There’s a move away from touchscreens as a general user interface for specific tasks in cars and even phones. CC-licensed photo by JC 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. Untouchable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A network of AI ‘Nudify’ sites are a front for notorious Russian hackers • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Multiple sites which promise to use AI to ‘nudify’ any photos uploaded are actually designed to infect users with powerful credential stealing malware, according to new findings from a cybersecurity company which has analyzed the sites. The researchers also believe the sites are run by Fin7, a notorious Russian cybercrime group that has previously even set up fake penetration testing services to trick people into hacking real victims on their behalf.

The news indicates that services for producing AI-generated nonconsensual intimate content are becoming enticing enough that hackers feel it is worth the time and effort to build fake versions they can then use to hack people. The news also shows that Fin7 is alive despite the U.S. Department of Justice saying last year that “Fin7 as an entity is no more.”

Hostinger, the domain registrar for most of the fake nudify sites, blocked the domains after 404 Media sent it a list of questions earlier this week. 404 Media also found that one of the Fin7-run sites was included one of the web’s biggest porn site aggregators, potentially putting many people who stumbled across the site at risk.

“The deepfake AI software may have an audience of mostly men with a decent amount who use other AI software or have crypto accounts,” Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push, told 404 Media in an online chat.

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Honeytraps: old ploy, modern method.
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Staying a step ahead: mitigating the DPRK IT worker threat • Google Cloud Blog

Codi Starks, Michael Barnhart, Taylor Long, Mike Lombardi, Joseph Pisano, and Alice Revelli:

»

UNC5267 is not a traditional, centralized threat group. IT workers consist of individuals sent by the North Korean government to live primarily in China and Russia, with smaller numbers in Africa and Southeast Asia. Their mission is to secure lucrative jobs within Western companies, especially those in the US tech sector.

UNC5267 gains initial access through the use of stolen identities to apply for various positions or are brought in as a contractor. UNC5267 operators have primarily applied for positions that offer 100% remote work. Mandiant observed the operators engaging in work of varying complexity and difficulty spanning disparate fields and sectors. It is not uncommon for a DPRK IT worker to be working multiple jobs at once, pulling in multiple salaries on a monthly basis. One American facilitator working with the IT workers compromised more than 60 identities of US persons, impacted more than 300 US companies, and resulted in at least $6.8m of revenue to be generated for the overseas IT workers from in or around October 2020 until October 2023.

…Mandiant has identified a substantial number of DPRK IT worker resumes used to apply for remote positions. In one resume from a suspected IT worker, the email address—previously observed in IT worker-related activities—was also linked to a fabricated software engineer profile hosted on Netlify, a platform often used for quickly creating and deploying websites. The profile claimed proficiency in multiple programming languages and included fake testimonials with stolen images from high-ranking professionals, likely stolen from CEOs, directors, and other software engineers’ LinkedIn profiles.

…To accomplish their duties, UNC5267 often remotely accesses victim company laptops situated within a laptop farm. These laptop farms are typically staffed with a single facilitator who is paid monthly to host numerous devices in one location. Mandiant has identified evidence that these laptops are often connected to an IP-based Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) device, although a recurring theme across these incidents is the installation of multiple remote management tools on victim corporate laptops immediately following shipment to the farm. These indicate that the individual is connecting to their corporate system remotely via the internet, and may not be geographically located in the city, state, or even country in which they report to reside.

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They’re also not very good at the programming jobs. Which shouldn’t surprise you. But able to work multiple jobs at once? Impressive!
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Touch screens are over. Even Apple is bringing back buttons • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

The tyranny of touch screens may be coming to an end.

Companies have spent nearly two decades cramming ever more functions onto tappable, swipeable displays. Now buttons, knobs, sliders and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances and personal electronics.

In cars, the widely emulated ultra-minimalism of Tesla’s touch-screen-centric control panels is giving way to actual buttons, knobs and toggles in new models from Kia, BMW’s Mini, and Volkswagen, among others. This trend is delighting reviewers and making the display-focused interiors of Tesla and its imitators feel passé.

Similar re-buttonization is occurring in everything from e-readers to induction stoves.

Perhaps the most prominent exponent of this button boom is the company that set us lurching toward touch screens in the first place. Apple added a third button it calls the “action button” to its full slate of new iPhone 16s unveiled this month, after introducing the feature on its upscale Apple Watch Ultra and Pro-model iPhones over the past couple of years. It also added a button-like “camera control” input on the iPhone’s side.

As Apple shows, companies aren’t just rediscovering buttons, they’re reconceiving them. The camera control includes touch features, and the company has also developed the “force sensor” that enables its AirPods to respond when you squeeze their stems.

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Pendulum swings are probably more common in technology than we realise. Unbundle! Then: bundle again! Make things modular! Then… make things integrated! Replace buttons with touchscreens! Then.. actually, buttons work better while we still have fingers.
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BBC confronts neo-Nazi who gave UK rioters arson tips • BBC News

Ed Thomas:

»

The BBC has confronted a neo-Nazi in Finland who shared online instructions on how to commit arson with UK rioters during the summer.

The 20-year-old was an administrator in the Southport Wake Up group on the Telegram messaging app, where he was known as “Mr AG”. He posted the arson manual, which was pinned to the top of the group chat.

In late July and early August, the group was key in helping to organise and provoke protests that turned to violence in England and Northern Ireland.

We tracked Mr AG – whose real name is Charles-Emmanuel Mikko Rasanen – to an apartment on the outskirts of the Finnish capital, Helsinki. It was from here, more than 1,000 miles away from Southport, that the neo-Nazi took a prominent online role during the UK riots.

On 29 July, within hours of the killings of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, the Southport Wake Up group was created. Within days it had grown to more than 14,000 members. Mr Rasanen – or Mr AG as he was known online – helped to run the group chat.

The group organised the very first protest in the UK, on St Luke’s Road in Southport, the day after the killings. That protest later turned into a riot. Before the group was taken down by Telegram, a series of other protest locations were advertised, as well as a list of dozens of refugee centres, suggested as potential targets.

…The BBC travelled to Finland to confront Mr Rasanen – we had previously emailed him. He refused to answer any of our questions, but did not deny sending the posts or being an administrator of the Southport Wake Up group.

Before we left him, he also accused the BBC of harassment and rang the police.

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Totally weird: he’s a mixed-race Finn who celebrates Hitler. Neat work tracking him down, which seems to have been done by Finnish investigative journalists: very Girl With The Dragon Tattoo of them.
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More than 9,000 scam Facebook pages deleted after Australians lose $43.4m to celebrity deepfakes • The Guardian

Josh Taylor:

»

Australians could see fewer deepfake images of celebrities being hauled off in handcuffs, or promoting a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment on Facebook, after Meta launched a new one-stop shop for banks to share information on scams that has blocked 8,000 pages and 9,000 celebrity scams in its first six months of operation.

From January to August 2024, Australians reported $43.4m in losses from scams on social media to Scamwatch, with close to $30m relating to fake investment scams.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has faced pressure from politicians and regulators in the past few years to tackle the plague of scams featuring deepfake images of public figures such as David Koch, Gina Rinehart, Anthony Albanese, Larry Emdur, Guy Sebastian and others which are used to promote investment scams.

The company is being sued by the mining magnate Andrew Forrest over the company’s alleged failure to tackle scams using his image.

Meta announced on Wednesday it had partnered with the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) to launch the Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (Fire) that provides a dedicated reporting channel for scams between Meta and financial providers of the victims of the scams.

…Since launching a pilot in April, there have been 102 reports, resulting in Meta removing more than 9,000 scam pages, and 8,000 AI-generated celebrity investment scams on Facebook and Instagram.

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Those celebrity fake ads are all over Twitter, but I doubt that they’re going to be taken down with anything like the same alacrity. It’s hardly worth celebrities suing Twitter, since it will just tie them up in court, and Musk has more money than they do. No obvious solution if the platform doesn’t see it as important.
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The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI • MIT Technology Review

Mat Honan:

»

when I tried Snap’s new Spectacles a couple of weeks ago, I was less taken by the ability to simulate a golf green in the living room than I was with the way I could look out on the horizon, ask Snap’s AI agent about the tall ship I saw in the distance, and have it not only identify it but give me a brief description of it. Similarly, in The Verge Alex Heath notes that the most impressive part of Meta’s Orion demo was when he looked at a set of ingredients and the glasses told him what they were and how to make a smoothie out of them.

The killer feature of Orion or other glasses won’t be AR Ping-Pong games—batting an invisible ball around with the palm of your hand is just goofy. But the ability to use multimodal AI to better understand, interact with, and just get more out of the world around you without getting sucked into a screen? That’s amazing.

And really, that’s always been the appeal. At least to me. Back in 2013, when I was writing about Google Glass, what was most revolutionary about that extremely nascent face computer was its ability to offer up relevant,  contextual information using Google Now (at the time the company’s answer to Apple’s Siri) in a way that bypassed my phone.

While I had mixed feelings about Glass overall, I argued, “You are so going to love Google Now for your face.” I still think that’s true.

Assistants that help you accomplish things in the world, without having to be given complicated instructions or making you interface with a screen at all, are going to usher in a new wave of computing. While Google’s Project Astra demo, a still unreleased AI agent that it showed off this summer, was wild on a phone, it was not until Astra ran on a pair of smart glasses that things really fired up.

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That’s always been the obvious use of smart glasses. Especially now we have AI to integrate to it.
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How Hurricane Helene became a monster storm – The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

It made landfall with winds reaching 140 miles per hour, making it a major storm and a Category 4 out of 5 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.

Helene packed a punch with water, too. When it hit Florida’s Big Bend region, it brought a massive storm surge, inundating the coastline with up to 15 feet of seawater. The underwater topography off Florida’s west coast, with a more gradual incline, acted like a ramp, making it easier for the storm to bring a taller wall of water with it. The sheer size of the hurricane also meant that the storm surge flooded a wider area.

Heavy rainfall dropped more water onto communities, leading to historic flooding in western North Carolina. Close to 14 inches of rain were recorded at the Asheville airport over three days between September 25th and 27th. The highest preliminary total was more than 31 inches of rain, recorded in Busick, North Carolina.

…Climate change is altering the calculus for storms like Helene. Rising global temperatures create conditions conducive to more intense storms that can gain strength quickly and stay more powerful onshore. Helene developed amid soaring sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Waters along the storm’s early path got as high as 31ºC (87.8ºf), providing ample fuel. The atmosphere’s ability to hold moisture is increasing because of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, allowing for more severe downpours.

To know how big of a role climate change played with Helene specifically, scientists will have to conduct more research. But Balaguru likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. “It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick,” Balaguru says.

Altogether, the pieces were in place for the perfect storm with Helene. “The storm started big, which was bad, it went over hot water, which was bad, it hit a place that is prone to high storm surge, and then it accelerated and went into populated areas and took wind and rainwater to those populated areas,” Knox says. “You don’t want to see much worse.”

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Oura nears $500m in annual revenue and readies new ring • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman and Evan Gorelick:

»

Oura Health Oy, a Finnish health technology company known for its fitness-tracking rings, will see annual sales double this year to roughly $500m and expects “healthy” growth in 2025.

Chief executive officer Tom Hale, speaking in an interview, said that Oura is building a loyal following after selling more than 2.5 million rings. Still, the company isn’t yet at the stage of planning an initial public offering, he said.

The 11-year-old business, which pioneered the concept of finger-worn activity trackers, makes its money by selling rings for $299 and subscriptions priced at $6 a month. It’s more of a niche market than smartwatches or earbuds, but the field is getting more crowded. Samsung Electronics Co. recently launched a $400 product called the Galaxy Ring.

Hale is upbeat about expanding the business. The company’s profit margins are closer to that of a software company than a hardware maker, he said, and Oura’s subscribers have been sticking with the product.

“Retention is better than any other subscription model I’ve seen,” Hale said. “To double this business, we don’t have to do that much.” He said that the company’s roughly half a billion dollars in revenue for calendar 2024 would be twice what it recorded in 2023.

Though Oura declined to discuss future products, people with knowledge of its plans say the company is introducing a fourth-generation ring in October. The device will have a thinner design and better battery life, as well as more accurate activity tracking, they said. It’s set to be the company’s biggest product overhaul in three years.

In addition to tracking fitness, Oura rings assess the quality of a user’s sleep and provide a “readiness score.” About 80% of Oura’s revenue comes from hardware, with the rest provided by software subscriptions, Hale said

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Neil Cybart (via whom this comes) reckons half of those 2.5 million rings will be sold this year. I just can’t imagine it as a mass market thing.
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Windows MR headsets no longer work in Windows 11 24H2 • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

Microsoft has removed Windows Mixed Reality from Windows 11.

With Windows 11 24H2, the latest major version of Microsoft’s PC operating system, you can no longer use a Windows MR headset in any way – not even on Steam.

This includes all the Windows MR headsets from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, including HP’s Reverb G2, released in 2020.

UploadVR tested Windows 11 24H2 with a Reverb G2 and found the above notice. Microsoft confirmed to UploadVR that this is an intentional removal when it originally announced the move back in December.

In August 3.49% of SteamVR users were using a Windows MR headset, roughly 80,000 people. If they install Windows 11 24H2, their VR headset will effectively become a paperweight.

Steam said: “Existing Windows Mixed Reality devices will continue to work with Steam through November 2026, if users remain on their current released version of Windows 11 (version 23H2) and do not upgrade to this year’s annual feature update for Windows 11 (version 24H2).”

The death of Windows MR headsets comes on the same week Microsoft revealed that HoloLens 2 production has ended, and that software support for the AR headset will end after 2027.

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I think that’s what’s known as a signal. HoloLens going is significant: it seems that Microsoft has decided that VR, at least its form, isn’t the thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Some university students in America now quail at reading a long book in a week. Or any books. CC-licensed photo by vickysandoval22 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. Novel. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google paid $2.7bn to bring back an AI genius who quit in frustration • WSJ

Miles Kruppa and Lauren Thomas:

»

At a time when tech companies are paying eye-popping sums to hire the best minds in artificial intelligence, Google’s deal to rehire Noam Shazeer has left others in the dust. 

A co-author of a seminal research paper that kicked off the AI boom, Shazeer quit Google in 2021 to start his own company after the search giant refused to release a chatbot he developed. When that startup, Character.AI, began to flounder, his old employer swooped in.

Google wrote Character a check for around $2.7bn, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The official reason for the payment was to license Character’s technology. But the deal included another component: Shazeer agreed to work for Google again.

Within Google, Shazeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason the company agreed to pay the multibillion-dollar licensing fee.

The arrangement has thrust him into the middle of a debate in Silicon Valley about whether tech giants are overspending in the race to develop cutting-edge AI, which some believe will define the future of computing. 

“Noam is clearly a great person in that space,” said Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “Is he 20 times as good as other people?” 

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The fact that Google has this amount of money to spend on a single individual (come on, they don’t need the technology) is just mindboggling. Heading off a rival? Is that the true profit that he will add to the company? It’s hard to think anyone since a few of the original hires at Google has managed to be that valuable.
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Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: ‘I see AI as born out of surveillance’ • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia:

»

Until 2017, Whittaker had thought she could successfully mobilise change from inside the machine, building up ethical AI research and development programmes at Google in collaboration with academics at universities and companies such as Microsoft. But in the autumn of that year, a colleague contacted her about a project they were working on. They had learnt it was part of a Department of Defense pilot contract, codenamed Project Maven, that used AI to analyse video imagery and eventually improve drone strikes. “I was basically just a . . . dissent court jester,” she says, still visibly disappointed.

She drafted an open letter to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, that received more than 3,000 employee signatures, urging the company to pull out of the contract. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter said.

“The Maven letter was sort of like, I can’t make my name as an ethical actor redounding to Google’s benefit,” she says. “You’re talking about Google becoming a military contractor. It’s still shocking, although it’s become normalised for us, but this is a centralised surveillance company with more kompromat than anyone could ever dream of, and now they’re partnering with the world’s most lethal military, as they call themselves.

“Yeah, that was the end of my rope.”

Whittaker went on to help organise employee protests and walkouts, in which more than 20,000 Google workers participated, to protest against the company’s handling of other ethical matters such as sexual harassment allegations against high-profile executives. At the time, Google’s management opted not to renew the Pentagon contract once it expired. But Whittaker left Google in 2019, after the company presented her with a set of options that she says gave her no choice but to quit. “It was like, you can go be an administrator, doing spreadsheets and budgets for the open source office [and] stop all the shit I had been building forever.”

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Fascinating interview – there’s much more (the link should pass the paywall) and it’s all engrossing.
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CNN puts a paywall on its website as TV revenues decline • SF Gate

Stephen Battaglio:

»

CNN has long had one of the most visited news websites in the world. Starting Tuesday, users are going to have to pay for it.

The Warner Bros. Discovery-owned news operation is putting a paywall on CNN.com, requiring U.S. users to pay $3.99 for access or a discounted rate of $29.99 a year. The subscription will allow unlimited usage of the site, which is visited by 150 million people globally each month.

Users will be asked to subscribe after accessing a number of free stories, according to an internal memo from Alex MacCallum, executive vice president of digital products and services for CNN.

CNN’s reason for the move is rooted in the problems that plague all of traditional television. Consumers are spending more time with online video and canceling their traditional pay-TV subscriptions. Revenues from cable and satellite subscribers are declining as cord-cutting continues at a steady pace each year. The trend, along with a decline in ratings, has put pressure on CNN’s profit margins.

Whether consumers will pay for a product they have used for free over the years remains to be seen. Mark Thompson, who took over as CNN’s chairman last year, turned the New York Times into a successful digital subscription site during his tenure at that company.

MacCallum’s memo said subscribers “will receive benefits like exclusive election features, original documentaries, a curated daily selection of our most distinctive journalism, and fewer digital ads.” CNN is currently developing video content with some of its talent designed to be behind the paywall on the site, according to people familiar with the plans.

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That’s not a lot of money to ask. And yet it’s going to mean a lot of people not going on the site: any amount of friction will do that. Passwords, usernames, different devices, it’s going to be the usual mess.
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The elite college students who can’t read books • The Atlantic

Rose Horowitch:

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Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet. “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible.

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Pride & Prejudice is 108,500 words (or so). Crime & Punishment is 107,500 words (or so). Think of all the TikToks you could watch in the time it takes you to read them!
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How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels • Grist

Akielly Hu:

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Matthias Weyland loves having people ask about his balcony. A pair of solar panels hang from the railing, casting a sheen of dark blue against the red brick of his apartment building. They’re connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home. On a sunny day, he’ll produce enough power to supply up to half of his family’s daily needs.

Weyland is one of hundreds of thousands of people across Germany who have embraced balkonkraftwerk, or balcony solar. Unlike rooftop photovoltaics, the technology doesn’t require users to own their home, and anyone capable of plugging in an appliance can set it up. Most people buy the simple hardware online or at the supermarket for about $550 (500 euros.)

The ease of installation and a potent mix of government policies to encourage adoption has made the wee arrays hugely popular. More than 550,000 of them dot cities and towns nationwide, half of which were installed in 2023. During the first half of this year, Germany added 200 megawatts of balcony solar. Regulations limit each system to just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop, but the cumulative effect is nudging the country toward its clean energy goals while giving apartment dwellers, who make up more than half of the population, an easy way to save money and address the climate crisis.

“I love the feeling of charging the bike when the sun is shining, or having the washing machine run when the sun is shining, and to know that it comes directly from the sun,” Weyland said. “It’s a small step you can take as a tenant” and an act of “self-efficacy, to not just sit and wait until the climate crisis gets worse.”

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Guess they could also not shut down their nuclear power stations and stop using coal? Just a thought.
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Fraud. So much fraud • Science

Derek Lowe:

»

Charles Piller and the team here at Science dropped a big story on Thursday morning, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible.

As is so often the case, image manipulation is at the heart of the scandal. Readers here will be all too familiar with the techniques of cutting and pasting Western blots in order to make them tell the story the authors want told, and of re-using images and parts of images over and over even when they’re supposed to be produced from different experiments at different times. That’s what we’re seeing here, and a 300-page dossier has been assembled with examples of it.

Splicing, cloning, overlaying, copy-and-pasting, duplication of the same image with different captions about different research in different journals: a great deal of effort seems to have gone into carefully doctoring, cleaning, beautifying, and spicing up these papers digitally. After looking over examples, I find the evidence convincing and impossible to explain (at least in my mind) as anything other than sustained, deliberate acts of deception lasting for decades.

Hundreds of them. Again and again. The dossier references 132 papers with apparent problems. Unfortunately, these include many highly cited papers on mechanisms of synaptic damage (Masliah specialized in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s mechanisms, particularly around the alpha-synuclein protein).

As the article details, this all has some direct drug discovery implications, particularly for an antibody called prasinezumab which targets alpha-synuclein. All four of the fundamental papers about prasinezumab (as cited on the web site of its developer, Prothena) are full of manipulated images, unfortunately.

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As the blogpost points out, this is disastrous for Alzheimer’s research. (Via Benedict Evans.)
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AI crawlers are hammering sites and nearly taking them offline • Fast Company

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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A number of websites have begun to take action to fend off crawlers, seeking to avoid the negative impact of being bombarded with requests. An increasing number of websites are putting restrictions on AI crawlers, according to a recent analysis by the Data Provenance Initiative (DPI), a group of AI researchers. In the DPI’s analysis, around one in four tokens from the most critical web domains called upon by crawlers have put up restrictions. And social media is buzzing with complaints about the increasing instances of web crawlers pushing up traffic on websites.

Edd Coates is one of those who has raised concerns online. He runs Game UI Database, a database of details taken from games designed to be used as a reference tool. The website was relaunched in early August, gaining large volumes of visitors keen to check it out. But then a few weeks later, the website’s performance declined dramatically, slowing to a crawl. “I thought that was weird, because we had about a quarter of the people visiting the website that did at the relaunch,” says Coates. “And it’s somehow running slower.”

Coates and his web developer checked the website’s server logs, which turned up the cause of the problem: a crawler by OpenAI was pouncing on the website. “They were hitting the site so hard,” he says. “It was, like, 200 times a second.” OpenAI doesn’t dispute its GPTBot crawler visited Game UI Database, but does dispute the scale of how frequently their crawler was hitting the website, showing evidence that suggested the number of queries per second was only around three.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Fast Company: “We enable publishers to use industry-standard tools to express preferences about access to their websites. By using robots.txt publishers can set time delays and reduce load on their systems, choose to allow access to only certain pages or directories, or opt out entirely. We stopped accessing this website as soon as they updated their robots.txt directions for our bot, as our systems recognized and respected this.”

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All these years it’s existed and robots.txt still doesn’t have a “don’t hit this site more than X times per second/minute/hour” setting.
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Study finds zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated for HPV before age 14 • STAT

Annalisa Merelli:

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A historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: no cases of cervical cancer were detected in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.

Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.

“The study is super exciting. It shows that the vaccine is extremely effective,” said Kathleen Schmeler, a professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the research. “It’s obviously early. We’re just starting to see the first data of the impact of the vaccine because it takes so long from the time of the vaccine to the effects.”

The results underscore the importance of working to increase uptake of the HPV vaccine in the US, said Schmeler. Scotland, for example, introduced routine immunization in schools in 2008, and close to 90% of students in their fourth year of secondary school (equivalent to 10th grade in the US.) in the 2022-2023 school year had received at least one dose of the vaccine. In the US, where HPV vaccines are not administered in school, uptake among adolescents ages 13 to 17 is a little over 60%.

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In case you didn’t know, HPV is identified as a key cause of cervical cancer. Even one dose given before girls become sexually active seems to be effective. In the age cohort, the expectation was for 15 to 17 cases. There could be other HPV strains, and this isn’t the end of the story. But it’s a big bookmark in the story.
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Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first • Nature

Smriti Mallapaty:

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A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body.

“I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjin, China, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.

James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”

The study, published in Cell, follows results from a separate group in Shanghai, China, who reported in April that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes. The islets were also derived from reprogrammed stem cells taken from the man’s own body, and he has since stopped taking insulin.

The studies are among a handful of pioneering trials using stem cells to treat diabetes, which affects close to half a billion people worldwide. Most of them have type 2 diabetes, in which the body doesn’t produce enough insulin or its ability to use the hormone diminishes. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks islet cells in the pancreas.

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So far the woman’s transplanted cells have generated insulin for a year; other researchers want to see them work for five years before they consider her “cured”. But it’s a big breakthrough.
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Did you solve it? The box problem that baffled the boffins • The Guardian

Alex Bellos:

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The 15 boxes problem.

Andrew and Barbara are playing a game, in which fifteen boxes are arranged in a 3-row 5-column grid as shown below:

Prizes are put in two randomly-chosen boxes. Andrew will search the boxes row by row, so his search order is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO. Barbara will search column by column, so her order is AFKBGLCHMDINEJO.

If Andrew and Barbara open their boxes together each turn, that is, on the first turn, they both open A, on the second, Andrew opens B and Barbara opens F, on the third Andrew opens C, and Barbara opens K, and so on, who is more likely to find a prize first?

a) Andrew.
b) Barbara.
c) Both equally likely.

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Think a bit about this one. I got the correct answer despite misreading the question (it matters that there are *two* prizes hidden.) Bellos says it intrigues mathematicians because they struggle to find an intuitive explanation for why the correct answer is correct. The obvious next step to find that intuitive explanation, I think, is to consider whether the result would be different if the grid were square, and if it were taller than it is wide but both players used the same strategy. (And would adding more prizes change anything?) Bellos has a new book out – Think Twice – which is full of intriguing puzzles like this. For those that like that sort of thing, that is the thing they like.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK’s last coal-fired power station closed down forever on Monday night, part of the transformation of its power system towards non-fossil sources. CC-licensed photo by Arran Bee 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. Cleaner. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Coal generation in OECD countries falls below half of its peak • Ember

Dave Jones:

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Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the UK’s last coal power plant, closes at midnight on the 30th September 2024. And with it, a long chapter of coal power in the UK comes to a rapid close. It’s not just the UK though: many countries around the world expanded coal power and are now in the process of moving away from it.

Among the world’s richest countries, who were the first to embrace coal and will be the first to move away from it, the decline in coal power is rapidly accelerating.

OECD coal generation peaked in 2007, and last year reached half that level for the first time (-52%). Rapid growth in solar and wind was responsible for 87% of the fall in coal during this period. Consequently, coal generation fell to just 17% of the OECD total electricity generation in 2023, down from 36% at its peak in 2007.

The UK is the 14th of 38 OECD countries to achieve a coal-free power system. Among the remaining 24 OECD countries that still have coal-fired electricity, 19 have seen coal power generation fall by at least 30% from its peak in 2007. Only four OECD countries have seen less than a 30% fall in coal from their peak, including South Korea and Japan. Türkiye was the only OECD country to set a new coal power record in 2023.

Of the 38 OECD countries, 13 are targeting a Paris-aligned coal phase-out by 2030, on top of the 14 countries that are already coal-free. Most countries have good plans for expanding wind and solar which means coal power will continue to collapse this decade, even in the 11 countries that have not explicitly committed to a phase-out by 2030.

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It’s a start!
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Essential node in global semiconductor supply chain hit by Hurricane Helene • HUNTERBROOK

Sam Koppelman:

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“The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina,” wrote Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and codirector of its Generative AI Labs, on March 9, 2024. 

At the end of this inconspicuous road sit two mines that produce the vast majority of high-purity quartz (HPQ) that is indispensable to the global semiconductor industry. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the horrific damage to the community appears to have extended to the roads and freight rail line connecting the mining operations to the outside world — according to images reviewed and geolocated by Hunterbrook Media.

One video posted to TikTok appeared to show the entrance to one of the structures of the mine — owned by SCR Sibelco NV — underwater, with a text overlay praying for the community. A truck is seen underwater at the entrance to Sibelco’s facility.

In the Appalachian Mountains, the facilities in Spruce Pine supply between an estimated 70% and 90% of the mined and processed HPQ used in the electronics industry. Although it is one of Earth’s most common minerals, quartz in its purest form — such as the white quartz in North Carolina — is much rarer. And pure quartz is a critical component for the production of the silicon wafers necessary for everything from your phone and computer to large language models and solar panels.

If the operations of the two major quartz miners in the region — Sibelco and The Quartz Corp. — are interrupted, experts have said, the consequences could be catastrophic. “If you flew over the two mines in Spruce Pine with a crop duster loaded with a very particular powder, you could end the world’s production of semiconductors and solar panels within six months,” said an industry expert in the acclaimed book Material World by economist Ed Conway. 

Conway claims this is because, “no high-purity quartz means no Czochralski crucibles, which means no monocrystalline silicon wafers, which means, well, the end of computer chip manufacture as we know it.” 

A Hunterbrook reporter in North Carolina was unable to reach the government in Spruce Pine for comment because the cell signal is still down. 

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Following up on yesterday’s piece. Hedge funds (including Hunterbrook Capital, “attached” to Hunterbrook Media here) are now wondering what the effect will be on, well, everything. But especially the stock market.
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Google could use small nuclear reactors to power data centres • Power Magazine

Darrell Proctor:

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[Google CEO Sundar] Pichai said that Google’s goal of being a carbon-neutral company by 2030 will be challenged by the need to develop data centers amid the boom in artificial intelligence (AI). He said that does not mean the group will miss its goal. Google reportedly is putting together a team looking at carbon-free energy alternatives to serve its growing power demand worldwide.

“We are now working on over 1-GW data centers, which I didn’t think we would be thinking about just maybe even two years earlier, and all of this needs energy, ” Pichai said during a talk in Carnegie Mellon’s Highmark Center as part of the university’s 2024-25 President’s Lecture Series. Pichai spoke on “The AI Platform Shift and the Opportunity Ahead,” as he focused his company’s advancements in AI and his vision for a future driven by AI.

“I think in the short term it is challenging,” said Pichai. “In the medium to long term I’m optimistic, because I think it’s also bringing a lot of capital investment to developing new sources of energy. We invested very early in wind and solar because we saw the opportunity there. And today, many of our data centers operate at around 90% carbon-free basis.”

Pichai did not say Google would use SMRs to power its data centers, but noted, “I see the amount of money going into SMRs … for nuclear energy. And so when I look at the capital and innovation going in, I’m optimistic in the medium to long term.”

Those new energy sources include geothermal.

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I like how the writer’s great enthusiasm for nuclear (you should see the sidebar on the website: if headlines were radioactive, it would achieve fission) means that when Pichai didn’t rule out nuclear, he ruled it in.
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Griefbots and the perils of digital immortality • The Garden of Forking Paths

Brian Klaas:

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In late 2012, shortly before Christmas, an old woman sat down in London’s Embankment station. Unlike the other passengers, she wasn’t there to travel. While everyone else ignored the pre-recorded safety announcement, she was eagerly awaiting it. When it came, she was dismayed. Then, she began to cry.

As Tube trains whizzed past, commuters swirling around her, Margaret McCollum wiped tears from her eyes. It had been five years since her husband, Oswald Laurence, had died. But this was the day Margaret felt like he was truly gone forever.

When staff at the station came over to comfort Margaret, they asked her what was wrong. What she told them moved them to tears, too.

She explained that her late husband, Oswald, was an actor. In the late 1960s, he had recorded the “Mind the Gap” announcement for the Northern Line on London’s sprawling underground network. Even after he died in 2007, McCollum could always come to the station, sit on the platform, and listen as her husband’s distinctive, sonorous voice boomed a safety warning to passengers, reminding them about the gap between the train doorway and the platform. It was a ritualized comfort, a tiny audio link to the man she loved and deeply missed.

This time, though, Oswald’s voice had disappeared, replaced in a fresh digital upgrade of the Tube announcements. McCollum’s visceral connection with her husband was gone.

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This is a paywalled post, but the three examples that are above the wall – including this one – are thought-provoking about our relationship with the dead in the digital world.
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Epic Games accuses Samsung and Google of scheme to block rivals • Reuters via The Guardian

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Fortnite video game maker Epic Games on Monday accused Alphabet’s Google and Samsung, the world’s largest Android phone manufacturer, of conspiring to protect Google’s Play store from competition.

Epic filed a lawsuit in US federal court in California alleging that a Samsung mobile security feature called Auto Blocker was intended to deter users from downloading apps from sources other than the Play store or Samsung’s Galaxy store. It’s Epic’s second antitrust suit against Google.

Samsung and Google are violating US antitrust law by reducing consumer choice and preventing competition that would make apps less expensive, said US-based Epic, which is backed by China’s Tencent.

“It’s about unfair competition by misleading users into thinking competitors’ products are inferior to the company’s products themselves,” Tim Sweeney, Epic’s chief executive, told reporters.

“Google is pretending to keep the user safe saying you’re not allowed to install apps from unknown sources. Well, Google knows what Fortnite is as they have distributed it in the past.”

Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Samsung said it planned to “vigorously contest Epic Games’ baseless claims”.

“The features integrated into its devices are designed in accordance with Samsung’s core principles of security, privacy, and user control, and we remain fully committed to safeguarding users’ personal data,” Samsung said in the statement, adding that users have choices to disable Auto Blocker at any time.

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Reminder that Epic mostly lost to Apple, but mostly won against Google, in an antitrust case because Google favoured some app makers over others in how they were treated in the Google Play store, whereas Apple was brutal to everyone. If Samsung has shown any favouritism, it’s cooked. (In about three years.)
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AI-assisted reporter • Journalism.co.uk Media jobs

A chance to work for the Hereford Gazette:

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This is an exciting opportunity for someone passionate about journalism and the potential for AI to contribute to the way we produce and consume news, without losing sight of the importance of quality reporting and writing.

As an AI-assisted reporter, you will have the opportunity to develop your news and technical skills, including learning how to manage and utilise AI technology effectively.

You will play a key role in ensuring that our articles meet the highest standards of accuracy, information, and compliance with media law, plagiarism, and privacy, utilising your journalistic expertise alongside AI tools.

Key responsibilities:  
• Check factual accuracy
• Work with an AI system to help write news articles, while also utilising your journalism skills to maintain the quality and authenticity of the content
• Ensure that all content produced meets legal and ethical standards, including those related to media law, plagiarism, privacy, and accuracy
• Efficiently upload and manage stories, using time-saving AI tools and techniques to ensure a seamless process without compromising the quality of the content
• Contribute to the development of AI technology by monitoring the performance of AI-generated content and identifying areas for improvement
• Work closely with our existing editorial teams to help integrate selected AI-generated content into a variety of newsrooms
• Train other reporters in the use of AI technology

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One little note: the advert says this is “part-time (three days a week), home-based”. If it’s home-based how are you going to train those other reporters? I suppose you could do it webcast-style but it seems a pretty grisly way to go about it. The times, they are a-changing.
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A Logic Named Joe

Murray Leinster:

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It was on the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, an’ that afternoon I saved civilization.

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That’s the opening line of this science fiction short story told by Leinster – real name William F Jenkins, who, it turns out, was Benedict Evans’s grandfather. This story is referenced in a 2017 piece by Evans about how we get predictions about the future wrong because we can’t see how the subtle things will change, so we tend to write about our existing society but with nuclear knobs on.

Yet reading A Logic Named Joe now, seven years after Evans’s original reference to it, I got the feeling that it was describing how people use – or would like to use – LLMs, which of course were not a thing at all seven years ago. (It’s quite an entertaining little story.)

But that might just be our human tendency to retrofit what we think we see in old writing.
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Mapping time: the surprising overlaps of history’s most influential minds • Big Think

Frank Jacobs:

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We look back on famous past lives through the prism of those mostly fictitious compartments — labelling one as a scientist, another as a pirate — as if they were as neatly separated from life’s complexities as they are from us by time.

This graph [in the article] perforates that temporal prejudice. Called “The Big Map of Who Lived When,” it shows us which historical figures were contemporaries. The co-aliveness of some of these figures may boggle your mind.

The most satisfying way to use this map is to look for long lives with short overlaps. Like a picture of a great-grandparent holding their great-grandchild, there is something poetic about two lives lived so far apart yet intertwining for a brief period.

The map [in the article] focuses mainly on western luminaries, in seven categories: artists (blue), business & industry (yellow), thinkers (green), entertainers (red), athletes (purple), writers (magenta), and leaders & baddies (black). (Credit: profound_whatever via Reddit/DataIsBeautiful)

Take, for example, current US president Joe Biden (°1942), the oldest serving president to date, who for about a year was alive at the same time as Nikola Tesla (1854-1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating current (AC) system that is used for distributing electricity.

Here’s another, more recent (and more baffling) overlap: The life of JRR Tolkien (1892-1973), who wrote The Lord of the Rings, coincided ever so slightly with that of Eminem (°1972), voted in 2015 the third-best rapper of all time.

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Via Sophie Warnes’s Fair Warning newsletter (like everything, it’s on Substack now): she, like me, can’t believe that Tolkien/Eminem overlap. A terrible prose composer and a great one! You choose which is which.
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Possible cluster of human bird-flu infections expands in Missouri • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli and Emily Anthes:

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A possible cluster of bird-flu infections in Missouri has grown to include eight people, in what may be the first examples of person-to-person transmission in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday.

If confirmed, the cases in Missouri could indicate that the virus may have acquired the ability to infect people more easily. Worldwide, clusters of bird flu among people are extremely rare. Most cases have resulted from close contact with infected birds.

Health officials in Missouri initially identified a patient with bird flu who was hospitalized last month with unusual symptoms. The patient may have infected one household member and six health care workers, all of whom developed symptoms, according to the C.D.C.

Investigators have not yet confirmed whether any of those seven individuals were infected with the virus, called H5N1, leaving open the possibility that they had Covid or some other illness with flulike symptoms.

Still, the news alarmed experts.

“We should be very concerned at this point,” said Dr. James Lawler, co-director of the University of Nebraska’s Global Center for Health Security.

“Nobody should be hitting the panic button yet, but we should really be devoting a lot of resources into figuring out what’s going on.”

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Watching brief, nothing more. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified