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.
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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.
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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:
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[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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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:
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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.
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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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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 