Set your watches: in about 40 million years Mar’s moon Phobos will spiral down into the planet. CC-licensed photo by Andrea Luck on Flickr.
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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. Orbiting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
US wiretap systems targeted in China-linked hack • WSJ
Sarah Krouse, Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha and Robert McMillan:
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A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of US broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.
For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful US requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.
Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies are among the companies whose networks were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the people said.
The widespread compromise is considered a potentially catastrophic security breach and was carried out by a sophisticated Chinese hacking group dubbed Salt Typhoon. It appeared to be geared toward intelligence collection, the people said.
Spokesmen for AT&T, Verizon and Lumen declined to comment on the Salt Typhoon campaign.
Companies are generally required to disclose material cyber intrusions to securities regulators within a short time, but in rare cases, federal authorities can grant them an exemption from doing so on national security grounds.
The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.
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You asked for an example demonstrating what people mean when they say that backdoor systems won’t only be used by “the good guys.”
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Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge • The Verge
Sean Hollister:
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Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly — and now it will have to change.
Today, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling in Epic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.
These were Epic’s biggest asks, and they might change the Android app marketplace forever — if they aren’t immediately paused or blocked on appeal.
And they’re not all that Epic has won today.
Starting November 1st, 2024, and ending November 1st, 2027, Google must also:
• Stop requiring Google Play Billing for apps distributed on the Google Play Store (the jury found that Google had illegally tied its payment system to its app store)
• Let Android developers tell users about other ways to pay from within the Play Store
• Let Android developers link to ways to download their apps outside of the Play Store
• Let Android developers set their own prices for apps irrespective of Play BillingGoogle also can’t:
• Share app revenue “with any person or entity that distributes Android apps” or plans to launch an app store or app platform
• Offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively or first
• Offer developers money or perks not to launch their apps on rival stores
• Offer device makers or carriers money or perks to preinstall the Play Store
• Offer device makers or carriers money or perks not to preinstall rival stores«
Google’s downfall in this case – unlike Apple’s when Epic brought the same complaint – is that it has done all sorts of deals favouring one developer or another, whereas Apple is just consistently brutal to everyone.
However this won’t be an overnight change: Google gets eight months to come up with the system to implement this.
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What happened to Elon Musk? • The Atlantic
Lora Kelley talks to Charlie Warzel:
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Lora: Why is Musk getting so involved in this presidential election, and with Trump (who apparently said he would give Musk a role leading a government-efficiency commission if he wins)? Is he making some kind of play to be a great man of history, or is he after power in a potential Trump administration?
Charlie: Elon Musk basically bought Donald Trump at the top. He endorsed him moments after the first assassination attempt, when Trump was riding a wave of positive attention, when Joe Biden was still in the race and it looked like Trump was probably going to dominate him. So much has changed since Musk endorsed Trump in July. If he were truly a savvy political operator, he would be hedging his bets right now, saying I can’t fully alienate myself from one political party, because I have all these government contracts and so many other interests that I need to be able to at least sit in a room with with Democrats.
I think the fact that he has effectively just become the in-house social-media team for Donald Trump speaks to the fact that he’s not just making a political calculation. He’s not playing a game of 3-D chess. It seems to me that he’s truly radicalized.
Here’s a guy who has, like, six jobs and has decided to spend most of his time tweeting propaganda for a political candidate and hosting him on his platform. Does he want another job? It’s entirely possible. But I really think what he wants more than anything else is to be that sort of Rupert Murdoch person for this political group. He seems to be trying to fit himself into the role of power broker.
Lora: In some ways, Musk’s turn feels surprising. But has he always sort of been like this?
Charlie: I started covering Musk in the 2010s. And there were signs of this stuff—picking the fight with the cave diver, the way he would dismiss claims around Tesla, irresponsibly tweeting in ways that had the power to move stock prices. He was a loose cannon and showed a lot of signs of his disregard for the rule of law and authority.
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Plus, as Warzel points out, there’s been a certain amount of audience capture, which means Musk has begun to perform for those who celebrate his behaviour, reinforcing it.
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Fake News! The Top 100 Community Noted Twitter accounts • MeidasTouch News
Ron Filipkowski:
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I wanted to note some other trends with the Worst 100. Many of the accounts are foreign, and most of those are from Asia. Many of them were permanently banned under the old regime but were reinstated by Musk. Many are not political – they just post fake stuff for clicks and focus on pop culture, the entertainment industry, or post false information about the weather, science, the environment, etc..
49 of the Top 100 worst offending accounts are overtly political. 48 of the 49 most Community Noted political accounts are right-wing. Only one – ‘Blade of the Sun’ is from the Left. Ironically, many of these accounts complain in their bios that they are “anti-fake news” or “anti-woke” while posting one lie and fake video after another. Six of the accounts have been permanently suspended, but for reasons other than posting false info. Most of the accounts have well over 100K followers and many over 1 million. Elon Musk follows many of them and has retweeted them often – including the Community Noted posts. Elon Musk himself checks in at #55 of the list of worst offenders with 89 posts getting Community Noted.
Another big problem is that Musk has actually created an incentive structure to post fake things. Sensationalized claims get amplified by his algorithm and lots of clicks. There is financial incentive to continue to do it. You don’t face any suspensions and false posts tend to draw more engagement than true ones. Forty of the Worst 100 are monetized subscription accounts – so Musk is actually paying them to post fake things.
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Included in that top 100 is the New York Post (“the only major American media company to make the top 100”) and, scraping in at No.96, ex-PM Rishi Sunak (“the most prominent politician to make the list”, where by “prominent” he means “had an important job”, because there are some right nutters in there).
Basically, all of the top 10 Most Noted should be on your blocklist. Perhaps the next 10 too. Worth pointing out that Community Notes predated Musk; it was called “Birdwatch” and launched in 2021.
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How long will life exist on Earth? • The Atlantic
Ross Andersen:
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Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the Far Future” is one of my favorite webpages from the internet’s pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. “Certain events in the future of the universe can be predicted with a comfortable level of accuracy,” he wrote at the top of the page. He then proposed a chronological list of 33 such events, beginning with the joining of Asia and Australia 40 million years from now. He noted that around this same time, Mars’s moon Phobos would complete its slow death spiral into the red planet’s surface. A community of 1,533 editors have since expanded the timeline to 160 events, including the heat death of the universe. I like to imagine these people on laptops in living rooms and cafés across the world, compiling obscure bits of speculative science into a secular Book of Revelation.
Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth’s axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.
Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels.
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Wait a minute – replenished its fossil fuels with what? Or should that be who?
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Apple shares trailer for ‘Submerged’ immersive Vision Pro short film • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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Announced back in July, Submerged is a short film that’s set in World War II, and it follows a group of sailors that are struggling to survive a deadly torpedo attack. It was created by Austrian filmmaker Edward Berger, who directed 2022 movie All Quiet on the Western Front.
Apple has not provided details on the length of Submerged, but most Apple Immersive Video content is on the shorter side. Apple has been regularly adding Immersive Video to the Vision Pro since the device came out last February. The immersive content is in 3D, and is meant to make the viewer feel like they are part of the scene.
Apple Immersive Video content can be viewed in the Apple TV app in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the U.K., and the U.S. Users in China can watch the content through the Migu Video and Tencent Video apps.
Submerged is set to premiere on the Vision Pro on Thursday, October 10.
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There’s a one-minute YouTube promo for the film (which is 17 minutes long) in the article. It’s hard to know what it would really be like, because if you don’t have a Vision Pro, you won’t know what immersive video is like. (Seems like they decided to take “immersive” seriously, with all the water.)
But good to see that Apple is actually trying to create some content for the Vision Pro.
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As bird flu spreads, two new cases diagnosed in California • The New York Times
Apoorva Mandavilli:
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Two more people were diagnosed with bird flu this week, even as scientists in Missouri continued to investigate a possible cluster of infections in that state, federal health officials said at a news briefing on Friday.
In California, two farmworkers who were exposed to infected dairy cattle at different farms tested positive for the virus, called H5N1, state health officials said on Thursday. Those cases bring the total this year to 16, not including those under investigation.
The cases do not come as a surprise, because the number of infected herds in California has risen to 56 from 16 two weeks ago, said Dr. Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“As there are more herds that test positive, there are more workers who are exposed, and where there are more workers who are exposed, the chances of human infection increase,” he said. The risk to the public remains low, he added.
Still, experts said that the appearance of H5N1 in multiple states was worrisome.
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Watching brief. That’s all it is, nothing else. Not at all.
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Regeneron head says weight-loss drugs could cause “more harm than good” • Financial Times
Oliver Barnes:
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The co-founder of Regeneron has warned that blockbuster weight-loss drugs could cause “more harm than good” unless the rapid muscle loss associated with the treatments is solved, as the US biotech pushes ahead with trials of muscle-preserving medicines.
Clinical studies suggest that patients treated with the new class of weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1s, lose muscle at far faster rates than people losing weight from diet or exercise, exposing them to health problems, said George Yancopoulos, who also serves as Regeneron’s chief scientific officer.
For the two in every five patients who discontinue the treatments within a year, according to a 2024 JAMA study, this means that they are likely to rebound to their original weight with less muscle and a higher body fat percentage, “adding insult to injury”, said Yancopoulos.
“I do think that the GLPs should be viewed with a lot of concern in terms of the way they’re actually being used in the real world,” said Yancopoulos. “They could be leading to successive changes in body composition that could be creating more harm than good in the long term.”
Regeneron is among a growing list of drugmakers researching experimental drugs to preserve lean muscle mass in combination with GLP-1 drugs as a route into a potentially $130bn-a-year market that is dominated by Ozempic and Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the company behind Mounjaro and Zepbound.
Regeneron, a $111bn biotech that specialises in antibody treatments, is testing a drug called trevogrumab, which blocks the hormone myostatin, which limits muscle growth, in combination with Wegovy in mid-stage trials.
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Damn. And we thought we were doing so well with peak obesity.
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Uber and Lyft drivers use Teslas as makeshift robotaxis, raising safety concerns • Reuters
Akash Sriram and Abhirup Roy:
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A self-driving Tesla carrying a passenger for Uber rammed into an SUV at an intersection in suburban Las Vegas in April, an accident that sparked new concerns that a growing stable of self-styled “robotaxis” is exploiting a regulatory gray area in US cities, putting lives at risk.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk aims to show off plans for a robotaxi, or self-driving car used for ride-hailing services, on Oct. 10, and he has long contemplated a Tesla-run taxi network of autonomous vehicles owned by individuals.
Do-it-yourself versions, however, are already proliferating, according to 11 ride-hail drivers who use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. Many say the software, which costs $99 per month, has limitations, but that they use it because it helps reduce drivers’ stress and therefore allows them to work longer hours and earn more money.
Reuters is first to report about the Las Vegas accident and a related inquiry by federal safety officials, and of the broad use by ride-hail drivers of Tesla autonomous software.
While test versions of self-driving cabs with human backup drivers from robotaxi operators such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise are heavily regulated, state and federal authorities say Tesla drivers alone are responsible for their vehicles, whether or not they use driver-assist software. Waymo and Cruise use test versions of software categorized as fully autonomous while Tesla FSD is categorized as a level requiring driver oversight.
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It’s just a common-or-garden shunt though isn’t it. Whether or not the driver had “FSD” (which isn’t) on or not, if they’re in the driving seat, they’re responsible. By contrast the legal situation for the actual robotaxis operated by Waymo and GM is different.
But it does show that being a taxi driver is tedious and tiring. Of course you’d use driver assistance software if you could.
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Police seldom disclose use of facial recognition despite false arrests • The Washington Post
Douglas MacMillan, David Ovalle and Aaron Schaffer:
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Police departments in 15 states provided The Post with rarely seen records documenting their use of facial recognition in more than 1,000 criminal investigations over the past four years. According to the arrest reports in those cases and interviews with people who were arrested, authorities routinely failed to inform defendants about their use of the software — denying them the opportunity to contest the results of an emerging technology that is prone to error, especially when identifying people of color.
In fact, the records show that officers often obscured their reliance on the software in public-facing reports, saying that they identified suspects “through investigative means” or that a human source such as a witness or police officer made the initial identification.
In Evansville, Ind., for example, police said they identified a man who beat up a stranger on the street from his tattooed arms, long hair and previous jail booking photos. And in Pflugerville, Tex., police said they learned the name of a man who helped steal $12,500 in merchandise from Ulta Beauty “by utilization of investigative databases.”
Both of these suspects were identified with the aid of facial recognition, according to internal police records — information that was never shared with the accused, according to them or their attorneys. A spokeswoman for Pflugerville declined to answer questions about this case. Evansville police did not respond to requests for comment.
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The problem is that there have been multiple wrongful arrests, including one person who spent six days in jail for using credit cards to buy things in a state he had never visited. (Quite hard to prove you’ve never been somewhere.)
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 