The spork’s continued existence, in the liminal place between useless and annoying, remains baffling. CC-licensed photo by Karl Baron on Flickr.
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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:
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“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.”
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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:
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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:
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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.
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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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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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