Bicycle theft is all too prevalent in London, but even when tracking devices show where they are, police won’t intervene. CC-licensed photo by Lisa Risager on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Locked up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Coinbase’s big election bet is about to be tested • CNBC
MacKenzie Sigalos:
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In the first few years after founding Coinbase, CEO Brian Armstrong shied away from Washington, DC. But as his ambitions for his crypto exchange scaled, so too did his need to curry favour on Capitol Hill.
“About five or six years ago, we realized that crypto was getting big enough that we needed to go really engage actively in a policy effort, so I started coming out to D.C.,” Armstrong, who started Coinbase in 2012, told CNBC in September, following a day of meetings with political leaders.
Now, it’s practically Armstrong’s full-time job, and Coinbase’s money is all over the nation’s capital. The company was one of the top corporate donors this election cycle, giving more than $75m to a group called Fairshake and its affiliate PACs, including a fresh pledge of $25m to support the pro-crypto super PAC in the 2026 midterms. Armstrong personally contributed more than $1.3m to a mix of candidates up and down the ballot.
The tech industry’s biggest names have dotted Washington for years to try and push their agendas as their market caps have expanded, but for Coinbase, the matter is potentially existential.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler sued the firm last year over claims that it sells unregistered securities. A judge has since ruled that the case should be heard by a jury. Coinbase has fought back vociferously, and has also said that it wants to work with regulators to come up with a proper set of laws governing the nascent industry.
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Coinbase, you might recall, is the company where Armstrong himself declared in October 2020 that politics was definitely, absolutely, not going to be a thing any more for the workplace: the new corporate policy was “political neutrality”. O tempora, o mores, and if you don’t like these mores we have plenty more out the back.
Secretly, one has to hope that all that money turns out to be wasted and that none of the candidates they’ve backed succeed. Though of course there’s probably been plenty of each-way funding going on.
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China hack enabled vast spying on US officials, likely ensnaring thousands of contacts • WSJ
Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha, Drew FitzGerald and Sarah Krouse:
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as U.S. officials and security experts piece together what the hackers—part of a group nicknamed Salt Typhoon by investigators—were able to achieve, they have assembled clues that fuel concerns that China’s mastery of cyber-espionage is dangerously advanced.
The hackers appeared to have had the ability to access the phone data of virtually any American who is a customer of a compromised carrier—a group that includes AT&T and Verizon—but limited their targets to several dozen select, high-value political and national-security figures, some of the people familiar with the investigation said.
The hackers also appear to have infiltrated communications providers outside the U.S., including at least one country that closely shares intelligence with the U.S., though it isn’t yet clear where or how extensively. Investigators expect more victims to be identified as the probe continues.
Investigators don’t yet know how China planned to use the information it allegedly stole. U.S. intelligence officials have warned for over a decade that Beijing has amassed an enormous trove of information on Americans in order to identify undercover spies, understand and anticipate decisions by political leaders, and potentially build dossiers on ordinary citizens for future use.
Though political figures are among those spied upon, officials don’t suspect the Chinese are seeking to use the access to disrupt or otherwise interfere in the presidential election.
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The US begins to look like a huge Swiss cheese at this point.
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EU plans to fine Apple for anticompetitive App Store practices • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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The European Commission plans to fine Apple for not adequately complying with Digital Markets Act (DMA) requirements for the App Store, reports Bloomberg. Regulators apparently believe that Apple did not implement changes that allowed developers to steer users to cheaper prices outside of the App Store .
Back in June, the EU said that Apple was in breach of the DMA due to its anti-steering rules. The European Commission said that developers should be able to inform their customers of alternative purchasing options, steer them to offers, and allow them to make purchases outside of the App Store .
In August, Apple again changed its App Store rules in Europe to satisfy regulators. Apple began allowing EU developers to communicate and promote offers that would direct customers outside of the App Store , and it marked a significant loosening of Apple’s prior rules. Developers are able to communicate discounts and deals without opting into Apple’s new developer terms or paying the Core Technology Fee, but Apple is requiring developers to report external purchase transactions and pay an initial acquisition fee and a store services fee.
It is not clear when the European Commission will announce the fine, but it could happen before current competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager leaves the position later this month. It could also be pushed back to later in the year, though.
Exactly how much Apple will have to pay is unknown at this time, but earlier this year, the EU fined Apple $2bn for anticompetitive behavior against third-party music services.
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It has taken a very, very long time for Apple to reap what it has been sowing for all these years, but it looks like it’s finally going to happen.
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Why we should start worrying about bird flu • The Washington Post
Leanna Wen:
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Forty-one people in the United States have been infected by the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu since April, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed last week. These include 17 cases from California and nine from Washington, both states that had no known human infections until last month.
The CDC reiterated that the risk to the public is low, citing that there has been no documented human-to-human transmission and that all cases thus far have been mild. But many public health experts are increasingly worried. Here are four reasons why:
The epidemiology of the virus has changed a lot in a short time. Caitlin M. Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and author of the book “Crisis Averted,” told me that it’s significant for a virus to evolve from circulating mostly among wild birds to causing outbreaks in mammals. In March, H5N1 began spreading among dairy cows.
“This was a new development that had not been seen before for avian influenza,” Rivers said, “And now we are finding more and more spillovers from those farm settings to humans.”
Other mammals have since been contracting bird flu. First, it was farm cats in Texas, then indoor cats in Colorado. Last week, it was found in a pig at a backyard farm in Oregon. The virus has even been detected in mice. Should spread in pest mice become prevalent, “that would be very troubling in terms of containment and the ease by which the virus could find other hosts,” Rivers said.
Many cases are probably undetected. An investigative reporter from KFF Health News obtained emails from state and local health departments and found that, despite their best efforts, surveillance was “marred by delays, inconsistencies, and blind spots.” Many farm owners did not want their employees tested and refused visits by health officials. Considering that avian flu outbreaks have been documented in 387 dairy herds in 14 states and 1,195 poultry operations in 48 states, infections among workers have almost certainly been missed.
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And the other joyful news is “the virus might spread more easily that we’d thought.” Something to take your minds off the US election, eh? (Only a watching brief. Nothing more.)
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Is your air fryer spying on you? Concerns over ‘excessive’ surveillance in smart devices • The Guardian
Robert Booth:
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Air fryers that gather your personal data and audio speakers “stuffed with trackers” are among examples of smart devices engaged in “excessive” surveillance, according to the consumer group Which?
The organisation tested three air fryers, increasingly a staple of British kitchens, each of which requested permission to record audio on the user’s phone through a connected app.
Smart air fryers allow cooks to schedule their meal to start cooking before they get home. Not all air fryers have such functionality but those that do often use an app installed on a smartphone.
Which? found the app provided by the company Xiaomi connected to trackers for Facebook and a TikTok ad network. The Xiaomi fryer and another by Aigostar sent people’s personal data to servers in China, although this was flagged in the privacy notice, the consumer testing body found.
Its tests also examined smartwatches that it said required “risky” phone permissions – in other words giving invasive access to the consumer’s phone through location tracking, audio recording and accessing stored files.
Which? found digital speakers that were preloaded with trackers for Facebook, Google and a digital marketing company called Urbanairship.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the latest consumer tests “show that many products not only fail to meet our expectations for data protection but also consumer expectations”.
The ICO, the UK’s independent regulator for data protection and information rights law, is drawing up new guidance for manufacturers of smart products to be published in spring 2025. It is due to outline clear expectations for what they need to do to comply with data protection laws and protect people using smart products.
Harry Rose, the editor of Which? magazine, said smart tech manufacturers were collecting data with little or no transparency and called for the ICO’s code to “be backed by effective enforcement, including against companies that operate abroad”.
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Overspecified smart devices are the worst. I rejected some scales because they required an app.
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Is your smartphone being tracked? Here’s how to tell • The Guardian
Ariel Bogle:
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We’re looking for apps I don’t remember downloading, and which platforms can access my smartphone’s camera or microphone; who else can see my calendar, my notes, my emails.
We also check the basics: whether my device is actually registered to my name and email address, and whether I have two-factor authentication turned on.
Rose MacDonald, cofounder of Nansen Digital Forensic Services, is walking me through the digital safety audit she provides to victim-survivors of family violence. I’m talking to the former police detective and digital forensics specialist so that I can better understand the experience of people who are subject to this kind of abuse – and how they can minimise the risks.
We examine who might be able to access my Google or iCloud accounts. What third-party platforms are connected to the account, and whether my emails are being forwarded to another address.
Sometimes when MacDonald does these audits she finds hi-tech surveillance tools – spyware, for example, which buries itself deep in your phone’s software. But this kind of technology costs money and much more often, she says, perpetrators take advantage of the opportunities for surveillance offered by everyday features: the shared accounts or location sharing tools that reveal more than we realise.
“What we find more typically is misconfiguration of normal settings … and breaches of the cloud environment. If they’ve got a username and password to something, you don’t really need a lot of technical knowledge,” she says.
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Notable that this is filed under “domestic violence”.
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How to catch a London bike thief • London Centric
Jim Waterson:
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James Dunn, the founder of bicycle recovery service BackPedal, wasn’t expecting a call from me on a Friday evening. We’d spent weeks discussing how best to investigate the plague of bike theft in the capital for a London Centric article. I’d tried knocking on the doors of convicted bike thieves after they got out of prison but, strangely, the criminals didn’t want to share all their tactics with a journalist. I’d asked to accompany Dunn’s recovery agents as they track down and retrieve client’s bikes, using GPS trackers they hide on the frame, but we hadn’t yet scheduled in a date.
In desperation, I’d bought a cheap bicycle with the intention of using it as “bait bike”, a tactic used occasionally by the police to smash organised gangs. Dunn’s company was going to fit my new purchase with a specialist tracker, wait for it to get stolen, then we’d see where it ended up.
Instead, I’d accidentally jumped the gun.
Earlier that day I’d left my family’s electric cargo bike outside my home while dashing in for a Teams meeting with a group of London council communications directors. The battery-powered bike can carry two children across London faster than public transport and is far cheaper than owning a car. Every story in London Centric is reported from its saddle, as I cover hundreds of miles across the capital every week in search of news. It has transformed my life. But, as the thieves who must have been watching my house knew, it is not a cheap bit of a kit. And by the time I went back outside, it was gone.
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Absorbing story. Waterson is, bit by bit, making London Centric a must-read for Londoners. This one – given that he found the bike, but the police wouldn’t act – is going to run and run.
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Oil giant BP is killing 18 hydrogen projects, chilling the nascent industry • TechCrunch
Tim De Chant:
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Tucked inside a 32-page earnings report, oil and gas giant BP revealed it was killing 18 early-stage hydrogen projects, a move that could have a chilling effect on the nascent hydrogen industry.
The decision, along with the sale of the company’s US onshore wind-power operations, will save BP $200m annually and help boost its bottom line. The hydrogen industry, which has relied on oil and gas companies both financially and through lobbying efforts, is preparing for a grimmer outcome.
BP has been a supporter of hydrogen. The company’s venture capital arm has invested in several green hydrogen startups, including Electric Hydrogen and Advanced Ionics. Earlier this year, BP said it would develop “more than 10” hydrogen projects in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.
Now BP is scaling back those plans, saying it’ll develop between five and ten projects. The company is keeping quiet about which ones will receive the green light.
Hydrogen has the potential to reduce carbon pollution significantly in a range of industries, including petrochemical refining, steelmaking, and long-haul shipping. But infrastructure for hydrogen, especially green hydrogen, which is produced using renewable electricity, remains underbuilt. That’s in part because green hydrogen is the most expensive form of the gas to produce, and because transporting hydrogen is costly relative to fossil fuels.
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Good old BP – why bother getting into renewables when you can just dump wind projects. Hydrogen projects have never seemed convincing: they get trialled and dumped, because it’s just too difficult in a world where microgeneration is booming and small nuclear seems like a plausible future.
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The law must respond when science changes • Scientific American
David Faigman and Jeff Kukucka:
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Whereas the law seeks to provide fair process in a timely fashion, science seeks to discover truth over time. This means that what was once fair may become unfair; the justice of yesteryear may be unjust today. [Robert] Roberson [sentenced to for death for the murder of his two-year-old daughter in 2002] and the Menendez brothers [life without parole for killing their parents] are the victims of that very divide.
In both cases, scientific understanding changed years ago. Shaken baby syndrome was called into question in the early 2010s, and, years before that, psychologists identified the relationship between the trauma of childhood abuse and violence. Yet all three men have struggled to reopen their cases. An essential principle of science is that it might change as research accumulates. That is a principle that the law has largely failed to come to grips with. This failure threatens the constitutional guarantee of due process.
The Roberson and Menendez cases are not abnormal. The annals of the law are replete with examples of what we once thought was scientific truth, upon which judges and juries decided both civil and criminal cases, where we later understood the science to be wrong. In 2004 the state of Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for the 1992 arson murders of his family. At the time of his execution, the forensic science that linked him to the fire had been categorically invalidated.
In a 2015 press release, the FBI reported that in their ongoing review of non-DNA-based microscopic hair identification, 90% of cases had errors. Similarly, prosecutors’ use of a questionable theory known as comparative bullet-lead analysis was eventually abandoned after scientific reports debunked its statistical bases. Even today, courts continue to allow bite mark identification testimony, even though people who say they are bite mark experts can’t even agree on whether a bite mark is from a person—or a dog. And what we know about firearms identification and fingerprints are changing— there could be scores of convictions based on what is no longer true.
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The death penalty goes wrong? Who would have guessed? (Faigman is a professor of law, and Kukucka a professor of psychology.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Turns out there was a Wordle on Tuesday morning, so perhaps the NYTimes has laid in a store against the possibility of its tech workers striking. Brief Drama Given Spare Space.
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 