministry and the police declined to comment.
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The big question being whether Telegram is compromised, either before or as a result of this. Intriguing that Durov now has duel French-Emirati citizenship but the Russian embassy wants to talk to him.
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Where have all the insects gone? • FT
Manuela Saragosa:
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beyond a niggling sense that there are fewer of them about, where is the definitive evidence that insects overall are in decline? Whenever a big report has come out, there has been blowback. In 2017, a German study found that the volume of insects — rather clinically referred to as “biomass” — had dropped more than 75% over a period of 27 years from 1989 to 2016. That prompted headlines around the world of an “insect apocalypse”.
But critics were sceptical: the fall could be explained away by a disproportionate loss of just a few heavy insect species. The survey had succumbed to bias, they argued; scientists had sampled areas where there had been large numbers of insects to start with, and don’t larger-than-average insect populations fluctuate more than smaller ones anyway?
In 2019, those data biases were addressed in another study. Hundreds of German forests and grasslands were surveyed over 10 years, from 2008 to 2017. Its conclusion was equally alarming. The biomass of arthropods, a classification that includes insects, spiders and any animal with an outer skeletal cover, was down by over two-thirds. The number of species had dropped by a third.
A global study followed in 2020, a meta-analysis encompassing long-term data sets of insect populations, including those that had found increases. It concluded that terrestrial insects were declining at a rate of 9% per decade but noted increases in freshwater insects. That clashed with an earlier meta-analysis that warned of the “extinction of 40% of the world’s insect species over the next few decades”. Cue more headlines about “insectaggedon” and the collapse of nature.
You get the picture: scientists agree there’s trouble in the insect world. They just can’t agree exactly how much trouble. Uncertainty is a difficult message to convey to the public. There is a “great parallel with climate change”, said Simon Potts, professor of biodiversity at the University of Reading, in his evidence to MPs for March’s parliamentary report on UK insect declines, published this year. “One of the risks is that [it] . . . can place the question in the public’s mind, ‘If the scientists cannot quite agree on this, who do we believe?’”
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So there is a problem, but we have not got the least idea what to do about it. This isn’t good.
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The point of a dashboard isn’t to use a dashboard • Terence Eden’s Blog
Terence Eden:
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Every so often, an employer asks me to help make a dashboard.
Usually, this causes technologists to roll their eyes. They have a vision of a CEO grandly staring at a giant projection screen, watching the pretty graphs go up and down, and making real-time decisions about Serious Business. Ugh! What a waste of time!
The thing is – that’s not what a dashboard is for. And that’s generally not why a CEO wants it.
A dashboard shows that you have access to your data. And that is a huge deal.
If you are able to successfully build a dashboard, that means you have demonstrated that you have the ability to get:
• Live data
• Historic data
• Comparative metrics
• Access to multiple databases
• External data sources
• …and a dozen more things.Most data are locked away. Either in Excel sheets, or behind a dozen different logins for a dozen different systems – none of which can talk to each other. The data (if they are even kept at all) are each in a different format and mildly incompatible with each other.
A dashboard isn’t there to be used. It is there to prove that the data are easily accessible, comparable, and trackable. Only once that is done can they be actionable.
Trapped data is useless data.
It’s the same reason that some people launch Twitter-bots at hackathons (myself included!). Is there any great skill in making a data feed push a snippet of text to an API? Of course not – it’s trivial! But it is a reasonably powerful statement that a novice can gain access to several different data sources in an afternoon and do something – anything – with them.
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To give a recent example, the UK’s Covid dashboard was incredibly useful (for serious scientists even if also, sigh, conspiracy theorists) but also demonstrated that someone had a handle on this data.
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Where shorthand note-taking refuses to die • FT
Andrew Hill:
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In this nightmare, I am in an exam hall in southern Poland competing with professional speed-writers working in 11 different languages. We are three and a half minutes into a verbatim report of a 15-minute speech, read at an accelerating pace, about the UN World Population Plan of Action, and my shaky shorthand is starting to fall apart.
This is no bad dream, however. It is the “speech capturing” competition of the 54th congress of Intersteno, a non-profit that organises a biennial Olympiad of speed-writing. I am in Katowice to try out the note-taking skills I learnt as a trainee journalist against the world’s finest. It is the first official test of my speed since I passed my journalism exams in 1987 at 100 words per minute.
The contest takes place on the same day England are set to meet Spain in the final of the men’s Euros. “Is shorthand coming home?” one of the friends who trained as a journalist jokes on our Class of 87 WhatsApp group. Downing my pen with more than 10 minutes to go, I know it is not.
…When I put down my pen in defeat that Sunday, [Erika] Vicai and [Zsuzsánna] Ferenc were still scribbling and so, it seemed, were most of the pen-shorthand writers in the competition. In the background, as I started laboriously trying to interpret the squiggles and dots of my notes, I could hear the sound of dozens of machine-writers pouring the speech into their keyboards, like a soft but intense rainfall.
