In America, videos from stars such as Adele is no longer available on YouTube. Not, we suspect, because YouTube paid too much to license them. CC-licensed photo by Laura Dorney 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. September up! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The ultra-pure, super-secret sand that makes your phone possible • WIRED

Vince Beiser, in 2018:

»

Spruce Pine is not a wealthy place. Its downtown consists of a somnambulant train station across the street from a couple of blocks of two‑story brick buildings, including a long‑closed movie theater and several empty storefronts.

The wooded mountains surrounding it, though, are rich in all kinds of desirable rocks, some valued for their industrial uses, some for their pure prettiness. But it’s the mineral in Glover’s bag—snowy white grains, soft as powdered sugar—that is by far the most important these days. It’s quartz, but not just any quartz. Spruce Pine, it turns out, is the source of the purest natural quartz—a species of pristine sand—ever found on Earth. This ultra‑elite deposit of silicon dioxide particles plays a key role in manufacturing the silicon used to make computer chips. In fact, there’s an excellent chance the chip that makes your laptop or cell phone work was made using sand from this obscure Appalachian backwater. “It’s a billion‑dollar industry here,” Glover says with a hooting laugh. “Can’t tell by driving through here. You’d never know it.”

…Spruce Pine quartz [is] the world’s primary source of the raw material needed to make the fused‑quartz crucibles in which computer‑chip‑grade polysilicon is melted. A fire in 2008 at one of the main quartz facilities in Spruce Pine for a time all but shut off the supply of high‑purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry.

Today one company dominates production of Spruce Pine quartz. Unimin, an outfit founded in 1970, has gradually bought up Spruce Pine area mines and bought out competitors, until today the company’s North Carolina quartz operations supply most of the world’s high‑ and ultra‑high‑purity quartz. (Unimin itself is now a division of a Belgian mining conglomerate, Sibelco.)

In recent years, another company, the imaginatively titled Quartz Corp, has managed to grab a small share of the Spruce Pine market. There are a very few other places around the world producing high‑purity quartz, and many other places where companies are looking hard for more. But Unimin controls the bulk of the trade.

«

Why link to this now? Because Spruce Pine lies in North Carolina – which has been hit hard by Hurricane Helene. Spruce Pine is inaccessible and all the bridges to it have been washed out. How long can the industry go without it? The cost of climate change is revealed in many ways. (Thanks @aadetugbo for the link.)
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AI avatars are doing job interviews now • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Jack Ryan from San Diego was recently being interviewed for a job. On a video call, the interviewer, a woman with red hair, said, “I find it helps when candidates tell me a story in answering the questions.” 

“I’m looking for examples from your work experience,” the woman added. During the conversation, Ryan had a smirk on his face.

That’s because the woman is not real. She is an AI avatar from a company called Fairgo.ai, which uses AI agents to interview job candidates on behalf of other companies.

“This HR AI avatar is a perfect demonstration of late stage capitalism,” Ryan told 404 Media in an online chat. “While Fairgo’s intent is to provide a fair and equitable interview process, I can’t imagine AI, LLMs, and other tools are able to interpret the human emotion and facial reactions to provide an actual, well rounded interview.” Ryan posted a clip of his interview to LinkedIn on Thursday.

On its website, Fairgo says its AI agent “talks to candidates any time, any where.” The company claims that it can “Ensure every candidate is evaluated on a level playing field with consistent and unbiased interview practices.” Julian Bright, founder and CEO of Fairgo, told 404 Media in an email that after an introductory video voiced by the AI avatar, candidate interviews are done by an audio-only AI. “At no point is any of the video or audio captured used to evaluate the candidate,” he wrote. Instead, that is done with a transcript afterwards.

Bright said that Fairgo does not make decisions on who to shortlist for a role; that instead falls to the hirers. Fairgo also says on its site that the interview process is low stress, and that “candidates consistently love the interview experience.”

«

Well, how many candidates for the job are going to say that they absolutely detested the technology that you made them use to interact with you?
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Apple Mobile processors are now made in America, by TSMC • Tim Culpan’s Position

Tim Culpan:

»

TSMC Arizona is the marquee project of the US government’s $39 billion CHIPS for America Fund under the CHIPS Act. Six months ago, I thought Apple might tap Arizona for a less-consequential chip like the H-series used in AirPods. I was surprised when I heard it was the A16. The fact that they went for the most-advanced chip they could manage on US soil, in terms of both technology and volume, shows Apple and TSMC want to start big.

(I believe there may be other products also in production at TSMC Arizona, but I don’t have much information on them. If you do, contact me here.)

Currently TSMC is achieving yields in Arizona that are slightly behind what’s enjoyed back home in Taiwan (basically, neck and neck). Most important, though, is that improvements are moving so rapidly that true yield parity between Taiwan and Arizona is expected to be reached in coming months.

I can’t tell you which Apple device these A16 chips will go into. One possibility is that they’re slated for one of the upcoming iPads, though perhaps not the iPad Mini since Mark Gurman believes they’re to be launched around October. Another likelihood is the next iteration of the iPhone SE, which makes sense since it’s supposedly based on the iPhone 14 which uses the A16 processor and is expected next year.

Normally, media outlets will pad out their reportage with lots of background and history. I’ll leave it here. That’s the scoop: Apple’s A16 mobile processors are in production at TSMC on American soil, and that choice of product is hugely significant.

«

Culpan has very good contacts with Taiwanese companies, having been there as a journalist for many years. TSMC might breathe a little easier having a reliable US base.
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‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman • The Conversation

Saul Justin Newman, the scientists who won an Ig Nobel for demonstrating that the data on super-centenarians is absurd:

»

In Okinawa [in Japan], the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.

According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.

Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.

The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.

Q: But most people don’t lose count of their age…

You would be amazed. Looking at the UK Biobank data, even people in mid-life routinely don’t remember how old they are, or how old they were when they had their children. There are similar stats from the US.

Q: What does this all mean for human longevity?

The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know.

«

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The quest to build a telescope on the Moon • The New Yorker

Matthew Hutson:

»

Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon. To show the FarView site up close, [CEO and co-founder of Lunar Resources, Elliot] Carol drew a big square filled with dots.

Each dot represented a cluster of four hundred antennas; all the clusters together would be sensitive enough to detect a cell phone on Pluto. They would perceive light that is nearly undetectable from Earth: radio waves from a mysterious period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.

To develop a plan for FarView, Lunar Resources, which is privately owned, has formed a consortium with several scientists and universities. “Usually, these missions are pursued by large academic and research institutions,” Carol told me. “But we said, ‘No, we want to support and fund the development of this observatory.’ ” The company’s goals go well beyond the construction of a telescope. FarView would double as a demonstration of two unprecedented activities: off-planet mining and manufacturing, which are known in the business as “in-situ resources utilization” (I.S.R.U.).

…FarView might not be completed for a decade or more, if at all, and could cost upward of two billion dollars. But it is part of a larger dream that, one day, moon-based mines might produce helium for fusion reactors, and lunar and orbital factories might build satellites that are too large to launch from Earth. Lunar ice could provide hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, which could power trips to deep space. According to a market assessment from the professional-services company PwC, the lunar economy could be worth a $170bn by 2040.

«

Alternate view: it won’t happen and the lunar economy won’t be worth anything like that.
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How to crash a wired network with Excel • LaurieWired on X

Laurie Wired:

»

An Excel spreadsheet crashed this company’s network.

But it wasn’t malware.

The truth is *much* weirder.

Try this out, open up a xls (not xlsx) file in your favorite text/hex editor. Notice all the repeating characters in the header.

When receiving POP3 emails with an Excel attachment, the characters bit patterns caused a signalling pattern on the physical copper of the company’s T1 line, crashing the network equipment.

«

The whole story dates back to 2003, and is documented on Reddit. It’s quite a tale.
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London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: more active kids • Grist

Syris Valentine:

»

Restricting the volume of high-emitting vehicles roaming city streets carries many benefits, from clearing the air to quieting the urban din and beyond. Recognition of this simple fact has led to the proliferation of clean air zones, designated regions within a city where vehicles must meet strict pollution standards or pay a fee to operate within it.

At last count, over 300 such areas had been established across Europe. In London, which boasts the largest ultra-low emissions zone in the world, a study has found a secondary benefit: Kids started walking and biking to school more.

In 2018 — the year before London’s rule took effect in the centre of the city, and five years before the zone encompassed its entirety — researchers at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University saw in the impending policy an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment.

They recruited children aged six to nine and their families in central London and in Luton, a small city to the north, for a multi-year study to investigate how the program might affect a child’s health. Though research focused on understanding how lightening a city’s pollution load shaped the way young lungs develop, participants completed questionnaires alongside their annual health assessments. The responses allowed researchers to glean insights into their subjects’ activity levels, mental health, and other ancillary outcomes.

«

Odd not to have heard this bit of ULEZ news somewhere else, but maybe the idea of ULEZ being good for something isn’t a popular one with some people.
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Sex and birth are big business. “Suicide pods” show death is next • The Times

Kathleen Stock:

»

Thinking of investing in a sleek, ergonomic vehicle with all mod cons in which you can sail off into the sunset? I don’t mean a yacht or even a caravan, I mean a mobile gas chamber.

A 64-year-old American woman in Switzerland last week became the first person to use the Sarco — short for sarcophagus — with the help of its sponsoring organisation, wittily called the Last Resort. A spokesman made the woman’s death sound like a restorative break at Center Parcs. Her end arrived “under a canopy of trees at a private forest retreat”, he said.

Once comfortably ensconced, the unnamed woman, who had an immune condition, entered a four-digit code on a touchpad and the Sarco flooded with nitrogen. She died within minutes.

The Swiss authorities, famously relaxed about the concept of assisted suicide but unhappy about this unregulated initiative, have since arrested several of the organisers.

Dr Philip Nitschke, the machine’s Australian inventor, has been trying to perfect the technological facilitation of suicide for decades. The 77-year-old called his first attempt Deliverance. It was an intravenous system connected to a laptop computer. His second go, a mask delivering carbon monoxide, looked exactly like a plastic bag. Customers rejected it.

Nitschke put it succinctly: “People do not want to leave the world in such an aesthetically displeasing way.”

Enter the Sarco. This capsule looks like a miniature spaceship and its maker says it is “luxurious”. It even has a window to take in the scenery before you depart.

«

It looks like a one-person spaceship and a tanning salon bed had a baby. It’s also a very weird concept. Yet it makes a weird sort of sense: of course you’d like to look at the sky and trees as you breathe your last. Eat your heart out, M*A*SH* theme song.
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YouTube blocks videos from Adele, Green Day, Bob Dylan, others in dispute with SESAC • TechCrunch

Anthony Ha:

»

A number of YouTube videos featuring music from artists such as Adele, Green Day, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, and R.E.M. have been unplayable in the United States since Saturday.

For example, if you try to play Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” (whether it’s the classic album recording or a live performance), you are instead told: “This video contains content from SESAC. It is not available in your country.” Sometimes, you even get to watch a pre-roll ad before you get the message.

However, not all videos featuring these artists are blocked; it’s not clear whether the playable videos are exempt from the current dispute or if they’ve simply been overlooked.

In statements to the press and on social media, YouTube blamed the situation on failed negotiations with SESAC, a performing rights group that says it represents more than 35,000 music artists and publishers.

«

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the reason for the failure was that YouTube wasn’t prepared to pay what SESAC wanted. But that, at the same time, that content is still available on Spotify and Apple Music. Which tells us a lot about YouTube and its view of the value of content.
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Rightmove’s property data is more valuable than news • Financial Times

John Gapper:

»

If you want to buy the best house in a desirable neighbourhood, you can make a discreet approach and even put notes through the door, but an occupier who does not wish to sell will ignore you. The same applies to Rightmove, the UK’s leading property listings group.

Rightmove this week spurned a £6.1bn bid by REA, its equivalent in Australia, which is majority owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. It was REA’s third takeover approach to Rightmove this month, showing the appeal of classified advertising to publishers, long after they controlled the business. Small ads for jobs and property that once had to be placed in papers now appear online.

News Corp’s stake in REA contributed 70% of the US company’s market value of $15.4bn this week, far outweighing its more famous assets, from Dow Jones to the book publisher HarperCollins. A tiny investment made by Lachlan Murdoch about 25 years ago has come to dominate the business in the view of shareholders, if not of its 93-year-old patriarch.

…News Corp is one of many media groups finding that online classified ads carry more financial clout than news. The German billionaire Mathias Döpfner last week struck a €13.5bn deal with the private equity firm KKR to break up Axel Springer, which publishes the German newspapers Bild and Die Welt, as well as the US news sites Politico and Business Insider.

He will run Axel Springer’s media business, which was valued at €3.5bn, while KKR will be the majority owner, with an investment partner, of its €10bn classified business. This includes the European property listings group Aviv and the job recruitment site StepStone. “I am a firm believer in the future . . . of journalism,” Döpfner declared, but KKR is a firm believer in asset values.

«

Chastening.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Researchers have found a flaw in the web connectivity for Kia cars that could let a hacker take over control of some key functions. CC-licensed photo by Sean Davis 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 10 links for you. Unkeyed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Millions of vehicles could be hacked and tracked thanks to a simple website bug • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

»

When security researchers in the past found ways to hijack vehicles’ internet-connected systems, their proof-of-concept demonstrations tended to show, thankfully, that hacking cars is hard. Exploits like the ones that hackers used to remotely take over a Chevrolet Impala in 2010 or a Jeep in 2015 took years of work to develop and required ingenious tricks: reverse engineering the obscure code in the cars’ telematics units, delivering malicious software to those systems via audio tones played over radio connections, or even putting a disc with a malware-laced music file into the car’s CD drive.

This summer, one small group of hackers demonstrated a technique to hack and track millions of vehicles that’s considerably easier—as easy as finding a simple bug in a website.

Today, a group of independent security researchers revealed that they’d found a flaw in a web portal operated by the carmaker Kia that let the researchers reassign control of the internet-connected features of most modern Kia vehicles—dozens of models representing millions of cars on the road—from the smartphone of a car’s owner to the hackers’ own phone or computer. By exploiting that vulnerability and building their own custom app to send commands to target cars, they were able to scan virtually any internet-connected Kia vehicle’s license plate and within seconds gain the ability to track that car’s location, unlock the car, honk its horn, or start its ignition at will.

After the researchers alerted Kia to the problem in June, Kia appears to have fixed the vulnerability in its web portal, though it told WIRED at the time that it was still investigating the group’s findings and hasn’t responded to WIRED’s emails since then. But Kia’s patch is far from the end of the car industry’s web-based security problems, the researchers say. The web bug they used to hack Kias is, in fact, the second of its kind that they’ve reported to the Hyundai-owned company; they found a similar technique for hijacking Kias’ digital systems last year. And those bugs are just two among a slew of similar web-based vulnerabilities they’ve discovered within the last two years that have affected cars sold by Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Toyota, and more.

«

I thought the story sounded familiar. This seems like it will crop up repeatedly because if vehicle makers want to nickel and dime you for things like heated seats, they’ll need to be able to identify your car uniquely, which means it’s hackable in some sense.
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Elon Musk hits back at UK government after he is not invited to tech summit • The Guardian

Ben Quinn:

»

Elon Musk has hit back at the UK government after he was not invited to an international investment summit following his controversial social media posts during last month’s riots.

Musk said on X on Thursday: “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts.”

He seemed to be referring to the prison early release scheme, initiated by the Labour government to ease pressure on a system it has said is “on the point of collapse” due to a lack of capacity.

The billionaire owner of X has used the platform to suggest civil war in Britain is “inevitable”, and to criticise Keir Starmer as rioting broke out after disinformation spread about the killing of three children in Southport.

Ministers initially said the early release scheme would not apply to the most serious offenders, but later confirmed that prisoners who had completed a sentence for a serious crime and were serving a consecutive sentence for a lesser one would qualify. But sex offenders are excluded from the early release programme.

Musk’s latest broadside came after it emerged he is not invited to a global investment summit in Britain on 14 October. The government hopes the event will be a boost for investment in the UK two weeks before the autumn budget. Government sources confirmed Musk was not invited.

Musk took centre stage in November last year at a UK summit on AI, where the then Conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, played the role of a chatshow host and flattered the entrepreneur during a 40-minute in-person conversation.

«

Musk’s immaturity is quite astonishing. Steve Jobs at least had years of failure after his first stint at Apple; even that didn’t quench his self-importance. Musk, though, has never hit the utter nadir that’s needed to really get empathy for everyone else.
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LAPD raid goes bad after gun allegedly sucked onto MRI machine • SF Gate

Lester Black, cannabis editor:

»

The owners of NoHo Diagnostic Center are suing the LAPD, the city of Los Angeles and multiple police officers, alleging they violated the business owners’ constitutional rights and demanding an unspecified amount in damages. Officers allegedly raided the diagnostic center, located in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, thinking it was a front for an illegal cannabis cultivation facility, pointing to higher-than-usual energy use and the “distinct odor” of cannabis plants, according to the lawsuit. 

Officers raided the facility on Oct. 18, 2023, and detained the lone female employee while they searched the business, the lawsuit said. However, they didn’t find a single cannabis plant and only saw a typical medical facility with rooms used for conducting x-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans and MRIs, the owners said. 

The officers then released the employee and told her to call a manager, the lawsuit said, while they continued to wander around various rooms of the facility. The plaintiffs say the officers’ behaviour was “nothing short of a disorganized circus, with no apparent rules, procedures, or even a hint of coordination.”

At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said. The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine. MRI machines are tube-shaped scanners that use incredibly strong magnetic fields to create images of the brain, bones, joints and other internal organs.

An officer then allegedly pulled a sealed emergency release button that shut the MRI machine down, deactivating it, evaporating thousands of liters of helium gas and damaging the machine in the process. The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.

«

1: I so hope there is CCTV of this. 2: What idiots. 3: wasting that much helium should be a crime. 4: How remarkable that SF Gate has a cannabis editor – though of course it is legal in California.
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Large language models will upend human rituals

Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell:

»

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us: the story’s last sentence is “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

Rituals aren’t just about God, but about people’s relations with each other. Everyday life depends on ritual performances such as being polite, dressing appropriately, following proper procedure and observing the law. The particulars vary, often mightily, across time, space and societies. But they are the foundation of all formal and informal institutions, making co-ordination between people feel effortless. They seem invisible, only because we take them so much for granted.

…Organisational ceremonies, such as the annual performance evaluations that can lead to employees being promoted or fired, can be carried out far more quickly and easily with LLMs. All the manager has to do is fire up ChatGPT, enter in a brief prompt with some cut-and-pasted data, and voilà! Tweak it a little, and an hour’s work is done in seconds. The efficiency gains could be remarkable.

And perhaps, sometimes, efficiency is all we care about. If a ritual is performed just to affirm an organisational shibboleth, then a machine’s words may suit just as well, or even better.

Still, things might get awkward if everyone suspects that everyone else is inauthentically using an LLM. As Erving Goffman, a sociologist, argued, belief in the sincerity of others—and the ritualistic performance of that belief—is one of the bedrocks of social life. What happens when people lose their faith? A bad performance evaluation is one thing if you think the manager has sweated over it, but quite another if you suspect he farmed it out to an algorithm. Some managers might feel ashamed, but will that really stop them for long?

What may hurt even more is the “decoupling” of organisational rituals from the generation of real knowledge. Scientific knowledge may seem impersonal, but it depends on a human-run infrastructure of evaluation and replication. Institutions like peer review are shot through with irrationality, jealousy and sloppy behaviour, but they are essential to scientific progress. Even AI optimists, such as Ethan Mollick, worry that they will not bear the strain of LLMs. Letters of recommendation, peer reviews and even scientific papers themselves will become less trustworthy. Plausibly, they already are.

«

Fourcade is a professor of sociology (UCal Berkeley), Farrell a professor of democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.
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Meta’s going to put AI-generated images in your Facebook and Instagram feeds • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

If you think avoiding AI-generated images is difficult as it is, Facebook and Instagram are now going to put them directly into your feeds. At the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, the company announced that it’s testing a new feature that creates AI-generated content for you “based on your interests or current trends” — including some that incorporate your face.

When you come across an “Imagined for You” image in your feed, you’ll see options to share the image or generate a new picture in real time. One example shows several AI-generated images of “an enchanted realm, where magic fills the air.” But others could contain your face… which I’d imagine will be a bit creepy to stumble upon as you scroll.

Other examples include captions that say you can “imagine yourself” as a video game character or an astronaut exploring space. Both images appear to use a person’s photos to create an AI-generated version of them in made-up scenarios.

In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Amanda Felix says the platform will only generate AI images of your face if you “onboarded to Meta’s Imagine yourself feature, which includes adding photos to that feature” and accepting its terms. You’ll be able to remove AI images from your feed as well.

Last week, 404 Media found that using Snapchat’s AI selfie feature gives the company permission to use your face in ads seen only by you (unless you disable the option). It looks like Facebook and Instagram will similarly only show the AI-generated content to you, while sharing remains optional.

«

This is very weird. Also, you can imagine that some people are going to be vain enough that they will embrace this with delight. There’s some small text on one of the example pictures saying “Only you can see this”, which some might feel is a blessing.

Anyhow, my principal IG feed is for my dog, so let’s see how the AI copes with that.
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Rail bodies investigate cyberattack at UK’s busiest stations • The Register

Connor Jones:

»

A cybersecurity incident is being probed at Network Rail, the UK non-departmental public body responsible for repairing and developing train infrastructure, after unsavoury messaging was displayed to those connecting to major stations’ free Wi-Fi portals.

The message displayed to users via a compromised Wi-Fi landing page, seen by The Register, is Islamophobic in nature and references the 2017 Manchester Arena bombings.

All 20 stations managed by Network Rail across the UK are thought to be affected, with Wi-Fi services still unavailable this morning while investigations into the root cause continue.

The stations affected include 10 in London – all the major rail hubs in the city – and other key commuter stations such as Manchester Piccadilly, Birmingham New Street, Leeds, Reading, Glasgow Central, Bristol Temple Meads, and more.

Network Rail and the British Transport Police (BTP) are on the case, with the latter telling us: “We received reports at around 1703 yesterday [25 September] of a cyberattack displaying Islamophobic messaging on some Network Rail Wi-Fi services. We are working alongside Network Rail to investigate the incident at pace.”

Network Rail’s Wi-Fi is operated by Warwickshire-based communications company Telent, which said it’s working alongside the two transport bodies to resolve the issues.

«

I’ll go with “racist script kiddie discovered how to hack the landing page” – rather than the preferred one of a couple of writers, which was “OMG IT IS NIGHTSLEEPER NOW THEY WILL HACK THE TRAINS AND SIGNALLING.” (For reference, for non-UK readers, Nightsleeper is a BBC drama whose premise is the utterly not-possible hacking of an Edinburgh-London overnight train along with all the signalling.)
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Trail running and drug-testing: where do we go from here? • Trail Runner Magazine

Brian Metzler:

»

For years, trail running has had a reputation as a clean sport with a bit of a “wild west” vibe. 

But the globalization of the sport, increased level of competition, more sponsorship contracts, and the advent of bigger prize purses has started to change the sport in the past decade, and with it, the concern about performance-enhancing drug use has followed. 

Because there is very little authentic drug testing in trail and ultra-distance running, no out-of-competition testing and often delayed and inconsistent communication among anti-doping agencies, the sport is at a critical juncture with a growing influx of money and professionalism — especially after the results of one of the sport’s most prestigious events were tarnished by doping last year. 

On January 7, Esther Chesang, the women’s winner of the 2022 Sierra-Zinal trail running race last August in Switzerland, was provisionally suspended by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) after it was revealed that the 28-year-old Kenyan runner had triamcinolone acetonide (glucocorticoid) — an anti-inflammatory steroid on banned by World Anti-Doping Agency — present in her system after an in-competition drug test last May 11. 

«

A followup on yesterday’s article about ultrarunner Camille Herron fiddling with Wikipedia – which, it turns out, has nothing on the pharmaceutical fiddling going on in the sport. (Thanks wendyg for the link.)
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WordPress vs WP Engine – community drama 2024 • WPJohnny

Johnny Nguyen on the drama (which you may not have heard of) between Matt Mullenweg, whose Automattic company owns Tumblr and also runs the WordPress open source project, who is having a verbal fight with a company called WP Engine:

»

I suspect this fight isn’t a matter of principle and values, but rather of personal conflict. On the WordPress side, we have Matt Mullenweg who’s done a good job of expressing his views as being his views alone. But on WP Engine’s side…it’s Lee Wittlinger, managing director for Silver Lake who overseas the WP Engine brand.

If I had to guess, this probably came down to Matt wanting more financial support from brands who profit off the WordPress space. And/or also wanting more development support. Perhaps feeling certain things should not have to be be managed or developed by WordPress core. And he wanted the big commercial companies in the WordPress space (the ones who profit the most from it) to help contribute to improving WordPress, perhaps maximizing its features and compatibility with 3rd-party extensions. Except only, maybe WP Engine did not lend their help to the degree of Matt’s liking.

And he decided to write them off, and officially end ties with them. Clarifying any mis-affiliations between WordPress and WP Engine moving forward, making clear they aren’t the same. That WP Engine isn’t an official WordPress entity and should not be allowed to profit of it.

• Publicly, WP Engine released a post showing how much contributions they’ve given to the WordPress community in the form of event sponsorships, developing extensions and frameworks.>br />• Privately, WP Engine opened legal action against WordPress…presumably to defend its brand and probably seek monetary damages for Matt’s statements.

«

I have tried reading a few takes on this topic, and this one delivers it best. I honestly don’t get Mullenweg’s complaint. The whole thing about OSS is that you can’t stop others using it as they want, including making tons of money. Nor can you force them to contribute back. If you want that, you need a different licence. (Thanks Caleb for the link.)

Though Mullenweg has now blocked WP Engine from accessing WordPress resources (eg themes and plugins). Taste for drama.
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X’s first transparency report since Elon Musk’s takeover is finally here • WIRED

Vittoria Elliott:

»

Comparing the 2021 report to the current X transparency report [released earlier this week] is a bit difficult, as the way the company measures different things has changed. For instance, in 2021, 11.6 million accounts were reported. Of this 11.6 million, 4.3 million were “actioned” and 1.3 million were suspended.

According to the new X report, there were over 224 million reports, of both accounts and pieces of individual content, but the result was 5.2 million accounts being suspended.

While some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports—reports of abuse and harassment are, somewhat predictably, high—in other areas, there’s a stark difference. For instance, in the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. (The reports used to be interactive on the website; the current PDF no longer allows users to flip through the data for more granular breakdowns.)

In the new X report, the company says it has taken action on only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.

But this may be due to the fact that X’s policies have changed since it was Twitter, which Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped put together its Moderation Research Consortium, says might change the way the numbers look in a transparency report. For instance, last year the company changed its policies on hate speech, which previously covered misgendering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation in November of 2022.

“As certain policies have been modified, some content is no longer violative. So if you’re looking at changes in the quality of experience, that might be hard to capture in a transparency report,” she says.

«

Even so, it’s quite a change. Far fewer active users, but an absolutely dramatic drop in the number of accounts removed. Hatefulness is totally permissible now, it seems. Hilariously, Musk’s Twitter has blocked links to a dossier about JD Vance allegedly obtained by hacking. After all the fulminating about the blocking of links to stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop? The hypocrisy is stratospheric.
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LG Smart TVs, including OLEDs, now show screensaver ads • FlatpanelsHD

Rasmus Larsen:

»

Almost a decade ago, ads began creeping onto user interfaces on our TVs. Initially appearing as paid placements (“recommendations”), the initiative has since expanded to include large ad carousels at the top of the screen and full-screen ads that take over your screen.

While reviewing LG’s latest high-end G4 OLED TV (review here), FlatpanelsHD discovered that it now shows full-screen screensaver ads. The ad appeared before the conventional screensaver kicks in, as shown below, and was localized to the region the TV was set to.

We saw an ad for LG Channels – the company’s free, ad-supported streaming service – but there can also be full-screen ads from external partners, as shown in the company’s own example below.

The ad we saw was muted, but it is unclear if this will remain the case. We observed the ad on a 2024 LG model, but there are no indications to suggest that it will be exclusive to new LG Smart TVs.

Digging a little deeper, we discovered that the initiative is spearheaded by LG Ad Solutions, the company’s division for “connected TV (CTV) and cross-screen advertising”.

The announcement (link) about screensaver ads on LG Smart TVs makes it sound as if the advertising team’s priorities now overshadow those of LG’s webOS team

«

Advertising, like gambling, corrodes everything it touches.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Ceefax system is dead, but if you’ve got enough old videotapes you can reconstruct it. Why not run a project to do so? CC-licensed photo by Andrew Bowden 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 10 links for you. Brightly coloured. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Meta debuts augmented reality glasses and Judi Dench-voiced AI chatbot • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early (and agencies):

»

The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, presented new augmented reality glasses at the company’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, debuting a prototype of the next phase in its expansion into smart eyewear. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta AI will be able to talk in the voice of Dame Judi Dench.

The glasses, named Orion, have the ability to project digital representations of media, people, games and communications on to the real world. Meta and Zuckerberg have framed the product as a step away from desktop computers and smartphone into eyewear that can perform similar tasks.

“A lot of people have said this is the craziest technology they’ve ever seen,” Zuckerberg boasted during his keynote speech, clad in a shirt that read “Aut Zuck aut nihil”, Latin for “Either Zuck or nothing”, substituting his own name into a motto associated with the Roman leader Julius Caesar. A pre-recorded demonstration showed some of the glasses’ capabilities, including two people playing a virtual Pong game and talking on a video chat through augmented reality.

Meta also expanded its bet on artificial intelligence, announcing a raft of new product offerings for its ChatGPT-like chatbot and plans to start automatically injecting personalized images created by the bot into people’s Facebook and Instagram feeds, as it kicked off its annual Connect conference at its California headquarters on Wednesday.

Among the AI updates announced was an audio upgrade to the digital assistant, called Meta AI, which will now respond to voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities including Judi Dench, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell and Awkwafina.

“I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text,” Zuckerberg said.

«

When can you buy the glasses? Ah, tricky. Don’t hold your breath over “prototypes”. But look, you can get AI junk inserted into your Instagram feed right away! As for AI and voice – yes, that’s how we’ve been doing it for years already.
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BBC Sound Effects: searchable library

Yes: the BBC’s Sounds Effects library. (No results for Dalek. Boo.) The licence allows non-commercial use. Lots of fun to be had!
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Help! I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don’t know what to do with them • Odds and Ends of History

James O’Malley:

»

Obviously, teletext was not going to stick around for the internet era. But unlike newspapers and books published in the 1980s and 90s, which historians and nostalgic millennials can go back and rediscover, nobody thought to keep an archive of teletext.

This means there is no great vault containing the millions of words that were written by thousands of people, and read by tens of millions more. A Library or Alexandria’s worth of journalism and culture, some of the most widely read works of the 80s and 90s, have disappeared forever.

Teletext Ltd, which operated the ITV and Channel 4 services, is today a holiday website. It didn’t retain an archive of its pages, because why the hell would it?

But perhaps more surprisingly, beyond holding a few representative pages of what Ceefax used to be like, the BBC didn’t either.

And in retrospect it seems like a bizarre omission. An act of cultural vandalism, akin to how the BBC famously destroyed recordings of Doctor Who, Dad’s Army and the like in the 1970s to save money.

It pains me in particularly that today that a fan archive of Digitiser, which was clearly very formative to me and is partially what inspired me to become a writer, is only about half complete.

But there is some good news for historians: There just might be a way to go back in time.

«

It turns out you can pull huge chunks of Ceefax history out of videotapes of old programs. There’s software for it. But James just doesn’t have the time. If anyone knows anyone who wants to do the archiving work…
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Masimo founder Joe Kiani resigns as CEO following ouster from board • Reuters

SK Sneha:

»

Masimo said on Wednesday founder Joe Kiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker’s CEO, days after shareholders voted to remove him from the company’s board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Politan Capital Management.

The company named veteran healthcare executive, Michelle Brennan, as interim chief. Brennan was nominated by Politan for Masimo’s board last year, along with the hedge fund’s founder Quentin Koffey.

Both were subsequently elected by shareholders. Shares of the company were up 5.4% at $133 in early trade.

The stock has fallen more than 40% since Feb. 15, 2022, when Masimo announced the $1bn acquisition of audio products maker Sound United. The deal was a key factor behind Politan’s activism.

«

Notable only because Masimo is the company with which Apple has had a big (losing) patent row over a blood oxygen sensor on the Apple Watch. Might this change something in the relationship? Having the anchor of an audio products maker (even if it has the Denon/HEOS, Marantz, Polk, Bowers & Wilkins, Definitive Technology brands) hasn’t been popular with the board; Apple certainly won’t have been unhappy at the tension.
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Doctors describe the horror of Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon • New Lines Magazine

Edmund Bower:

»

On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager.

Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over seven pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice.

“Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it.

As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back.

…The mechanism of the explosions appears to have been designed to cause maximum damage. Most of those who were injured were men, along with a number of women and children. They tended to pick up the beeping pager and hold it toward their eyes to read the message. When it exploded, it caused damage to both hands and their face.

…Of the 160 patients who came into the emergency room, 140 suffered serious eye injuries. For almost two hours, American University of Beirut Medical Center’s head of ophthalmology, Bahaa Noureddine, conducted triage among the waiting patients to see “which were the eyes that can be salvaged,” deciding which could wait and which were beyond hope. At 7 p.m., the first case was wheeled into the operating room. Noureddine and his staff of nine surgeons did not stop operating until midnight three days later.

«

The baby survived; a few minutes earlier and it wouldn’t have. I doubt that the “mechanism” was intended to maximise the damage to users, but it certainly had that effect.
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US ultrarunner Camille Herron involved in Wikipedia controversy • Canadian Running Magazine

Marley Dickinson:

»

Acclaimed American ultrarunner Camille Herron, who has more than 12 ultrarunning world records to her name, along with her coach and husband, Conor Holt, have found themselves at the centre of a Wikipedia controversy. It stems from several edits to the Wikipedia pages of ultrarunners Kilian Jornet and Courtney Dauwalter, which degraded their accomplishments, while also adding accolades to Herron’s own page. The edits have been traced back to Herron’s email and Holt’s IP address.

The couple has been operating under the username “Rundbowie” since February 2024, after their previous Wikipedia account, “Temporun73,” was temporarily banned for violating Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policies for the edits to Herron’s page. Just hours after Temporun73 was banned, a new account under the name “Rundbowie” was created and resumed activity, making edits to Herron’s page and to those of other athletes.

«

You’re thinking “oh, she’s only been noodling with Wikipedia pages” (the discovery of which is quite funny, really) but it points to something in her character:

»

The Global Organization of Multi-day Marathoners (GOMU) president Trishul Cherns said he was appalled by the situation. “In my forty-six years of ultrarunning, I’ve never seen anyone as talented as Camille, who is so dedicated to creating division and animosity within the ultrarunning community. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia story is part of a pattern of interference. This couple has a history of trying to disrupt athletes, their reputations, races, and performances by citing World Athletics rules that do not apply to ultrarunning and multi-day running. I was appalled by Camille’s criticism directed at athletes challenging “her” records and her efforts to discredit them. This unsportsmanlike behaviour is bullying and mean-spirited and has no place in the larger ultrarunning community.”

«

Maybe aggressive Wikipedia use should be taken as indicative of other behaviour.
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New study reveals positive mood changes during video game play • Oxford Internet Institute

»

Playing video games can be good for your mood, according to a new international study from researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford.

• Study looks at player data from 67,328 gaming sessions from 8,695 players in 39 countries, analysing their mood before and during gameplay
• Across 162,325 in-game mood reports from players of the popular game PowerWash Simulator (PWS), the average player reported a more positive mood during play than at the start of each session
• Researchers predict 72% of players experience this uplift in mood during the play session based on statistical modelling of player data

The study analysed data from players in 39 countries, including the US, UK, Canada and Germany and found that PWS players’ moods rapidly increased during gameplay. Players consistently reported a higher mood after the first fifteen minutes of the play session compared to the start of each session.

The research team from the Oxford Internet Institute carried out the study to understand more about the short-term effects of playing video games.

Lead author Assistant Professor Matti Vuorre, Tilburg University and Research Associate, Oxford Internet Institute said: “At present short-term changes in video game players’ moods are poorly understood. Gameplay research frequently relies on artificial stimuli, with games created or modified by academic researchers, typically played in a lab environment rather than a natural context. Instead, we wanted to know how real play in natural contexts might predict player mood on short timescales.”

The researchers collaborated with PWS’s developer, FuturLab, to develop a research edition of the game that recorded gameplay events, game status records, participant demographics and responses to psychological survey items. This latest analysis is based on a dataset the team previously published in the journal Scientific Data last year.

«

Interestingly, one of the authors is Professor Andrew Przybylski, who – in my experience – is very apt to find positive outcomes, or at least no negative ones, in studies like this.
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OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati resigns • WSJ

Deepa Seetharaman:

»

OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, said Wednesday she was resigning, the latest in a string of departures among top executives at the company behind ChatGPT.

Murati was one of chief executive Sam Altman’s top deputies and handled much of the day-to-day management of the company, according to current and former employees.

Over the past few months, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former top researcher John Schulman, and former top researcher Jan Leike all resigned. In addition, co-founder and former president Greg Brockman recently took a leave of absence through the end of the year.

Murati’s departure comes at a critical moment for OpenAI, as it is attempting to close a funding round worth up to $6.5bn. Venture-capital firm Thrive Capital has committed about $1bn and OpenAI is in talks to get investments from longtime backer Microsoft, along with Apple, Nvidia and United Arab Emirates firm MGX, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Murati was a significant player in Altman’s brief ouster as CEO last year. She had previously approached some of OpenAI’s board members with concerns about Altman’s leadership, according to people close to the company. She described some of his leadership tactics as psychologically abusive and said she was likely to leave, according to people close to the company.

Murati was named interim CEO but Altman returned to the job just a few days later following pressure on the board by many of the company’s employees and investors. Murati has said she also shared her feedback directly with Altman and didn’t support the board of directors’ decision to fire him.

«

Murati’s statement on Twitter isn’t very dramatic – it’s all jollity and delight. (Did she write it herself, or get ChatGPT to do it? “Write a resignation letter, formal, upbeat, 200 words.”)
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The end of the iPhone upgrade? • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

The fact that I do not need an iPhone 16 is a testament not so much to the iPhone’s failure as to its resounding success. A lot of the digital software we rely on has grown worse for users in recent years; the iPhone, by contrast, has become so good that it’s hard to imagine anything but incremental improvements. Apple’s teleological phone-design strategy may have simply reached its end point, the same way evolution in nature has repeatedly resulted in an optimized species of crab.

Other tech companies, meanwhile, are embracing radical departures in phone design. Samsung offers devices that fold in half, creating a smaller screen that’s useful for minor tasks, such as texting, and a larger one for watching videos; Huawei is upping the ante with three folds. The BOOX Palma has become a surprise hit as a smartphone-ish device with an e-ink screen, similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which uses physical pixels in its display. Dumbphones, too, are growing more popular by intentionally doing less. Apple devices, by contrast, remain effective enough that they can afford to be somewhat static.

On the way out of the Apple Store, I spoke with one of the protesters, M, a young D.C. resident who was there to speak out against the new phone launch, “because there are human-rights violations being committed in order to produce new Apple products.” She continued, “The product differences between the 15 and the 16, none of them at all justify these destructions that are occurring.” She personally used an iPhone 12 that she bought refurbished, to at least avoid contributing to the proliferation of new Apple products.

«

That’s the way to show ’em, lady.
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Apple’s 80% charging limit for iPhone: how much did it help after a year? • MacRumors

Juli Clover tried the optional “only charge to 80%” method:

»

I left my iPhone [15 Pro Max, ie last year’s big model] at that 80% limit and at no point turned the setting off or tweaked it. There were some days when I ran out of battery because I was without a charger for most of the day, and there were other times that I had to bring a battery along to make sure I didn’t run out of power. It wasn’t always convenient to keep it at 80%, but there were days when it didn’t have too much of an impact.

It was always a treat when the iPhone randomly decided to charge to 100%, which is something Apple has baked in to the 80% limit to ensure the battery level stays calibrated.

Current capacity (compared to when new): 94%. Cycles (no. times charged): 299.

For the most part, I charged using USB-C rather than MagSafe, but there was some MagSafe charging mixed in. There was probably a 70/30 split between wired charging and MagSafe charging. I did often let my battery get quite low before charging, and it didn’t sit on the charger for long periods of time too often. Most charging was done in a room at 72 degrees. I’m adding this context because temperature is a factor that can affect battery longevity, and wireless charging is warmer than wired charging.

You can compare your level battery to mine, but here are a couple other metrics from MacRumors staff that also have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and did not have the battery level limited.

Current capacity: 87%. Cycles: 329
Current capacity: 90%. Cycles: 271

I don’t have a lot of data points for comparison, but it does seem that limiting the charge to 80% kept my maximum battery capacity higher than what my co-workers are seeing, but there isn’t a major difference.

«

I’ve done the same on a 15 Pro: Current capacity 97%, Cycles: 238. I think the significant difference might come in the second year, and succeeding years, but even here I think there’s a visible difference.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The art critic Brian Sewell had a low opinion of Banksy’s work. Now the Evening Standard wants to bring him back in AI form. CC-licensed photo by seanbjack 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. Critical. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How Google made the ad tech industry revolve around itself • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

»

the decisions Google made in growing its massive advertising technology business were cold-blooded and carefully crafted to primarily benefit itself, the Department of Justice argued during the first two weeks of its antitrust trial.

The DOJ finished arguing its case-in-chief on Friday in a Virginia federal court, and now it’s Google’s turn to haul in witnesses, including US government agencies that use the company’s products. Its challenge: to explain why the government is wrong to call it an illegal monopoly and why its decisions reflect reasonable business judgments that it shouldn’t be forced to change.

Over more than nine days of witness testimony, the DOJ told US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema that Google manipulated the ad tech industry to revolve around itself. The government contends that through its dominance across the entire ad tech stack, Google ensured rivals couldn’t compete and publishers couldn’t walk away. DOJ counsel Julia Tarver Wood put it this way: “The rules are set so that all roads lead back to Google.”

The government’s basic argument is that Google monopolized three markets: publisher-side tools (mainly publisher ad servers, where outlets sell ad space), a subset of advertiser-side tools (where advertisers offer their ads), and the ad exchanges where auctions take place. While Google says it’s achieved a large customer base by offering good products, the DOJ argues it simply bought up competitors — like the publisher tool DoubleClick — and tied its products together to lock customers in.

«

There’s more detail in the story, but it’s pretty hard for Google to argue that it’s not a monopoly, nor that it excluded rivals, or recognised threats to its hold on the business.
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A $1bn solar + battery storage project just broke ground in Utah • Electrek

Michelle Lewis:

»

Renewables developer rPlus Energies has broken ground on one of the largest solar + battery storage projects in the US, in east-central Utah.

The Green River Energy Center in Emery County, Utah, is a 400-megawatt (MW) solar and 400 MW/1,600-megawatt-hour battery storage project that will supply power to western electric utility PacifiCorp under a power purchase agreement.

EliTe Solar is supplying solar panels, and Tesla is providing battery storage. Sundt Construction is the engineering, procurement, and construction contractor for the project.

Securing over $1bn in construction debt financing in July, the Green River project is expected to create around 500 jobs. Salt Lake City-based rPlus Energies gives the target completion date as 2026.

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), as of Q2 2024, Utah has nearly 3.5 GW of solar installed. It forecasts another 6.1 GW will be installed in the state over the next five years, moving it from 13th to 11th for national ranking.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, in 2023, 46% of Utah’s electricity net generation came from coal-fired power plants, down from 75% in 2015.

«

Gradually but relentlessly, the US is shifting away from fossil fuels to non-fossil sources.
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Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app – The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Marques Brownlee, the YouTuber known as MKBHD, has responded to backlash over the launch of his new wallpaper app, called Panels. In a post on Tuesday, Brownlee says he’s going to address users’ concerns about pricing and “excessive data disclosures.”

Brownlee revealed the new app as part of his iPhone 16 review on Monday — a video that’s usually among his biggest of the year. But a flood of criticism about the Panels app quickly overshadowed comments about the new iPhone. “Part of building in public is getting mass feedback immediately, which is pretty dope. Almost exactly like publishing a YouTube video,” Brownlee said.

Panels is meant to offer access to a curated selection of “stunning full resolution wallpapers” from digital artists, but fans aren’t happy about the subscription that comes along with it. It costs $49.99 per year (or $11.99 per month) for a Panels Plus subscription, which lets you download all the wallpapers in the app in high resolution. You can still access a more limited selection of wallpapers for free, but you can only download them in standard definition and have to watch two ads first.

«

1: no idea why you’d want to pay money for wallpapers. Take a photo! Use Apple’s free ones!
2: amazing that Brownlee wouldn’t have tried the app out and noticed that the app wants to have location data and track you across sites. Even if he thinks the price is OK (which I think it isn’t, given the value it doesn’t add.)
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North Carolina governor candidate cries AI fabrication as defense for racist porn forum posts • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Thursday, CNN reported about inflammatory comments made by Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, on a pornography website’s message board over a decade ago. After the allegations emerged, Mark Robinson played on what we call “deep doubt” and denied the comments were his words, claiming they were manufactured by AI.

“Look, I’m not going to get into the minutia about how somebody manufactured these salacious tabloid lies, but I can tell you this: There’s been over one million dollars spent on me through AI by a billionaire’s son who’s bound and determined to destroy me,” Robinson told CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski in a televised interview, referring to an AI-generated political commercial set to air next week. “The things that people can do with the Internet now is incredible. But what I can tell you is this: Again, these are not my words. This is simply tabloid trash being used as a distraction from the substantive issues that the people of this state are facing.”

The CNN investigation found that Robinson, currently serving as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, used the username “minisoldr” on a website called “Nude Africa” between 2008 and 2012. CNN identified Robinson as the user by matching biographical details, a shared email address, and profile photos. The comments reportedly included Robinson referring to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressing support for reinstating slavery, among other controversial comments.

Considering the trail of evidence CNN pieced together and the fact the comments were reportedly posted long before the current AI boom, Robinson’s claim of an AI-generated attack is very unlikely to be true.

«

But that’s going to be the new defence: it wasn’t me, it’s fake, generated by AI. In which case resources such as the Wayback Machine keeping archives of sites (where one presumes Robinson’s previous posts are preserved) become even more valuable.
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Facebook loses jurisdiction appeal in Kenyan court paving the way for moderators’ case to proceed • AP News

Evelyne Musambi:

»

Facebook ’s parent company Meta on Friday lost its appeal in a Kenyan labour court that ruled the company could be sued in Kenya over the mass sacking of content moderators.

The court had earlier ruled that Kenyan courts had jurisdiction over the matter, but Meta challenged the ruling on appeal.

The case filed by some 185 content moderators from different African countries who were working for a Meta contractor, Sama, in Nairobi will now proceed in the labor court, their lawyer, Mercy Mutemi, said Friday. They are seeking $1.6bn in compensation.

Facebook is facing two lawsuits in Kenya, the first one filed by content moderator Daniel Motaung who alleges the company exploited him and his colleagues and damaged their mental health. The second case filed by 185 moderators challenges the termination of their employment contracts.

Facebook and Sama have defended their employment practices.

Some of the petitioners have told The Associated Press that their jobs required them to watch horrific content for eight hours a day that overwhelmed many of them while being paid 60,000 Kenyan shillings, or $414 a month. They accused Sama of doing little to ensure post-traumatic professional counseling was offered.

The Kenyan workers’ case is supported by UK-based non-profit organization Foxglove whose director, Martha Dark, said Meta had played “legal tricks to delay the case” and expressed hope that justice would be served.

«

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Evening Standard to revive Brian Sewell as AI for Van Gogh review • Deadline

Jake Kanter:

»

He was one of the most feared and revered British art critics of his generation — and now, nearly a decade after his death, Brian Sewell could be about to wield his pen once more.

Deadline understands that London’s historic Evening Standard newspaper has been making plans to revive its former writer using artificial intelligence. Two sources said AI Sewell has been assigned to review The National Gallery’s new Vincent van Gogh exhibition, titled Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers.

One person said the plans were discussed at the highest level of the Standard and in consultation with Lord Lebedev, the newspaper’s proprietor. Dylan Jones, editor-in-chief of the Standard, did not respond to requests for comment.

It is not clear how the AI will work or if the Standard has permission from Sewell’s estate. The critic was survived by his partner, the artist Dean Marsh.

The idea is part of an attempt to reinvent the Standard, a 197-year-old institution, after it stopped daily presses last week. It will pivot to weekly editions from Thursday. The embrace of AI has raised eyebrows among staff after the Standard made around 150 layoffs, including 70 editorial roles, as part of the move to weekly editions.

Sewell, who died in 2015 at the age of 84, worked for the Standard for more than 30 years and was renowned for his biting critiques. Known as Britain’s poshest art critic, he described a Damien Hirst exhibition as “detestable” and said Banksy should have been “put down at birth.” He once said there has “never been a first-rank woman artist” and “only men are capable of aesthetic greatness.”

«

I dunno, I’d leave him dead with opinions like those. Sewell was always too fond of his own voice.
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X will let people you’ve blocked see your posts • The Verge

Emma Roth and Kyle Robison:

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X will now make your posts visible to users you’ve blocked. In a reply on Monday, X owner Elon Musk said the “block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, public post.”

Currently, X displays a “You’re blocked” message when trying to view the profile of a person who’s blocked you. In addition to blocking all posts, it also prevents you from seeing their replies, media, followers, and following list.

While a source at X told The Verge that the platform is making this change because people can already view posts from users who’ve blocked them when using another account or when logged out, several of us at The Verge (myself included) have noticed that X actually prevents you from viewing someone’s profile if you’re logged out.

Musk has been vocal about his dislike of the block button. Last year, he said the feature “makes no sense” and that “it needs to be deprecated in favor of a stronger form of mute.” He also threatened to stop letting users block people on the platform completely, except for direct messages.

Even though X’s block button will continue to prevent someone from interacting with a person’s posts, they’ll still be able to see them, potentially making it easier for bad actors to continue harassing their victims.

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What Musk misses, in arguing that you can look at someone’s profile via an alt, is that that adds friction: you have to change profile, navigate to the person (if they haven’t blocked your alt), screenshot whatever, save it, go back to your original profile, post your screenshot with dunking quote tweet. The idea of blocking has been clearly applied for the past 20 years; this would mess it up.
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After X’s ban in Brazil, Tumblr reports quadrupled user growth • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Bluesky isn’t the only social networking service to benefit from X’s ban in Brazil. Tumblr this week is also reporting an increase in both active users and blog creation, the company tells TechCrunch.

According to Tumblr, in the days since the X ban in Brazil, the site saw 222.99% [tripled] growth in communities and 349.55% [quadrupled] growth in users. More specifically, Tumblr’s daily active users in Brazil have shot up by 30% from the 110,000 it was seeing, on average, in the days ahead of the ban.

What’s more, the new users aren’t just visiting the site, they’re creating accounts, too, Tumblr claims. The company says blog creation and community joins have also increased. (The company didn’t provide metrics on this front, however.)

Of those users who joined communities, Tumblr found that the percentage of daily active users in Brazil was also five times higher than those in the rest of the world.

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I think this is the reason why Musk backed down over the Brazil legal ban: losing users like this isn’t sustainable.
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Perplexity in talks with top brands on ads model as it challenges Google • FT

Cristina Criddle:

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Artificial intelligence-powered search engine Perplexity is in talks with brands including Nike and Marriott over its new advertising model, as the start-up mounts an ambitious effort to break Google’s stranglehold over the $300bn digital ads industry.

The San Francisco-based group is seeking to redesign the auction-based ads system pioneered by Google, where marketers bid to have a sponsored link placed against search queries.

At present, Perplexity’s AI chatbot gives a comprehensive response to user questions based on information from the internet, citing sources and including links to web pages. Below this, Perplexity offers suggested follow-up queries.

Under its new advertising model, brands will be able to bid for a “sponsored” question, which features an AI-generated answer approved by the advertiser.

Perplexity has held talks with a small number of top companies, including Nike and Marriott, according to correspondence seen by the Financial Times. The company said it hoped to roll out the ads system by the end of the year and was targeting “premium” brands. Nike and Marriott declined to comment.

Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chief executive and a former Google intern, said: “Ads are really useful when they are relevant and coming from brands that are high quality, and a lot of people make purchases based on that.”

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I’m not sure *lots* of people do. Instagram and Google have to show a lot of ads to people to get them to buy things – though Instagram perhaps has a better hit rate. Also, Google (and Instagram, and Facebook) have pretty tight holds on the ad market. Along with Netflix and everyone else you can imagine.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if an MRI could be shrunk from a car-sized thing to a hand-sized one? One startup is trying. CC-licensed photo by Navy Medicine 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 10 links for you. Not that small. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Alibaba’s Qwen AI model challenges US dominance despite chip restrictions • Rest Of World

Sam Eifling:

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So far, the AI boom has been dominated by U.S. companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta. In recent months, though, a new name has been popping up on benchmarking lists: Alibabai’s Qwen. Over the past few months, variants of Qwen have been topping the leaderboards of sites that measure an AI model’s performance.

“Qwen 72B is the king, and Chinese models are dominating,” Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue wrote in June, after a Qwen-based model first rose to the top of his company’s Open LLM leaderboard.

It’s a surprising turnaround for the Chinese AI industry, which many thought was doomed by semiconductor restrictions and limitations on computing power. Qwen’s success is showing that China can compete with the world’s best AI models — raising serious questions about how long U.S. companies will continue to dominate the field. And by focusing on capabilities like language support, Qwen is breaking new ground on what an AI model can do — and who it can be built for.

Those capabilities have come as a surprise to many developers, even those working on Qwen itself. AI developer David Ng used Qwen to build the model that topped the Open LLM leaderboard. He’s built models using Meta and Google’s technology also but says Alibaba’s gave him the best results. “For some reason, it works best on the Chinese models,” he told Rest of World. “I don’t know why.”

In the short term, much of Qwen’s success comes from its unique position in the Chinese market. At launch, Alibaba claimed some 90,000 clients were using some models from Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen LLM series. (The name “Qwen” comes from a shortening of the term, which translates roughly to “all-encompassing knowledge.”) Most of the clients are Chinese companies that would be reluctant to form direct partnerships with U.S. companies like OpenAI or Anthropic.

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World’s biggest banks pledge support for nuclear power • FT

Lee Harris and Malcolm Moore:

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Fourteen of the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions are pledging to increase their support for nuclear energy, a move that governments and the industry hope will unlock finance for a new wave of nuclear power plants.

At an event on Monday in New York with White House climate policy adviser John Podesta, institutions including Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will say they support a goal first set out at the COP28 climate negotiations last year to triple the world’s nuclear energy capacity by 2050.

They will not spell out exactly what they would do, but nuclear experts said the public show of support was a long-awaited recognition that the sector had a critical role to play in the transition to low-carbon energy.

The difficulty and high cost of financing nuclear projects has been an obstacle to new plants and contributed to a significant slowdown in western countries since a wave of reactors was built in the 1970s and 1980s.

“This event is going to be a game-changer,” said George Borovas, head of the nuclear practice at law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth and a board member of the World Nuclear Association. Until now, he said, banks had found it politically difficult to support new nuclear projects, which often required sign-off from the chief executive’s office.

“Banks at their senior management level would just say, we don’t understand anything about nuclear. We just know it’s very difficult, very controversial.”

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Promising; next you’d want the money to be withdrawn from funding fossil fuel projects.
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Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse? • The Guardian

Isabel O’Brien:

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Big tech has made some big claims about greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. But as the rise of artificial intelligence creates ever bigger energy demands, it’s getting hard for the industry to hide the true costs of the data centers powering the tech revolution.

According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are probably about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported.

Amazon is the largest emitter of the big five tech companies by a mile – the emissions of the second-largest emitter, Apple, were less than half of Amazon’s in 2022. However, Amazon has been kept out of the calculation above because its differing business model makes it difficult to isolate data center-specific emissions figures for the company.

As energy demands for these data centers grow, many are worried that carbon emissions will, too. The International Energy Agency stated that data centers already accounted for 1% to 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2022 – and that was before the AI boom began with ChatGPT’s launch at the end of that year.

AI is far more energy-intensive on data centers than typical cloud-based applications. According to Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search, and data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030. Goldman competitor Morgan Stanley’s research has made similar findings, projecting data center emissions globally to accumulate to 2.5bn metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030.

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Hence, unsurprisingly, you might want to get a nuclear power station to be your provider – because, as Ben Thompson also points out, nuclear stations run 24/7.
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Jony Ive confirms he’s working on a new device with OpenAI • The Verge

Alex Cranz:

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Jony Ive has confirmed that he’s working with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on an AI hardware project. The confirmation came today as part of a profile of Ive in The New York Times, nearly a year after the possibility of a collaboration between Altman and the longtime Apple designer was first reported on.

There aren’t a lot of details on the project. Ive reportedly met Altman through Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, and the venture is being funded by Ive and the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’ company. The Times reports it could raise $1 billion in funding by the end of the year but makes no mention of Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank CEO rumored last year to have invested $1 billion in the project.

The project only has 10 employees currently, but they include Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, two key people who worked with Ive on the iPhone. LoveFrom, Ive’s company, is leading the device’s design, according to the report. The team is reportedly now working out of a 32,000-square-foot office building in San Francisco, part of a $90 million strip of real estate that Ive has bought up on a single city block.

As for the device itself? The Times says that Ive and Altman discussed “how generative AI made it possible to create a new computing device because the technology could do more for users than traditional software” due to its ability to handle complicated requests. Last year, it was rumored to be inspired by touchscreen technology and the original iPhone.

But it sounds like few specifics are nailed down.

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Guess: it will be a round flat oblong (perhaps with one side raised) with at most one button and one light. Perhaps a hidden speaker.
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‘It’s not a solution for teen girls like me’: Instagram’s new under-18 rules met with skepticism • The Guardian

Alaina Demopoulos:

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Meta, which owns Instagram, rolled out changes that give parents the ability to set daily time limits on the app and block teens from using Instagram at night. Parents can also see the accounts their children message, along with the content categories they view. Teen accounts are now private by default, and Meta said “sensitive content” – which could range from violence to influencers hawking plastic surgery – will be “limited”.

Teens with Instagram accounts will notice these rules go into effect within 60 days. If a child under the age of 16 wants to nix or alter these settings, they need parental permission; 16- and 17-year-olds can change the features without an adult. (One very easy loophole for teens: lying about their age. Meta also said it is working on improved age verification measures to prevent teens from circumventing age restrictions.)

“I feel these changes are very positive in a lot of ways, especially because they’re restricting sensitive content, but I don’t think it’s a solution,” Morton said. “Especially for teen girls, if you ask them what the main problem with Instagram is, they would say body image stuff.”

The issue of teen safety has dogged Meta since its start as Facebook, and these new rules come amid revived backlash from parents and watchdog groups. Instagram has come under fire for not protecting children from child predators and feeding them self-harm content. While testifying at a Senate hearing on online child safety in January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to parents in the audience holding signs with pictures of children lost to suicide or exploited on the app.

And according to a 2021 Wall Street Journal investigation, researchers at Instagram have been studying how the app harms young users, especially young girls, for years.

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Electronic warfare spooks airlines, pilots and air-safety officials • WSJ

Andrew Tangel and Drew FitzGerald; graphics by Adrienne Tong and Carl Churchill:

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American Airlines Capt. Dan Carey knew his cockpit equipment was lying to him when an alert began blaring “pull up!” as his Boeing 777 passed over Pakistan in March—at an altitude of 32,000 feet, far above any terrain.

The warning stemmed from a kind of electronic warfare that hundreds of civilian pilots encounter each day: GPS spoofing. The alert turned out to be false but illustrated how fake signals that militaries use to ward off drones and missiles are also permeating growing numbers of commercial aircraft, including U.S. airlines’ international flights.

“It was concerning, but it wasn’t startling, because we were at cruise altitude,” Carey said. Had an engine failure or other in-flight emergency struck at the same time, though, the situation “could be extremely dangerous.”

Pilots, aviation-industry officials and regulators said spoofed Global Positioning System signals are spreading beyond active conflict zones near Ukraine and the Middle East, confusing cockpit navigation and safety systems and taxing pilots’ attention in commercial jets carrying passengers and cargo.

The attacks started affecting a large number of commercial flights about a year ago, pilots and aviation experts said. The number of flights affected daily has surged from a few dozen in February to more than 1,100 in August, according to analyses from SkAI Data Services and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

Modern airliners’ heavy reliance on GPS means that fake data can cascade through cockpit systems, creating glitches that last for a few minutes or an entire flight. Pilots have reported clocks resetting to earlier times, false warnings and misdirected flight paths, according to anonymized reports shared with government and industry groups.

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(Thanks Karsten for the link.)
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When you call a restaurant, you might be chatting with an AI host • Wired via Ars Technica

Flora Tsapovsky:

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A pleasant female voice greets me over the phone. “Hi, I’m an assistant named Jasmine for Bodega,” the voice says. “How can I help?”

“Do you have patio seating,” I ask. Jasmine sounds a little sad as she tells me that unfortunately, the San Francisco–based Vietnamese restaurant doesn’t have outdoor seating. But her sadness isn’t the result of her having a bad day. Rather, her tone is a feature, a setting.

Jasmine is a member of a new, growing clan: the AI voice restaurant host. If you recently called up a restaurant in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, or San Francisco, chances are you have spoken to one of Jasmine’s polite, calculated competitors.  

In the sea of AI voice assistants, hospitality phone agents haven’t been getting as much attention as consumer-based generative AI tools like Gemini Live and ChatGPT-4o. And yet, the niche is heating up, with multiple emerging startups vying for restaurant accounts across the US.

Last May, voice-ordering AI garnered much attention at the National Restaurant Association’s annual food show. Bodega, the high-end Vietnamese restaurant I called, used Maitre-D AI, which launched primarily in the Bay Area in 2024. Newo, another new startup, is currently rolling its software out at numerous Silicon Valley restaurants. One-year-old RestoHost is now answering calls at 150 restaurants in the Atlanta metro area, and Slang, a voice AI company that started focusing on restaurants exclusively during the COVID-19 pandemic and announced a $20m funding round in 2023, is gaining ground in the New York and Las Vegas markets.

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And there you were thinking that it would be your Google phone that would be ringing up and making appointments. Well the joke’s on you, human.
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Telegram changes policy, says it will provide user data to authorities • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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Telegram updated its privacy policy on Monday to say that the company will provide user data, such as IP addresses and phone numbers, to law enforcement agencies in response to a valid legal order.

The news is a significant shift in Telegram’s policies on providing data to law enforcement. It comes after French authorities arrested Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov in August, in part due to Telegram’s refusal to hand over data in response to lawful orders.

“If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you’re a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities,” the privacy policy read on Monday. 

A day earlier, the policy only specifically mentioned terror cases. “If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you’re a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened,” an archived version of the policy reads. 

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Telegram (or more specifically Pavel Durov) deciding that keeping its bosses out of jail is more important than its users staying out of jail. Which makes sense, really.
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Synex founder, once detained at the border with an 80-pound magnet, is building portable MRIs to test glucose • TechCrunch

Margaux MacColl:

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Back in 2019, Synex Medical founder Ben Nashman spent the night detained by US customs. Nashman tried to explain he was simply transporting materials from Buffalo to Toronto for his homemade MRI. Customs, however, took issue with the label on the package: “nuclear magnetic resonance.” 

Nashman spent hours in a bright waiting room before he finally convinced them that he was really just a run-of-the-mill 18-year-old scientist with an obsession with MRI technology. They let him take his roughly 80-pound magnet, and he zoomed back to Toronto. “I got back at like 3 or 4 am and got a few hours of sleep before classes,” he said. 

Nashman, now 24, might have landed himself on a list of suspicious individuals, but he insists it was worth it: that one very long night was part of his years-long journey to build a portable MRI capable of testing glucose and other important molecules without the need to extract blood. Today, the company is one step closer to that goal, announcing a $21.8m Series A fundraise, with investors like Accomplice, Radical Ventures, Fundomo and Khosla Ventures. It brings the company’s total haul up to over $36m, with includes seed funding from Sam Altman. 

Right now, Synex’s prototype is the size of a toaster, although Nashman hopes to one day have it fit in your palm. It works by first using MRI to create a 3D image of the finger to find the best spot to test. It then uses something called magnetic resonance spectroscopy to send radio pulses that “excite the different molecules,” Nashman said. The machine then takes the signals from all the molecules and filters for a specific one. Synex will start with glucose testing, but will eventually track things like amino acids, lactate and ketones.  

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Very ambitious project, but if it can be made to work, then it’s got a huge potential market for diabetics.
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Sonos workers shed light on why the app update went so horribly • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Employees Bloomberg spoke with claimed that internal frustrations were high close to the app’s scheduled launch date because the app wasn’t ready. Three former workers who recently worked there pointed to “yelling” and “screaming” in meetings as employees tried to warn higher-ups. Employees claimed that Sonos’ desire to get new customers and please investors was becoming more important than ensuring that old hardware would work properly with the new app. Indeed, this is exactly what happened when the app released. [CEO Patrick] Spence admitted in August that many customers, “especially those with some of our older products in their systems, are having an experience that is worse than” before. Examples included “existing speakers missing from their Sonos systems,” “errors while setting up new products,” and latency, per Spence.

“They thought they were making such a big, bold decision. It was the wrong decision,” someone Bloomberg described as a “former senior employee” said. Additionally, two people told Bloomberg that one former employee who worked on the app said during a meeting that they were worried about losing their job if they kept questioning the app’s release.

Per Bloomberg, Spence asked Sonos lead counsel Eddie Lazarus to investigate what led to the app debacle. Speaking with about 24 “key employees,” Bloomberg reported, Lazarus reported his findings to Sonos at the end of July.

Sonos’ head counsel said that Sonos created a list of “essential” bugs to fix before releasing the update but admitted: “Our list of essential bugs, obviously, was not comprehensive enough.”

Lazarus disagreed with the idea of a “breakdown in culture,” as Bloomberg put it, driving the bad app’s release. He noted that the app’s release was pushed from early 2024 until May in response to employee concerns.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that Sonos should have waited until the app was on par with the experience long-time users have enjoyed for years before rolling it out. It’s possible that it would have delayed the release of the Ace headphones, which were supposed to help Sonos revive its revenue after a post-pandemic decline. But now Sonos is delaying two product launches because of its hastiness.

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The technical debt had built up literally for decades. But Sonos got the timing exactly wrong on when and how to pay it. Still a business school example of how not to do it.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The demand for electricity for AI means Microsoft is signing a deal that will reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. CC-licensed photo by Ted Van Pelt 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. Fizzing with energy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The Russian bot army that conquered online poker

Kit Chellel on how Russians realised they could make a serious amount of money by “solving” poker:

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Deeplay’s bots could help club operators attract new members by making sure there were always active tables to join. The company also offered game analysis and, ironically, anti-bot security, to keep interlopers away.

Some former Deeplay employees told me that once its bots were operating at poker club tables, they could make money at the expense of real users. Others said the skill level could be adjusted down, allowing humans to win just enough so they stayed at tables longer, spending more money. Deeplay would get a fee for providing this technology or take a share of the increased revenue. It’s unclear whether any of Deeplay’s clients knew they were in business with an offshoot of perhaps the largest cheating operation in the history of poker.

I couldn’t find a single poker club or traditional website that openly admitted to running internal bots or having a relationship with Deeplay. “It’s a complicated question,” one gambling executive responded when I asked whether liquidity bots were ethical. “I know of other platforms that use bots.” I asked the top five poker websites the same thing. They all either denied any connection to the practice, declined to comment or didn’t respond. Messages sent to official channels at Deeplay went unreturned.

The average poker enthusiast today can’t really know whether their online opponent is a person or a machine. Game security isn’t infallible, even on the big platforms. “This is an arms race against some very motivated individuals,” PokerStars said in a 2023 blog post. At a recent tournament with a $12.5m prize pool, run by Winning Poker Network, a unit of Americas Cardroom, the second-place player was disqualified midevent on suspicion of botting. “I believe there is no clean game online,” Vitaly Lunkin, a Russian professional, told me.

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It’s a long read, and Bloomberg wants you to register for free to read it. Unfortunately the Javascript on my browser broke and I just got the text.
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Qualcomm approached Intel about a takeover in recent days • WSJ

Lauren Thomas, Laura Cooper and Asa Fitch:

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Chip giant Qualcomm made a takeover approach to rival Intel in recent days, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be one of the largest and most consequential deals in recent years.

A deal for Intel, which has a market value of roughly $90bn, would come as the chip maker has been suffering through one of the most significant crises in its five-decade history.

A deal is far from certain, the people cautioned. Even if Intel is receptive, a deal of that size is all but certain to attract antitrust scrutiny, though it is also possible it could be seen as an opportunity to strengthen the US’s competitive edge in chips. To get the deal done, Qualcomm could intend to sell assets or parts of Intel to other buyers.

Intel—once the world’s most valuable chip company—had seen its shares drop roughly 60% so far this year before The Wall Street Journal reported on the approach. As recently as 2020, the company had a market value above $290bn. The stock closed up over 3% Friday after the Journal’s report.

…Both Intel and Qualcomm have become US national champions of sorts as chip-making gets increasingly politicized. Intel is in line to get up to $8.5bn of potential grants for factories in the US as chief executive Pat Gelsinger tries to build up a business making chips on contract for outsiders.

Qualcomm, led by chief executive Cristiano Amon, had engaged with Intel to potentially make its chips in Intel’s factories. But Qualcomm halted the effort amid technical missteps, the Journal reported last year.

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That last bit goes against the idea that Qualcomm would want to buy it, doesn’t it? Maybe Qualcomm would want some bits, but not the whole mess. Feels like Intel let this out to pep up its share price and make itself look attractive – or just harder to acquire.
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Israel’s pager attacks have changed the world • The New York Times

Bruce Schneier:

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The bottom line: our supply chains are vulnerable, which means that we are vulnerable. Anyone — any country, any group, any individual — that interacts with a high-tech supply chain can potentially subvert the equipment passing through it. It could be subverted to eavesdrop. It could be subverted to degrade or fail on command. And, although it’s harder, it can be subverted to kill.

Personal devices connected to the internet — and countries in which they are in high use, such as the United States — are especially at risk. In 2007, the Idaho National Laboratory demonstrated that a cyberattack could cause a high-voltage generator to explode. In 2010, a computer virus believed to have been developed jointly by the United States and Israel destroyed centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear facility. A 2017 dump of C.I.A. documents included statements about the possibility of remotely hacking cars, which WikiLeaks asserted can be used to carry out “nearly undetectable assassinations.” This isn’t just theoretical: in 2015, a Wired reporter allowed hackers to remotely take over his car while he was driving it. They disabled the engine while he was on a highway.

The world has already begun to adjust to this threat. Many countries are increasingly wary of buying communications equipment from countries they don’t trust. The United States and others are banning large routers from the Chinese company Huawei because we fear that they could be used for eavesdropping and — even worse — disabled remotely in a time of escalating hostilities. In 2019 there was a minor panic over Chinese-made subway cars that could possibly have been modified to eavesdrop on their riders.

…It’s not obvious how to defend against these and similar attacks. Our high-tech supply chains are complex and international. It didn’t raise any red flags to Hezbollah that the group’s pagers came from a Hungary-based company that sourced them from Taiwan, because that sort of thing is perfectly normal. Most of the electronics Americans buy come from overseas, including our iPhones, whose parts come from dozens of countries before being pieced together primarily in China.

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How Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” took over the internet • Vox

Aja Romano:

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It’s the stories that draw people in: A bride feeling upstaged on her wedding day; the woman whose husband insists on bringing his sister with them on their honeymoon; an airline passenger who wonders if she should have given up her first-class seat for a stranger’s child.

These are all tales of questionable behavior from r/AmItheAsshole. AITA, as it’s known for short, is hosted by Reddit, the one-stop clearinghouse for internet drama, comeuppances, and popcorn gallery judgments on the behavior of strangers. The mothership has been on a hot streak, tripling its traffic over the last year, when Google tweaked its search algorithm to prioritize content made by and for real people. Since then, Reddit has risen to over 340 million weekly unique users. Starting from around that same period, AITA has ascended rapidly from niche forum to mainstream forum to omnipresent cultural juggernaut.

The AmITheAsshole subreddit, as Reddit’s topic-based forums are known, boasts 20 million members ready to decide who’s right in a given situation and who’s wrong, if a hair more evocatively. It’s seen numerous spin-offs; not just advice subreddits and confessional subreddits that get at the same yen for revelation and judgment, but subreddits devoted to filtering and curating all those other advice and confessional subs, so that readers can find only the best (or worst) stories. But AmITheAsshole’s cultural dominance doesn’t end there.

This Reddit sprawl has spilled over outside of the platform itself, spawning a whole internet ecosystem dedicated to reading and sharing content from advice subreddits.

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Microsoft signs deal to revive Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to help power data centers • GeekWire

Lisa Stiffler:

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As tech companies scramble to secure new sources of energy, Microsoft on Friday announced a 20-year deal to restart a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island — a facility made infamous by a partial meltdown in 1979.

The deal is a power purchase agreement (PPA) between Microsoft and the clean energy company Constellation to bring a 835-megawatt nuclear reactor back online. The plant was mothballed in 2019 due to economic issues, according to the energy company.

In a LinkedIn post, Constellation CEO Joseph Dominguez called the arrangement, “a win for Pennsylvania’s economy, a big step for Microsoft in its efforts to help decarbonize the grid, and a key milestone as we advance the clean energy transition.”

He also noted that the reactor being restarted, called TMI Unit 1, “was among the safest and most reliable power generators in the U.S.” The partial meltdown impacted TMI-2. The facility is getting a new name in the deal, Crane Clean Energy Center, and is expected to become operational by 2028.

Power demand is rising as Microsoft ramps up construction of new, power-hungry data centers in order to support the increased use of artificial intelligence and generative AI.

At the same time, the Redmond, Wash.-based company has ambitious carbon reduction targets that are becoming more difficult to meet.

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It was all set for decommissioning and/or closure back in 2019. This is quite the reverse.
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Elon Musk’s X backs down in Brazil • The New York Times

Jack Nicas and Ana Ionova:

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Elon Musk suddenly appears to be giving up.

After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.

The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.

Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.

Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.

The abrupt about-face from Mr. Musk in Brazil appeared to be a defeat for the outspoken businessman and his self-designed image as a warrior for free speech.

«

Or, just possibly, someone pointed out to him that Brazil actually provided millions of users, and desperately needed advertising revenue, and that they’d migrated to other social networks and might not come back, and that he’d backed down in other countries.
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Silent solar • The Crucial Years

Bill McKibben:

»

[In] Pakistan… power prices in the wake of Putin’s Ukraine invasion have soared so dramatically that sales of electricity have gone down 10% in the last two years. That should cripple a country—”yet somehow it’s economy grew by two% anyway,” [Aseem Ashar and Nathan Warren reported]. Again, that should have been impossible: if there’s a truism, especially in the developing world, it’s that growth in energy use is tied to growth in economies.

So what was happening? Basically, Pakistanis were buying huge quantities of very cheap Chinese solar panels and putting them up themselves. Pakistan, they reported, “has become the third-largest importer of Chinese solar modules, acquiring a staggering 13GW in the first half of this year alone.” This is particularly astonishing because the country’s entire official electricity generating capacity is only 46 GW.

In other words: In just six months, Pakistan imported solar capacity equivalent to 30% of its total electricity generation capacity – an absolutely staggering amount.

Energy analyst Dave Jones has gone to great lengths to track this spread on Google maps, finding building after building across the country with big new solar arrays on the roof. For middle-class Pakistanis, they can pay off the investment in a few years selling back power to the grid; in poor areas, things like tube wells for irrigation are now increasingly run on solar.

«

Once again, it’s easy to underestimate how cheap solar has become, and how many countries have plentiful sunshine.
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iPad Pro iPadOS 18 warning: Apple pulls update as tablets are bricked • Forbes

David Phelan:

»

The latest iPad Pro with the M4 chip is a triumph of software and hardware, so users may have been champing at the bit to upgrade to the latest iPadOS 18 software when it launched on Monday, Sept. 16. However, some users have claimed that their iPad have become useless, and Apple has now removed the option to update to it.

Since the software has some cool upgrades, like a customizable home screen, improved handwriting with the Apple Pencil, live audio transcription and the long-awaited arrival of the Calculator app, you can see why people would hurry to install it.

The iPadOS 18 software has now been withdrawn, as pointed out by MacRumors, so it’s no longer available to be downloaded or installed.

Well, you can download it for other iPads—I’ve just done it on an iPad Air—but Apple is apparently holding it back for its latest, most premium iPad.

You can understand why: some users on Reddit have reported that when installed, the iPad Pro simply stopped working.

«

I have one of these new devices, and had wondered why iPadOS 18 wasn’t available on it. This explains. (Hope you didn’t upgrade too hastily. Personally I’m not sure what v18 really has that’s worth upgrading for.)
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‘Remorseless, ruthless, racist’: my battle to expose Mohamed Al Fayed • The Guardian

Henry Porter was from 1995 leading the investigation by Vanity Fair magazine into allegations of sexual assault on his employees by Mohamed al-Fayed, at that time the owner of Harrods:

»

Our concern was that if we settled, the evidence about his abuse and surveillance would never be available to [Princess Diana, then beginning a relationship with al-Fayed’s song Dodi]. So it was vital that she understood that all Fayed’s properties were wired for audio and video, and that she could never be sure of having a private conversation on his premises, let alone being able to undress without being watched. Through intermediaries, we made our fears known. Diana’s friend Rosa Monckton and her husband Dominic Lawson also repeatedly warned Diana. I have no idea whether she paid attention.

By the end of July 1997, no agreement was reached. The holidays were upon us and things were closing down, but on 4 August we learned that George Carman, the celebrated QC of the time who was acting for Fayed, had blanched when reading our re-re-amended defence, which included the evidence of security head Bob Loftus and Fayed’s former secretary. The judge delayed the trial by a year – to autumn 1998 – and commented that even without the latest 800 pages of evidence: “you would win this case if you proved only 75% of what you already have.” He described the new allegations as “very serious, including conspiracy to commit several serious offences. It is a matter of public interest.”

That had been my line in a four-page memo to my bosses in New York when I listed the main findings of our investigation, some involving serious criminality. But the crucial point, which I made less well, was that we owed so much to the seven women who had agreed to testify, arguably a bigger step then than the one taken by the women who appeared in the BBC’s documentary, although that, too, required extraordinary courage. In his prime, Fayed was a remorseless enemy to anyone who crossed him, and our witnesses had good reason to be fearful.

Everything was swept away by the death of Diana and Dodi in Paris on 31 August 1997. Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, decided to shut down the case immediately out of respect for the grieving father. Both sides absorbed their own costs, no damages were paid, and we agreed to place all evidence in locked storage. It seemed the right and humane decision in the immediate aftermath of the shocking deaths. But it wasn’t, because of the countless women who have suffered since our case was settled, including many who were raped by a man who appeared unaffected by grief or regret.

«

What a bizarre thing: Diana’s death – the fault of al-Fayed’s driver, who was over the limit – also killed the legal case that would have destroyed his reputation, and saved scores of women from his abuse. Fate is a fickle, indifferent thing.
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Do black babies have better survival rates with black doctors than white doctors? • Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche

Steve Stewart-Williams:

»

According to a famous study, Black newborns have higher survival rates when they’re attended by Black doctors than White doctors. A re-analysis of the data, however, shows that the effect disappears when you account for the fact that Black doctors more often see normal weight Black newborns, whereas White doctors more often see low birth weight Black newborns – newborns that have much poorer odds of survival.

The re-analysis was reported in a new paper by George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s [part of] the paper’s significance statement:

»

An influential study suggests that Black newborns experience much lower mortality when attended by Black physicians after birth. Using the same data, we replicate those findings and estimate alternative models that include controls for very low birth weights, a key determinant of neonatal mortality not included in the original analysis.

«

«

Subtle point, but also this is why it’s useful to have the data available so it can be reexamined for subtle points that might be missed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new social network is just AI chatbots, all the time. A vision of heaven, or hell? CC-licensed photo by James Royal-Lawson 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: all hail the algorithm.

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.

A new era in sabotage: turning ordinary devices into grenades, on a mass scale • The New York Times

David Sanger:

»

the presumed Israeli sabotage of hundreds or thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies and other wireless devices used by Hezbollah has taken the murky art of electronic sabotage to new and frightening heights. This time the targeted devices were kept in trouser pockets, on belts, in the kitchen. Ordinary communication devices were turned into miniature grenades.

And while the target was Hezbollah fighters, the victims were anyone standing around, including children. Lebanese authorities say 11 people died and more than 2,700 were injured in Tuesday’s attack. On Wednesday, at least 20 more people were killed and 450 injured in a second round of attacks with exploding walkie-talkies.

There is reason to fear where this attack on Hezbollah fighters might go next. The history of such sabotage is that once a new threshold is crossed, it becomes available to everyone.

Of course, there is nothing new about sabotaging phones or planting bombs: terrorists and spy agencies have done that for decades. What made this different was the mass scale, the implantation of explosives on so many devices at once. Such subterfuge is difficult to pull off, because it requires getting deep into the supply chain. And that, in a way, is the best reason for people not to be afraid of their internet-connected refrigerators and computers.

But our sense of vulnerability about how everyday implements connected to the internet can become deadly weapons may be just beginning.

«

There’s a suggestion that the pagers and walkie-talkies were routed through Iran – after all, it’s hard to get a licence to export to Hezbolla – which will increase the group’s uncertainty about what can be trusted.

At The Atlantic, Eliot Cohen points out:

»

Hezbollah members will now be unlikely to trust any form of electronics: car keys, cellphones, computers, television sets. Myth and legend, no doubt reinforced by an information-warfare campaign, will magnify Israel’s success in getting inside black boxes no matter how big or how small. An army skittish about any kind of electronics is one that is paralyzed—an individual leader, like Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar, can communicate without a phone, but an entire organization cannot.

The Iranians, already reeling from the assassination of the political head of Hamas in a Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse on the day of the inauguration of the new president, now have much to wonder about as well. How, they must ask themselves, did the Israelis penetrate the supply chain? How did they get access to the pagers? How did they know that this batch was going to Hezbollah? How did they manage to foil whatever security precautions had been taken?

«

The ground war is inevitable, Cohen says:

»

Both Iran and Hezbollah have to know that Israel now believes itself to be fighting an existential fight, with a different set of rules.

«

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AI-generated code is causing outages and security issues in businesses • Tech Republic

Fiona Jackson:

»

Bilkent University researchers found that the latest versions of ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Amazon CodeWhisperer generated correct code just 65.2%, 46.3%, and 31.1% of the time, respectively.

Part of the problem is that AI is notoriously bad at maths because it struggles to understand logic. Plus, programmers are not known for being great at writing prompts because “AI doesn’t do things consistently or work like code,” according to Wharton AI professor Ethan Mollick.

In late 2023, more than half of organisations said they encountered security issues with poor AI-generated code “sometimes” or “frequently,” as per a survey by Snyk. But the issue could worsen, as 90% of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants by 2028, according to Gartner.

Tariq Shaukat, CEO of Sonar and a former president at Bumble and Google Cloud, is “hearing more and more about it” already. He told TechRepublic in an interview, “Companies are deploying AI-code generation tools more frequently, and the generated code is being put into production, causing outages and/or security issues.

“In general, this is due to insufficient reviews, either because the company has not implemented robust code quality and code-review practices, or because developers are scrutinising AI-written code less than they would scrutinise their own code.

“When asked about buggy AI, a common refrain is ‘it is not my code,’ meaning they feel less accountable because they didn’t write it.”

«

No actual evidence is provided of these outages – we’re told the CEO of a company is “hearing more and more” about them – and I’d also like to know how good your average Joe or Jane programmer is at generating “correct” code. (The linked paper doesn’t specify that – big miss! – though it did introduce me to the concept of a “code smell” which I’d somehow never come across before.)
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Google employees’ attempts to hide messages from investigators might backfire • The Verge

Lauren Feiner on how Google’s peculiar approach to retaining documents on legal request might not help it in its adtech trial, because the judge could “draw an adverse inference” about why that happened:

»

Brad Bender, another Google ad tech executive who testified earlier in the week, described conversations with colleagues over chat as more akin to “bumping into the hall and saying ‘hey we should chat.’” The DOJ also questioned former Google executive Rahul Srinivasan about emails he marked privileged and confidential, asking what legal advice he was seeking in those emails. He said he didn’t remember.

Google employees were well aware of how their written words could be used against the company, the DOJ argued, pointing to the company’s “Communicate with Care” legal training for employees. In one 2019 email, Srinivasan copied a lawyer on an email to colleagues about an ad tech feature and reminded the group to be careful with their language. “We should be particularly careful when framing something as a ‘circumvention,’” he wrote. “We should assume that every document (and email) we generate will likely be seen by regulators.” The email was labeled “PRIVILEGED and CONFIDENTIAL.”

While the many documents shown by the DOJ demonstrate that Google often discussed business decisions in writing, at other times, they seemed to intentionally leave the documentation sparse. “Keeping the notes limited due to sensitivity of the subject,” a 2021 Google document says. “Separate privileged emails will be sent to folks to follow up on explicit [action items].”

“We take seriously our obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents,” Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels said in a statement.

«

The judge in a previous trial didn’t think Google took those obligations seriously enough. Remains to be seen what this one will think.
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Norway: electric cars outnumber petrol for first time in ‘historic milestone’ • AFP via The Guardian

»

Electric cars now outnumber petrol cars in Norway for the first time, an industry organisation has said, a world first that puts the country on track towards taking fossil fuel vehicles off the road.

Of the 2.8m private cars registered in the Nordic country, 754,303 are all-electric, against 753,905 that run on petrol, the Norwegian road federation (OFV) said in a statement.

Diesel models remain the most numerous at just under 1m, but their sales are falling rapidly.

“This is historic. A milestone few saw coming 10 years ago,” said OFV director Øyvind Solberg Thorsen.

“The electrification of the fleet of passenger cars is going quickly, and Norway is thereby rapidly moving towards becoming the first country in the world with a passenger car fleet dominated by electric cars.”

Norway, paradoxically a major oil and gas producer, has set a target for all new cars being sold to be zero emission vehicles – mostly EVs since the share of hydrogen cars is so small – by 2025, 10 years ahead of the EU’s goal.

In August, all-electric vehicles made up a record 94.3% of new car registrations in Norway, boosted by sales of the Tesla Model Y.

«

There’s a nice read from back in March about how Norway got there, apparently involving Morten from A-ha before he was Morten from A-ha.
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“Dead Internet theory” comes to life with new AI-powered social media app • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

For the past few years, a conspiracy theory called “Dead Internet theory” has picked up speed as large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT increasingly generate text and even social media interactions found online. The theory says that most social Internet activity today is artificial and designed to manipulate humans for engagement.

On Monday, software developer Michael Sayman launched a new AI-populated social network app called SocialAI that feels like it’s bringing that conspiracy theory to life, allowing users to interact solely with AI chatbots instead of other humans. It’s available on the iPhone app store, but so far, it’s picking up pointed criticism.

After its creator announced SocialAI as “a private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make,” computer security specialist Ian Coldwater quipped on X, “This sounds like actual hell.” Software developer and frequent AI pundit Colin Fraser expressed a similar sentiment: “I don’t mean this like in a mean way or as a dunk or whatever but this actually sounds like Hell. Like capital H Hell.”

SocialAI’s 28-year-old creator, Michael Sayman, previously served as a product lead at Google, and he also bounced between Facebook, Roblox, and Twitter over the years. In an announcement post on X, Sayman wrote about how he had dreamed of creating the service for years, but the tech was not yet ready. He sees it as a tool that can help lonely or rejected people.

“SocialAI is designed to help people feel heard, and to give them a space for reflection, support, and feedback that acts like a close-knit community,” wrote Sayman. “It’s a response to all those times I’ve felt isolated, or like I needed a sounding board but didn’t have one. I know this app won’t solve all of life’s problems, but I hope it can be a small tool for others to reflect, to grow, and to feel seen.”

«

No. Nonononononono. This is Black Mirror stuff. You could almost, if you looked sidewise enough, think it might be something that those at end of life or with dementia might use, but even so it feels like denying humans the thing they most need: human companionship.
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Solar power continues to surge in 2024 • Ember

Euan Graham and Nicolas Fulghum:

»

Ember’s analysis of the latest data on monthly capacity installations shows that the world is on track to reach 593 GW of solar installations by the end of this year. This would once again surpass most industry forecasts, and comes after 2023 showed record growth in solar installations of 86% compared to 2022. Countries need to plan ahead to make the most of the high levels of solar capacity being built today and ensure the continued build-out of capacity in the coming years.

Ember estimates that at the current rate of additions, the world will install 593 GW of solar panels this year. That’s 29% more than was installed last year, maintaining strong growth even after an estimated 87% surge in 2023. In 2024, an estimated 292 GW of solar capacity was installed by the end of July.

«

Half of that will be in China, but countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are also jumping on this very fast-moving bandwagon. And most countries are accelerating their installs. (Pakistan because its grid company is heavily indebted to.. China.)

Now we just need the battery capacity to gather pace.
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Elon Musk’s X finds way around Brazil ban and goes live again for many users • The New York Times

Jack Nicas:

»

In his continuing fight with the Brazilian authorities, score one for Elon Musk — at least briefly.

On Wednesday, his social network, X, suddenly went live again for many across Brazil after three weeks of being blocked under orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court. The reason? X made a technical change to how it routes its internet traffic, enabling the site to evade the digital roadblocks set up in recent weeks by Brazilian internet providers.

But by Wednesday night, the president of Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, said his agency believed it would soon be able to restore the block.

The new twist showed how Mr. Musk appears far from backing down in Brazil, making the dispute a significant test of strength between national sovereignty and the borderless power of internet companies. Brazil’s Supreme Court blocked X because the company defied orders to remove certain accounts and then closed its offices in the country to avoid consequences.

…“You can’t just block Cloudflare because you would block half of the internet,” said Basílio Perez, president of Abrint, the trade group for Brazilian internet providers. He said Cloudflare supported more than 24 million websites, including those of the Brazilian government and banks.

But hours later, Anatel’s president, Carlos Baigorri, said in an interview that Cloudflare had agreed to isolate internet traffic from X, enabling Brazilian internet providers to easily target and block that traffic.

“Cloudflare has been extremely cooperative,” he said. “It really shows the diverse reactions from two companies, Cloudflare and X.”

«

Unclear if this really was Musk trying to find a way around the Brazilian block or – as claimed in this BBC version of the story – just an “inadvertent mistake”.
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The wordfreq dataset will not be updated any more · GitHub

Robyn Speer:

»

The wordfreq data is a snapshot of language that could be found in various online sources up through 2021. There are several reasons why it will not be updated anymore.

1: Generative AI has polluted the data

I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans.

The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.

…As one example, Philip Shapira reports that ChatGPT (OpenAI’s popular brand of generative language model circa 2024) is obsessed with the word “delve” in a way that people never have been, and caused its overall frequency to increase by an order of magnitude.

2: Information that used to be free became expensive

wordfreq is not just concerned with formal printed words. It collected more conversational language usage from two sources in particular: Twitter and Reddit.

The Twitter data was always built on sand. Even when Twitter allowed free access to a portion of their “firehose”, the terms of use did not allow me to distribute that data outside of the company where I collected it (Luminoso). wordfreq has the frequencies that were built with that data as input, but the collected data didn’t belong to me and I don’t have it anymore.

«

(Thanks wendyg for the link.)
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Marree Man: The enduring mystery of a giant outback figure (2018) • BBC News

Frances Mao:

»

This week [end of June 2018] marks 20 years since a helicopter pilot flying over central Australia spotted the outline of a giant man drawn into the earth.

The 4.2km (2.5 miles) tall figure, on a remote plateau in South Australia, is often thought to depict an Aboriginal hunter. Dubbed Marree Man after a nearby town, it is one of the world’s largest designs to be etched into the ground.

But mystery surrounds who created it – and why.

Earlier this week, Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith offered a A$5,000 (£2,800; $3,700) reward for any information about the artwork’s origins. “How has it been kept secret for 20 years?” he said on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Monday, external.

Marree Man has been a subject of fascination since its discovery in the desert about 700km north of Adelaide. It has gained popularity on tourism flights because it is too large to be viewed from the ground.

With an outline measuring a total of 28km, Marree Man had an initial depth of about 35cm (14 inches), according to local media reports. Locals believe it portrays an Aboriginal man carrying a woomera – a throwing stick – in his left hand.

Marree publican Phil Turner says he is convinced that its creator, or creators, were “professionals” who possibly used GPS technology.

«

I came across this because someone on Twitter did a thread about how they spotted it out of an airplane window the other day and were very proud of tracking it down via Google Earth and old Landsat photos. (Overkill, really.)

Plenty of ideas about who might have made it; clearly they used earthmoving equipment, and satellite photos show it was created between 27 May and 12 June 1998. It’s 28km of tracks: to do that accurately in two weeks you need big plant and accurate GPS – which in those days wasn’t guaranteed to civilian users.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The chances of AI designing a bioweapon are between zero and none because it takes real work by humans in a laboratory. CC-licensed photo by DisconnecTomas 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 10 links for you. Not weaponised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Israel detonates Hezbollah walkie-talkies a day after pager attack • Axios

Barak Ravid:

»

Israel on Wednesday blew up thousands of two-way personal radios used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon in a second wave of an intelligence operation that started on Tuesday with the explosions of pager devices, two sources with knowledge of the operation told Axios. More than a dozen people were killed and hundreds of others were wounded.

The second wave of clandestine attacks is another serious security breach in Hezbollah’s ranks and increases pressure on the militant Lebanese group.

Lebanon’s health ministry said 14 people were killed and 450 wounded in the attacks on Wednesday. The walkie-talkies were booby-trapped in advance by Israeli intelligence services and then delivered to Hezbollah as part of the militia’s emergency communications system, which was supposed to be used during a war with Israel, the sources said.

The attack further damages Hezbollah’s military command and control system.

«

Lots of detail has come out in the intervening 24 hours. A Taiwanese company licensed the manufacture of the pagers in Europe to a Hungarian company, but in fact a Bulgarian company made them, and they sat on some docks for three months.

The walkie-talkies had ICOM branding, but the company says it hasn’t made that model for 20 years. So they’re knockoffs, or fakes, and contained more explosive than pagers.

There’s no denying this is terrorism – civilians and children were injured, some with life-altering injuries. The only question is whether it’s justified. Will Hezbollah roll over? Or will the rocket attacks intensify? Making everyday technology into a weapon changes everything.
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Massive China-state IoT botnet went undetected for four years—until now • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

The FBI has dismantled a massive network of compromised devices that Chinese state-sponsored hackers have used for four years to mount attacks on government agencies, telecoms, defence contractors, and other targets in the US and Taiwan.

The botnet was made up primarily of small office and home office routers, surveillance cameras, network-attached storage, and other internet-connected devices located all over the world. Over the past four years, US officials said, 260,000 such devices have cycled through the sophisticated network, which is organized in three tiers that allow the botnet to operate with efficiency and precision. At its peak in June 2023 Raptor Train, as the botnet is named, consisted of more than 60,000 commandeered devices, according to researchers from Black Lotus Labs, making it the largest China state botnet discovered to date.

Raptor Train is the second China state-operated botnet US authorities have taken down this year. In January, law enforcement officials covertly issued commands to disinfect Internet of Things devices that hackers backed by the Chinese government had taken over without the device owners’ knowledge. The Chinese hackers, part of a group tracked as Volt Typhoon, used the botnet for more than a year as a platform to deliver exploits that burrowed deep into the networks of targets of interest.

«

Half of it was in the US; a quarter in Europe. (Only 3% in the UK. Hurrah.)
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Exclusive: Google offered to sell part of ad tech business, not enough for EU publishers, sources say • Reuters via MSN

Foo Yun Chee and Jody Godoy:

»

Alphabet’s Google took a major step this year to end an EU antitrust investigation with an offer to sell its advertising marketplace AdX but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.

Google’s lucrative ad tech business attracted EU regulatory scrutiny last year following a complaint from the European Publishers Council.

The European Commission subsequently charged Google with favouring its own advertising services, opening its fourth case against the world’s most-popular search engine.

Google has never before offered to sell an asset in an antitrust case, according to three lawyers involved in antitrust cases who did not have permission to speak publicly.

The company is on trial in the US, fighting claims by antitrust authorities who seek to make Google sell its Ad Manager product, which contains AdX and Google’s publisher ad server, known as DFP.

Publishers rejected Google’s proposal because they want it to divest more than just AdX to address conflicts of interest due to its presence in almost all levels of the ad tech supply chain, the people said. They said the EU antitrust enforcer was aware of the offer.

“As we have said before, the European Commission’s case about our third-party display advertising products rests on flawed interpretations of the ad-tech sector, which is fiercely competitive and rapidly evolving. We remain committed to this business,” a Google spokesperson said.

«

Doesn’t sound like you were committed to the business if you offered to sell it, to be honest. Google is fighting this case in multiple locations: EU, UK, US. Not going well in any of them.
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Google gets win from European court as €1.5bn fine overturned • FT via Ars Technica

Javier Espinoza:

»

Google has won an appeal against a €1.5bn competition fine from the European Commission in a victory for the Big Tech group as it comes under growing scrutiny from Brussels regulators.

The EU’s General Court said on Wednesday that while it accepted “most of the commission’s assessments” that the company had used its dominant position to block rival online advertisers, it annulled the hefty fine levied against Google in the case.

When launching the action against Google in 2019, Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief, said that the search giant had imposed anti-competitive restrictions on third-party websites for a decade between 2006 and 2016. She justified the €1.5bn fine by arguing that it reflected the “serious and sustained nature” of the infringement.

However, the Luxembourg-based General Court found that the commission, the EU’s executive arm, had failed “to take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had found to be unfair.”

The commission, which is likely to appeal, said it took “note” of the judgment and “will carefully study the judgment and reflect on possible next steps.”

«

Pretty hard to keep track of who’s paying and who’s repaying with all these nine-digit fines.
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iPhone 16 Pro Camera Review: Kenya — Travel Photographer • Austin Mann

The photographer has been testing the new camera (which has a phone attached):

»

Last week at the Apple keynote event, the iPhone camera features that stood out the most to me were the new Camera Control button, upgraded 48-megapixel Ultra Wide sensor, improved audio recording features (wind reduction and Audio Mix), and Photographic Styles.

When I finally landed in Nairobi (after more than 15 hours of flight delays), these were the features I was most excited to put to the test.

Over the past week we’ve traveled over a thousand kilometers across Kenya, capturing more than 10,000 photos and logging over 3TB of ProRes footage with the new iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max cameras. Along the way, we’ve gained valuable insights into these camera systems and their features.

As iPhone cameras have improved over the years, finding their boundaries has become more challenging, but Kenya’s vast and diverse landscape has provided the ideal setting to really push these devices to their limits.

My question today is the same as it’s always been: how will this new tech make our pictures and videos better?

«

This set of pictures definitely gave me an absolutely irresistible urge to.. go on safari in Kenya.
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Against prophecy among the machines

Anselm Levskaya:

»

The backers of California’s SB1047 routinely cite AI-enabled bioweapons as a threat justifying the radical regulatory regime that places a locus of liability on general computational models, rather than on particular dangerous applications or criminal acts.

For six years I’ve worked on scaling generative AI models at a leading industrial lab – I’ve worked on some of the largest language models ever trained. But before that I was an experimental lab-scientist for two decades working in synthetic biology, optogenetics, and immuno-oncology.

As a biologist I feel compelled to comment on this risk-scenario, speaking solely on my own behalf as a resident of California, and as someone who generally admires my state senator Scott Wiener, the primary sponsor of the bill. The claims being made about biological risks do not reflect scientific reality.

Language models won’t create bioterrorists any more readily than celebrity cookbooks have created Michelin star chefs.

Those of us who have made a living in the practical, experimental arts of the world know: it is not easy to explain to someone how a line cook tests the elasticity of a steak to measure doneness, how a machinist listens to the sound of a cutting bit for signs of a good feed rate, or how a biologist reads the fluorescent smears in a gel to see that a polymerase chain reaction’s annealing temperature was low. These tacit skills are acquired by hand, via repetition, under apprenticeship.

The preparedness and safety studies written by various AI labs on the subject of biological risks all try to assay the ability of users to elicit dangerous experimental recipes from language models. None publish the protocols or results in the sufficient detail necessary for an independent review, but it is clear that none of them actually assay the ability of any of these study participants to translate their dangerous chats into actual bench practice.

Having trained many people in experimental biology, I can tell you that it is a long and cruel apprenticeship requiring the disabuse of enthusiasts’ ideas that manipulating the machines of life is straightforward. One can watch their sanity fray as they slowly learn to stitch DNA constructs together through the arcane and interminable mixing of clear and precious droplets of fluid. One can watch their bright eyes dim as they deal with failed DNA assemblies, failed cell transfections, fritzing instruments, and their own faltering punctiliousness. One can only try to cheer their fatalism as they learn that even the smallest of ambitions will demand the sacrifice of their youth to the lonely nights of a laboratory.

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AI started as a dream to save humanity. Then Big Tech took over • Bloomberg

Parmy Olson, with an extract from her new book “Supremacy”:

»

Generative AI promises to make people more productive and bring more useful information to our fingertips through tools like ChatGPT. But every innovation has a price to pay. Businesses and governments are adjusting to a new reality where the distinction between real and “AI-generated” is a crapshoot. Companies are throwing money at AI software to help displace their employees and boost profit margins. And devices that can conduct new levels of personal surveillance are cropping up.

We got here after the visions of two innovators [Demis Hassabis and, separately, Sam Altman] who tried to build AI for good were eventually ground down by the forces of monopoly. Their story is one of idealism but also one of naivety and ego — and of how it can be virtually impossible to keep an ethical code in the bubbles of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Altman and Hassabis tied themselves into knots over the stewardship of AI, knowing that the world needed to manage the technology responsibly if we were to stop it from causing irreversible harm. But they couldn’t forge AI with godlike power without the resources of the world’s largest tech firms. With the goal of enhancing human life, they would end up empowering those companies, leaving humanity’s welfare and future caught in a battle for corporate supremacy.

After selling DeepMind to Google in 2014, Hassabis and his co-founders tried for years to spin out and restructure themselves as a nonprofit-style organization. They wanted to protect their increasingly powerful AI systems from being under the sole control of a tech monolith, and they worked on creating a board of independent luminaries that included former heads of state like Barack Obama to oversee its use. They even designed a new legal charter that would prioritize human well-being and the environment. Google appeared to go along with the plan at first and promised its entity billions of dollars, but its executives were stringing the founders along.

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Lionsgate, studio behind ‘John Wick,’ signs deal with AI startup Runway • WSJ

Jessica Toonkel:

»

The entertainment company behind “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” plans to start using generative artificial intelligence in the creation of its new movies and TV shows, a sign of the emerging technology’s advance in Hollywood.

Lions Gate Entertainment has agreed to give Runway, one of several fast-evolving AI startups, access to its content library in exchange for a new, custom AI model that the studio can use in the editing and production process. 

The deal—the first of its kind for Runway and one that could become a blueprint in the entertainment industry—comes as creatives, actors and studio executives debate whether to use the new technology and how to protect their copyright material. Advocates say generative AI can enhance creators’ work and help a cash-strapped industry save time and money.

Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate Studio, expects the company to be able to save “millions and millions of dollars” from using the new model. The studio behind the “John Wick” franchise and “Megalopolis” plans to initially use the new AI tool for internal purposes like storyboarding—laying out a series of graphics to show how a story unfolds—and eventually creating backgrounds and special effects, like explosions, for the big screen. 

“We do a lot of action movies, so we blow a lot of things up and that is one of the things Runway does,” Burns said.

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Runway, it should be pointed out, is one of the AI startups against which a copyright case is proceeding. And this is also not going to be a popular move at all.
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ITV launches ITV Kerching • Advanced Television

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ITV has launched its new consumer-facing affiliate marketing brand, ITV Kerching – a browser extension which aims to simplify the process of finding discount codes across hundreds of online retailers.

Available from the ITVX website and mobile app, ITV Kerching uses tech company Kindred’s technology to search for discount codes from retailers to help consumers search for the best price available for their online purchases.

Following activation, when a user lands on a retailer’s website, coupons are searched for, applied and redeemed with minimum effort.

ITV research found that 79% of ITVX viewers already use discount codes and one-third said their usage has increased in the last year. Among those that don’t use discount codes, 48% say they don’t know where to look, a problem that ITV Kerching solves by doing the hard work for you.

The launch of ITV Kerching is being supported by marketing promotion across ITV’s linear channels, ITVX, social media and email marketing.

In addition to the launch, ITV is also investing up to £8.5m of advertising inventory across ITV’s channels and ITVX in return for a minority equity stake in Kindred, the company powering ITV Kerching.

«

Google long since passed ITV for UK advertising revenue; so the plan now is to find any additional revenue you can, even if it’s down-the-sofa stuff like this.
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Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac review – Musk’s Twitter takeover • The Guardian

James Ball:

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Even people who never used Twitter more or less know its story over the last few years: Musk bought it, gave it a juvenile new name, X, and the whole thing seems to have been a complete mess that has made everyone miserable, including Musk himself.

That makes the job of New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac in their chronicle of the takeover and its resulting fallout, a difficult one: almost anyone who might actually read this book is pretty familiar with how things have played out. How can you make a story compelling when each step along the way has already been so heavily covered?

Conger and Mac’s answer to that is their astonishing ability to take the reader into almost every room that mattered during the contentious $44bn acquisition. The book opens with a Twitter data scientist getting ready to meet Musk, ostensibly in a bid to keep his job. The employee, however, has already decided he’s quitting and is instead using the opportunity to level with the new boss. The encounter goes predictably badly, leading him to accuse Musk of being one of the most gullible men on the planet. The book records Musk’s response as being two words long: “Fuck you.”

At other moments, the narration seems to know Musk’s exact movements when he was at home with his then-girlfriend Claire Elise Boucher (better known as the musician Grimes), or the conversations that take place on his plane. Such is the apparent omniscience that impressive accounts of goings-on in boardrooms and executive suites during the takeover seem par for the course.

Musk himself did not grant the authors an interview. Some of their insights come from court documents and other reporting, but there is no doubt that Conger and Mac enjoyed unmatched access to a range of characters from all sides. You couldn’t hope for a better ringside seat on the unfolding drama.

«

Twitter (now X) has given rise to a multitude of books, charting its rise and plateau and now fall. This certainly looks worth the time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The killing of more than ten people and wounding of hundreds in Lebanon by exploding pagers has raised many questions. CC-licensed photo by Hades2k 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 10 links for you. Ride on time. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

New Instagram changes for teens include private accounts and other restrictions • WSJ

Julie Jargon:

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Instagram is placing teens in a protective bubble.

Starting this week, it will begin automatically making youth accounts private, with the most restrictive settings. And younger teens won’t be able to get around it by changing settings or creating adult accounts with fake birth dates.

Account restrictions for teens include direct messaging only with people they follow or are already connected to, a reduction in adult-oriented content, automatic muting during nighttime hours and more.

Building on changes to teen accounts it announced earlier this year—and following years of criticism about child safety—the Meta Platforms-owned social network said it would shift 100 million teenagers in the US and around the world into the guardrailed accounts. The move applies to all accounts with an under-18 birth date, though teens 16 and older will be able to change their settings without parental approval.

Any new teen accounts will be similarly restricted starting Tuesday. Parents will no longer have to manually enter those settings using Instagram’s parental supervision tool.

Teens are unlikely to be happy with the changes. Instagram is expecting to lose “some meaningful amount of teen growth and teen engagement,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in an interview. “I have to believe earning some trust from parents and giving parents peace of mind will help business in the long run, but it will certainly hurt in the short term.”

Instagram plans to go even further, starting next year: Using artificial intelligence, it said, it will identify children who are lying about their age—then automatically place them into the restricted teen accounts.

«

There’s a writeup at The Guardian too, quoting Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly killed herself in 2017 after viewing suicide-related content shown to her via Instagram’s algorithm. So it’s only taken them seven years to get to this.
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Hezbollah pagers explode in apparent attack across Lebanon • WSJ

Adam Chamseddine, Summer Said and Stephen Kalin:

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Pagers carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon in what appeared to be an unprecedented attack that authorities said injured more than 2,700 and killed eight [update: at least 11 – Overspill Ed] across Lebanon.

Many of the affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days, people familiar with the matter said. A Hezbollah official said many fighters had such devices, speculating that malware might have caused the devices to explode. The official said some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them before they burst.

Hezbollah said a number of pagers carried by its members exploded simultaneously at 3:30 p.m. local time. It couldn’t immediately be determined what caused the blasts, which were spread out across the country in several areas where Hezbollah has a heavy presence.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for the attack. Both said civilians were killed, and Hezbollah threatened to retaliate. The Israeli military declined to comment.

Iranian state television said the country’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was injured by his pager but was conscious and not in danger. Iran is the main supporter of Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist group that has grown into one of the world’s best-armed nonstate militias.

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No details at the time of compilation, but here’s the obvious method: infiltrate the supply chain and pack C-4/Semtex into the pagers. The details of how the battery charge is diverted into the explosive is for the bombmakers. That’s the “new shipment”. Hezbollah had stopped using mobile phones because they considered them unsafe for various reasons – including the fact that Israel, apparently, killed a Hamas operative using a boobytrapped one in 1996.

Hezbollah has been indiscriminate with its attacks: in July, one of its rockets hit a playground and soccer field in northern Israel, killing nine children and injuring 20 more. Making pagers explode is indiscriminate too: among those killed on Tuesday was the 10-year-old daughter of a Hezbollah operative who was standing by her father.

The US said it had nothing to do with it. Unconnected: the American University of Beirut Medical Center replaced the pagers of all doctors and staff at the end of August following an upgrade in April. (Thanks Jimbo.)
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Streaming struggles with churn as even buzzy shows can’t keep subscribers • Deadline

Katie Campione:

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Even as streaming continues to grow, subscribers are still cycling through the premium services to watch their favorite shows, rather than committing to any or all of them.

According to Samba TV‘s latest State of Viewership Report, U.S. households watched a record level of streaming content in the first half of the year, up 40% from the same time frame in 2023. However, the same report also states that about 44% of subscribers are only willing to watch one or two platforms per six months.

Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) platforms are still consistently adding subscribers each quarter, but cancellations each quarter have also grown, and the services only added about 4.8m net subscribers in Q1 2024 — down more than 3m from the previous quarter.

Samba’s data shows that viewers are generally invested in a specific piece of content, choosing to leave the platform after they’ve finished watching. The only exception to this is Netflix, which is unsurprising given that the streamer has proven highly effective at using its algorithm to draw users to new content and keep them engaged on the platform. It’s a tool that many of the newer platforms have yet to perfect.

Netflix had the lowest level of churn and also represented 60% of the Top 50 shows in the first half of the year with series like Fool Me Once, Griselda, American Nightmare, Bridgerton and The Gentlemen in the Top 10.

Elsewhere, subscription cyclers come back for buzzy new shows, Samba says, including Peacock’s Ted, AppleTV’s Masters of the Air, and FX’s Shōgun, which aired in Hulu and Disney+. New seasons of House of the Dragon (the second most-popular premiere of the half, behind Fool Me Once), True Detective, and Reacher were also a big draw.

But still, once those shows are over, subscribers often leave the service until they’re enticed back again for another anticipated release.

«

Fabulous irony: I’ve been glued to the BBC’s Sherwood series, which is completely bingeable on iPlayer. Meanwhile, Apple TV+ parcels out one episode per week of Slow Horses.
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Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the “thoughts” of OpenAI’s latest model • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Unlike previous AI models from OpenAI, such as GPT-4o, the company trained o1 specifically to work through a step-by-step problem-solving process before generating an answer. When users ask an “o1” model a question in ChatGPT, users have the option of seeing this chain-of-thought process written out in the ChatGPT interface. However, by design, OpenAI hides the raw chain of thought from users, instead presenting a filtered interpretation created by a second AI model.

Nothing is more enticing to enthusiasts than information obscured, so the race has been on among hackers and red-teamers to try to uncover o1’s raw chain of thought using jailbreaking or prompt injection techniques that attempt to trick the model into spilling its secrets. There have been early reports of some successes, but nothing has yet been strongly confirmed.

Along the way, OpenAI is watching through the ChatGPT interface, and the company is reportedly coming down hard on any attempts to probe o1’s reasoning, even among the merely curious.

One X user reported (confirmed by others, including Scale AI prompt engineer Riley Goodside) that they received a warning email if they used the term “reasoning trace” in conversation with o1. Others say the warning is triggered simply by asking ChatGPT about the model’s “reasoning” at all.

«

Simon Willison (a smart developer, for those who don’t know) has a good writeup of what he reckons is going on with the “reasoning”. Ben Thompson (in his paywalled Stratechery) got it to solve a 7×7 crossword, and John Gruber got it to solve a logic puzzle that I found too exhausting to fight through.

It’s getting closer to something that “reasons”.
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TikTok fights ban in court hearing, facing skeptical judges • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell and Eva Dou:

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The fate of the wildly popular TikTok app hangs in the balance after the company tried to persuade a Washington appeals court Monday to halt a fast-approaching ban on the platform’s use across America.

A deep legal discussion over the potential ban’s constitutionality Monday morning offered no clear answers, leaving the company’s fate uncertain even as it nears a Jan. 19 deadline to divest from Chinese ownership, with a ban coming into place if it hasn’t done so by that date.

The political backdrop is striking: Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are both seizing on the viral short-video platform to vie for young voters, even though both the Trump and Biden administrations backed banning it.

In Monday morning’s hearing in federal D.C. Court of Appeals, the panel of three judges — Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judges Neomi Rao and Douglas H. Ginsburg — grilled TikTok attorney Andrew Pincus on why he thought the company’s right to free speech outweighed national security concerns over its ownership, citing wartime precedents of the United States curbing the broadcast of foreign propaganda into America.

The judges pressed Pincus on a hypothetical scenario involving a war between the United States and a foreign country, asking whether Congress would be within its right to bar “the enemy’s ownership of a major media source” — in line with Congress’s designation of TikTok and other China-based apps as controlled by a “foreign adversary.”

They also cited the government’s concern over how ByteDance developers in China could curate TikTok’s recommendation algorithm for American users.

Pincus argued that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company in China, is a private company, not a state-owned enterprise, and that the United States isn’t at war with China. The judges didn’t seem wholly convinced.

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An information war is still a war, after all.
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Mozilla exits the fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users as of the time of Tuesday’s announcement. By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users.

Mozilla had telegraphed its plans to scale back on its fediverse investments earlier this year after the CEO stepped down. At the time, Mozilla board member Laura Chambers took over the job as the interim CEO of Mozilla Corporation through the end of 2024. Shortly after the change in leadership, Mozilla said it would refocus its product strategy around Firefox and AI and significantly scale back or even shutter other efforts. Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down.

The redirection of Mozilla’s efforts came after its flagship product, the Firefox web browser, spent years losing market share. That left room for other competitors, like the startup Arc, to take hold in the alternative browser market.

Months prior to this change in strategy, Mozilla had been touting the fediverse’s potential, but under Chambers, the company said that a more “modest approach” to the fediverse would have allowed it to participate with “greater agility.”

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Mozilla is really hunkering down. The Mastodon server can’t have been costing anything, but it seems like anything surplus is too much. Presently Mozilla has nine products (but that includes Relay and the VPN). Odd to abandon the VPN: companies like Nord are making good money from them (even though their adverts wildly exaggerate the need for them).
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CMA objects to Google’s ad tech practices in bid to help UK advertisers and publishers • GOV.UK

»

An investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally found that Google is using anti-competitive practices in open-display ad tech, which it believes could be harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers.

As set out in a statement of objections issued to Google today (Friday 6 September), the CMA has provisionally found that, when placing digital ads on websites, the vast majority of publishers and advertisers use Google’s ad tech services in order to bid for and sell advertising space.

The CMA is concerned that Google is actively using its dominance in this sector to preference its own services. Google disadvantages competitors and prevents them competing on a level playing field to provide publishers and advertisers with a better, more competitive service that supports growth in their business.

In its 2019 market study into digital advertising, the CMA found that advertisers were spending around £1.8bn annually on open-display ads, marketing goods and services via apps and websites to UK consumers.

…The CMA has provisionally found that, since at least 2015, Google has abused its dominant positions through the operation of both its buying tools and publisher ad server in order to strengthen AdX’s market position and to protect AdX from competition from other exchanges. Moreover, due to the highly integrated nature of Google’s ad tech business, the CMA has provisionally found that Google’s conduct has also prevented rival publisher ad servers from being able to compete effectively with DFP, harming competition in this market.

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This may look abstruse and acronym/abbreviation-laden, but it’s the same topic as the DOJ trial in the US: Google abuses its position at both ends of the advertising market (selling space to advertisers, finding buyers for publishers’ space, aka “inventory”) to charge excess fees.
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Is My Blue Your Blue?

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Colour perception is tricky to measure–vision scientists use specialized calibrated equipment to measure colour perception. Graphic designers use physical colour cards, such as those made by Pantone, so that they can communicate colours unambiguously. Here we use your monitor or phone to test how you categorize colours, which is far from perfect, since your calibration may differ from mine.

The validity of the inference is limited by the calibration of your monitor, ambient lighting, and filters such as night mode. Despite these limitations, the results should have good test-retest reliability on the same device, in the same ambient light, which you can verify by taking the test multiple times. If you want to compare your results with friends, use the same device in the same ambient light.

Getting outlier results doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your vision. It might mean you have an idiosyncratic way of naming colours, or that your monitor and lighting is unusual.

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Fun game! When you see a colour on the screen, press the “This is blue” or “This is green” button at the bottom. Then keep on going. Apparently my green pushes over into most people’s blue. Look, you just need to move your idea of “blue”.
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South Korea: the deepfake crisis engulfing hundreds of schools • BBC News

Jean Mackenzie and Leehyun Choi:

»

South Korean journalist Ko Narin published what would turn into the biggest scoop of her career. It had recently emerged that police were investigating deepfake porn rings at two of the country’s major universities, and Ms Ko was convinced there must be more.

She started searching social media and uncovered dozens of chat groups on the messaging app Telegram where users were sharing photos of women they knew and using AI software to convert them into fake pornographic images within seconds.

“Every minute people were uploading photos of girls they knew and asking them to be turned into deepfakes,” Ms Ko told us.

Ms Ko discovered these groups were not just targeting university students. There were rooms dedicated to specific high schools and even middle schools. If a lot of content was created using images of a particular student, she might even be given her own room. Broadly labelled “humiliation rooms” or “friend of friend rooms”, they often come with strict entry terms.

Ms Ko’s report in the Hankyoreh newspaper has shocked South Korea. On Monday, police announced they were considering opening an investigation into Telegram, following the lead of authorities in France, who recently charged Telegram’s Russian founder for crimes relating to the app. The government has vowed to bring in stricter punishments for those involved, and the president has called for young men to be better educated.

Telegram said it “actively combats harmful content on its platform, including illegal pornography,” in a statement provided to the BBC.

The BBC has viewed the descriptions of a number of these chatrooms. One calls for members to post more than four photos of someone along with their name, age and the area they live in.
“I was shocked at how systematic and organised the process was,” said Ms Ko. “The most horrific thing I discovered was a group for underage pupils at one school that had more than 2,000 members.”

In the days after Ms Ko’s article was published, women’s rights activists started to scour Telegram too, and follow leads. By the end of that week, more than 500 schools and universities had been identified as targets. The actual number impacted is still to be established, but many are believed to be aged under 16, which is South Korea’s age of consent. A large proportion of the suspected perpetrators are teenagers themselves.

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Agenda Hero: we make calendars magically simple

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We make calendars magically simple. An AI companion for calendars you already use and any new ones you create

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Neat: I gave it an image of a spreadsheet of a set of tennis matches (without saying they were tennis matches anywhere; they were just described as “Mixed”) and it correctly created the calendar events and added a tennis ball in front of each event.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A significant number of hard drives with music recordings from the 1990s are unreadable – meaning a huge amount of original sessions have been lost. CC-licensed photo by slgckgc 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 10 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.

Google serves AI slop as top result for one of the most famous paintings in history • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history.

Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above the list of links they usually see in results. As first spotted by a user on Twitter, when people searched for “Hieronymus Bosch” on Google, it included a couple of images from the real painting, but the first and largest image they saw was an AI-generated version of it.

I was able to confirm that Google Search was serving this AI-generated image to users yesterday, but Google removed it from search results at some point on Sunday night.

“Search is designed to show helpful and high quality information – including representative imagery in knowledge panels  – while giving people tools to help them make sense of what they find online,” a Google spokesperson told me in an email. “Given the scale of the open web, however, it’s possible that our systems might not always select the best images regardless of how those images are produced, AI-generated or not. When we receive user feedback about potential issues, we work to make timely improvements.”

Google was pulling the image from the personal website of Andrea Concas, who according to his Linkedin is an “Art Tech Entrepreneur” and the founder of an “NFT Magazine to be read and collected on Ethereum.”

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What this is really showing is that Google Search hasn’t been reliable for a long, long time: it wasn’t necessarily linking to what was really the most authoritative site. It was more like luck, and the lack of enough AI-generated junk, that kept search looking believable. Now? All bets are off.
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Amazon mandates five days a week in office starting next year • The Guardian

Guardian staff and agencies:

»

Amazon said on Monday it would require employees to return to the office five days a week, effective 2 January.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Andy Jassy, the CEO, said in a note to employees.

The e-commerce giant’s previous office attendance requirement for its workers was three days a week. Amazon workers can claim “extenuating circumstances” or request exceptions from senior leadership, according to Jassy’s memo.

“If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.” He cited improved collaboration and connection between teams as reasons for the new requirement as well as the ability to “strengthen our culture”.

As part of an organizational restructuring, Amazon is looking to reduce the number of managers in its organization and boost the number of individual contributors by the end of the first quarter of 2025 to reduce bureaucracy. Like other technology companies, Amazon grew rapidly at the start of the coronavirus pandemic then laid off wide swaths of its staff.

“We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way, including the US headquarters locations (Puget Sound and Arlington),” Jassy said.

Since Covid lockdowns first forced workers home four years ago, employers and employees have clashed over how many days of the work week must be spent in the office. In May last year, employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters staged a walkout protesting against changes to the e-commerce giant’s climate policy, layoffs and a return-to-office mandate.

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A trend gathers steam.
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Exclusive: how Intel lost the Sony PlayStation business • Reuters

Max Cherney:

»

Intel lost out on a contract to design and fabricate Sony’s PlayStation 6 chip in 2022, which dealt a significant blow to its effort to build its fledgling contract manufacturing business, according to three sources with knowledge of the events.

The effort by Intel to win out over Advanced Micro Devices in a competitive bidding process to supply the design for the forthcoming PlayStation 6 chip and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co as the contract manufacturer would have amounted to billions of dollars of revenue and fabricating thousands of silicon wafers a month, two sources said.

Intel and AMD were the final two contenders in the bidding process for the contract.

Winning the Sony PlayStation 6 chip design business would have been a victory for Intel’s design segment and would have doubled as a win for the company’s contract manufacturing effort, or foundry business, which was the centerpiece of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s turnaround plan.

Gelsinger announced plans for Intel to create a foundry unit in 2021 and formally launched it at an event in San Jose, California, in February of this year. The PlayStation chip deal originated in Intel’s design segment, but would have been a boon to the financial performance of the foundry business after this year’s separation.

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Missed out on making 100m chips over five years or so: couldn’t agree on the price (or, perhaps a better characterisation, Intel’s profit). And Intel just had a big board meeting at which one member quit over the latest plans for the future. Things really aren’t looking good.
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The prospect of the childless city • Financial Times

Emma Jacobs:

»

Randal Cremer is one of several planned primary school closures and mergers in inner London triggered by low birth rates, families moving away because of expensive childcare, Brexit, and parents re-evaluating their lives during the pandemic. The biggest factor, says Riley, is that “housing is just becoming unaffordable”. Philip Glanville, mayor of Hackney, calls it “the acute affordability crisis”. Retaining children in the area, he says, requires an intervention from central government, to provide “meaningful investment in social housing, match wel fare support with the real cost of housing, and put controls on rocketing rents”.

Hackney is not the only area in the capital that is losing children. London Councils, which represents the 32 boroughs and the City of London Corporation, predicts a 7.6% decrease in reception pupil numbers across the city between 2022-23 and 2026-27, the equivalent of about 243 classes.

A future with dwindling numbers of children is one many cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, are grappling with. In Hong Kong, for every adult over 65 there are, to put it crudely, 0.7 children, and in Tokyo it is even fewer (0.5).

Even before the pandemic, Joel Kotkin, author of The Human City wrote a decade ago about the prospect of a childless city, saying that US cities “have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children . . . The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating ‘creative class’ — a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students — occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich.”

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(Should be free to read)

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Inside Iron Mountain: it’s time to talk about hard drives • Mixonline

Steve Harvey:

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A few years ago, archiving specialist Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services did a survey of its vaults and discovered an alarming trend: Of the thousands and thousands of archived hard disk drives from the 1990s that clients ask the company to work on, around one-fifth are unreadable. Iron Mountain has a broad customer base, but if you focus strictly on the music business, says Robert Koszela, Global Director Studio Growth and Strategic Initiatives, “That means there are historic sessions from the early to mid-’90s that are dying.”

Until the turn of the millennium, the workflow for record releases was simple enough. Once the multitrack was mixed, the 2-track master was turned into a piece of vinyl, a cassette tape or, starting in 1982, a compact disc, and those original tapes—by and large— then went into storage. Around 2000, with the advent of 5.1-surround releases, then in 2005 with the debut of the Guitar Hero video game, things started to get complicated. When rights holders went to the vaults to transfer, remix and repurpose some of their catalog tracks for these new platforms, they discovered that some tapes were deteriorating while others were unplayable. Not all assets had been stored under optimum conditions. Some recordings had been made on machines that were now obsolete, in formats that could no longer be easily played. And some recordings were missing.

In short, for the past 25 or more years, the music industry has been focused on its magnetic tape archives, and on the remediation, digitization and migration of assets to more accessible, reliable storage. Hard drives also became a focus of the industry during that period, ever since the emergence of the first DAWs in the late 1980s. But unlike tape, surely, all you need to do, decades later, is connect a drive and open the files. Well, not necessarily. And Iron Mountain would like to alert the music industry at large to the fact that, even though you may have followed recommended best practices at the time, those archived drives may now be no more easily playable than a 40-year-old reel of Ampex 456 tape.

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As much as anything, even if the hard drive isn’t digital mush, does the version of Pro Tools that it was recorded on still function?
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iOS 18 is a smart upgrade, even without the AI • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

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You know this is a big update when an entirely new Passwords app is only, like, the fourth most interesting thing going on. It’s self-explanatory, and after poking around for a bit, I’m convinced that this is an app for your parents who refuse to learn how to use a password manager. You can save passwords and access them from your iOS, iPad, and macOS devices, as you’d expect. But you can also share individual passwords or groups of passwords with other people, which would be handy for families and people in the same household.

The catch, of course, is that everyone needs to be in the Apple ecosystem, and since I frequently jump between iOS and Android, it’s not something I can really use in the long term. Incidentally, using a first-party Apple password manager would also make switching away from iOS in the future that much harder, which is probably no accident. But if my parents were all in on Apple, I’d absolutely make sure they were using it.

One feature I know I’ll be using for the long haul? Transcription in Voice Memos. This might be one for my fellow journalists, but friends, it is good. For years, I’ve used Pixel phones to record and transcribe interviews, and the Pixel has basically remained unchallenged as the best tool for the job. In iOS 18, Voice Memos will finally transcribe your recordings, in real time or after the fact, and it’s on par with the Pixel Recorder app as far as quality goes. It may not be a feature for the masses, but if you know, you know.

A new Control Center and a more customizable app grid don’t look like much on paper. And plenty of people will probably just leave them alone, which is fine. But if you don’t mind putting in a little effort, you’ll find iOS 18 pretty rewarding — no artificial intelligence required.

Still, AI is the big missing piece here.

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The upgrade is less and less compelling. It’s gone from “must-have” to “oh, has it?”
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Apple suddenly drops NSO Group spyware lawsuit • SecurityWeek

Ryan Naraine:

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Apple has abruptly withdrawn its lawsuit against NSO Group, citing increased risk that the legal battle might unintentionally reveal sensitive vulnerability data and difficulties in acquiring essential information from the spyware vendor.

In a court filing Friday, Apple said continuing the lawsuit now poses “too significant a risk” of exposing the anti-exploitation and threat intelligence efforts needed to fend off the very adversaries involved in the legal dispute.

“When it filed this lawsuit nearly three years ago, Apple recognized that it would involve sharing information with third parties. However, developments since then have reshaped the risk landscape associated with sharing such information,” Apple said.

“Apple knows and appreciates that this Court would take the utmost care with the sensitive information relevant to this case. But it is also aware that — now more than ever — predatory spyware companies, including those not before this Court, will use any means to obtain this information,” the company added.

“Any disclosure, even under the most stringent controls, puts this information at risk. Due to the developments since this suit was filed, proceeding forward at this time would now present too significant a risk to Apple’s threat-intelligence program.”

The case, originally filed in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, sought to to hold NSO Group accountable for hacking into Apple’s iOS platforms with so-called zero-click exploits to spy on researchers, journalists, activists, dissidents, academics, and government officials.

…On Friday, Apple also cited concerns that NSO Group and unidentified officials in Israel may have taken actions to avoid producing information during discovery. “This means that going forward with this case will potentially involve disclosure to third parties of the information Apple uses to defeat spyware while Defendants and others create significant obstacles to obtaining an effective remedy,” the company said.

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That’s certainly the problem with a lawsuit like this: you don’t trust the other side to play by the rules – and you’re suing them because they didn’t play by the rules.
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Going the distance at the tram driver Olympics • The New York Times

Amelia Nierenberg:

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The driver braked hard and came to a screeching stop. Fans gasped, awed at the precision. Referees conferred, making sure all was aboveboard.

“We’re ready to rumble,” said Markus Chencinsky, 50, a driver from Vienna.

Despite the adrenaline, the speed and the thousands of eyes, this was not a demolition derby or a stunt-driving expo. Instead, the competitors facing off on Saturday in a central square of Frankfurt were the captains of Europe’s tram systems. They had come to Germany’s financial hub to vie for the trophy at the 11th European Tramdriver Championship.

The annual public transit jamboree might best be described as tram dressage. The drivers coaxed their commuter chariots through an obstacle course meant to test their whimsy, mettle and precision.
“We try to mirror the entire range of skills a driver should have,” said Wieland Stumpf, the president of the championship.

Some events focused on safety: Drivers had to emergency brake at a precise spot, just as if a cyclist had swerved in front of them. Another tested their ability to multitask: Could they remember a series of symbols that appeared on mock traffic signs? A few challenges evaluated the smoothness of their touch: Drivers had to come to a stop so gently that water did not slosh out of a bowl that was filled to the brim. (A front-mounted camera showed every lost droplet: the less spilled, the more points.)

One test was downright counterintuitive: Tram billiards, in which a driver steers the vehicle to gently knock a pool cue attached to a stand into a billiard ball on a table. (The highest possible score for the billiards portion was 500 points, awarded if the ball rolled to a stop right in the middle of the table.)

“It’s not often you’re trying to hit something with your tram,” joked Victoria Young, 39, of Edinburgh. “You’ve just got this feeling inside you that says, ‘I should be stopping now.’”

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Excel Olympics, tram Olympics. We are not short of Olympics.
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FUBAR Mode • Noan

Neal Mann works in venture capital (having formerly worked in journalism):

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If you want to understand how poorly most people have grasped the impact AI could have on business, the statement ‘AI isn’t ready for enterprise’ is the place to start. The logic goes that AI is not ready for enterprise because the output people are getting is not accurate enough to make their jobs easier and businesses more efficient. Microsoft recently had a contract for co-pilot canceled because the output was the same as a ‘middle school presentation’. Spend five minutes searching for co-pilot on social media and you’ll see similar responses. 

Advocates of this position essentially believe AI will be ready for enterprise when the models have improved and are betting on those improvements solving the accuracy problem. But it’s not that AI isn’t ready for enterprise, it’s that enterprise business structures as they stand will never be ready for AI.

Most people don’t realize this because their experience of enterprise is siloed – they’ve often worked in an individual department. If they’re in the investment community, they may never have worked in an enterprise-scale organisation at all. If we start from a place of believing AI automation of a business is possible then it’s irrelevant either way.

There there is a much deeper problem that needs to be dealt with – the knowledge that underpins the organisation, that defines it, and its processes, is often a chaotic, self-contradictory mess of disconnected documents, fragmented files and siloed concepts.

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A lot of his conclusions resemble, for me, the excitement from the 1980s about expert systems – that you’d pour experts’ expertise into a computer and it would regurgitate it as required. It didn’t work out that way, though.
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Why GB News is angrier than ever • Financial Times

Henry Mance with a long read about life inside GB News:

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All the board members have actively supported conservative politics. None has prior experience in TV. Alan McCormick, the chairman, explained: “Ask anyone under 50 and almost no one receives their news and debate via television, this is fast becoming a bygone era, we need fresh thinking.” Three years after launching as a TV channel, GB News sees the future elsewhere.

Marshall and GB News’s other owner, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum, have bankrolled the broadcaster. In the year ending May 2022, its pre-tax loss was £30.7m. The following year losses widened to £42.4m. Marshall and Legatum agreed to put in a further £60m. 

“It’s never going to make enough money,” says Gill Hind, a media analyst at Enders Analysis.

In the US, Fox News and other cable news channels are paid by cable companies for the right to transmit them. UK channels, in contrast, are almost entirely reliant on advertising. Financially, GB News really isn’t Fox News: its revenues were £15.5m last year, while Fox News’s were about $3bn. Total losses have now exceeded £100m.

Billionaires tend to tire of losing such sums, even on passion projects: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made cuts at The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 and which lost $77m last year. “Paul and the Legatum guys have deep pockets, but they are not infinite,” says one person who has worked with them. “He likes new toys . . . GB News is a very demanding baby,” said another. Having bought The Spectator, Marshall is among a small group of bidders for The Telegraph, expected to cost somewhere below £600m. Those outlets have a record of profits.

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(The link should make the article free to read, at least for some of you.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified