South Korea’s LG is ceasing production of Blu-ray players, marking the end of another hardware era. CC-licensed photo by Detlef Kroeze on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Still in production. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Bankruptcy judge rejects The Onion’s bid to buy Alex Jones’ Infowars • NBC News
David Ingram:
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A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday rejected a bid by The Onion’s parent company to buy Alex Jones’ far-right media empire, including the website Infowars, ruling that the auction process was unfair.
Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee.
“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”
It was not immediately clear whether there would be a new auction in which The Onion could bid again for Jones’ assets. Lopez said he would leave the decision about what to do next in the hands of the trustee, Christopher Murray, who had overseen the auction.
The judge said Murray had acted in good faith in running the auction in which The Onion’s parent company initially appeared to prevail, but he said the trustee did not run a transparent process and should have given a rival bidder associated with Jones another chance to improve its bid.
“I think you’ve got to go out and try to get every dollar,” Lopez said. “I think that the process fell down.”
The ruling dashed, at least for now, Global Tetrahedron’s plans to take over Infowars and radically shift its content from anti-government conspiracy theories to satirical humor. Instead, Jones can continue operating his far-right media business as he has for decades.
…A rival bidder associated with Jones, First United American Cos., offered $3.5m in cash, or twice as much cash as The Onion’s parent company. First United American is a limited liability company affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, and its bid had Jones’ blessing.
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One wonders about the shenanigans that have been going on here. Rather like Rudy Guiliani hanging on by his fingernails to stuff a court order has confiscated, Jones won’t give up.
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LG discontinues all UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray players • FlatpanelsHD
Rasmus Larsen:
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LG has discontinued all Blu-ray players, including the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players, with remaining units only available while stocks last.
The announcement echoes similar moves from Oppo in 2018 and Samsung in 2019, when both companies exited the optical disc player market.
LG has now officially discontinued its Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray players, as reflected on LG’s online portals and confirmed by multiple sources to FlatpanelsHD.
However, in a statement to FlatpanelsHD, LG Korea stopped short of confirming a definitive global exit from the optical disc player market, leaving the door open for a return if demand picks up. For now, a few old models remain available in regions such as America and Europe, but only until inventory runs out.
LG has not launched any new optical disc players since 2018, when it introduced the UBK80 and UBK90 UHD Blu-ray players. This same is true for other major brands such as Panasonic and Sony.
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Sales peaked in 2017. Now things are pretty much cooked for these devices into which colossal amounts of money – and amazing technological breakthroughs – were poured.
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Staff at Britain’s AI institute in open revolt • POLITICO
Laurie Clarke:
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Staff at the UK’s prestigious artificial intelligence institute are up in arms about the way it is being run — and have urged its board to step in and save it from itself.
A letter signed by 93 employees of the Alan Turing Institute — which is largely funded by the UK government and serves as Britain’s national institute for AI and data science — expresses no confidence in the body’s executive leadership team (ELT) and calls on the institute’s board to “urgently intervene.”
The missive, sent in early December, warns that employee concerns on a host of issues — including the institute’s sense of direction, progress on gender diversity, and a major redundancy round — have been “ignored, minimized or misdirected.” Immediate action is needed, it continues, to avoid “jeopardizing our funding base and long term financial health.”
The research institute — set up in 2015 with cash from central government — is supposed to lead the country’s research ecosystem on AI and data science.
But it has attracted strong criticism from other organisations in the space, including the influential Tony Blair Institute think tank, over a perceived failure to keep the UK abreast of the seismic developments in generative AI that have taken place in recent years.
The letter — seen by POLITICO — meanwhile argues that there has been “catastrophic decline in trust in leadership, particularly at senior levels. Staff morale and wellbeing has also become a critical concern, with rising levels of stress and burnout across teams.”
…A review of the Turing Institute conducted by Britain’s science research funding agency last year highlighted governance issues at the organization. An open letter signed by more than 180 staff members denounced the lack of gender diversity across leadership roles following the appointment of four new research directors in February, all of whom were men.
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First, that’s a lot of people. Who knew the AI institute needed that many to keep abreast of things? Second, I’ve never heard of any of its governance team. Not sure if this reflects on me or them.
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Gemini Advanced rolling out first agentic feature: Deep Research • 9to5 Google
Abner Li:
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Gemini Advanced subscribers are getting access to a new “Deep Research” capability. It is the “first feature in Gemini” to bring Google’s vision of agents that can perform complex actions on your behalf.
First previewed at the end of Made by Google 2024 in August, you ask Gemini a research question and it will create a multi-step plan. You will be able to revise that plan, like adding more aspects to look into.
Once approved and “Start research” is clicked, Gemini will be “searching [the web], finding interesting pieces of information and then starting a new search based on what it’s learned. It repeats this process multiple times.” Throughout the process, Gemini “continuously refines its analysis.”
The end result is a “comprehensive report of the key findings” that’s organized into sections/headings. Gemini will note “Sources and related content,” as well as link to “Researched websites.” You’ll find “helpful, easy-to-read insights” and a conclusion, with the ability to export to Google Docs.
Framed as a “personal research assistant,” Google says Gemini Deep Research takes a “few minutes” instead of several hours.
Deep Research is rolling out today to Gemini Advanced in English on desktop and mobile web. In the top-left model picker, select “Use 1.5 Pro with Deep Research.” This is coming to the mobile in early 2025.
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This might sound trivial, but has the potential to be absolutely enormous, and underpin all sorts of work. The most important part is that you can review the proposed steps. Give it a few years and this will be available everywhere for nothing.
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The department of flags: Syrian rebels lay bare Assad’s corrupt state • Financial Times
Raya Jalabi and Sarah Dadouch:
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“It’s all going to become one. All the government bodies will be dissolved: no Salvation Government, no factions, nothing,” said Mohammad Yasser Ghazal, a 36-year-old technocrat in the rebel government seconded from his job to help reconfigure the Damascus governorate. “It will all soon be dissolved into one Syrian republic.”
Ghazal and his colleagues displayed a strong command of the state apparatus they inherited just hours earlier, and hinted that HTS’ plans to overhaul it had long been in the works. But the task they face is formidable. Syria’s dysfunctional state institutions became engorged by corruption, cronyism and centralised power over five decades of rule by the Assad dynasty.
In his lilting Aleppan accent, Ghazal asked the department chiefs to list their remits and explain their departments’ functions. The two-hour meeting showcased how Assad’s government was “stopped in time”, he later told the FT in an interview.
Employees quoted government handbooks from the 1930s and 1960s, and were unable to answer direct questions about their duties, nor explain why decisions had been made. “The problems piled up, and they let them be,” he said. “They do not see themselves as responsible.”
One man introduced himself as the head of the public relations department, which he said included “international co-operation” as well as a division for “festival and events management”. Asked what this division did exactly, the civil servant answered, “flags”.
“There’s a department for flags?” Ghazal asked incredulously.
“Yes, when foreign dignitaries come, we put up a lot of flags,” he said. “We hang them from the poles. It’s a big job.”
The same department head also had a translation division, staffed by two employees who spoke English. Ghazal asked if there were Russian or Iranian translators — states that propped up the Assad regime and frequently sent envoys — and was told there were none because representatives of these countries brought their own.
“But you didn’t have English-speaking dignitaries visit?”
“No,” the department head said.
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The end of Cruise is the beginning of a risky new phase for autonomous vehicles – The Verge
Andrew Hawkins:
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The robotaxi subsidiary lost a staggering $3.48bn in 2023. Kyle Vogt, Cruise cofounder and [Dan] Amman’s successor as CEO, was under mounting pressure to expand the service and bring in more money to help cover the losses. Plus, he was directly competing with Alphabet’s Waymo, which had more vehicles and seemingly better technology. And Google’s parent company was more willing to spend billions of dollars, without any near-term profits, to win the robotaxi race. With the screws tightening, Vogt publicly drew a line in the sand: Cruise would bring in over $1bn in revenue by 2025.
Instead, Cruise never made it to the end of 2024.
It all culminated in an incident on October 7th, 2023, when a Cruise vehicle in San Francisco struck and dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet, seriously injuring her. The victim was initially struck by a hit-and-run driver, which launched her into the path of the Cruise car.
…the incident damaged Cruise’s effort to win the public’s trust.
…GM may have scrapped its “Ultra Cruise” branding to develop a partially autonomous system that covers “95 percent” of driving scenarios, but it still thinks that people want a fully autonomous car of their own — on their own terms.
“I think the application of what the customer wants in a privately owned vehicle is very different,” Barra said on Tuesday. “But I also think… there’s a lot of commonality [with Cruise’s technology]. How it seamlessly moves back and forth, I think is something different in a personal autonomous vehicle.”
“I think the application of what the customer wants in a privately owned vehicle is very different”
Driver-assistance technologies, especially so-called Level 3 systems, carry their own risks. There have been studies that show that the handoff between a partially automated system and a human driver can be especially fraught.«
It feels like GM is making lots of bad decisions, serially.
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What we really mean by “the massive scale” required for carbon dioxide removal in climate goals • Rocky Mountain Institute
Ryan Mills:
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Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) experts have explained the need for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), alongside aggressive and urgent decarbonization efforts, to meet climate goals. Recent estimates based on IPCC projections of emissions reductions indicate that the world may need to remove up to 10 gigatons of CO2 each year by 2050 to stay below 1.5°C of warming. Those working in the CDR field often describe this scale as “massive” or “enormous” and the necessary speed of growth as “unprecedented” or “ambitious.” But these terms alone do not allow people to truly envision the magnitude of a gigaton.
The prefix “giga-” translates to billion; each gigaton of CDR deployment means removing 1,000,000,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the same way that it is difficult to conceptualize the vastness of the solar system, the microscopic size of a cell, or the age of the Earth, it is hard to grasp what “gigatons of CDR” means without helpful comparisons and visuals. This article will break down the massive scale of CDR needed by 2050, using five key graphics.
…Interviews with CDR companies across approaches suggest that removing 1 gigaton of CO2 per year may require between 400,000 and 1,800,000 workers in areas including construction, operations, and ancillary corporate positions such as finance and legal support. Reaching 10 gigatons of removals per year could therefore require a total workforce of ~10 million workers. To put this in perspective, the global renewable energy industry employed 13.7 million people in 2022.
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The numbers in this are truly scary. As in, unattainable by anything except an international effort. And the COP meetings suggest that isn’t happening in a hurry.
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Bird flu in California child linked to virus in dairy cows, CDC says • The Washington Post
Lena Sun:
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Federal disease trackers reported Tuesday that the first child diagnosed with bird flu in an ongoing US outbreak was infected with a virus strain closely related to one moving rapidly through dairy cattle, even though there is no evidence the youngster was exposed to livestock or any infected animals.
The finding by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the child, who lives in California, deepened the mystery about the spread of H5N1 bird flu, a viral ailment that epidemiologists have watched warily for more than two decades, fearing it could spark a pandemic.
The ongoing bird flu outbreak emerged this spring in US dairy herds. Almost 60 people, mostly farmworkers, have been sickened. All experienced mild illness, mostly pink eye. In all but two cases, including the California child, officials determined that patients had direct contact with infected animals. The only other human bird flu case in which the source of exposure is not known involved an adult in Missouri.
State health officials in California and in Alameda County, where the child lives, do not know how the youngster became infected. [Not via raw milk products, the CDC says.]
…For months, experts have warned that the longer the virus spreads among humans and animals, the greater the chance for mutations that make it more virulent and transmissible person to person. A teen in Canada was hospitalized with an H5N1 infection, and, like the child in California, had no known contact with infected animals.
…In a separate development Tuesday, state and local public health officials in California said they have received reports of illnesses afflicting 10 people who drank raw milk even though the state had recalled such products after bird flu virus was detected in raw milk sold in stores.
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It’s just one marvellous thing after another. (I still wonder if one of the child’s parents works on a farm.) (Thanks Joe S for the link. Only a watching brief!)
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Crypto’s legacy is finally clear • The Atlantic
Charlie Warzel:
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I’ve spent time reporting on NFTs and crypto-token-based decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs (like the one that tried to buy an original printing of the Constitution in 2021). I’ve read opaque white papers for Web3 start-ups and decentralized finance protocols that use smart contracts to enable financial-service transactions without major banks, but I’ve never found a killer app.
The aftermath of the presidential election, however, has left me thinking about crypto’s influence differently.
Crypto is a technology whose transformative product is not a particular service but a culture—one that is, by nature, distrustful of institutions and sympathetic to people who want to dismantle or troll them. The election results were at least in part a repudiation of institutional authorities (the federal government, our public-health apparatus, the media), and crypto helped deliver them: the industry formed a super PAC that raised more than $200m to support crypto-friendly politicians. This group, Fairshake, was nonpartisan and supported both Democrats and Republicans.
But it was Donald Trump who went all in on the technology: During his campaign, he promoted World Liberty Financial, a new crypto start-up platform for decentralized finance, and offered assurances that he would fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who was known for cracking down on the crypto industry. (Gensler will resign in January, as is typical when new administrations take over.)
Trump also pledged deregulation to help “ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” During his campaign, he said, “If you’re in favor of crypto, you’d better vote for Trump.”
At least in the short term, crypto’s legacy seems to be that it has built a durable culture of true believers, techno-utopians, grifters, criminals, dupes, investors, and pandering politicians. Investments in this technology have enriched many of these people, who have then used that money to try to create a world in their image.
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Definitely: the establishment for the anti-establishment, the culture for the anti-culture.
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Booking.com says typos giving strangers access to private trip info is not a bug • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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You may want to be extra careful if you’re booking holiday travel for family and friends this year through Booking.com. A stunned user recently discovered that a typo in an email address could inadvertently share private trip info with strangers, who can then access sensitive information and potentially even take over bookings that Booking.com automatically adds to their accounts.
This issue came to light after a Booking.com user, Alfie, got an email confirming that he had booked a trip he did not.
At first, Alfie assumed it was a phishing attempt, so he avoided clicking any links in the email to prevent any malicious activity and instead went directly to his Booking.com account to verify that the trip info wasn’t there. But rather than feeling the sweet relief that his account had not been compromised, he was shocked to find the trip had somehow been booked through his account.
Alfie told Ars he was “quite sure” he had not been hacked but could not explain how the booking got there. He contacted a Booking.com support team member, who he said also seemed surprised, putting him on hold for 10 minutes and telling him that “they had not seen anything like it in the many years they had worked there.” By the end of the call, Alfie was told that the issue was escalated to security teams who would follow up within 48 hours.
…Booking.com’s spokesperson told Ars. “Following our investigation, we found that the issue occurred due to a customer input error during the reservation process, where he inadvertently entered an incorrect email address. That email address, however, belonged to another Booking.com customer”—Alfie—”which caused the reservation to be linked to their account.”
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It gets worse: people can attach their trips to other emails. Booking.com doesn’t think it’s a security breach. Users might not concur.
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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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 