To make the leaderboard at all, I needed to transcribe at least three minutes of the speech, with a minimum number of errors, a result recorded as C3. Anyone with the skill and stamina to transcribe a near-flawless 15 minutes, including the final seconds when the speaker was gabbling like a fast-forwarded cartoon character, would score A15. Having abandoned the dream of a podium finish, C3 was my new gold.
When the results came out a couple of days later, Vicai had taken gold at A13 and 415 syllables a minute, beating Ferenc into second. There seemed to be hope for written shorthand, at least outside the Anglosphere. Four Hungarians, four Germans, two Austrians and a Finn qualified. And one Brit. Twelfth out of 13 competitors, I had clung on to hit C4, one minute longer than I had dared to hope.
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On five ludicrous years • E.W. Niedermeyer
Edward Niedermeyer:
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At this precise moment, EV hype hit high gear, Tesla began producing its most mainstream model yet, the Model Y crossover, and the entire auto industry went into undersupply for the first time in living memory. Suddenly, not only was Tesla’s stock screaming, but it was growing faster and making bigger profits than anyone could have imagined. If you just looked at the numbers, it looked like Tesla’s core business fundamentals were beyond reproach. The central critique of [Niedermeyer’s 2019 book] Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, which questioned Tesla’s ability to operate profitably at mass scale, seemed to be blown apart as the firm approached 2 million annual sales.
And yet, now, in 2024, things look quite different. Having failed to reinvest in its products in order to show big profits, and its aging lineup assailed on all sides by a flood of competition, Tesla’s sales and profit margins are now a long way from the “hypergrowth” fans and investors have come to expect. Tesla’s only new product, the polarizing Cybertruck, is light years from the kind of mass appeal that helped launch the brand. Worse, rather than investing its alleged $30bn in cash in entirely new products, particularly low-cost models that would expand the market, Tesla appears to be betting that updates to the current lineup will do the trick… even as sales numbers suggest they won’t.
Not only is Tesla once again looking like a company whose lack of focus and discipline makes it unable to compete at mass scale and lower prices now that the perfect storm that fueled it through COVID has receded, the “dream factory” of fraud is now eclipsing its very real automotive accomplishments. With federal fraud investigations into the still-undelivered “Full Self-Driving” ongoing, Musk continues to double down on AI and robotics, variously promising to “solve real-world AI,” and create a race of mechanical slaves that will lead us into a techno-economic utopia. Musk himself now claims that Tesla’s value as an automaker is “basically zero,” and that his promise of high-tech miracles to come is the reason to invest from here on out.
Here, after the fever dream of the last five years, are those two same dynamics that define Tesla’s story: the inability to operate sustainably as a real automaker at scale, and the pattern of hype and fraud that started small but now towers over Tesla the car company.
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We got a judge to unseal a list of X’s shareholders • Jacob Silverman
Jacob Silverman:
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The case in which we intervened, Anoke v. Twitter, is just one of many X-related civil suits wending their way through the courts — from the four fired executives suing for $128m to lower level employees who didn’t receive promised severance or claim that they were forced to break laws to fulfill Musk’s mercurial edicts (turn Twitter HQ into an employee hotel, mount a giant blazing X on the roof without permits, etc). In a previous post, I wrote about a list of names subpoenaed in one of these cases, Arnold v. X Corp, which helped reveal who was on Musk’s Twitter transition team and which Tesla engineers he drafted for his crash assessment of Twitter’s code base. (RCFP also filed on my behalf to unseal a shareholder list filed under seal in another civil case, McMillian v. Twitter.)
Not only does Musk owe a lot of money to his creditors, but he’s knee-deep in litigation that one might argue would never have been necessary had he abided by existing legal agreements, contracts, and labor law. Yes, it can save money in the short-term to stiff your landlord and cloud provider, or to forego state law-mandated severance payments. But it creates a lot of billable hours for lawyers and expensive potential settlements, along with the threat of regulatory enforcement. (As for reputational damage, Musk doesn’t seem to care.)
Musk, who decries lawfare, has aggressively pursued his own brand of it — from financing Gina Carano’s lawsuit against Disney to suing the National Labor Relations Board when it began an enforcement process against SpaceX for firing eight engineers who signed a letter criticizing Musk’s sexism. And there’s much more. “Musk and his companies have filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts alone since July of 2023,” according to Fortune.
With so many lawsuits before him, it’s almost inevitable that X’s lawyers would have to file sensitive company information with a court. Litigants have asked for a shareholder disclosure list to see if the judge has any conflict of interest and to see which entities might be impacted by an adverse ruling against X. Whenever possible, they seek to filed this information under seal to prevent its dissemination.
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The list includes venture capitalists, a UAE-based VC, the Qatari government, a Saudi prince.. quite the list.
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Inside Elon Musk’s chaotic revamp of Twitter Blue • The New York Times
Ryan Mac and Kate Conger:
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the absurdity of being asked to launch [Twitter Blue] built to Mr. Musk’s specifications in less than two weeks, amid widespread layoffs, was not lost on her. In one meeting, [Esther Crawford, the rapidly promoted director of product management] presented her team with customized mugs that wouldn’t have been out of place at a tech-themed Bed Bath & Beyond. “Chance made us co-workers, crazy psycho [expletive] made us Tweeps,” read the mugs’ inscription.
Ms. Crawford and her team tried to develop safeguards. On Oct. 31, they presented options to Mr. Musk and his retinue of investors and friends. In one version of the system, there would be two badges: People who were already verified would keep their blue badges, while those who paid for the subscription program would get a different badge, this one in white.
To illustrate the differences, they created mock-ups of two tweets. One, from the legacy verified @JoeBiden account, advised people to vote. The other, from the Blue-subscribed @JoeB1den account, which replaced the “i” with a “1,” tweeted that it was “starting nuclear war with Russia.” Besides the slight change in spelling, the two accounts could be distinguished by their colored badges.
The attempt to make clearer distinctions between legacy and paid verified users, however, was not embraced by Mr. Musk’s friends. It “feels like a second-class citizen,” David Sacks, a venture capitalist who was assisting with the takeover, wrote in an email seen by The New York Times, adding that it would “disincentivize purchase.” Eventually, Mr. Musk vetoed the move.…Mr. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up.
“There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol.
Mr. Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?”
Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”«
(Mac and Conger are the co-authors of “Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,” from which this article is adapted.)
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Hacker dad who faked death to avoid child support sentenced to prison • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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A Kentucky man has been sentenced to nearly seven years in prison after hacking into state registries to fake his own death, in hopes of avoiding about $116,000 in child support payments.
In a press release, the US Attorney’s Office wrote that Jesse Kipf, 39, was sentenced for charges including computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. On top of hacking state death registries in Arizona, Hawaii, and Vermont, Kipf also “hacked into private businesses and attempted to sell access to networks on the dark web” and stole identities of real people to open two credit accounts.
Now, Kipf has agreed to pay $195,758.65 in damages, including the child support owed to his ex-wife and nearly $80,000 to repair damage to the state death registries.
Carlton S. Shier IV, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, said that Kipf’s “scheme was a cynical and destructive effort, based in part on the inexcusable goal of avoiding his child support obligations.”
It’s unclear how the scheme was discovered, but it was launched in January 2023 when Kipf used “the username and password of a physician living in another state” to access the Hawaii Death Registry System and created a “case” for his fake death, the US Attorney’s Office said.
He then “assigned himself as the medical certifier for the case and certified his death, using the digital signature of the doctor,” the press release said.
After that, Kipf was registered as “a deceased person in many government databases,” the US Attorney’s office said, but he didn’t stop there. He furthered his scheme for months, hacking into registries in Arizona and Vermont, as well as “private business networks and governmental and corporate networks,” using “credentials he stole from real people.”
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Doing this is a form of making yourself invisible. Except it would make it really hard to get a bank account, or credit card, or rent a house, or get a passport. Invisibility has its drawbacks.
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Sonos app issues leave company racing to save its reputation • Bloomberg
Dave Lee:
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Taking questions [in a Reddit AMA], [Sonos CEO Patrick] Spence quickly put one issue to rest. The company wouldn’t be reverting back to the old Sonos app while the new app was being straightened out. “After doing extensive testing we’ve reluctantly concluded that re-releasing S2 would make the problems worse, not better,” he wrote. “I’m sure this is disappointing. It was disappointing to me.”
Past the point of no return, the company has said the problem would take at least $20 to m$30m to fix. The app debacle has meant slower sales of existing products, and two products that had been scheduled to launch imminently are being held back. As a result, the company reduced its top-end revenue forecast for its fiscal year to $1.5 billion from $1.7 billion. It is laying off 100 people — around 6% of its staff.
Does it stop there? Since the new app was first launched, Sonos’ stock has fallen more than 35%. Its market cap of about $1.4 billion makes it a vulnerable minnow among those that seek to compete, like Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. or Apple Inc., all of which have invested in smart speaker products. Bose Corp., another competitor, is privately held, and there are a few other smaller players.
What all of these competitors lack, experts say, is Sonos’ expertise in multiroom setups, which is a deal-breaker for many consumers. This advantage, says Jeffries analyst Brent Thill, means that if the problems can be solved in the next couple of months, consumers will be forgiving and Sonos will be right back on track. Software meltdowns are not uncommon, Thill argues — just ask CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. or Delta Air Lines Inc. The question is how quickly Sonos can get it rectified.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 