A new paper by Google claims to have used quantum computing to solve a problem normal computers couldn’t. There might be implications for bitcoin. CC-licensed photo by cohærence * on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

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He investigates the internet’s most vicious hackers—from a secret location • WSJ

Robert McMillan and Vipal Monga:

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While many researchers sell cybersecurity services to companies, [Brian] Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter, makes most of his money from banner ads on the website where he shares his findings. His site, Krebs on Security, routinely pulls in more than 1 million visits a month. He hears from law enforcement and other officials who read his posts—and from hackers, too.

[The hacker] Waifu is well known among investigators, who say he is part of an anarchic online community known as the Com, made up mostly of young men in English-speaking countries. They say Waifu has a history of harassing his online foes and of SIM swapping, in which someone seizes control of a victim’s phone number and uses it to reset online passwords, such as for cryptocurrency accounts. 

“He’s been an influential figure in the culture of the Com for at least five years,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at online investigations firm Unit 221B, who was also drawn into the hunt for Waifu.  

Com hackers have grown more dangerous, ratcheting up their activities from taking over social-media accounts to stealing cryptocurrency to digital extortion. They have been linked to major hacks at Nvidia, Twitter and MGM Resorts. 

The online mayhem is spilling into the real world. Com hackers have been linked to home invasions designed to steal cryptocurrency at gunpoint and have hired strangers to fire guns or throw bricks at a victim’s house. FBI agents routinely redact their own names from legal filings related to the Com to protect their identities, and analysts zealously guard their privacy.

Krebs tracks it all from his workstation, sitting in a black leather professional racing seat that his wife calls the “space chair.” In it, he’s surrounded by a 250-watt Bose sound system, a microphone and six feet of touchscreen monitors that slowly lower up and down, like something out of a sci-fi movie. 

With a glance to his left, Krebs can see a half-dozen live feeds from security cameras placed around his home. He gives fake names to plumbers and landscapers who work on his home to keep his address secret. He asked a visiting reporter not to reveal certain information, like the name of his dog. He isn’t registered to vote, because that requires an address.

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Krebs is a determined, resourceful reporter. That he hasn’t chosen any other way than internet advertising to fund himself is truly remarkable. (Thanks Andrew B for the link.)
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The publisher is always right • Nieman Journalism Lab

Gabe Schneider:

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The business model that sustained newsrooms for the last century is over, and we’re left with the rich buying up newspapers like hometown sports teams.

This sort of saviorism isn’t just unacceptable — it’s disastrous.

We’ve watched The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, layoff staff in the name of profitability — followed by Bezos himself prompting 250,000 people to unsubscribe by blocking the publication of a presidential endorsement. We’ve watched members of the L.A. Times editorial board resign because the paper’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, wouldn’t allow them to publish an editorial about the stakes of the 2024 election (supposedly because of his concerns about Gaza — something L.A. Times staffers were punished for late last year ). And it almost goes without saying, but Rupert Murdoch’s media empire (primarily Fox News) is one of the worst beasts a political system has had the pleasure of dealing with.

If we value journalism, more specifically access to credible information, this can’t continue. Unions, newsroom cooperatives, philanthropists, and industry leaders must understand and make clear the gravity of the situation — because simply protecting jobs to maintain what’s left and hope the publisher class won’t make things worse will be the death knell of credibility for the profession.

To be fair, publishers with questionable motivations are not new.

…While I don’t have faith in most of them, billionaire newspaper owners still have the opportunity to do better and I welcome them to support new models for information and journalism focused on models not shaped by their immediate political interests. Whether the future is stronger union-run newsrooms or news cooperatives or nonprofits or even significantly more government investment in news, I won’t prescribe.

But I do know one thing: In 2025, unless we come together as a journalism field and course-correct away from information consolidation controlled by the ultra-wealthy, it will get worse.

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There’s a sort of blindness here: where does Schneider think the money’s going to come from?
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The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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Nothing symbolizes the changed media landscape of this past election more than Rogan’s casual brush-off [of Kamala Harris, who declined to come to him and would only offer him an hour of her time; Rogan declined]. Within a week, his interview with Trump racked up more than 40 million views on YouTube alone, and millions more on other platforms. No single event, apart from the Harris-Trump debate, had a bigger audience this election cycle. By comparison, Harris’s contentious interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, the most popular of the cable networks, drew 8 million viewers to the live broadcast, and another 6.5 million on YouTube.

Those figures demonstrate the absurdity of talking about the “mainstream media” as many still do, especially those who disparage it. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, Americans with a wide range of political views generally agree about which outlets fall within this definition: newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and television networks such as CNN. Everyone else who’s disseminating information at scale is treated like a couple of hipsters running a craft brewery who are valiantly competing with Budweiser.

That’s simply not true. Rogan is the “mainstream media” now. Elon Musk, too. In the 2024 campaign, both presidential candidates largely skipped newspaper and television sit-downs—the tougher, more focused “accountability” interviews—in favor of talking directly with online personalities. (J. D. Vance, to his credit, made a point of taking reporters’ questions at his events and sat down with CNN and the Times, among others.)

The result was that both Trump and Harris got away with reciting slogans rather than outlining policies. Trump has not outlined how his promised mass deportations might work in practice, nor did we ever find out if Harris still held firm to her previous stances, such as the abolition of the death penalty and the decriminalization of sex work. The vacuum was filled with vibes.

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The way in which “mainstream media” (more often now described as “legacy media”) has been overtaken by all the other forms has been subtle, and coming for a long time, but certainly happened in this past four years. The landscape is very, very different now.
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Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip • Google Blog

Hartmut Neven, founder and lead of Google Quantum AI:

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Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10^25) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.

The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges. As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications.

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Well: if this point about the calculation (which isn’t specified here; I can’t honestly understand the Nature paper abstract) is generally useful, this is earthshattering. But I’ll wait for more general explanations and uses.

(One interesting claim is that quantum computers could make the price of bitcoin drop precipitously because they could shortcut the process of solving its equation. Except those rich enough to have a quantum computer wouldn’t use it that way.. would they?)
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TikTok failed to save itself with the First Amendment • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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law that could ban TikTok in the US doesn’t violate the Constitution, a panel of judges unanimously — and forcefully — ruled on Friday. The decision suggests TikTok, which has evaded attempts at a ban or sale for over four years, really could be forced out of the US, unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it off by January 19th. TikTok has indicated it will take its fight to the Supreme Court, and President-elect Donald Trump has previously promised to save the app, though he’s been fuzzy on how. But as the deadline approaches, it faces an uphill legal battle.

Gautam Hans, a Cornell Law School professor and associate director of the school’s First Amendment Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely the Supreme Court will upend the DC Circuit’s opinion. “Why would the Supreme Court take this case if they are already pretty deferential to national security in general? There’s no mixed dissent, this was a bipartisan, congressional action,” he says.

Plus, Hans says, the majority opinion is written to “insulate itself from reversal” by assuming a lot in TikTok’s favor and still deciding against it. For example, the court says that its opinion is entirely based on the public record — not the classified evidence that convinced many lawmakers to pass the bill and which TikTok objected to.

Despite the broad government consensus, some online speech advocates say the ruling sets a risky precedent, particularly if it leads to a TikTok ban instead of a sale.

…TikTok made several claims against the government, saying it unlawfully singled out the company and violated its First and Fifth Amendment rights. The court dismissed these concerns, but it spent the most time on the First Amendment challenge — concluding that any harm to TikTok and its users was outweighed by national security concerns.

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Tick tock, time is running out for TikTok to either be sold or figure a way to get Trump to like it.
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Spam in the firehose • Conspirador Norteño

Conspirador Norteño monitors spam and hacking attempts on social networks:

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Every public action on social media platform Bluesky is published via a stream of events known as the Bluesky firehose. This can be used to monitor Bluesky in near-real time for various behaviors indicative of spam or other inauthentic activity.

For example, accounts that are created in bulk often use the same names and biographies over and over, and this repetition can be tracked by programmatically watching the firehose for profile updates. Over the course of five days, the process of monitoring the firehose for repeated biographies flagged 2234 spam accounts, over half of which belong to a single network.

……non-trivial biographies duplicated by at least five accounts were by far the most accurate indicator of inauthentic activity, with 2234 of the 2380 accounts flagged (93.9%) being confirmed as spam via manual inspection.

…some of the spam accounts are for sale, although in the case of one network, “extortion” might be a better word than “sale”. 25 accounts with handles implying affiliation with various major corporations such as Netflix, Best Buy, and Progressive Insurance have the biography “message for a handle transfer fee or your competitor’s advertisements will be posted”.

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Spam is, ironically, the sign that your social network is healthy: if it’s worth taking the time to spam, there must be sufficient real people there to want to influence or rip off.
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Delta Air Lines check-in was halted at London Heathrow as agents threatened to seize plane over $3,400 debt • View from the Wing

Gary Leff, in Februarry 2024:

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A U.K. series Call The Bailiffs: Time To Pay Up, which debuted in summer 2021 on Britain’s Channel 5, aired footage of Delta Air Lines check-in at London Heathrow being shut down prior to a flight to New York JFK.

Bailiffs sought to collect a $3,400 refund that had been owed to a passenger for a couple of years. The customer had obtained a court writ, and the agents are empowered to seize a company’s property to satisfy the debt. They can seize planes. They’re shown planning to halt check-in and ground aircraft unless Delta paid.

Once agents were inside the terminal, check-in staff call their manager, and they had a dispute over whether the check-in desks could be closed. As one agent put it, “it may seem slightly disproportionate when you’re perhaps using a 50 million pound asset for a debt that’s maybe only a few thousand pounds.”

They closed check-in, passengers were turning up and the airline’s queues got longer. So a Delta manager pulled out their personal credit card. The ordeal took “over an hour” but collections were made.

This all occurred at London Heathrow Terminal 2, and Delta currently operates out of Terminal 3. That, and the prevalence of masking, tells me that this was filmed during the pandemic. Terminal 3 had been closed temporarily and operations were consolidated in other terminals, but Delta (and Virgin Atlantic) returned to Terminal 3 in July 2021.

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What would the bailiffs do with the plane, one wonders? How would they legally get to airside to take it over? Could they tell the pilot to fly it to a lockup in Stevenage until the debt was paid? Or would they go to air traffic control and tell them not to let the Delta plane take off? So many questions. But that’s certainly an impressive way to get your debt paid. (Though I thought bailiffs didn’t accept credit cards. Another question..)
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Will Washington need to step up to support Intel? • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

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Is anyone prepared to step up and take on part of the huge costs of ensuring the US has a position at the forefront of the world’s most advanced manufacturing industry?

That question looms large at the end of a week of turmoil at Intel, the world’s leading chipmaker for decades until its recent struggles. The abrupt departure of chief executive Pat Gelsinger is the clearest sign yet that the company’s board is having second thoughts about the trajectory of its ambitious, $100bn investment plan.

Gelsinger had smartly staked an explicit claim to national champion status for Intel, aware that his company’s expensive attempt to reclaim a lead in advanced chip manufacturing would require all the support from Washington it could get. But he also needed to pull off a corporate turnaround of breathtaking difficulty. Given the huge capital investment and the long process and product cycles involved, this has been a painful, slow-motion slog in the full glare of Wall Street.

The obvious conclusion from this week’s events is that Intel’s board is losing its appetite to underwrite the effort to make the US a power in advanced chipmaking, even with the billions of dollars of taxpayer support it formally secured last week under the Biden administration’s Chips Act.

There has been no admission of a strategy shift, but the implications of Gelsinger’s departure were not lost on anybody. He was the strongest advocate of a plan that called for Intel to double down on manufacturing, and stood against persistent calls for the company to be broken up into separate manufacturing and chip design operations.

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I think it’s beyond question now that Intel has to split into two companies – a fab company that makes chips, and a design company that designs them. Its current trajectory is unsustainable because the flaws in each part drag the whole down. The design part can’t get good prices from TSMC because of its fab part, and the fab part can’t do what it wants because it’s beholden to the design part.

One feels that Andy Grove would have seen this problem coming. He died in 2016, a couple of years after Intel made its big investment in EUV, which it then abandoned – and TSMC took up.
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The key to sticking to an exercise program? It’s supposed to feel easy! • The Growth Equation

Steve Magness:

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If I go for a run, 80% to 90% of the time it’s pretty dang easy. My breathing is under control. I can have a full-on conversation. If I’m running with others, the banter is often endless. When I’m in shape, going for an easy nine-mile run is the equivalent of going for a walk. Yes, I’m moving, yes, my heart rate is up a bit, but, for me, it’s comfortable.

And that’s the mistake novices often make. When I talk to friends who start training, they often lament how difficult the exercise is. Every day they walk out the door and it’s a grind. They trudge through their run, swim, gym session, or group cycling class. They feel good completing it, but it took a lot of mental effort just to get started because they knew the suffering they were in for.
 
And therein lies the secret. Thanks to the work of sports scientist Stephen Seiler, we know that even the best endurance athletes on the planet spend about 80% to 85% of their time training easy. Yes, the other 15% to 20% is the kind of training where suffering and pain are real. However experienced athletes know that they have to save up their mental and physical energy for those days. If they tried to train at that level all the time, they’d burn out.

So, when a friend starts running and complains about how difficult it is, I agree. What they are doing is difficult. But the way through isn’t to keep grinding. It’s to stop making the majority of it difficult!

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There’s more, of course, but I found this stunning. For running in particular, it’s never felt like anything but a dire grind. Clearly been doing it all wrong all these years. Do they kids this in school?
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AI-powered resurrections in Mexico are raising privacy fears • Rest of World

Daniela Dib:

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When Guadalupe González Rodríguez saw a Facebook post offering people artificial intelligence-generated animated images of their dead relatives, she was instantly interested. “I wanted to give my husband a video of his mom, as a gift,” González Rodríguez, who liked using AI to enhance photos and videos on social media, told Rest of World.

She sent two photos, one of her husband and one of her mother-in-law, to a WhatsApp number. Within minutes, she received a five-second animated image of them both: her husband blinking almost naturally and his mother smiling and contorting awkwardly for a second.

Cerveza Victoria, a popular beer brand in Mexico, had launched the marketing campaign ahead of the Day of the Dead celebrations in November. Several other companies launched similar campaigns last month. AI regulation and cybersecurity experts told Rest of World they are worried that the images of deceased persons could be misused and lead to identity theft. Last year, one out of every five people in Mexico was a victim of cybercrime, including identity theft and scams, according to a study by cybersecurity firm Norton.

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Not deceased, but I caught a bit of a British show that looks at scams, and there was a woman who had been scammed out of £10,000 by deepfake videos purporting to be Donny Osmond, which were pretty convincing (at least, viewed on a tiny screen).

I also question, a bit, the wife’s thinking around giving him a video of his dead mother. Appropriate for Dia de los Muertos though.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified