Imagine an original Casio digital watch – and now imagine it as a ring. And now you can buy it! CC-licensed photo by John Booty on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Suitably sized. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

TikTok CEO summoned to European Parliament over role in shock Romania election • POLITICO

Nicholas Vinocur and Pieter Haeck:

»

A top EU lawmaker is demanding that TikTok’s chief executive appear before the European Parliament to answer questions about the platform’s role in Sunday’s Romanian presidential election, as researchers warn of covert activity on thousands of fake accounts leading up to the vote.

The first-round victory of the ultranationalist and pro-Russian Călin Georgescu has triggered shockwaves about the political trajectory of the EU and NATO country, with many concerns focused on how a TikTok campaign managed to propel an unknown candidate from obscurity. A second-round will be held on Dec. 8.

“We call on the CEO of TikTok to come to speak in this house and to ensure his platform conducted to no infringement under the DSA,” Valérie Hayer, head of the liberal Renew Europe group, told a press conference on Thursday, referring to the Digital Services Act, Europe’s rulebook for online content.

“Romania is a warning bell: radicalization and disinformation can happen all over Europe with harmful consequences,” added Hayer, an ally of French President Emmanuel Macron.

Hayer’s appeal comes only two days after Georgescu’s shock victory. He had no party backing and polls had failed to pick up on his popularity — though researchers are now zeroing on a major TikTok campaign he led in the days leading up to the election.

“We believed that Tiktok was misused and was led to be misused by him and an army of fake accounts that were used for his purpose,” said Bogdan Manolea, executive director of the Romanian campaign group, Association for Technology and Internet.

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Romania’s highest court has ordered a recount to rule out fraud. TikTok becomes interesting.
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Bluesky has a verification problem • Engadget

Karissa Bell:

»

Bluesky is bigger than ever. But as the upstart social media service surges, the platform is facing some growing pains. Among them: The influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators hoping to capitalize on the attention — and Bluesky’s lack of a conventional verification system.

A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44% of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one “doppelganger,” with most looking like “cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture,” Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up.

Unlike many of its counterparts, which offer checkmarks and official badges to government officials, celebrities and other high profile accounts, Bluesky has a more hands-off approach to verification. Instead of proactively verifying notable accounts itself, the company encourages users to use a custom domain name as their handle in order to “self-verify.”

For example, my employer Engadget currently has the Bluesky handle engadget.bsky.social. But if we wanted to “verify” our account, we could opt to change it to Engadget.com. Some media organizations, like The New York Times, Bloomberg and The Onion have done this for their official accounts. Individuals are also able to verify by using a personal website.

But, the process is more complicated than simply changing your handle. It also requires entities to add a string of text to the DNS record associated with their domain.

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Yeah, well, screw that. We have speed-run to the point where Bluesky needs to do verification by people. Sure, it doesn’t scale, but in that case you speed-run to the point where you’re also taking money from people for some aspect of your site to pay for that.

There were about 294,000 verified Twitter accounts (back when that meant something). Apart from the blue tick – easily faked – there was one other simple tell: did the Twitter @verified account follow an account? In that case, it was the real thing.
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Australia passes world-first law banning under-16s from social media despite safety concerns • The Guardian

Helen Sullivan:

»

Australia’s parliament has passed a law that will aim to do what no other government has, and many parents have tried to: stop children from using social media. The new law was drafted in response to what the Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, says is a “clear, causal link between the rise of social media and the harm [to] the mental health of young Australians.”

On Thursday, parliament’s upper house, the Senate, passed a bill by 34 votes to 19 banning children under 16 from social media platforms.

But academics, politicians and advocacy groups have warned that the ban – as envisioned by the government – could backfire, driving teenagers to the dark web, or making them feel more isolated. There are questions about how it will work in practice. Many worry that the process has been too rushed, and that, if users are asked to prove their age, it could lead to social media companies being handed valuable personal data. Even Elon Musk has weighed in.

The online safety amendment (social media minimum age) bill bans social media platforms from allowing users under 16 to access their services, threatening companies with fines of up to AU$50m (US$32m) if they fail to comply. However, it contains no details about how it will work, only that the companies will be expected to take reasonable steps to ensure users are aged 16 or over. The detail will come later, through the completion of a trial of age-assurance technology in mid-2025. The bill won’t come into force for another 12 months.

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What a complete and utter mess. (The topic of my Substack, linked at the top.)
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CRW001-1 • CASIO

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Creating a ring-sized, full-metal version of the Casio watch’s complex form is no easy feat. To make this possible, we needed to use a special method of metal processing to inject a mixture of fine metal powders and resin into a mold. Using metal injection molding (MIM), the case, case back, and ring are molded in one piece, with even the dimpled design on the band faithfully reproduced. A special glass adhesive technique ensures a tight seal for a watch built to be water-resistant while still allowing the battery to be replaced.

With an inner diameter of 20 mm and a circumference of 62.8 mm, the ring fits a size 22 finger (US 10.5, EU U) and includes two size-adjusting spacers, in size 19 (19-mm inner diameter) and 16 (18-mm inner diameter).

We downsized the standard watch module by a factor of 10 and combined it with a small button battery to create a 3-button digital watch that fits on your finger. Even at this small size, the watch features a 7-segment LCD that displays not only the time down to the second, but also the date, dual time, and stopwatch functionality.

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Yes, you read that correctly: it’s a Casio digital watch, shrunk down to the size of a ring. A conversation piece for sure, such as: “what the hell time is it? This thing’s too small to read.”
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Exclusive: new hijacking scam targets Elsevier, Springer Nature, and other major publishers • Retraction Watch

Ellie Kincaid and others:

»

Typically, cloned versions of journals’ websites are of low quality and don’t resemble the recognizable and professional designs of Springer Nature and Elsevier. As described in previous posts, fraudulent publishers would usually copy the ISSN, title and other metadata of niche and university journals in order to avoid identification, and possibly index their unauthorized content in bibliographic databases such as Scopus or Web of Science. 

We’ve cataloged over 300 such cloned journals in the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, a small number of which involve major publishers like Springer Nature, Elsevier and Wiley. For example, earlier this year the Journal of Academic Ethics and Machine Intelligence Research, both published by Springer Nature, were cloned.

But earlier this month, William Black, founder and CEO of PSIref, an online platform aggregating scholarly publication data which offers advertising opportunities for publishers, sent me evidence of a new, more sophisticated scam.

The company “Springer Global Publication” – which is not affiliated with Springer Nature – has published dozens of papers cloning the websites of journals officially published by Elsevier, Springer, the American Medical Association and more.  The company had advertised a variety of services on its website, including finding a writer for research papers, editing manuscripts, developing research proposals, analyzing data and managing the peer review process. This collection of services is a classic attribute of a paper mill. 

Springer Global Publication did not respond to our request for comment, but after we contacted them, they removed descriptions of their services from their website, as well as links to papers published in cloned journals.

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It says nothing good about the current state of the online scientific journal publishing business that there is such a thing as the “Hijacked Journal Checker”.
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Meta’s Threads is developing its own take on Bluesky’s ‘Starter Packs’ • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Hoping to quell some of the momentum behind social network Bluesky, a competitor to X and Meta’s Threads, Meta is developing a feature that takes inspiration from one of Bluesky’s more popular additions: the concept of “Starter Packs,” or hand-curated lists of suggested users that help newcomers find people to follow. Meta’s version of these Starter Packs will also suggest profiles that are “handpicked by people on Threads,” according to screenshots of the feature, which is still in development.

Unlike Threads, which is built off the back of Instagram’s existing social graph, Bluesky needed a way to quickly and easily connect new users to others in its community whose posts they may find interesting. Instead of importing users’ address books, the startup introduced the concept of “Starter Packs,” which are curated lists of recommended users that anyone in the community can make.

These lists can center around topics of interest, geographies, industries, fan groups, languages, or anything else.

The feature has become so popular there are now websites that organize everyone’s Bluesky Starter Packs into a searchable database. Starter Packs can also often be found shared by others in the Bluesky feed and are available as a tab on users’ profiles.

«

Hilarious how Bluesky is now the product manager for Threads. First, Threads manager Adam Mosseri had to say that there would be a pure “Following” default for those who wanted it, rather than the algorithmic timeline; and now this. Change of logo next?
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Yes, that viral LinkedIn post you read was probably AI-generated • WIRED

Kate Knibbs:

»

Over 54% of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by the AI detection startup Originality AI. It’s just that the corporate-speak style of AI writing on the platform can be tricky to distinguish from genuine human-penned Thought Leader Blogging.

Originality scanned a sample of 8,795 public LinkedIn posts over 100 words long that were published from January 2018 to October 2024. For the first few years, the use of AI writing tools on LinkedIn was negligible. A major increase then occurred at the beginning of 2023. “The uptick happened when ChatGPT came out,” says Originality CEO Jon Gillham. At that point, Originality found the number of likely AI-generated posts had spiked 189%; it has since leveled off.

LinkedIn says it doesn’t track how many posts on the site are written or edited with AI tools. “But we do have robust defenses in place to proactively identify low-quality, and exact or near-exact duplicate content. When we detect such content, we take action to ensure it is not broadly promoted,” says Adam Walkiewicz, LinkedIn’s head of “feed relevance.” “We see AI as a tool that can help with review of a draft or to beat the blank page problem, but the original thoughts and ideas that our members share are what matter.”

LinkedIn is for finding a new job and keeping in touch with former coworkers, which means it’s a relatively staid social media platform. But in recent years, it’s developed its own network of influencers and is surprisingly popular with Gen Z, including teenagers.

«

What a fabulous race: will AI slop take over Facebook or LinkedIn first? Let’s watch!
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Musk admits X throttles links as “news influencers” take over • The Washington Post

Will Oremus:

»

X owner Elon Musk seemed on Monday to confirm what sharp-eyed users have suspected for months: that putting a link in your post on his social network is a good way to ensure it won’t go viral.

Musk was replying to a post by the influential Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, who opined on Sunday that “the deprioritization of tweets with links in them is Twitter’s biggest flaw.” X’s main draw, Graham said, is “to find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.”

Musk’s response implied Graham was right that X’s algorithm downgrades link posts.

“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply,” Musk said, mentioning a strategy that some savvy X users were already employing. “This just stops lazy linking.”

It’s another sign that the humble hyperlink – the connective tissue of the open web – has fallen on hard times. Earlier this century, when first Google and then social networks conquered the attention economy, they left the legacy media and other online publishers a consolation prize: the chance to siphon readers back to their websites via links. The local news outlet might no longer be its readers’ daily portal to the wider world, but at least its grabbiest stories still stood a chance of topping their search results or Facebook feeds. That meant eyeballs and therefore revenue.

Those were the days. Facebook began de-emphasizing posts from publishers around 2017 in favor of posts from friends, family and groups, along with images, memes and videos uploaded directly to Facebook. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok gave rise to new classes of influencers and creators who connected with audiences and made money directly on their platforms — often discussing news they read elsewhere without directing viewers to the source. The term of art for such posts betrays the platforms’ bias: “native content.”

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Global foldable smartphone shipments decline in Q3 2024 despite Samsung’s launch of new models • Counterpoint Research

»

Global foldable smartphone shipments saw a 1% YoY decline in Q3 2024 after six consecutive quarters of YoY growth, according to the latest Counterpoint Research Global Foldable Smartphone Market Tracker. This was also the first-ever Q3 decline in the segment’s history, mainly due to Samsung’s relatively underwhelming performance with its new Galaxy Z6 series.

Samsung regained its position as the global market leader with a 56% share, driven by the Z6 series launch. However, the brand’s unit shipments fell 21% YoY. Among its new models, the book-type Galaxy Z Fold 6 delivered a modest performance, while the clamshell Galaxy Z Flip 6 struggled to match its predecessor’s sales. The decline in global market share was partly due to growing foldable demand and contribution from China, where Samsung has a comparatively small presence with only 8% foldables share in Q3 2024 compared to being the undisputed leader globally (ex-China) with 82% share.

Having said that, as the foldables supply chain matures, Samsung is increasingly facing strong competition from in North America from Moto with its full range of sub-$1000 Razr flip foldables, and in Western Europe from Honor with its attractive and thin Magic V series book-type foldables.

…Jene Park, senior analyst at Counterpoint, said, “The global foldable market appears to have entered a transitionary phase where it is facing challenges as it progresses from a niche segment to the mainstream. User satisfaction is particularly high with book-type foldable devices, but the prohibitively high prices remain the biggest obstacle to mass adoption.

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No word on actual numbers, but as they’re only about 20m annually, or about 1% of the total market, this remains the nichiest of niche topics.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The growth of touchscreens may finally be going into reverse as their downsides become clear. CC-licensed photo by Graeme Maclean 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.

Have we reached peak touchscreen? Maybe yes • User Mag

Taylor Lorenz:

»

After years of futilely mashing our fingers onto touch screens, buttons on technology products are making a comeback. I’ve been fascinated by this re-buttonization of tech and once you see it, you’ll notice it everywhere.

There has been a proliferation of tools like the Clicks Keyboard Case, which appends a physical keyboard to your iPhone, BlackBerry style. E-readers like the Nook have started to put page-turning buttons back onto their devices.

Apple even added buttons back to the top of its MacBook Pro keyboards after backlash to the “Touch Bar” that it had it rolled out in 2016. In Apple’s announcement, the company noted, “Physical function keys… replace the Touch Bar, bringing back the familiar, tactile feel of mechanical keys that pro users love.”

Historically, producing custom buttons has been expensive, and as technology advanced in recent decades it became much cheaper for companies to produce touch screen interfaces. Touchscreens also have some benefits: they allow for a more flexible user interface design and make it easy to push updates to products remotely.

But now that touch screens have become ubiquitous, it’s becoming very clear that they suck. Touch screen interfaces can crash, rendering products unusable, they can wear out over time, and poorly designed touch screens often don’t sense a user’s swipes or taps. Not to mention, to navigate a touch screen interface you have to look at it, making things more dangerous when you integrate touchscreens into things like a car or heavy machinery.

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I mean, buttons can come off in your hand, they can lose their functionality, but that’s nothing compared to the problems with touchscreens.
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Chinese ship’s crew suspected of deliberately dragging anchor for 100 miles to cut Baltic cables • WSJ

Bojan Pancevski:

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A Chinese commercial vessel that has been surrounded by European warships in international waters for a week is central to an investigation of suspected sabotage that threatens to test the limits of maritime law—and heighten tensions between Beijing and European capitals.

Investigators suspect that the crew of the Yi Peng 3 bulk carrier—225 meters long, 32 meters wide and loaded with Russian fertilizer—deliberately severed two critical data cables last week as its anchor was dragged along the Baltic seabed for over 100 miles (160km).

Their probe now centers on whether the captain of the Chinese-owned ship, which departed the Russian Baltic port of Ust-Luga on Nov. 15, was induced by Russian intelligence to carry out the sabotage. It would be the latest in a series of attacks on Europe’s critical infrastructure that law-enforcement and intelligence officials say have been orchestrated by Russia.

“It’s extremely unlikely that the captain would not have noticed that his ship dropped and dragged its anchor, losing speed for hours and cutting cables on the way,” said a senior European investigator involved in the case.

The ship’s Chinese owner, Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, is cooperating with the investigation and has allowed the vessel to be stopped in international waters, according to people familiar with the probe. The company declined to comment. 

The damage to undersea cables occurred in Swedish waters on Nov. 17-18, prompting that country’s authorities to open a sabotage investigation. Russia has denied wrongdoing. 

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Ningbo Yipeng Shipping only owns one other vessel, and is based near the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo. Shipping companies: terribly useful for all sorts of fronts.
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Elon Musk’s Twitter backers gain windfall from xAI deal • Financial Times

Tabby Kinder and George Hammond:

»

Investors in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter are set to make a huge windfall from a surge in the valuation of his artificial intelligence company, reaping rewards from being loyal backers of the billionaire’s business empire.

Musk has given investors that backed his $44bn Twitter acquisition 25% of the shares in xAI, which he founded last year to take on rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

xAI is set to close a new $5bn fundraising round as early as Wednesday, according to people with knowledge of the talks, doubling its valuation to $50bn in just six months.

That has meant some of Musk’s backers, who were sitting on billions of dollars of unrealised losses from the Twitter takeover, could be made “whole” through shares in xAI thanks to the startup’s massive rise in value.

Those set to benefit as investors in both Musk companies include Fidelity, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Silicon Valley venture firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

The connections between the Musk businesses are the latest example of the overlapping incentives for those who support his ventures, which also include electric-car maker Tesla and rocket builder SpaceX.

Many of his financial backers have justified their support of the takeover of Twitter, since renamed X, as a bet on Musk and a means to stay within his orbit. That thinking has been considered especially prescient as Musk has become a close confidant of president-elect Donald Trump.

“There are few adages in tech that really hold up,” said one investor in Musk’s companies. “Never bet against Elon is one.”

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Rich people not becoming poor but instead staying or becoming even more rich! It’s a tale told again and again. Weird how it happens, eh.
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Google’s plan to keep AI out of search trial remedies isn’t going very well • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Google got some disappointing news at a status conference Tuesday, where US District Judge Amit Mehta suggested that Google’s AI products may be restricted as an appropriate remedy following the government’s win in the search monopoly trial.

According to Law360, Mehta said that “the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines” is rapidly shifting the search market. Because the judge is now weighing preventive measures to combat Google’s anticompetitive behavior, the judge wants to hear much more about how each side views AI’s role in Google’s search empire during the remedies stage of litigation than he did during the search trial.

“AI and the integration of AI is only going to play a much larger role, it seems to me, in the remedy phase than it did in the liability phase,” Mehta said. “Is that because of the remedies being requested? Perhaps. But is it also potentially because the market that we have all been discussing has shifted?”

To fight the DOJ’s proposed remedies, Google is seemingly dragging its major AI rivals into the trial. Trying to prove that remedies would harm Google’s ability to compete, the tech company is currently trying to pry into Microsoft’s AI deals, including its $13bn investment in OpenAI, Law360 reported. At least preliminarily, Mehta has agreed that information Google is seeking from rivals has “core relevance” to the remedies litigation, Law360 reported.

The DOJ has asked for a wide range of remedies to stop Google from potentially using AI to entrench its market dominance in search and search text advertising. They include a ban on exclusive agreements with publishers to train on content, which the DOJ fears might allow Google to block AI rivals from licensing data, potentially posing a barrier to entry in both markets. Under the proposed remedies, Google would also face restrictions on investments in or acquisitions of AI products, as well as mergers with AI companies.

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OpenAI’s Sora tool leaked by group of aggrieved early testers • Forbes

Moin Roberts-Islam:

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A storm has been brewing in the AI landscape following the unauthorized leak of OpenAI’s groundbreaking Sora model, a text-to-video generator that has been making waves for its ability to create short, high-fidelity videos with remarkable temporal stability. At the heart of the controversy is a multifaceted conflict involving technological advancement, ethical concerns and artistic advocacy.

The leak was posted on Hugging Face and was allegedly carried out by individuals involved in the testing phase — using the username “PR-Puppets” — and raises pressing questions about the relationship between innovation, labor and corporate accountability. The leaked model, released alongside an open letter addressed to the “Corporate AI Overlords,” can purportedly produce 10-second video clips at up to 1080p resolution.

…The leak of Sora’s model appears to stem from dissatisfaction among testers and contributors, particularly those in creative industries. Critics allege that OpenAI (currently valued at over $150 billion) exploited their labor by relying on unpaid or undercompensated contributions to refine the model. These testers, including visual artists and filmmakers, provided valuable feedback and creative input, only to allegedly find themselves excluded from equitable recognition or compensation.

“This wasn’t just about unpaid work—it was about respect,” noted one anonymous contributor quoted in the Hugging Face commentary. “OpenAI treated our input like raw material, not creative expertise. It’s not collaboration; it’s extraction.”

This act of rebellion serves as a protest against the broader commodification of creative expertise in AI development.

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If you leak a product like this, does it really put power back into the hands of the artists, or does it just reduce the chance to monetise for OpenAI et al?
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Nuclear electricity generation has hidden problems • Our Finite World

Gail Tverberg:

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It is easy to get the impression that proposed new modular nuclear generating units will solve the problems of nuclear generation. Perhaps they will allow more nuclear electricity to be generated at a low cost and with much less of a problem with spent fuel.

As I analyze the situation, however, the problems associated with nuclear electricity generation are more complex and immediate than most people perceive. My analysis shows that the world is already dealing with “not enough uranium from mines to go around.” In particular, US production of uranium “peaked”about 1980.

For many years, the US was able to down-blend nuclear warheads (both purchased from Russia and from its own supply) to get around its uranium supply deficit.

Today, the inventory of nuclear warheads has dropped quite low. There are few warheads available for down-blending. This is creating a limit on uranium supply that is only now starting to hit.

Nuclear warheads, besides providing uranium in general, are important for the fact that they provide a concentrated source of uranium-235, which is the isotope of uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction. With the warhead supply depleting, the US has a second huge problem: developing a way to produce nuclear fuel, probably mostly from spent fuel, with the desired high concentration of uranium-235. Today, Russia is the primary supplier of enriched uranium.

The plan of the US is to use government research grants to kickstart work on new small modular nuclear reactors that will be more efficient than current nuclear plants. These reactors will use a new fuel with a higher concentration of uranium-235 than is available today, except through purchase from Russia.

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There’s a long laundry list of problems. None seems simple to solve.
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Cold case solved: DNA evidence confirms the identity of a rapist and killer in a case dating back to 1979 • Riverside County District Attorney

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In 1979, the body of a 17-year-old girl was found dumped in a snowpack off Highway 243 near Banning. Authorities determined she had been raped and bludgeoned to death.

Now, more than 45 years later, using forensic genealogy, the Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team announced on Nov. 20, 2024, that they have confirmed the identity of the rapist and killer.

On Feb. 9, 1979, Esther Gonzalez was attacked and murdered while walking from her parents’ house in Beaumont to her sister’s house in Banning. Her body was found the next day off Highway 243, south of Poppet Flats Road.

Esther’s body was found after an unidentified man, described by deputies as argumentative, called the Riverside County Sheriff’s Station in Banning to report finding a body, saying he didn’t know if it was a male or female. Five days later, sheriff’s investigators were able to identify the caller as Lewis Randolph “Randy” Williamson and asked him to take a polygraph. He agreed and passed which, at the time, cleared him of any wrongdoing.

Investigators continued to work on this case for years and eventually uploaded a semen sample from the crime scene into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). In 2023, members of the cold case homicide team sent various items of evidence to Othram, Inc. in Texas, initiating a Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy investigation, in hopes of developing additional leads. Earlier this year, a crime analyst assigned to the cold case team determined that, although Williamson was seemingly cleared by the polygraph in 1979, he was never cleared through DNA because the technology had not yet been developed.

Williamson died in Florida in 2014.

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If you needed any more evidence that polygraphs (aka lie detectors) aren’t reliable, there you go.
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2022: Police used a baby’s DNA to investigate its father for a crime • WIRED

Emily Mullin, in 2022:

»

If you were born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government. By the 1970s, states had established newborn screening programs, in which a nurse takes a few drops of blood from a pinprick on a baby’s heel, then sends the sample to a lab to test for certain diseases. Over the years, the list has grown from just a few conditions to dozens.

The blood is supposed to be used for medical purposes—these screenings identify babies with serious health issues, and they have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children. But a public records lawsuit filed last month in New Jersey suggests these samples are also being used by police in criminal investigations. The lawsuit, filed by the state’s Office of the Public Defender and the New Jersey Monitor, a nonprofit news outlet, alleges that state police sought a newborn’s blood sample from the New Jersey Department of Health to investigate the child’s father in connection with a sexual assault from the 1990s.

Crystal Grant, a technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the case represents a “whole new leap forward” in the misuse of DNA by law enforcement. “It means that essentially every baby born in the US could be included in police surveillance,” she says.

It’s not known how many agencies around the country have sought to use newborn screening samples to investigate crimes, or how often those attempts were successful. But there is at least one other instance of it happening. In December 2020, a local TV station reported that police in California had issued five search warrants to access such samples, and that at least one cold case there was solved with the help of newborn blood. “This increasing overreach into the health system by police to get genetic information is really concerning,” Grant says.

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I came across this by chance, but it’s a remarkable use of DNA, which now feels like the police’s go-to for solving crimes of all sorts.
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Taiwan gets slammed with 15,000 cyber attacks per second, says digital minister • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

»

A government minister asserted that Taiwan experiences four times more cyber attacks than the average country. Earlier this week, Taiwanese Digital Minister Huang Yen-nun (黃彥男) told attendees at the CYBERDAY 2024 Information Security Industry Day in Tainan that hackers attempt to breach Taiwan’s digital defenses an astonishing 15,000 times per second. As well as being 4X the average figure, this digital onslaught is touted as the most intense worldwide.

As far as geopolitics goes, Taiwan is well known to be a political hot potato and a potential flashpoint for a major military conflict in East Asia. Military hardware like planes and ships dance carefully around each other all around the sweet potato-shaped island, but so far (touch wood) have never sparked a serious incident. In contrast, Taiwan is now seen as a “first-level war zone,” in the cyber world.

Huang Yen-nun heads up the Ministry of Digital Affairs, which was only set up in 2022. Revealing these figures to the public might be scary in some ways, but knowing politicians are well aware of the problems and are actively bolstering cybersecurity for government and business should encourage stakeholders.

The Taiwanese government has also reportedly tasked the National Security Bureau with setting up a national cybersecurity response center. Leveraging the country’s top intelligence agency this way, with a structure for information sharing, should also protect both private and government concerns on the island.

In addition to securing data in Taiwan, the above initiative demonstrates that the country is serious about building trust with anyone who works with or trades with the island.

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Surprising if China isn’t behind it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The famous German camera company Leica has just had its best-ever year of sales. Are physical cameras making a comeback? CC-licensed photo by Sherman Geronimo-Tan 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. Me? No Leica. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Don’t break up Google • The New York Times

Herbert Hovenkamp is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School:

»

The entire point of antitrust law is to promote competitive markets. Antitrust remedies are not designed to punish a wrongdoer but rather to correct the effects of a monopoly. The test for a successful remedy is whether the market becomes more competitive, with higher output or a better experience for consumers.

At this point, the Justice Department has not sufficiently explained why its proposed actions are an appropriate remedy. Some of the proposals were not addressed at any length in the judge’s opinion in the Google trial at all. Others would split up complementary products, which often leads to poorer quality outcomes and higher coordination costs, both of which would be passed on to consumers. If the government gets everything it wants, the result could remove some of the features that have made Google products so successful and result in a fractured system that requires greater user effort to get inferior results.

History has shown us that courts are generally poor instruments for restructuring industries. Too often they simply make firms less competitive. The record of success is particularly poor in situations involving highly innovative companies that, like Google, have developed mainly by internal growth, rather than through acquisitions.

Breaking up Standard Oil in 1911 created firms too small to be as efficient as their predecessor was, which coincided with an increase in the price of gasoline mainly caused by increased demand. And breaking up United Shoe Machinery in 1968 was followed soon after by that firm’s closure as an independent entity.

In his earlier ruling, Judge Mehta concluded that Google’s monopolization of the market owed in part to the fact that it pays hardware makers large sums to ensure its products are the default option on their products. But if people were completely free to choose, Google would likely be the most popular option regardless — in the European Union, where Google’s Android system is required to ask users to select from a choice of browsers, most of them choose Google search.

«

Hovenkamp doesn’t appear to be one of the (many) American academics who gets funding from Google, and his arguments here are forceful. He writes a lot on antitrust (such as this) and I’d certainly agree that the DOJ’s proposals don’t seem like a remedy; they just make life worse for lots of people.
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X’s objection to the Onion buying InfoWars is a reminder you do not own your social media accounts • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

On Monday, X filed an objection in The Onion’s bid to buy InfoWars out of bankruptcy. In the objection, Elon Musk’s lawyers argued that X has “superior ownership” of all accounts on X, that it objects to the inclusion of InfoWars and related Twitter accounts in the bankruptcy auction, and that the court should therefore prevent the transfer of them to The Onion. 

The legal basis that X asserts in the filing is not terribly interesting. But what is interesting is that X has decided to involve itself at all, and it highlights that you do not own your followers or your account or anything at all on corporate social media, and it also highlights the fact that Elon Musk’s X is primarily a political project he is using to boost, or stifle, specific viewpoints and help his friends. In the filing, X’s lawyers essentially say—like many other software companies, and, increasingly, device manufacturers as well—that the company’s terms of service grant X’s users a “license” to use the platform but that, ultimately, X owns all accounts on the social network and can do anything that it wants with them.

“Few bankruptcy courts have addressed the issue of ownership of social media accounts, and those courts that have were focused on whether an individual or the individual’s employer owned an account used for business purposes—not whether the social media company had a superior right of ownership over either the individual or the corporation,” Musk’s lawyers write. 

«

Musk’s lawyers are right: just because you tweak their database (by adding an email and choosing a username), that doesn’t give you property rights over any aspect of the account. As Koebler observes, though, Musk doesn’t have to get involved in this, and the fact he has indicates that he is treating this network not as one for “free speech”, but his little projects. And that’s bad.
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Philippines recruits civilian tech talent to fend off cyber attacks • Rest of World

Julia Ornedo:

»

Earlier this year, the Philippine Army put out an unusual call on Facebook, inviting civilian hackers to join its cybersecurity unit. “We have a greater enemy that wants to devour us. Do we want to let them?” Joey Fontiveros, founding commander of the Cyber Battalion, said in a Facebook Reel that has been viewed over 2 million times. “Why not join us?”

The Philippines is among the countries most vulnerable to cyber attacks, with tens of thousands of cyber threats targeting its government agencies, academic institutions, and corporations in recent years. Cyber attacks on the email servers and websites of the Philippine Coast Guard and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. this year were traced to China, authorities said. China has denied this.

In response to the threats, the Philippine government has adopted a new five-year national cybersecurity plan, formed a defense network with the U.S. and Japan, and asked the military to reinforce the security of its systems. The Cyber Battalion, which was set up in 2020, was initially staffed by soldiers. The army then decided to actively recruit civilians. It targets young IT professionals who may be open to lower wages for greater job security and the pride of working for the nation, Lieutenant Colonel Ariel Alejandro, the Cyber Battalion’s commander, told Rest of World.

“The cyber practitioners in our military force are very limited. We need a lot more,” Alejandro said. “Our limitation is we cannot afford to offer the same benefits as private and multinational companies. [But] joining the Philippine Army through the Cyber Battalion is a way of helping the country for our young bloods.”

The Cyber Battalion currently has a staff of about 120. The unit has so far hired about 70 civilian experts in their 20s and 30s. Civilian recruits receive months-long training, including the basics of life in the military, such as morning calls, exercise drills, and some weapons training.

«

Quite why you’d train a bunch of hackers in weapons training when the idea is that they are, you know, hackers, escapes me.
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Bluesky is working on addressing the EU’s DSA complaints. – The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu confirmed in an email to The Verge that the platform is “actively working” with its lawyers to ensure Bluesky’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act’s information disclosure rules, as Bloomberg reports.

On Monday, the European Commission called out that Bluesky has no page listing “how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” as required by the DSA.

«

In the Bloomberg story it was Bluesky’s lawyer, singular, who was on the job, which to be honest sounds more believable than lawyers, multiple.
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Elon Musk has pledged to settle Mars. This book offers a reality check • CNN

Katie Hunt:

»

The promise of starting life anew on Mars may appear alluring, even feasible, as the climate crisis intensifies and space and rocket technology advances.

But the reality would be dreadful, according to one book that argues that Elon Musk’s intention to settle the red planet within the next 30 years is doomed to failure.

Written by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, “A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?” won the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize and was published in November 2023.

The husband-and-wife authors investigate what life would actually be like in the unforgiving environment of the red planet and clear up any misconceptions about what it might involve.

Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist and an adjunct assistant professor at Rice University in Houston, and, Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist, delve into all sorts of questions that humans would face if we became a multiplanetary species. How would we build space farms to feed everyone? What about giving birth to babies and raising kids? Would settling Mars unleash a new space race?

Initially enthusiastic about the prospect of humans living on Mars, the authors said their research turned them into space settlement skeptics. “Leaving a 2 (degree Celsius) warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump,” they wrote in the book’s introduction.

«

There’s an interview, but you get the idea (which has also been examined by Maciej Cieglowski, aka Pinboard, who also reckons there’s no point in humans going to Mars because “nature cannot be fooled” – quoting Richard Feynman).
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Shop like a Pro • Perplexity.ai

“Perplexity team”:

»

Today, we’re excited to launch a new experience for shopping. Perplexity is now a one-stop solution where you can research and purchase products. It marks a big leap forward in how we serve our users – empowering seamless native actions right from an answer. Shopping online just got 10x more easy and fun.

Here’s what’s new:
• One-click checkout to save time. For Perplexity Pro users in the U.S., we’ve built a first-of-its kind AI commerce experience, Buy with Pro, which lets you check out seamlessly right on our website or app for select products from select merchants. Just save your shipping and billing information through our secure portal and select “Buy with Pro” to place your order. We’ll take care of the rest. Plus, you’ll get free shipping on all Buy with Pro orders as a thank-you for shopping with Perplexity. If Buy with Pro isn’t available, we’ll redirect you to the merchant’s website to complete your purchase.

• Snap to Shop, a visual search tool that shows you relevant products when you take a photo of an item. Now, you can easily find what you’re looking for, even if you don’t have a product description or name.

• Discover the best product. When you ask Perplexity a shopping question, you’ll still get the precise, objective answers you expect, plus easy-to-read product cards showing the most relevant items, along with key details presented in a simple, visual format. These cards aren’t sponsored—they’re unbiased recommendations, tailored to your search by our AI.

This new discovery experience is powered by platform integrations including Shopify, which gives access to the most recent and relevant information on products across Shopify-powered businesses globally that sell and ship to the US.

You no longer have to scroll through countless product reviews. Perplexity gives you comparisons in clear, everyday language, so you can narrow down the best choices quickly and confidently.

«

Tanks parked firmly and thoroughly on Google’s lawn.
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Leica just recorded the highest revenue in its entire 100-year history • PetaPixel

Jaron Schneider:

»

Leica Camera announced that its 2023/2024 fiscal year saw it achieve the highest revenue in the entire history of the company. It saw 14% growth to 554 million euros over last year’s already spectacular 485 million euros.

Last winter, Leica announced that it had set a sales record for the 2022/23 financial year and it has shattered that achievement now in 2024. The company says it was able to build on its successful business and sustain the growth of its earnings. The biggest driver of the company’s success remains unchanged: cameras. While Leica has bolstered its business with its Mobile Imaging segment (smartphone technology and partnerships), the core of its business remains stand-alone cameras and the support of photography.

Specifically, Leica says that the most potent revenue driver this year was the Leica Q3. However, it did not elaborate on sales numbers for this camera.

2024 is the best fiscal year so far in the almost 100-year history of the company and Leica says that this result confirms its “strategic alignment” of the Leica Camera Group as it continues to foster its core business as well as expansions into other markets.

…Leica’s success is global. It saw the most significant growth in the Asia region with a 25% increase in revenue while Europe (not counting Germany) saw growth of over 10%.

«

No word on profit; Leica has been a private company (owned by two investment firms) since 2012. It’s like the vinyl renaissance.
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Sonos’ smart TV plans might have found an OS • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

After its foray into headphones, the next major new product category from Sonos is rumored to be a video streaming box similar to a Roku, Amazon Fire TV, or Apple TV. Such a device has been rumored for ages now, with Bloomberg previously reporting that its price is expected to fall between $150 and $200. And today we got confirmation (or at least something close to it) that the Sonos streamer will run an operating system built by The Trade Desk, a digital advertising business.

Janko Roettgers first reported on a partnership between the two back in September, noting that The Trade Desk is “supplying Sonos with the core smart TV OS, and facilitating deals with app publishers, while Sonos is designing its own hardware, and customizing the user interface.” Considering the rocky last several months that Sonos has endured — through a mess of its own making — this Trade Desk arrangement sounds like yet another reason for customers to be wary about the company’s current trajectory.

The Trade Desk declined to share any images of its newly-announced Ventura operating system with The Verge. If hardware partners have free reign to customize it, maybe that’s why there’s nothing to showcase right now. But the company’s press release covers some of Ventura’s goals, and here’s the most relevant portion:

»

Ventura represents a major advance in streaming TV operating systems as it solves key issues with prevailing market systems today, including frustrating user experiences, inefficient advertising supply chains, and content conflicts-of-interest.

«

«

From the very first day I saw Sonos demonstrating its “music in multiple rooms” product (that’s 2005) I’ve been asking periodically when it was going to get into video. The answer was always “we don’t think that’s a key focus now” (or words to that effect.

Getting into bed with an advertising business seems.. like a move that will undermine its brand as a high-end ad-free product. Welch pretty much nails it:

»

I’ve scratched my head for months, wondering what the potential killer app of a Sonos set-top box might be, and I still can’t come up with one.

«

Nor me. The time when it could is long past.
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Kenyan workers with AI jobs thought they had tickets to the future until the grim reality set in • CBS News

Lesley Stahl, Aliza Chasan, Shachar Bar-On and Jinsol Jung:

»

The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs, but right now it’s also creating jobs. There’s a growing global workforce of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. It’s gruntwork that needs to be done accurately and fast. To do it cheaply, the work is often farmed out to developing countries like Kenya.

Nairobi, Kenya, is one of the main hubs for this kind of work. It’s a country desperate for work. The unemployment rate is as high as 67% among young people. 

“The workforce is so large and desperate that they could pay whatever and have whatever working conditions, and they will have someone who will pick up that job,” [Kenyan civil rights activist Nerima] Wako-Ojiwa said.

Every year, a million young people enter the job market, so the government has been courting tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Intel. Officials have promoted Kenya as a “Silicon Savannah” — tech savvy and digitally connected. 

Kenyan President William Ruto has offered financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws to attract the tech companies.

Naftali Wambalo, a father of two with a college degree in mathematics, was elated to find work in Nairobi in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. He is what’s known as a “human in the loop”: someone sorting, labeling and sifting through reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. 

Wambalo and other digital workers spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching AI algorithms to recognize them.

Human labelers tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities in CTs, MRIs and X-rays to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI gets smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that’ll need labeling. 

Humans in the loop are found not only in Kenya, but also in India, the Philippines and Venezuela. They’re often countries with low wages but large populations — well educated, but unemployed.

«

The product changes, but the exploitation stays the same.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Our modern world of human-pretending chatbots and fake-real images would seem very recognisable to SF writer Philip K Dick. CC-licensed photo by Bill Smith on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Probably real. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The PKD Dystopia • Programmable Mutter

Henry Farrell:

»

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways.

Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping). [Recounted in Social Warming – Overspill Ed.]

In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties’ and sixties’ California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.

Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon):

»

The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again.

«

These obsessions had some of their roots in Dick’s complex and ever-evolving personal mythology (in which it was perfectly plausible that the “real” world was a fake, and that we were all living in Palestine sometime in the first century AD). Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed.

«

Farrell makes a really good point: this is a dystopia that Dick would recognise at once.
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WhatsApp becomes the latest social media app blocked in Pakistan • TechRadar

Chiara Castro:

»

Pakistan restricted yet another social media platform over the weekend.

WhatsApp is the new target of government censorship after X, Facebook, Instagram, and, most recently, Bluesky were blocked across the country.

The internet watchdog NetBlocks reported the outage on Saturday, November 23, 2024 (see tweet below).

“The measure comes as authorities tighten security ahead of protests planned by opposition party PTI calling for the release of former PM Imran Khan,” noted the experts.

Censorship levels in Pakistan have increased significantly in 2024.

Today’s most popular social media platforms first went dark in January, a month away from general elections, as Khan’s party, PTI, launched its online election fundraising telethon.

Authorities enforced a temporary internet shutdown on February 8, election day. X was then restricted on the night of February 17, as a wave of protests contesting election results spread across the country. To this day, Pakistanis still cannot access the ex-Twitter app without one of the best VPNs, together with Meta’s Facebook and Instagram and, since November 21, Bluesky.

«

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OpenAI blamed NYT for tech problem erasing evidence of copyright abuse • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

the NYT asked OpenAI to collaborate on a joint filing admitting the deletion occurred. But OpenAI declined, instead filing a separate response calling the newspaper’s accusation that evidence was deleted “exaggerated” and blaming the NYT for the technical problem that triggered the data deleting.

OpenAI denied deleting “any evidence,” instead admitting only that file-system information was “inadvertently removed” after the NYT requested a change that resulted in “self-inflicted wounds.” According to OpenAI, the tech problem emerged because NYT was hoping to speed up its searches and requested a change to the model inspection set-up that OpenAI warned “would yield no speed improvements and might even hinder performance.”

The AI company accused the NYT of negligence during discovery, “repeatedly running flawed code” while conducting searches of URLs and phrases from various newspaper articles and failing to back up their data. Allegedly the change that NYT requested “resulted in removing the folder structure and some file names on one hard drive,” which “was supposed to be used as a temporary cache for storing OpenAI data, but evidently was also used by Plaintiffs to save some of their search results (apparently without any backups).”

Once OpenAI figured out what happened, data was restored, OpenAI said. But the NYT alleged that the only data that OpenAI could recover did “not include the original folder structure and original file names” and therefore “is unreliable and cannot be used to determine where the News Plaintiffs’ copied articles were used to build Defendants’ models.”

In response, OpenAI suggested that the NYT could simply take a few days and re-run the searches, insisting, “contrary to Plaintiffs’ insinuations, there is no reason to think that the contents of any files were lost.” But the NYT does not seem happy about having to retread any part of model inspection, continually frustrated by OpenAI’s expectation that plaintiffs must come up with search terms when OpenAI understands its models best.

«

Note how OpenAI is prolonging the process by filing responses rather than just getting on and doing things. It is hoping that it can make the process as elongated as possible so that other cases are decided first, preferably in a direction that suits it.
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Google thinking on Apple ad ambitions revealed in “Project Black Walnut” • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

»

Apple used to hate the ad business. Now, it looks like it’s taking it more seriously. So, how big could Apple’s ad business get?

That’s a question lots of people in the advertising world have been wondering. And that includes Google. And now, thanks to documents unearthed during Google’s antitrust court case, we can see how Google has been thinking about Apple’s potential as it edges into an industry Google has dominated for decades.

Titled “Operation Black Walnut,” the 2022 report appears to have been assembled by Google strategists to try to imagine what kind of ad business Apple might eventually build out one day.

Apple’s current ad business is mostly confined to selling ads on its App Store search results page. But the report’s authors speculate that Apple could eventually start selling ads that run on other people’s apps and eventually on the web via its Safari browser. It might eventually become a $30bn business, they guesstimate.

But while the document’s authors were trying to imagine how big Apple’s ad business could get, they also wondered if Apple would really want to fully embrace it. Right now, most of the money Apple says it gets from “ads” is really money it gets from Google, which pays Apple upward of $20bn a year to make Google’s search engine the default on Apple’s phones.

“We believe Apple is unlikely to give up search TAC [the annual payments Apple gets from Google] for a $10-$20bn Spotlight Search [Apple’s own search engine] opportunity, unless regulation or Google disrupts the status quo,” the report notes at one point.

Then again, one of the commenters on the document points out, those annual payments — which could account for 15% or more of Apple’s annual profits are “at risk … by regulation or Google’s choice.”

«

Right now that $20bn is the easiest of easy money, but if Google is blocked from paying for search priority in its antitrust trial then perhaps Apple will shift into the ad business seriously. Which wouldn’t be enjoyable.
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Macy’s, Inc. reports preliminary third quarter 2024 results • Macy’s, Inc.

»

Other Corporate Developments

The company also reported today that, during the preparation of its unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements for the fiscal quarter ended November 2, 2024, it identified an issue related to delivery expenses in one of its accrual accounts. The company consequently initiated an independent investigation.

As a result of the independent investigation and forensic analysis, the company identified that a single employee with responsibility for small package delivery expense accounting intentionally made erroneous accounting accrual entries to hide approximately $132 to $154 million of cumulative delivery expenses from the fourth quarter of 2021 through fiscal quarter ended November 2, 2024.

During this same time period, the company recognized approximately $4.36 billion of delivery expenses. There is no indication that the erroneous accounting accrual entries had any impact on the company’s cash management activities or vendor payments. The individual who engaged in this conduct is no longer employed by the company. The investigation has not identified involvement by any other employee.

The company is delaying its earnings release and conference call relating to the third quarter of 2024 to allow for completion of the independent investigation.

«

Never seen anything like this before in corporate accounts. So want to know what this person was doing, and why there was no oversight. Over 12 quarters, an average of $11-$13m per quarter, or about $130,000 per day. More on this story as we get it.
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Tether has become a massive money laundering tool for Mexican drug traffickers, Feds say • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A money laundering organization allegedly connected to large seizures of cocaine inside the United States and works with cartels in Mexico and Colombia has moved at least tens of millions of dollars using a string of front businesses, cash drop-offs, and massive transfers of cryptocurrency, according to recently unsealed court records reviewed by 404 Media.

The court records provide deep insight into how alleged drug traffickers have turned to cryptocurrency, and in particular Tether (USDT), as a way to quickly move wealth across borders in recent years. 404 Media also reviewed other recently unsealed court documents which appear to describe another money laundering organization doing much the same thing for Mexican drug cartels including the Sinaloa, showing that cryptocurrencies have become a normal part of large scale drug trafficking in the 21st century. One of the documents even highlights that Tether is sold for cheaper in Mexico because it is known to be from drug proceeds.

One confidential source told investigators “the current trend was to purchase USDT from Mexico-based groups at a cheaper rate than the market price, and then sell the USDT in Colombia at Casa de Cambios [currency exchanges], virtual currency exchanges, over-the-counter (OTC) transactions, or peer-to-peer transactions (P2P). The USDT was sold at a cheaper rate in Mexico because it was known to be drug proceeds.” 

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Cryptocurrency used for drug money laundering! What a surprise!
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Bluesky breaching rules around disclosure of information, says EU • Financial Times

Andy Bounds and Javier Espinoza:

»

Bluesky, the social media site that has grown rapidly following an exodus of users from Elon Musk’s X, is in breach of EU regulations for not disclosing key details about the group, the European Commission said on Monday.

“All platforms in the EU . . . have to have a dedicated page on their website where it says how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” said commission spokesman Thomas Regnier. “This is not the case for Bluesky as of today. This is not followed.”

The intervention comes as thousands of users, including commission president Ursula von der Leyen, have opened Bluesky accounts in recent weeks.

The site has benefited from Musk’s endorsement of US president-elect Donald Trump and decision to reduce content moderation — moves that appear to have driven many academics, journalists and left-leaning politicians to Bluesky.

Regnier said the commission, the EU’s executive arm, had written to the 27 national governments to see “if they can find any trace of Bluesky” such as identifying a EU-based office. It has not yet contacted the company directly, he added. Bluesky did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Since US election day, app usage of Bluesky in the US and UK has jumped by almost 300% to 3.5mn daily users, according to data from research group Similarweb. 

Bluesky is a US public benefit company led by digital rights activist and software engineer Jay Graber. It was founded in 2019 for the purpose of developing a single standard, or protocol, upon which social platforms and other developers could build their own operations. It has come to resemble X with users posting short messages and images.

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The little social network’s all nearly grown up! Just needs a major news event to happen on it.
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China’s telco attacks mean ‘thousands’ of boxes compromised • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

»

The Biden administration on Friday hosted telco execs to chat about China’s recent attacks on the sector, amid revelations that US networks may need mass rebuilds to recover.

Details of the extent of China’s attacks came from senator Mark R Warner, who on Thursday gave both The Washington Post and The New York Times insights into info he’s learned in his role as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Warner told the Post, “my hair is on fire,” given the severity of China’s attacks on US telcos. The attacks, which started well before the US election, have seen Middle Kingdom operatives establish a persistent presence – and may require the replacement of “literally thousands and thousands and thousands” of switches and routers.

The senator added that China’s activities make Russia-linked incidents like the SolarWinds supply chain incident and the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline look like “child’s play.”

Warner told The Times the extent of China’s activity remains unknown, and that “The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open.”

The senator, a Democrat who represents Virginia, also confirmed previously known details, claming it was likely Chinese state employees could listen to phone calls – including some involving president-elect Donald Trump – perhaps by using carriers’ wiretapping capabilities. He also said attackers were able to steal substantial quantities of data about calls made on networks.

Most of the senator’s remarks confirm prior guidance from the FBI and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency about the activities of a Beijing-backed crew dubbed Salt Typhoon that’s accused of compromising, and rummaging around inside, US telco networks for many months.

«

At this point the entire US network infrastructure seems like Swiss cheese.
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Bird flu virus detected in California raw milk • Los Angeles Times

Susanne Rust:

»

State health officials said Sunday that bird flu virus was detected in a retail sample of raw milk from the Fresno-based Raw Farm dairy.

The sample was collected by officials with the Santa Clara County public health office, who have been testing raw milk products from retail stores “as a second line of consumer protection.”

County officials identified the virus in “one sample of raw milk purchased at a retail outlet” on Nov. 21, according to statements from both the state and the county. The county contacted stores on Friday and recommended they pull the raw milk from sale. The test results were confirmed on Saturday by the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System at UC Davis.

“This isn’t surprising, given how quickly H5N1 seems to be spreading among farms in California and given the fact that these outbreaks on farms are being discovered in large part due to bulk testing of raw milk from farms,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “What we don’t know is how much risk H5N1 poses to people that drink unpasteurized, infected milk.”

«

Don’t worry, RFK Jr thinks there’s too much “suppression” of unpasteurised milk, so we can find out how much risk quite soon. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Red squirrel or grey squirrel? An AI system is being used to distinguish the two, and help the red ones. CC-licensed photo by Shawn Nystrand on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Distinguishable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Social media users probably won’t read beyond this headline, researchers say • Penn State University

Ashley Wenners Herron:

»

Congratulations. Reading this far into the story is a feat not many will accomplish, especially if shared on Facebook, according to a team led by Penn State researchers. In an analysis of more than 35 million public posts containing links that were shared extensively on the social media platform between 2017 and 2020, the researchers found that around 75% of the shares were made without the posters clicking the link first. Of these, political content from both ends of the spectrum was shared without clicking more often than politically neutral content.

The findings, which the researchers said suggest that social media users tend to merely read headlines and blurbs rather than fully engage with core content, appeared on Nov. 19 in Nature Human Behavior. While the data were limited to Facebook, the researchers said the findings could likely map to other social media platforms and help explain why misinformation can spread so quickly online.

“It was a big surprise to find out that more than 75% of the time, the links shared on Facebook were shared without the user clicking through first,” said corresponding author S. Shyam Sundar, Evan Pugh University Professor and the James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects at Penn State. “I had assumed that if someone shared something, they read and thought about it, that they’re supporting or even championing the content. You might expect that maybe a few people would occasionally share content without thinking it through, but for most shares to be like this? That was a surprising, very scary finding.”

«

I feel that the good professor can’t have spent any actual time on social media, because if he had then he’d know for sure that people share articles willy-nilly, and the headline is the start and finish of their examination of it. Twitter introduced an element back in mid-2020 asking if you wanted to read the article first if you didn’t seem to have read it first. Hard to say whether it has really made a lot of difference, especially since links have been downgraded on X, and Musk doesn’t bother to do the most cursory examination of what he amplifies.
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Twitter’s heir apparent isn’t X or Threads — it’s Bluesky • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Things haven’t been perfect for Bluesky; the platform has had some hiccups, seemingly due to the influx of people, and one major outage due to a cut fiber cable. But Meta has clearly been feeling the heat.

Last week, the day after Bluesky touted its 15 million total users, Threads boss Adam Mosseri shared that Threads had already surpassed 15 million signups for November alone. (CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently shared that the platform has 275 million monthly users.) And Meta has aggressively introduced some significant Threads changes, including its own version of custom feeds, a major change to make the For You feed show more from people you follow, and some big improvements to search.

Even if Bluesky is my preferred place right now, it’s still comparatively small to Threads and X. It’s unclear if people will stick with it over the long term, especially since Meta seems committed to making Threads its next billion-user social network. And X is still going to matter, given that many companies post updates on the platform and because owner Elon Musk is set to have enormous power in the Trump administration.

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I think – if Bluesky does want to become an authoritative source – then it needs to add verification of users, and then perhaps to amplify them. But it’s still in its early phase; it hasn’t had its Miracle In The Hudson moment.
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How WSJ readers use AI: from brainstorming to learning a new language and more • WSJ

Demetria Gallegos:

»

we asked Wall Street Journal readers: Tell us how you have used ChatGPT and other generative AI tools in your daily life, both personal and professional.

Here’s what they said.

• …I use Perplexity for understanding background to the news, for satisfying my curiosities about science, and sometimes to solve household maintenance issues. For example, I recently became interested in amateur radio astronomy. I researched what computing power I might need to pursue the hobby but got bogged down until I wrote one question to Perplexity AI. From its response I found I will need only slightly more processing power than I had expected. The bottom line for me is: For $20/month, I can save time and money by making a better-informed decision. I use it about 15 times a month.

• I tried using ChatGPT to suggest improvements on a watercolor I painted. First, it complimented the painting and then gave me six suggestions (all good) on how to make it even better. Among the tips, it wanted me to increase the contrast where the dock of my boatyard painting met the water, or where the building cast shadows. It also suggested I add a small foreground element such as a canoe or a few floating leaves to guide a viewer’s eye into the painting and add a sense of scale. Its final comment was “happy painting.”

•…My daughter and I were watching a History Channel program on the Roman Republic, a segment talking about the Roman legions. She’s a fan of a rather violent pseudo-historical series called “The Vikings,” and at the end of our program she turned to me and asked, “If the Romans and the Vikings had a war, who would win?” I said, ”Let’s ask ChatGPT.”

We got more than I bargained for—extended analysis about this hypothetical matchup, including specifics of battlefields and logistics. It analyzed the Romans’ respective strengths, including organization and discipline, training, sophistication of tactics, engineering and weapons. The Vikings were credited with their guerrilla tactics, naval skills, ferocity and skill in one-on-one combat.

ChatGPT concluded the Romans would likely win. My daughter was unconvinced her fearsome Vikings could be defeated.

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Conservationists turn to AI in battle to save red squirrels • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

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An artificial intelligence (AI) tool which has been trained to tell the difference between grey and red squirrels could be “an absolute game changer”, conservationists say.

The system, called Squirrel Agent, has been trained on thousands of images of the animals allowing it to tell them apart with 97% accuracy, its developer says.

It can then be used to automatically control access to squirrel feeders – with only reds being allowed into those containing food, and only greys into those where food has been replaced with contraceptive paste.

“It’s a real showcase of what AI can do,” said Emma McClenaghan, co-founder of Genysys Engine, which developed the tool. “It’s working in real time to do a task that we don’t have enough [human] volunteers to do.”

Squirrel Agent is currently being tested in sites around the UK in conjunction with five wildlife charities.
Genysys Engine hopes it will eventually be used much more widely not just with squirrels but with other species which would benefit from sophisticated digital monitoring.

Ian Glendinning, from Northern Red Squirrels – one of the conservation groups involved in the trial – told the BBC that, for the animals he is trying to protect, help from technology was urgently needed.

“We are in the bar of the last chance saloon, and the landlord has just called last orders,” he said.

«

Interesting idea. Grey squirrels are carriers of a virus that kills red squirrels, so maybe we also need the AI feeders to inject the red squirrels with a vaccine? Otherwise it’s hard to see things changing that much.

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Hold on, the suicide counsellor will be with you presently • Radiolab

Simon Adler:

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Two years ago, the United States did something amazing. In response to the mental health crisis the federal government launched 988 – a nationwide, easy to remember phone number that anyone can call anytime and talk to a counselor. It was 911 but for mental health and they hoped that it would save lives. However, if you call 988 today the first thing you hear isn’t a sympathetic counselor. What you hear is hold music.

Today, the story of the highest stakes hold music in the universe, the three men who created suicide prevention and the two women trying to fix it. 

«

You can listen to the podcast, or read the transcript.

Initially, the hold music was “snazzy jazz music”. Really you have to listen to it to understand the nuances.

(And no, it wasn’t the M*A*S*H* theme.)
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WhatsApp gains voice message transcripts • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Popular Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp has announced a new transcription feature that’s designed to provide you with a transcript of a voice message received from a friend or family member.

WhatsApp says that voice message transcripts are designed for instances when you’re in a loud place and can’t stop to listen to a traditional voice message. Transcripts are created on-device, are end-to-end encrypted, and aren’t shared with WhatsApp.

WhatsApp users can go to Settings > Chats > Voice Message Transcripts to turn transcriptions on and off and to select a preferred transcript language. A voice message can be transcribed by long pressing on it and tapping on the “transcribe” option.

The voice message transcript feature has been available to WhatsApp beta testers for months now, but it is now ready to start rolling out to all users.

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Smart idea. Transcription is going to become something that within a year or two is utterly routine, after decades and decades when it seemed just in reach. (In passing, my version hasn’t yet got this option.)
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Sweden’s Northvolt files for bankruptcy, in blow to Europe’s EV ambitions • Reuters

Dietrich Knauth, Marie Mannes and Terje Solsvik:

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Northvolt, the Swedish maker of battery cells for electric vehicles, said on Thursday it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US, dealing a blow to Europe’s hopes that its most developed battery player would reduce Western car makers’ reliance on Chinese rivals.

Northvolt said it has only enough cash to support operations for about a week and said it has secured $100m in new financing for the bankruptcy process. It said operations will continue as normal during the bankruptcy.

“Northvolt’s liquidity picture has become dire,” the company said in its Chapter 11 petition, filed in US Bankruptcy Court in Houston. The company, which has operations in California, has about $30m of cash, which can support its operations for only about a week. It has $5.8bn in debts.

Northvolt, which employs around 6,600 staff across seven countries, said it expects to complete the restructuring by the first quarter of 2025.

Northvolt transformed in a matter of months from Europe’s best shot at a homegrown electric-vehicle battery champion to a company struggling to stay afloat by slimming down, hobbled by production problems, the loss of a major customer and a lack of funding.

Europe has been hoping that Northvolt would reduce Western car makers’ reliance on Chinese rivals such as battery maker CATL and EV and battery maker BYD.

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They seem to be blaming both lack of demand and missed targets, which seems contradictory.
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Kate Nash says her OnlyFans photos will earn more than tour • BBC News

Ian Youngs:

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Nash, who released her fifth studio album in June, also told fans on Instagram: “No need to stream my music, I’m good for the 0.003 of a penny per stream thanks.”

Last month, fellow singer Lily Allen revealed she makes more money by selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify streams.

Meanwhile, in recent months, acts including Rachel Chinouriri, Ratboy and The Duke Spirit singer Liela Moss have all cancelled tours, blaming the costs.

Nash highlighted a survey from recording and rehearsal studio network Pirate, which said most artists have not seen an increase in gig fees in recent years despite a rise in ticket prices.

“Festival prices and ticket prices have gone up drastically, but the musicians’ wage hasn’t,” she said. “So you might be playing a venue that you’ve played multiple times and you can sell it out, [but] you’re getting the same fee that you did 10 years ago, probably. But all the other costs have gone up.”

Some corporations make big profits from music, as do a “select few” artists, she said. “But the majority are losing money, and we are also creating an environment where the industry is saying, we don’t want diversity in music, because we don’t want working class people to be able to afford to do this.”

Musicians could follow a lead from people who earn a living from selling sexual content on sites like OnlyFans, she suggested. “You’ve got all this control, and you’re deciding what you want to do and how you want to do it, and people want to pay you for it.

“We just haven’t taught any of those lessons to anyone with music and art – that art is so valuable and so worthwhile in our lives and so meaningful. We’re totally happy to devalue it.

“Where can we learn from the sex workers? Maybe we can learn something from this industry. How do we get empowered as artists and take a bit more control?”

«

That point about the cut going to artists not rising is where the Competition & Markets Authority should be getting involved. Ticketing companies are raking it in.
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Source: Google has canceled the Pixel Tablet 2 – but not the Tab 3? • Android Authority

Mishaal Rahman:

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Android Authority has learned that Google has cancelled the Pixel Tablet 2, the presumed name of Google’s second-generation Pixel Tablet. This is disappointing for Pixel fans who were waiting for Google to refresh its first-generation Pixel Tablet with a newer chipset, a better camera, and, more importantly, an official keyboard accessory.

It’s also surprising to hear because it might suggest that Google is giving up on its tablet ambitions entirely, considering a separate report published last week claimed that Google is also killing the Pixel Tablet 3. However, we have reason to believe that the device cited in yesterday’s report is actually the Pixel Tablet 2, and not the third-generation tablet after all.

Last week, I shared what I learned about the Pixel Tablet 2 from a source within Google. I deemed this source to be very credible given my past history with them as well as the fact that they were able to share unreleased images of the device with me (which I obviously did not publish to protect their identity). After the publication of this article, however, I learned from my source that Google had decided to cancel its plans to release the device, citing concerns that the company would lose money on it.

On Wednesday, Android Headlines published an article claiming that Google has canceled development of the Pixel Tablet 3 and not the Pixel Tablet 2 that Google was actively working on. I found this report to be strange, considering that Google has almost assuredly not started working on the Pixel Tablet 3 while the Pixel Tablet 2 is still in an early stage of the product development lifecycle. I had heard that the device that had been cancelled was the very device I had reported on last week, and that device is almost certainly not the Pixel Tablet 3.

«

Google’s hate-hate relationship with tablets continues: aside from the Nexus 7in tablet, in 2012, its first effort – which was a success – it has always struggled to find a reason to have tablets in its lineup. There is talk of “merging-but-not-merging” ChromeOS and Android, though who knows how that’s going to go.
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First case of bird flu infection in a US child confirmed in California, officials say • Associated Press via PBS News

Mike Stobbe and JoNel Aleccia:

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Health officials on Friday confirmed bird flu in a California child — the first reported case in a US minor.

The child had mild symptoms, was treated with antiviral medication and is recovering, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in announcing the test results. State officials have said the child attends day care and lives in Alameda County, which includes Oakland and surrounding communities, but released no other details.

The infection brings the reported number of US bird flu cases this year to 55, including 29 in California, the CDC said. Most were farmworkers who tested positive with mild symptoms.

One exception was an adult in Missouri who did not work at a farm and had no known contact with an infected animal. It remains a mystery how that person was infected — health officials have said there was no evidence of it spreading between people.

A British Columbia teen also was recently hospitalized with bird flu, Canadian officials have said.

H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely in the U.S. among wild birds, poultry and a number of other animals over the last few years.

It began spreading in US dairy cattle in March. California has become the center of that outbreak, with 402 infected herds detected there since August. That’s 65% of the 616 herds confirmed with the virus in 15 states.

«

What is faintly interesting is that the story says “US child” rather than “American child”, which to me subtly implies that this is the child of an immigrant worker. The CDC statement is also a little cagey, and doesn’t make it absolutely clear whether the child worked on a farm, though the strong implication is that they didn’t. In which case it’s a human carrier transmitting it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The spork’s continued existence, in the liminal place between useless and annoying, remains baffling. CC-licensed photo by Karl Baron on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Cutting edge. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google stops letting sites like Forbes rule search for “Best CBD Gummies” • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

“Updating our site reputation abuse policy” is how Google, in wondrously opaque fashion, announced yesterday that big changes have come to some big websites, especially those that rely on their domain authority to promote lucrative third-party product recommendations.

If you’ve searched for reviews and seen results that make you ask why so many old-fashioned news sites seem to be “reviewing” products lately—especially products outside that site’s expertise—that’s what Google is targeting.

“This is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take advantage of the host’s already-established ranking signals,” Google’s post on its Search Central blog reads. “The goal of this tactic is for the content to rank better than it could otherwise on a different site, and leads to a bad search experience for users.”

Search firm Sistrix cited the lost traffic to the third-party review content inside Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune, and Time as worth $7.5m last week, according to AdWeek. Search rankings dropped by up to 97% at Time’s affiliate review site, Time Stamped, and 43% at Forbes Advisor. The drops are isolated to the affiliate subdomains of the sites, so their news-minded primary URLs still rank where relevant.

The “site reputation abuse” Google is targeting takes many forms, but it has one common theme: using an established site’s domain history to quietly sell things. Forbes, a well-established business news site, has an ownership stake in Forbes Marketplace (named Forbes Advisor in site copy) but does not fully own it.

Under the strength of Forbes’ long-existing and well-linked site, Forbes Marketplace/Advisor has dominated the search term “best cbd gummies” for “an eternity,” according to SEO analyst Lily Ray. Forbes has similarly dominated “best pet insurance,” and long came up as the second result for “how to get rid of roaches,” as detailed in a blog post by Lars Lofgren. If people click on this high-ranking result, and then click on a link to buy a product or request a roach removal consultation, Forbes typically gets a cut.

Forbes Marketplace had seemingly also provided SEO-minded review services to CNN and USA Today, as detailed by Lofgren. Lofgren’s term for this business, “Parasite SEO,” took hold in corners critical of the trend.

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Long overdue, but at least it’s happening.
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DOJ asks judge to force Google to sell Chrome as remedy in landmark antitrust case • Business Insider via Yahoo

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert:

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Because of Google’s size, the popularity of Chrome, and the profits its search wing drives for the company, it would be a historic development if they were ultimately required to divest themselves of Chrome, Eric Chaffee, a business and tech law professor at Case Western Reserve University, told BI.

Such a sale would be a multibillion-dollar proposal, and it’s not immediately clear who a potential buyer would be.

“Google could receive proceeds in the range of $15 billion to $20 billion,” Peter Cohan, an associate professor of management practice at Babson College, told BI. “But if Google is able to control the company that buys Chrome, the impact of selling the business would be minimal. What matters most to Google is all the data Google collects and uses for advertising.”

Neil Chilson, a former acting chief technologist at the FTC, told BI that asking Mehta to force Google to sell Chrome is the DOJ’s way of swinging for the fences — but he expects the final remedies to land somewhere short of complete divestment.

“It’s a pretty fantastical ask,” Chilson said. “I don’t think that this remedy really tackles the area in which Judge Mehta found liability, which is for these exclusive contracts, and so this seems like a very aggressive ask — one that doesn’t really fix the problem that the judge said was creating the competitive problem in the first place.”

«

Stripping out Chrome would mean ChromeOS would have to pay for Chrome, and would mean Android (still owned by Google?) would have to pick a browser – hmm, wonder if it would be Chrome? – so ChromeCo might eke out a living, but if the DoJ also prevents Google paying to be default search (also expected) then a whole lot of money falls out of the system. Tim Cook must be sweating.
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Put a fork in the spork • Zócalo Public Square

Ken Albala:

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Positivists since the 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte have considered material progress an inevitable feature of human history. The human condition always continues to improve in direct proportion to the advancement of science and technological innovation.

A single commonplace object proves Comte’s assertion absurd and fallacious: the spork. 

The spork is a prime example of the debasement of our species. Everyone who has ever tried to use it realizes the idiocy of the contraption. Its design—a shallow bowl with small projecting truncated tines—precludes any effective use as either a spoon or a fork. Instead, it combines the worst features of both utensils: Liquid spills through the diminutive tines before soup hits the lips, and the tines themselves are too blunt to easily puncture and convey to the mouth anything that might be considered solid food.

Why then are we subjected to this disaster on a regular basis? And what could set us free from its poorly manufactured grip?

…Perhaps the success of the spork may also be attributed to the fact that Americans never really became comfortable using a knife and fork. We tend to cut food with a knife in the right hand and a fork in the left, and then trade the utensils in order to eat. We also keep the tines of the fork upward like a scoop, unlike in Europe, where the fork stays in the left hand and the tines point downward. This is apparently because Americans first began to use forks in the 17th century, before they fully evolved in Europe. In any case, it might explain why many people were happy jettisoning the fork entirely in favor of the spork.

The spork that’s become ubiquitous over the last few decades—the plastic spork—is what deserves the full brunt of our opprobrium. Preeminently disposable, destined for landfills and the stomachs of defenseless sea creatures, plastic is the single most heinous material humans have ever invented. This is not only because of its detrimental environmental effects but from a purely gastronomic point of view. It is the taste of industrial waste.

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At The Onion, they think of headlines and then write the story to fit. One which apparently never quite made the grade was “Man knifed with spork”. May we never see its like again.
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How to produce a kamikaze drone • Statecraft

Santi Ruiz interviews Chris Anderson, formerly with the US DoD’s Asymmetric Warfare Group:

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SR: Will you describe more of the characteristics of the solution that you guys ended up with in the Switchblade? It’s pretty remarkable to me that in 2010 or 2011, this fairly advanced machine that weighed less than six pounds could be launched from a tube on the ground and controlled from a laptop. 

CA: The story of the Switchblade is really the story of a company and its vision for the future. That company, AeroVironment, also makes the Raven unmanned aerial system, the Wasp, the Puma. But around 2008 and 2009, they invested a lot of their own money into the Switchblade. There was a requirement for it: to be able to take out four targets inside of a pickup truck, a Hilux truck. Hilux trucks are the number one choice for all terrorists today, but particularly the Taliban. I don’t understand why we don’t have them here in America — they’re a good truck. 

But anyway, the idea was low collateral damage. We needed the capability to precisely, from kilometers away, reach out and touch targets like a guy on a mountainside, a dude on a rooftop.

SR: Askonas says that you could remotely calibrate the warhead for different burst patterns, and that it could take out a vehicle in traffic without harming anyone around it. 

CA: It’s pretty accurate. I still have “classified PTSD,” so I’m always worried about what I can say, but yes, you could calibrate the warhead and the blast pattern. It had a warhead with what’s called CL 20, which is a special kind of explosive, and inside that warhead was tungsten, say 200 pieces of tungsten fragmentation. That’s a really heavy metal, and they were in very small diamond patterns. 

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Fascinating interview (this is the transcript of the podcast) about the evolution of the drones we now hear about patrolling behind the lines in Ukraine.
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Church in Switzerland is using an AI-powered Jesus hologram to take confession • Daily Mail Online

Wiliam Hunter:

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As part of an art project called ‘Deus in Machina’ (God in a Machine) St Peter’s Church in Lucerne has installed an AI-powered Jesus hologram to take confessions.

Worshipers simply voice their concerns and questions to get a response from the digitally-rendered face of Jesus Christ.

At least two-thirds of people who spoke to AI Jesus came out of the confessional reporting having had a ‘spiritual’ experience. One impressed worshiper told news outlet DW: ‘I was surprised, it was so easy, and though it’s a machine, it gave me so much advice.’

While the installation is only temporary, St Peter’s Chapel says that similar chatbots could one day take on some of the responsibilities of church pastors.

However, not everyone is quite so impressed with some visitors calling the avatar’s advice ‘generic’ and branding it as ‘a gimmick’.

Visitors to this futuristic shrine sit in a confessional booth from which a screen showing the face of Jesus can be seen through the grate. As the visitor asks their questions an AI interprets their words and formulates answers, animating the face so it moves in time with computer-generated speech.

AI Jesus is even equipped with the ability to speak 100 different languages to cater to Lucerne’s many visiting tourists.

Upon entering, the worshiper is greeted by AI Jesus intoning the message: ‘Do not disclose personal information under any circumstances, use this service at your own risk, press the button if you accept.’ From this point on, it is up to the individual to interact with the AI in any way they like by pressing the button and speaking aloud.

Many who came to see the AI avatar reported coming with questions about scripture or seeking spiritual advice. One visitor says: ‘I asked about the spiral of violence, how to break one. The answer: through prayer and not seeking retribution.’

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Eliza lives!
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Misinformation expert cites non-existent sources in Minnesota deep fake case • Minnesota Reformer

Christopher Ingraham:

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A leading misinformation expert is being accused of citing non-existent sources to defend Minnesota’s new law banning election misinformation.

Professor Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology,” according to his Stanford biography. 

At the behest of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hancock recently submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology to influence an election. The law is being challenged in federal court by a conservative YouTuber and Republican state Rep. Mary Franson of Alexandria for violating First Amendment free speech protections.

Hancock’s expert declaration in support of the deep fake law cites numerous academic works. But several of those sources do not appear to exist, and the lawyers challenging the law say they appear to have been made up by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.

For instance, the declaration cites a study titled “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior,” and says that it was published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics in 2023. But no study by that name appears in that journal; academic databases don’t have any record of it existing; and the specific journal pages referenced contain two entirely different articles.

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I am now officially begging you not to use chatbots of any ilk as search engines. Absolutely begging you. And where search engines stick a chatbot on the top (looking at you, Google), ignore that too.
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Bird flu in Canada may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans • The Guardian

Melody Schreiber:

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The Canadian teen first developed symptoms on 2 November and was hospitalized at the British Columbia children’s hospital on 8 November. The child is still in critical condition with acute respiratory distress – a serious lung condition that can be fatal.

Preliminary sequencing of the H5N1 variant sickening the teenager showed a potential mutation on the genomic spot known to make people more susceptible to the virus.

That could indicate that H5N1 has the capability to become more like a human virus, rather than an avian virus, but it is also not clear yet whether this change is meaningful and more dangerous to people, experts said.

The virus may have mutated over the course of the teen’s illness; additional sequencing could reveal more about its evolution.

“Often it’s not just one thing that is going to confer that ability” to infect humans more effectively, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

“It’s not quite clear what the real-world implications are going to be, but certainly all of these things are a warning sign,” Rasmussen said. “We really do need to pay attention to this, and we really do need to try to reduce more human infections as much as we possibly can.”

The particular variant of H5N1 circulating among birds in British Columbia and the north-western US appeared over the past few months, several years after bird flu was first found in North America, Webby said. The variant also sickened 11 workers in Washington state who were killing infected poultry, though those workers did not have the possible mutation detected in the teenager.

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Narrowed eyes watching brief.
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Could avian flu cause our next pandemic? • MedPage Today

Claire Dunavan is a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at UCLA:

»

it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. Or, for a true reality check, just scan the Department of Agriculture’s frequently-updated map and tables naming the many animals that have tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in the US since May 2022.

Finding influenza A/H5N1 in wild birds and waterfowl and poultry is nothing new, of course. During 2024, however, our country has seen its first-ever multi-state outbreak in dairy cows expressing milk heavily tainted with the virus, as well as illness, deaths, or detections in cats, goats, alpaca, skunks, and house mice, among others. The latest species found to harbor A/H5N1 was a backyard pig in Oregonopens in a new tab or window. Once euthanized, its tissues teeming with virus fueled further unease because pigs are classic mixing vessels in which human and avian flu viruses can recombine and form new, virulent strains.

Now for some less ominous news: the viral strain currently circulating in American dairy cows and poultry has not yet caused serious disease in people. Thus far, based on very limited testing, roughly four dozen A/H5N1 infections almost equally divided between dairy and poultry workers have been mild or even asymptomatic. As a result, CDC continues to state that the riskopens in a new tab or window to the general public is low.

Having said that, there is now a critically ill teenageropens in a new tab or window up in Canada infected with H5N1 whose source of exposure is unknown. In addition, no knowledgeable expert would deny that influenza viruses are notoriously unpredictable, having caused more pandemics than any other pathogen over the last 500 yearsopens in a new tab or window. Now factor in the modern challenge of getting Big Agriculture, government, and public health to work hand-in-hand on control measures while communicating clear, sensible advice to everyday folks already exhausted by COVID, a few of whom also believe that raw milk is Nature’s perfect food, discounting its previously proven hazardsopens in a new tab or window as mere hogwash.

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Ah yes, RFK Jr and his love of unpasteurised milk. Who’s to say that after he caused scores of deaths in Papua New Guinea by opposing measles vaccines that he shouldn’t go for the big one and give the next pandemic a helping hand? (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Elon Musk asked people to upload their health data. X users obliged • The New York Times

Elizabeth Passarella:

»

Over the past few weeks, users on X have been submitting X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and other medical images to Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot, asking for diagnoses. The reason: Elon Musk, X’s owner, suggested it.

“This is still early stage, but it is already quite accurate and will become extremely good,” Musk said in a post. The hope is that if enough users feed the AI their scans, it will eventually get good at interpreting them accurately. Patients could get faster results without waiting for a portal message, or use Grok as a second opinion.

Some users have shared Grok’s misses, like a broken clavicle that was misindentified as a dislocated shoulder. Others praised it: “Had it check out my brain tumor, not bad at all,” one user wrote alongside a brain scan. Some doctors have even played along, curious to test whether a chatbot could confirm their own findings.

Although there’s been no similar public callout from Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, people can submit medical images to those tools, too.

The decision to share information as sensitive as your colonoscopy results with an A.I. chatbot has alarmed some medical privacy experts.

“This is very personal information, and you don’t exactly know what Grok is going to do with it,” said Bradley Malin, a professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University who has studied machine learning in health care.

«

I hardly think that Grok is going to send people round to your house if you upload something showing you’ve got a broken leg; though I suppose the American fear is that somehow insurance companies will demand the imagery or analysis. If all these AI tools get to see more images, that should be useful, though interpretation is far more tricky. (I am tempted to try uploading a recent MRI to ChatGPT for fun, to see how it compares with the human interpretation I already have.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An experiment by Google has used mobile phones to map the ionosphere, improving GPS accuracy. CC-licensed photo by Mike Lewinski 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. Location, location, location. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google uses millions of phones to map Earth’s ionosphere and improve GPS • Nature

Elizabeth Gibney:

»

For the first time, researchers have used real-time data from around 40 million mobile phones to map conditions in the ionosphere — a region of the upper atmosphere in which some of the air molecules are ionized. Such crowdsourced signals could improve satellite navigation, especially in swathes of the world where data are otherwise scarce, including Africa, South America and South Asia.

The proof-of-principle study, by a team at Google, was published in Nature on 13 November.

“It’s an amazing data set,” says Anthea Coster, an atmospheric physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “It fills in the map a lot, in areas where we desperately need more information.”

Phone data could reduce GPS errors by 10–20% in some areas, and more in underserved regions, estimates Ningbo Wang, an atmospheric physicist at the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Even with adjustments, interference from the ionosphere remains a challenge, he says, especially during solar storms that trigger uneven conditions in the ionosphere. “The results presented are truly impressive.”

When the air is partly ionized, freely moving electrons slightly slow down the radio signals travelling to Earth from GPS and other navigation satellites. This can affect the nanosecond-precision timing that satellite navigation devices use to pinpoint their locations, with potentially serious impacts on aeroplane landings and autonomous vehicles.

Real-time maps of the density of these electrons are commonly used to correct for fluctuations in the ionosphere. Engineers create the maps using data from ground-based receiver stations, which can detect the arrival times of two different frequencies of radio waves received from the same satellite. Electrons in the ionosphere slow down low-frequency waves more than they do high-frequency ones, by a nanosecond or so. This difference reveals the density of the electrons the wave passed through on its way to a receiver.

«

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Nvidia posts record quarterly revenue • Axios

Hope King:

»

Nvidia on Wednesday afternoon projected strong demand for its products in Q4, the first period to include sales of its new Blackwell AI chip.

It’s the latest sign that businesses continue to crave more computing power for emerging AI projects.

Sales for the current quarter are projected to reach $37.5bn, slightly above average Wall Street expectations of about $37bn.

Meeting that target would represent roughly 70% growth from a year ago’s $22.1bn. “Blackwell demand is staggering, and we are racing to scale supply to meet the incredible demand customers are placing on us,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress told analysts Wednesday afternoon.

This is Nvidia’s first earnings report and call since the US presidential election. Some investors are already worried about the potential impact on Nvidia’s business if new tariffs or greater China export restrictions are put in place.

Nvidia’s outsized impact on the overall stock market means investor sentiment on the stock will spillover to other sectors in the days to come.

«

Nvidia’s revenue exploded in summer of 2023, after years of noodling along fairly quietly making gamers and then cryptocoiners happy. Making shovels for the AI goldrush is good business.
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Robot manufacturer has 12 robots ‘kidnapped’ from showroom by another robot • Oddity Central

“Spooky”:

»

Viral footage captured by CCTV cameras at a robotics company showroom shows 12 large robots being ‘kidnapped by another manufacturer’s robot that convinced them to “quit their jobs” and follow it.

For the past week, Chinese social media has been abuzz about a bizarre incident that reportedly occurred back in august at a robotics company showroom in Shanghai, but was only made public recently. Footage captured by the venue’s surveillance cameras shows a small robot making its way into the showroom at night and slowly rolling over to a bunch of larger robots before engaging in a dialogue with them. After asking them if they’re working overtime, the little robot manages to somehow pursuade two of the other robots to “come home” with it, and then the remaining 10 robots follow them. In the beginning, the video was deemed staged and amusing by most viewers, but then the Shanghai robotics company came out and admitted that its robots had indeed been “kidnapped” by a robot created by another manufacturer.

«

There is video with this. I’m going to say it’s complete and utter junk and done as some sort of guerilla marketing. But this is probably going to get spread around, so let’s head it off at the pass.
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IMG_0001: all the YouTube videos iPhones sent untitled

Riley Walz:

»

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.

Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found five million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.

«

From when the internet was not just young, but nascent. YouTube only started in 2005.
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The global growth rate for mobile internet subscribers has stalled • Rest of World

Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom:

»

A recent survey from Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence (GSMA), the research wing of a U.K.-based organization that represents mobile operators around the world, found that 4.6 billion people across the globe are now connected to mobile internet — or roughly 57% of the world’s population. 

Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing. From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers.

That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge. GSMA collects data by surveying a nationally representative sample of people in each country, and then it correlates the results with similar studies.

…In countries including China, the U.S., and Singapore, a high share of the population is already connected to mobile internet — 80%, 81%, and 93%, respectively. So it’s no surprise that the rate of mobile internet subscriptions has slowed.

But the rate of new users has also slowed in countries including Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan — where only 37%, 34%, and 24% of the population currently use mobile internet.

«

All the memes they’re missing! Oh, the humanity!
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The cost of Her • Tomasz Tunguz

Tunguz is a venture capitalist:

»

What it cost to have an assistant with you like in the movie Her?

The cost of using AI has dropped precipitously, an order of magnitude every year.

If the average American picks up their phone 144 times per day & engages with an assistant, each time for four interactions every day of a month, an assistant like Her would cost about 78 cents in inference cost.1

I’m not taking into account any of the additional costs associated with delivering such a product. Assuming a commercial vendor would 10x the price, it’s still $7 per month, less than half of a Netflix subscription.

«

But but but: what sort of quality of Her would it be? Possibly it’s time to rewatch the film and be reminded of the qualities that that software had (apart from Scarlet Johansson’s voice, of course).
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Danish military says it’s staying close to Chinese ship after data cable breaches • Reuters

Johan Ahlander:

»

The Danish military said on Wednesday that it was staying close to a Chinese ship currently sitting idle in Danish waters, days after two fibre-optic data telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea were severed.

Chinese bulk carrier Yi Peng 3 was anchored in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and Sweden on Wednesday, with a Danish navy patrol ship at anchor nearby, MarineTraffic vessel tracking data showed. “The Danish Defence can confirm that we are present in the area near the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3,” the military said in a post on social media X, adding it had no further comments.

It is quite rare for Denmark’s military to comment publicly on individual vessels travelling in Danish waters. It did not mention the cable breaches or say why it was staying with the ship. Swedish police later told news agency TT they were also interested in the Yi Peng 3, adding there might be other vessels of interest to Sweden’s investigation.

The Chinese ship left the Russian port of Ust-Luga on Nov. 15 and was in the areas where the cable damages occurred, according to traffic data, which showed other ships to have been in the areas too.
One cable running between Sweden and Lithuania was cut on Sunday and another one between Finland and Germany was severed less than 24 hours later on Monday.

The breaches happened in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone and Swedish prosecutors started a preliminary investigation on Tuesday on suspicion of possible sabotage. Swedish Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told Reuters on Tuesday that the country’s armed forces and coastguard had picked up ship movements that corresponded with the interruption of two telecoms cables in the Baltic Sea.

…European governments accused Russia on Tuesday of escalating hybrid attacks on Ukraine’s Western allies, but stopped short of directly accusing Russia of destroying the cables.

«

Probably wise that they stopped short. Unlike the ship. Badum-tish.
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The US response to bird flu is not reassuring the world • The New York Times

Tulio de Oliveira is the director of the Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation in South Africa:

»

As a virus scientist in South Africa, I’ve been watching with dread as H5N1 bird flu spreads among animals in the United States. The pathogen poses a serious pandemic threat and has been detected in over 500 dairy herds in 15 states — which is probably an undercount. And yet the U.S. response appears inadequate and slow, with too few genomic sequences of H5N1 cases in farm animals made publicly available for scientific review.

Failure to control H5N1 among American livestock could have global consequences, and this demands urgent attention. The United States has done little to reassure the world that it has the outbreak contained.

The recent infection of a pig at a farm in Oregon is especially concerning, as pigs are known to be mixing bowls for influenza viruses. Pigs can be infected by both avian and human influenza viruses, creating a risk for the viruses to exchange genetic material and potentially speed up adaptation for human transmission. The H1N1 pandemic in 2009 was created and spread initially by pigs.

Beyond the risks to its citizens (there are over 45 cases of people in the United States getting the virus in 2024), the United States should remember that the country where a pandemic emerges can be accused of not doing enough to control it. We still hear how China did not do enough to stop the Covid-19 pandemic. None of us would want a new pathogen labeled “the American virus,” as this could be very damaging for the United States’ reputation and economy.

The United States should learn from how the global south responds to infectious diseases. Those of us working in the region have a good track record of responding to epidemics and emerging pandemics and can help the United States identify new virus strains and offer insights into how to control H5N1. This knowledge has not come easily or without suffering; it has developed from decades of dealing with deadly diseases. We’ve learned one simple lesson: you need to learn your enemy as quickly as possible in order to fight it.

«

Watching brief! Also perhaps worrying brief, because it’s hard to see the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) becoming more effective in a Trump administration. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The US Patent and Trademark Office banned staff from using generative AI • WIRED

Reece Rogers:

»

The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit “bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior,” according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer of the USPTO, wrote that the office is “committed to pursuing innovation within our agency” but are still “working to bring these capabilities to the office in a responsible way.”

Paul Fucito, press secretary for the USPTO, clarified to WIRED that employees can use “state-of-the-art generative AI models” at work—but only inside the agency’s internal testing environment. “Innovators from across the USPTO are now using the AI Lab to better understand generative AI’s capabilities and limitations and to prototype AI-powered solutions to critical business needs,” Fucito wrote in an email.

Outside of the testing environment, USPTO staff are barred from relying on AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude for work tasks. The guidance memo from last year also prohibits the use of any outputs from the tools, including images and videos generated by AI. But Patent Office employees can use some approved AI programs, such as those within the agency’s own public database for looking up registered patents and patent applications. Earlier this year, the USPTO approved a $75m contract with Accenture Federal Services to update its patent database with enhanced AI-powered search features.

«

Perhaps AI search will stumble on the real perpetual motion machine lost in the applications. And the working cold fusion machine!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scammers who call one of the numbers in their lists will encounter an “AI granny” who wastes time by talking about knitting. CC-licensed photo by IMLS Digital Collections & Content 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Meta lobbyist turned regulator says Europe’s Big Tech rules have gone too far • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

»

By 2022, around three-quarters of all Google and Meta lobbyists in Europe previously worked at the European Commission, according to LobbyControl research. [40-year-old Finnish former Meta lobbyist, Aura] Salla once fell into this category, too. Her career in Brussels started at the European Commission before she was hired by Meta in 2020. The company did not respond to WIRED’s request to comment on this article.

Salla is worried that recently passed laws—like the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, or the AI Act—may be stifling potential European rivals to the likes of OpenAI or Apple. “We have very layered regulation on the tech sector, and that’s harming our companies,” Salla says.

The MEP does not oppose the aims of laws like the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which includes rules forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores onto European iPhones. “I hope that the DMA will be enforced so we can enable more companies to enter this field where Apple is—absolutely, I would love to see that,” Salla says. Yet she’s pessimistic the regulation will actually compel Apple to change. “I’m sorry, the company will go around it, go around it, go around it.” Instead, the businesses that will suffer, she claims, will be some of Europe’s most successful—travel company Booking.com and online retailer Zalando. “So, our own companies.”

Salla is becoming an outspoken figure, articulating concern that regulation went too far, too fast. She believes the EU should focus on boosting innovation at home over restraining companies from abroad. “We did it completely the wrong way around,” she says. European companies should be able to collect and feed their AI models data, Salla says, arguing companies are limited by “too many overlapping” rules. She stresses she is advocating for businesses to be able to use traffic and metadata—not private data—to train AI. “Even if [they are] not limited, it takes an army of consultants to make sure everything is correct,” she says.

«

There is a strong feeling that the US has been too lax but the EU has been too strict in regulating tech, and getting each back to the ideal point is no easy task.
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Bluesky tops 20m users, narrowing gap with Instagram Threads • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Bluesky, the social network and X competitor, has been benefiting from a surge of departures from the Elon Musk-owned app formerly known as Twitter. On Tuesday, Bluesky hit a major milestone: it topped 20 million users. What’s more, new data indicates the app’s rapid growth is seeing it close the gap with another prominent X rival, Instagram Threads, across metrics like daily active users and website visits.

Bluesky’s user base is still much smaller than Threads, which recently reported north of 275 million monthly active users. However, if Bluesky’s current rate of growth holds up, it could catch up with Threads in time, market intelligence firm Similarweb believes.

Its data indicates that Threads had five times more daily active users (DAUs) than Bluesky ahead of the US elections, but on November 15, a peak day of activity for Bluesky, Threads’ lead over Bluesky had been reduced to just 1.5x in the US. (Daily active users include the mobile apps on iOS and Android, not website visitors.)

Instagram head Adam Mosseri denied Similarweb’s data is accurate, but Meta does not share DAUs.

«

It would be amusing if all Threads’s engagement-baiting (and news-minimisation) has been for naught, and what people wanted was a really vanilla social network.

You can see a real-time update of Bluesky registered users: presently just short of 20.3m users.
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Is Bluesky the new Twitter? • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

»

Can Bluesky be the fix for all those woes, and a lasting replacement for the site that once was Twitter? I really doubt it.

Woe that people, myself included, have been inspired even to ask the question. Although white supremacy, scams, and porn are real and worsening problems on X and other social media, I have written before in The Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all of these others: People just aren’t meant to talk with one another this much. The decline of X is a sign that we may soon be free of social media, and the compulsive, constant attention-seeking that it normalized. Counterintuitively, the rise of Bluesky is also a good sign, in that so many people are still trying to hold on to the past. Giving up on social media will take time, and it will inspire relapse.

For all its growth, Bluesky still trails far behind Meta’s Threads—Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that his Twitter-like app adds 1 million users each day. But numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Meta has added buttons to access Threads from Instagram, so that any of its 2 billion users can slide right over, even if they never end up posting there. Bluesky, meanwhile, seems to be drawing actual users, especially in the United States, who want to post and follow.

…the internet’s media ecosystem is more fragmentary this decade than it was during the last. Uncertainty about social media’s future produces existential questions about the major platforms: Will TikTok be banned? Will X become state media? Will the Bluesky bubble grow beyond this week? Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself will fade away. In the meantime, though, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, noshing on news, performing identities, picking fights, and accruing cultural capital or longing to do so.

«

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One Billion Users: the social media card game • Kickstarter

Mike Masnick

»

Have you ever been on social media and thought “I bet I could run this site better than the people in charge”? Well, now’s your chance to test your skills. We’ve created One Billion Users: a fast, fun card game where you’re in charge of your own social network. It’s for 2-4 players and lasts about 30 minutes.

In One Billion Users, players compete to build the most successful social network. Gain users and attract influencers to build your site while playing cards to slow down your rivals and overcome obstacles. But be careful about which communities you attract — the toxicity they bring with them could hurt your platform!

Community cards are the lifeblood of your network. They represent hundreds of millions of users on your path to One Billion and beyond, but they also bring with them different levels of toxicity that can hamper your future growth and hurt your final score.

«

Another month to go and about a tenth of the way there. Could be the next Exploding Kittens. Haven’t you always wanted to show Zuckerberg and Musk how it’s done? (Do we think Musk is hurting his final score presently?)
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Nigeria’s Ogun State wants to lead the country’s EV revolution • Rest of World

Jesusegun Alagbe:

»

One day in September, Bisi Alade rode past a long line of motorists at a fuel station in Abeokuta, the capital city of Ogun State in southwest Nigeria. Two weeks earlier, Alade would have been stuck waiting in line with the other motorists. But not anymore — he’d traded his combustion motorcycle for an electric one.

A full charge of his Spiro Commando electric motorcycle is enough to last him for a day and costs just 2,500 naira ($1.53) — half as expensive as fuel, the 42-year-old ride-hailing driver told Rest of World. The savings are significant because since May 2023, when the newly elected Nigerian president Bola Tinubu scrapped fuel subsidies, gas prices in the country have shot up by more than 450%. There are also persistent shortages.

“Life is easier now since I started riding an electric motorcycle,” Alade said. “I pity my friends who are still riding regular motorcycles.”

Alade is among the first wave of drivers to benefit from Ogun State’s push for EVs. In October last year, the state announced the E-Mobility Program, under which it plans to turn its public transportation system electric. This made Ogun State the first Nigerian state with an EV road map. Government officials, including Sa’idu Alkali, the transportation minister, and Mele Kyari, chief of state-owned oil company Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited praised the effort.

“We are not just introducing a new mode of transportation; we are pioneering a movement towards a cleaner, more efficient, and technologically advanced way of life,” Ogun State governor Dapo Abiodun said at the launch.

«

EVs! They’re everywhere!
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AI-generated shows could replace lost DVD revenue, Ben Affleck says • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Last week, actor and director Ben Affleck shared his views on AI’s role in filmmaking during the 2024 CNBC Delivering Alpha investor summit, arguing that AI models will transform visual effects but won’t replace creative filmmaking anytime soon. A video clip of Affleck’s opinion began circulating widely on social media not long after.

“Didn’t expect Ben Affleck to have the most articulate and realistic explanation where video models and Hollywood is going,” wrote one X user.

In the clip, Affleck spoke of current AI models’ abilities as imitators and conceptual translators—mimics that are typically better at translating one style into another instead of originating deeply creative material.

“AI can write excellent imitative verse, but it cannot write Shakespeare,” Affleck told CNBC’s David Faber. “The function of having two, three, or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct that entirely eludes AI’s capability.”

Affleck sees AI models as “craftsmen” rather than artists (although some might find the term “craftsman” in his analogy somewhat imprecise). He explained that while AI can learn through imitation—like a craftsman studying furniture-making techniques—it lacks the creative judgment that defines artistry. “Craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop,” he said.

“It’s not going to replace human beings making films,” Affleck stated. Instead, he sees AI taking over “the more laborious, less creative and more costly aspects of filmmaking,” which could lower barriers to entry and make it easier for emerging filmmakers to create movies like Good Will Hunting.

While it may seem on its surface like Affleck was attacking generative AI capabilities in the tech industry, he also did not deny the impact it may have on filmmaking. For example, he predicted that AI would reduce costs and speed up production schedules, potentially allowing shows like HBO’s House of the Dragon to release two seasons in the same period as it takes to make one.

«

I dunno, no point getting the second season of House of the Dragon out faster if it’s not worth watching. Which it wasn’t.
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Thanks to AI, Apple’s China problem is only getting worse • The Hill

Geoffrey Cain:

»

For years, Tim Cook insisted Apple could change China from the inside. Instead, China changed Apple.

The latest evidence? Apple spent billions developing cutting-edge electric vehicle battery technology with Chinese automaker BYD, only to watch its innovations become the cornerstone of BYD’s rise to global electric vehicle dominance. Apple walked away with nothing. China walked away with everything.

This isn’t just another story about corporate research and development gone wrong. It’s a cautionary tale about how even America’s most valuable company has become trapped in China’s web of technological control — and how that web is about to tighten even further.

The battery partnership reveals a familiar pattern: American innovation flows into Chinese hands, strengthening Beijing’s technological ambitions while weakening America’s competitive edge. 

But BYD isn’t the real story here: It’s about how deeply Apple has become entangled with the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic objectives. The company that once removed the Dalai Lama from its ads to appease Beijing now faces an even more consequential test: artificial intelligence.

As Apple races to roll out Apple Intelligence globally, it faces a stark choice in China. The country’s strict AI regulations require companies to hand over their algorithms for government review and ensure their AI systems “adhere to the correct political direction.” For Apple, this means either walking away from its largest overseas market or creating a separate, censored version of its AI assistant that advances the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance and control objectives.

History suggests Apple will choose accommodation.

«

This is an opinion piece rather than a closely researched news story, but it still comes across very solidly. (And you’d forgotten about the BYD deal, which was putatively going to work wonders for Apple’s Car, hadn’t you? I had.)
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O2 deploys AI granny against scammers • The Register

Dan Robinson:

»

O2, the mobile operator arm of Brit telecoms giant Virgin Media (VMO2), says it has built the human-like AI to answer calls from fraudsters in real time, keeping them busy on the phone and wasting their time by pretending to be a potential vulnerable target.

“Daisy” is claimed to be indistinguishable from a real person, fooling scammers into thinking they’ve found perfect prey thanks to its ability to engage in “human-like” rambling chat, the biz claims.

For several weeks in the run-up to International Fraud Awareness Week (November 17–23), the AI has already frustrated scam callers with meandering stories about her family and talked at length about her passion for knitting, according to O2.

At this point, many Reg readers are probably feeling they know someone the telco might have used as training data.

But phone scams are an increasingly common threat. Criminals, often working from call centers, cold-call lists of numbers to try to con people out of their money. Common tricks include pretending to be their bank or a courier needing payment to deliver a parcel in order to get them to divulge their bank account details.

Daisy is said to combine various AI models that work together to listen to fraudulent calls and respond immediately, as if engaged in a conversation. Appropriate responses are generated through a custom large language model (LLM) with a character “personality” layer, and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate the spoken answer.

O2 claims it to be so lifelike that it has successfully kept fraudsters sidetracked for up to 40 minutes at a time. Some scammers were even tricked by Daisy offering false personal information, including made-up bank details.

…The AI has its own dedicated number, which the anti-fraud team managed to infiltrate into contact lists used by scammers to target Brits, an O2 spokesperson told us.

«

At last, AI used for good! Or against evil! (Thanks John K for the link.)
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No, Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t say he prefers Logitech’s MX Master 3 over the Magic Mouse • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

While the Logitech MX Master 3 is a terrific mouse for the Mac, reports claiming that Apple CEO Tim Cook prefers that mouse over the Magic Mouse are false.

The Wall Street Journal last month published an interview with Cook, in which he said he uses every Apple product every day. Soon after, The Verge’s Wes Davis attempted to replicate using every Apple product in a single day. During that day, Davis said he mostly used the MX Master 3, but sometimes switched to a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad.

In other words, it was Davis who said he himself used a Logitech mouse, not Cook.

Unfortunately, The Mac Observer misinterpreted The Verge’s article and ran a since-deleted story claiming that Cook prefers the MX Master 3 over the Magic Mouse. Mistakes happen, but the false claim has since gained traction on Reddit multiple times, so hopefully this helps to clear up the situation before wrong information continues to spread.

«

That’s a bizarre mistake; you’ll have noticed that I didn’t pick up the story from the Mac Observer, but maybe I should have followed it back up the river to the source. Even so, I’d probably have ended up at the Mac Observer with its erroneous piece. Just goes to show how far and wide mistakes can go – even when they should make you think “uh?” (Thanks Fabian S and others for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The ISS is leaking air, but Nasa and the Russians can’t agree on how to fix it or how urgently to act. CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons 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. Pressurised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US lawyers will reportedly try to force Google to sell Chrome and unbundle Android • The Verge

Wes Davis:

»

The Department of Justice is planning to ask for Google’s antitrust trial judge to force the company to sell off its Chrome browser after the judge ruled the company has maintained an illegal search monopoly, reports Bloomberg.

Chrome is the world’s most widely used browser, and the government’s lawyers have argued that its use in cross-promoting Google’s products is one of the things limiting available channels and incentives for competition to grow.

Requirements that officials are preparing to propose include that Google separate Android from Search and Google Play, but without trying to force Google to sell off Android. Another requirement would say it has to share more information with advertisers and that it “give them more control over where their ads appear,” the outlet writes.

Bloomberg also reports that officials will recommend that the company “give websites more options to prevent their content from being used by Google’s artificial intelligence products.” Finally, they will reportedly push for “a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of the case against Google.”

«

Cleaving Chrome from Google would be quite the move: how do you transfer all the data that people have stored on Google’s servers (lots of passwords in there!). Do you then make people pay for it? Or do you rely on advertising to somehow pay for those coders?

One thing’s for sure: ChromeCo would have far fewer engineers than presently work on Chrome.
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The ISS has been leaking air for 5 years, and engineers still don’t know why – Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

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US and Russian officials “don’t have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks,” said Bob Cabana, a retired NASA astronaut who took the helm of the advisory committee earlier this year. Cabana replaced former Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford, who chaired the committee before he died in March.

The transfer tunnel, known by the Russian acronym PrK, connects the Zvezda module with a docking port where Soyuz crew and Progress resupply spacecraft attach to the station.

Air has been leaking from the transfer tunnel since September 2019. On several occasions, Russian cosmonauts have repaired the cracks and temporarily reduced the leak rate. In February, the leak rate jumped up again to 2.4 pounds per day, then increased to 3.7 pounds per day in April.

This prompted managers to elevate the transfer tunnel leak to the highest level of risk in the space station program’s risk management system. This 5×5 “risk matrix” classifies the likelihood and consequence of risks. Ars reported in June that the leaks are now classified as a “5” both in terms of high likelihood and high consequence.

NASA reported in September that the latest round of repairs cut the leak rate by a third, but it did not eliminate the problem.

“The Russian position is that the most probable cause of the PrK cracks is high cyclic fatigue caused by micro-vibrations,” Cabana said on November 13. “NASA believes the PrK cracks are likely multi-causal, including pressure and mechanical stress, residual stress, material properties, and environmental exposures.”

The ISS is aging. Zvezda and the PrK launched in July 2000 and will mark a quarter-century in orbit next year. NASA wants to keep the space station operating until at least 2030, while Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, has committed only through 2028.

Roscosmos has shared sample metals, welds, and investigation reports with NASA to assist in the study of the cracks and leaks. In a report published in September, NASA’s inspector general said NASA’s ISS Vehicle Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston said the leaks are “not an immediate risk to the structural integrity of the station.”

This is because managers have implemented mitigations to protect the entire station in the event of a structural failure of the PrK.

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Well *this* wasn’t in Gravity.
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Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea cut, Germany and Finland fear sabotage • Reuters via MSN

Johan Alexander, Essi Lehton and Adrius Sytas:

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Two undersea fibre-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, including one linking Finland and Germany, were severed, raising suspicions of sabotage by bad actors, countries and companies involved said on Monday.

The episode recalled other incidents in the same waterway that authorities have probed as potentially malicious including damage to a gas pipeline and undersea cables last year and the 2022 explosions of the Nord Sea gas pipelines.

The 1,200-kilometre (745-mile) cable connecting Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working around 0200 GMT on Monday, Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms company Cinia said.

A 218-km (135-mile) internet link between Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at about 0800 GMT on Sunday, according to Lithuania’s Telia Lietuva, part of Sweden’s Telia Company group.

Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable” and were investigating “an incident (that) immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage.”

Europe’s security is threatened by Russia’s war against Ukraine and “hybrid warfare by malicious actors,” the joint statement said, without naming the actors.

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One could be accident, two definitely feels like intent. By Russia.
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How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could destroy one of civilization’s best achievements • The New York Times

Zeynep Tufecki:

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Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30% of infants in some US cities never made it to their first birthday. Since that time, vaccines, sanitation and effective medications have eliminated many previously commonplace illnesses and consigned others to extreme rarity. It’s easy to take much of that for granted, especially as those days have receded from living memory, but those achievements are fragile and can be lost.

The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.

Kennedy has brought attention to some worthwhile public health concerns, such as the downsides of ultraprocessed foods and the value of exercise. But beyond those reasonable issues, he has filled the internet and the airwaves with views on vaccines, food safety, medicines and supplements that are a mix of grave misrepresentations and far-fetched conspiracies.

His opposition to vaccines has attracted the most attention. He doesn’t say just that they merit closer scrutiny, as some “vaccine skeptics” claim. Last year he told a podcaster that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” When it later became expedient, he denied that he had ever said such a thing. The truth is that he has long promoted the lie that vaccines cause autism, and the extravagantly false claim that “researchers have done very little to study the health” of children after they get shots for once-common diseases.

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Let’s be clear: Trump’s administration is going to be an utter clown show, with all the restraint of a lit flare thrown into a fireworks box. For a moment, while he isn’t yet in power, it’s funny. But that’s going to wear off.

For a similar view of more of the appointees, The Unpopulist has a rundown.
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AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favourably • Scientific Reports

Brian Porter and Edouard Machery:

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We conducted two experiments with non-expert poetry readers and found that participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems (46.6% accuracy, χ2(1, N = 16,340) = 75.13, p < 0.0001).

Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems (χ2(2, N = 16,340) = 247.04, p < 0.0001).

We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.

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You can see the poems here. And yes, I’d agree that it seems non-experts don’t like having to work too hard when reading poetry.
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The Alex cartoon for Thursday 14 November 2024

“Alex” by Peattie and Taylor has been running for decades: it started in the London Daily News (I know, sounds like a made-up newspaper name from a film) in 1987 and has been going pretty much unbroken since.

This one nails yet another truism of life today, with a social media twist. (Bookmark the site and stay with it.)
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A study found that X’s algorithm now loves two things: Republicans and Elon Musk • The Verge

Wes Davis:

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Elon Musk’s X may have tweaked its algorithm to boost his account, along with those of other conservative-leaning users, starting around the time he announced his support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. That’s according to a new study published by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which found that Musk’s posts in particular were suddenly much more popular.

The study’s authors — QUT associate professor in digital media Timothy Graham and Monash University communications and media studies professor Mark Andrejevic — first looked at Musk’s engagement before and after his July endorsement of Trump. They report that starting around July 13th, Musks’ posts received 138% more views and 238% more retweets than before that date.

Musk’s numbers “outpaced the general engagement trends observed across the platform,” they concluded. (This paper isn’t the first time it’s been suggested that X adjusted its algorithm to specifically boost Musk’s account.) The researchers also found that other Republican-leaning accounts they examined saw similar boosts that started in July, albeit to a lesser degree.

The study’s results are similar to other recently reported findings by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post of potential right-wing bias in X’s algorithms. However, the researchers say they were limited by the “relatively small amount of data” that could be collected since the platform cut off access to its Academic API.

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Apple’s mouse is so bad that Tim Cook prefers using a different brand for work • Glass Almanac

Brian Foster:

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In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook provided a glimpse into his daily workflow, listing several Apple devices he uses regularly: a Mac Studio, an iPhone 13 Pro Max, an iPad Pro, and even a retro iMac G4 for nostalgic flair. But when it came to the mouse he relies on the most, Cook admitted that his go-to is the Logitech MX Master 3 — not Apple’s Magic Mouse.

While Cook mentioned occasionally switching to the Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad, his preference for a competitor’s product caught many by surprise.

It’s easy to see why Cook opts for the Logitech MX Master 3. Designed with ergonomics in mind, it features a comfortable thumb rest, a customizable MagSpeed scroll wheel, and a Flow feature that allows seamless use across multiple devices. Notably, the MX Master 3 charges via a front-facing USB-C port, meaning it can continue to be used while plugged in — a stark contrast to the Magic Mouse’s disruptive design.

The Logitech MX Master 3 also offers impressive battery life and versatility, making it a popular choice for professionals juggling various tasks. Cook’s mention of this mouse could very well boost its appeal to Mac users — and even PC users — looking for a productivity-friendly alternative.

While it’s unusual for a CEO to promote a competitor’s product, Cook’s candidness is refreshing. His choice underscores a key lesson: even in a company as innovative as Apple, practicality sometimes requires looking beyond in-house solutions.

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If Apple were ever to make a mouse that looked like the Logitech MX Master 3, everyone would assume that the designers were on hallucinogenic drugs.

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Apple [allegedly] thinks about an Apple TV set — yet again • Business Insider

Peter Kafka:

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Yes, you’ve heard this before: What if Apple built its own TV set?

It’s an idea that never goes away completely but has never actually happened.

That’s for good reason: An Apple TV set didn’t make sense years ago. It makes even less sense now.

Is Apple going to build a TV?

First: probably not. Second: It would be a terrible idea if Apple did.

But for the record, Apple is “evaluating” the idea of an Apple-branded set, reports Mark Gurman, Bloomberg’s very well-sourced Apple expert.

Gurman himself doesn’t seem to think there’s a meaningful chance that this happens. He made a short, throwaway reference to the idea in his latest column, which focuses primarily on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s relationship with Donald Trump. (TL;DR: Cook became an expert Trump manager during Trump 1.0 by letting the president do what he wanted in public, like take credit for things he didn’t do, while prevailing on him privately to do things Cook wanted Trump to do — namely, exempting Apple products from tariffs.)

What Gurman thinks Apple is going to do is roll out an “AI wall tablet” that people would use in their homes to control smart devices and talk to people in other rooms, etc. — basically, a souped-up intercom/doorbell system using a series of iPad-like devices. But in theory, if that goes well, then maybe Apple will be more interested in chasing an Actual TV Set. (I’ve asked Apple PR for comment.)

The thing is, we’ve been hearing about Apple and its ambitions to build an actual TV set for a long, long time. And they didn’t really make sense at the time, and they definitely don’t now.

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Kafka knows this is not going to happen, and Apple knows it’s not going to happen, and you know it’s not going to happen, and I know it’s not going to happen: TV sets are utter commodities. But it entertains people to trot it out every so often. Kafka wearily tweeted that this is his third decade of writing about how this isn’t going to happen.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Deadly or delicious (or both)? Facebook put an AI chatbot offering potentially lethal advice into a mushroom Group. CC-licensed photo by Aleksey Gnilenkov on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Uncapped. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI chatbot added to mushroom foraging Facebook Group immediately gives tips for cooking dangerous mushroom • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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An AI chatbot called “FungiFriend” was added to a popular mushroom identification Facebook group last week. It then told users there how to “sauté in butter” a potentially dangerous mushroom, signaling again the high level of risk that AI chatbots and tools pose to people who forage for mushrooms.

404 Media has previously reported on the prevalence and risk of AI tools intersecting with the mushroom foraging hobby. We reported on AI-generated mushroom foraging books on Amazon and the fact that Google image search has shown AI-generated images of mushrooms as top search results. On Tuesday, the FungiFriend AI chatbot to the Northeast Mushroom Identification & Discussion Facebook group, which has 13,500 members and is a place where beginner mushroom foragers often ask others for help identifying the mushrooms they have found in the wild. A moderator for the group said that the bot was automatically added by Meta and that “we are most certainly removing it from here.” Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bot is personified as a bearded, psychedelic wizard. Meta recently began adding AI chatbots into specific groups, and has also created different character AIs.

Rick Claypool, research director for consumer safety group Public Citizen’s president’s office, told 404 Media about FungiFriend. Claypool has done important work about corporate capture of local and state governments, but is also an avid mushroom forager and has been documenting the risks of AI tools in mushroom foraging over the last few months.

Over the summer, he wrote a lengthy article in Fungi Magazine that noted “emerging AI technologies are being deployed to help beginner foragers identify edible wild mushrooms. Distinguishing edible mushrooms from toxic mushrooms in the wild is a high-risk activity that requires real-world skills that current AI systems cannot reliably emulate.” 

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This is all a bit Darwinian. Are we sure that they haven’t achieved intelligence and are trying to wipe us out, quietly?
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Netflix served the Tyson vs. Paul fight to 60 million households • The Verge

Wes Davis:

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Netflix peaked at “65 million concurrent streams” during the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul last night, according to Most Valuable Promotions, the promoter for the fight. Those streams went out to 60 million households globally, the group said in a press release shared with The Verge via email. That’s more than twice the traffic Netflix could see for its Christmas Day NFL stream this year, if everyone who watched last year streamed it.

The crush of people trying to watch Tyson vs. Paul seemed to be more than Netflix’s servers could easily handle, as the social web was awash with complaints about the quality of the stream, which many found to be muddy, or plagued with buffering and dropped connections. Downdetector recorded more than 100,000 complaints of Netflix streaming issues during the event, according to Bloomberg.

That’s also just a massive number of people streaming a single live event at the same time. Disney served 59 million concurrent streams of a World Cup cricket match through its Disney Plus Hotstar service last year. It hit similar numbers a few days earlier, and again in June this year.

Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone told employees that the company dealt with this “unprecedented scale” by prioritizing keeping the stream stable “for the majority of viewers,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

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When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, 60 years ago, 73 million people watched. Now, the quality might not have been tip-top, but it was as good as they could offer at the time, and modern broadcast could reach that number in HD.

A roundabout way of saying that we seem to do two steps forward, two steps back. (Or vice-versa.) We now do live sports! To lots of people! Which we did before. (I remember pay-per-view Tyson fights years ago. Everything old is new again.)
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London bus crashes are the result of an unsafe model • FT

Camilla Cavendish, who met Tom Kearney, an American businessman who was hit by a London bus’s wing mirror and put into a coma (from which he recovered):

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The most recent data show that 86 people died or were badly injured in bus collisions in London between 10 December 2023 and 31 March 2024. Kearney’s analysis of TfL data suggests that around three people a day are hospitalised after bus safety incidents. That doesn’t feel good, even though it’s tiny in comparison to the 1.8bn annual passenger journeys. Compared with other world cities like New York and Paris the capital’s buses rank in the top quartile for financial efficiency but the bottom quartile for collisions per kilometre. And the number of collisions in London has increased in the past couple of years, despite buses travelling fewer miles.  

Could this have anything to do with the way that bus contracts prioritise speed? Last week, hundreds of bus drivers marched to TfL headquarters to demand better working conditions and the right to report safety concerns “without fear of retribution from TfL or employers”. Drivers described the pressure of long shifts, few breaks and having to drive in sometimes blistering heat, all while being shouted at over a monitor by controllers who want them to make up the time to the next stop, and keep the right amount of distance between their bus and next. It’s not surprising that a third of bus drivers, before the pandemic, reported having had a “close call” from fatigue.  

With the government about to export the London franchise model to other parts of the country, someone in Whitehall needs to take a look. Michael Liebreich, a former McKinsey consultant who sat on the TfL board for six years, believes that TfL’s contracting out model is “institutionally unsafe”. Bus drivers are under such pressure, he thinks, that some may break the speed limit and overtake cyclists dangerously. 

I still wasn’t sure about this, until I met the families of more victims. Katrina Finnegan’s aunt Kathleen died earlier this year, after being hit by a bus at Victoria bus station. Trish Burr’s daughter Melissa also died in Victoria a few years earlier, after a driver accidentally hit the accelerator.

What shocked me was how badly the families were treated.

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Dreaming of snow this winter? Look up the forecast • Washington Post

Harry Stevens and Ben Noll:

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For Joseph Gordon, 83, a snowless season will further confirm his sense that the winters of his memory have been irretrievably lost. Four decades ago, Gordon moved to McLean, Virginia, where he raised his family. He remembers snowy days when he would pile his kids into a 10-foot toboggan or cross-country ski through acres of farmland where rows of houses now stand.

Gordon has not consulted a meteorological database, but his experience tells him McLean gets less snow than it used to. According to our analysis of 60 years of snowfall data, he’s right. “It’s so gradual,” Gordon said of the change in snowfall. “We’re like frogs in a pot of boiling water, and we don’t jump out until it’s too late.”

With the exception of part of the Northeast and a few patches elsewhere, the snowfall trend across the country has matched Northern Virginia’s, with less snow in the most recent three decades than in the three decades before that.

Over the past 60 years, as humans have added more than 2.3 trillion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the average global temperature has increased by about 2.1ºF (1.2ºC). The warming has contributed to less snow in the United States and elsewhere.

“The laws of thermodynamics are tough to beat,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist who has studied long-term snowfall trends. “As you warm temperatures up, you’re just going to get less snow. There’s just no way around that.”

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The accompanying map shows that barely anywhere in the US is going to see “more” snow; almost everywhere will get less. Unsurprising.
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Lucy Manning on how a sexually obscene phone call led to a two-year ordeal getting police to act • BBC News

Lucy Manning is a BBC journalist who received an obscene call – which she taped – and took it to the police:

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I was concerned about my personal safety: if this man knew my first name and number, did he know me? Had I met him? Was it someone I’d interviewed? Did he know where I lived?

He had an accent I didn’t recognise, maybe Midlands. I assumed it was in some way connected to the fact I was an on-air BBC journalist but I wasn’t sure. I dialled 999 to report the crime.

The following day I went to my local police station to give a statement and was asked to upload the taped recording onto the Metropolitan Police’s system.

I was naively hopeful they could use it to quickly trace the caller and arrest the man.
I’ve worked on too many stories of violence against women – including the disappearance and subsequent rape and murder of Sarah Everard.

Police had failed to investigate Wayne Couzens for at least three indecent exposure offences before he murdered Sarah Everard. Experts say those offences may have been a “red flag” that someone could go onto more serious offending.

So I had two concerns: my own safety and making sure this man couldn’t go on to commit more serious sexual offences.

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The incredibly screwed-up way that things which should have happened did not happen ought to shame the police. But you know that instead of remaking the way in which cases are handled, they’ll just shrug.
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The X exodus: could Bluesky spike spark end of Elon Musk’s social media platform? • Sky News

Mickey Carroll:

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Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, The Guardian newspaper, and even the Clifton Suspension Bridge have joined swathes of people deserting Elon Musk’s social media site X.

Millions have instead joined Bluesky, which has a stronger focus on moderation, set up by former Twitter founder Jack Dorsey – who is now no longer affiliated with the social media platform – in 2019.

According to the official Bluesky account, a million people joined the platform in just one day this week, after Musk was given a position in Donald Trump’s government.

“The alignment of Mr Musk with president-elect Trump and his use of the platform to promote the interests of president-elect Trump is obviously driving out a lot of people,” says Adam Tinworth, a social media expert and digital journalism lecturer at City St George’s University.

…Jason Barnard, the chief executive of Kalicube, spent nine years gathering three billion different data points that Google uses to decide what is factual information.

He told Sky News that although X has a long-standing agreement with Google to allow the search engine to use X posts to help it understand the world, Google’s trust appears to be waning.

“Bluesky is 20 times smaller in terms of the number of people on the platform,” he says. “If you search for people [on Google], you will find Bluesky 10 times less often than you will find X.

“But,” he says, “it’s 10 times more important to Google today for factual information.”

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I think people like Bluesky perhaps a little more because they can create blocklists, and there will probably be APIs sooner. (It certainly needs better native Mac apps.) And shouldn’t it be called the Xodus?

That Google data point though is dramatic.
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Why do we put fluoride in water? • The Atlantic

Charles C. Mann, writing in 2020:

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Nonfluoridated nations such as Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark actually have better dental health by this measure than the United States, one of the world’s fluoridation champions. Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland tried fluoridation, abandoned it years later—and saw no rise in tooth decay. What’s going on?

One of the lesser-known advantages of government-run health-care systems, such as Britain’s National Health Service, is the fact that because taxpayers are funding everything, the government occasionally tries to determine whether the money is being spent usefully. In 1999, the government asked the NHS to “carry out an up-to-date expert scientific review of fluoride and health.” A research team based at the University of York evaluated every study of fluoridation it could find—about 3,200 of them. The team’s conclusion was, it said, “surprising.” Despite the long fight over fluoridation, few of the thousands of studies counted as “high-quality research.” The implication was that Britain had been tinkering with its water supply with little empirical support. Trevor Sheldon, the head of the York review’s advisory board, was blunt: “There’s really hardly any evidence” that fluoridation works, he told Newsweek. “And if anything there may be some evidence the other way.” These findings were respectfully ignored.

In 2015, the Cochrane organization waded into the debate. Founded in 1993, Cochrane is a London-based global network of about 30,000 medical researchers in multiple countries that provides systematic analyses of medical issues. The goal is to produce painstaking, rigorous assessments of what research has—and hasn’t—established about a given subject. Cochrane has a fiercely guarded reputation for impartiality and thoroughness. Its verdicts have global impact. Which may be why the pushback on its fluoridation work was so strong.

…The Cochrane group reported its work carefully. The evidence, it said, is poor and sparse, but what little there is “indicates” that the fluoridation of water reduces cavities in children. But, the group said, “these results are based predominantly on old studies”—from before 1975—“and may not be applicable today.” For adults, there is “insufficient evidence,” old or new, to determine whether fluoridation is effective. The report did not support or attack fluoridation; it only asked for more research.

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Well, now RFK Jr is going to remove it. Let the research begin!
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TikTok takes down 400k videos in Kenya over sexual content • Semafor

Martin Siele:

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TikTok is deleting more videos in Kenya for violating community guidelines, as the company looks to avoid government scrutiny over content moderation for sexually explicit content.

TikTok pulled down 360,000 videos in Kenya in the three months to June, according to its newly published Q2 enforcement report. It took down 296,000 videos in all of 2023 in Kenya. The videos removed in the three-month period accounted for 0.3% of videos uploaded in Kenya in that quarter.

The platform was compelled by Kenya’s government in April to share quarterly compliance reports because it faced a petition that threatened to see it banned in the country.

The proliferation of sexual content in particular on TikTok in Kenya fueled the push for stricter moderation from regulators concerned about Only Fans-style content. Videos featuring ethnic incitement and violence are also often pulled down for violating guidelines.

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A reminder that it’s not just the US where people get worked up over social media content.
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The Onion CEO explains Infowars purchase amid Alex Jones’s claims about auction • Politico via MSN

Ashleigh Fields:

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The Onion CEO Ben Collins confirmed that the publication purchased Alex Jones’s Infowars outlet in a Saturday series of posts on the social media platform Bluesky amid Jones’s claims of wrongdoing and illegal activity.  

“I just wanted to give a quick update on The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, which we can’t wait to relaunch as the dumbest website on the internet,” Collins wrote. 

“The long and short of it: We won the auction and — you’re not going to believe this — the previous InfoWars folks aren’t taking it well.”

He shared that The Onion, a satirical news website, won the bid for Infowars on Thursday at Jones’s bankruptcy auction, along with the Connecticut Sandy Hook families of victims. Jones previously said the massacre was a “hoax.”

Jones was held liable for nearly $1.5bn in damages due to his false claims about the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. The families moved to liquidate his business and take over his social media accounts, which was granted by a judge in September.

Throughout their efforts to acquire Jones’s platforms, he has spread conspiracies about legal missteps in the process. He recently claimed that the auction for his Infowars site was changed from a “regular auction” to a “secret” auction two days before it occurred. He also said that higher bidders were prevented from submitting offers so that a lower bid could be accepted. 

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For clarification of Friday’s link and its update. Alex Jones telling fibs? Perish the thought.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified