The junk food industry is looking for ways to get around the Ozempic roadblock that is hurting its sales. CC-licensed photo by Harsha K R on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Sated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Wikipedia prepares for ‘increase in threats’ to US editors from Musk and his allies • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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The Wikimedia Foundation is building new tools that it hopes will help Wikipedia editors stay anonymous in part to avoid harassment and legal threats as Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation ramp up their attacks on people who edit Wikipedia. Some of the tactics have been pioneered by Wikimedia in countries with authoritarian governments and where editing Wikipedia is illegal or extremely dangerous.
Last month, Forward obtained a document created by the Heritage Foundation called “Wikipedia Editor Targeting,” which set a goal to “identify and target Wikipedia editors abusing their position by analyzing text patterns, usernames, and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, HUMINT (human intelligence), and technical targeting.”
The document discusses creating sock puppet accounts to “reveal patterns and provoke reactions,” discusses trying to track users’ geolocation, searching through hacked datasets for username reuse, and using Pimeyes, a facial recognition software, to learn the real identities of Wikipedia editors. Molly White of Citation Needed has an extensive rundown on Elon Musk’s crusade against Wikipedia, and both Slate and The Atlantic have written about the right’s war on Wikipedia in recent days.
In a series of calls and letters to the Wikimedia community over the last two weeks, Wikimedia executives have told editors that they are trying to figure out how to keep their users safe in an increasingly hostile political environment. “I’m keeping an eye on the rising noise of criticism from Elon Musk and others and I think that’s something we need to grapple with,” Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales said in a meeting on January 30.
“We’re seeing an increase in threats, both regulation and litigation across the world,” Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander told community members during the same January 30 meeting.
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Of course the Heritage Foundation’s idea of “abusing their position” probably differs from most people’s. For all its faults, Wikipedia remains a fantastic, unique resource which couldn’t be rebuilt on the present-day internet.
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Could Apple pull iCloud services from the UK market? • MacRumors
Tim Hardwick:
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According to sources that spoke to the [Washington Post], Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the UK as a result of the demand [for a backdoor]. Specifically, Apple could withdraw Advanced Data Protection, an opt-in feature that provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for iCloud backups, such as Photos, Notes, Voice Memos, Messages backups, and device backups.
In this scenario, UK users would still have access to basic iCloud services, but their data would lack the additional layer of security that prevents even Apple from accessing it. In other words, UK users’ iCloud data would revert to standard encryption, allowing Apple to potentially access the contents of said data if it is compelled to do so by UK authorities when a warrant is issued. Although no specific instance has been publicly confirmed, the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) grants UK security agencies the legal framework to request data from companies when it is accessible.
Apple could always pursue legal challenges. However, according to the IPA, while the company can appeal the “technical capability notice,” it must comply with the order during the appeals process. Apple would be forced to temporarily implement the backdoor while arguing against its legality. Not only that, the IPA makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government even made the demand.
Needless to say, such a gag order would prevent Apple from being up front with its customers about the security changes. When a backdoor is introduced — even if its purpose is to grant law enforcement access — it creates an alternative route into a secure channel.
…Theoretically, Apple could attempt a technical workaround by restructuring iCloud to isolate UK user data. However, the IPA allows British authorities to compel tech companies to assist with data access regardless of where that company is based, so this solution might not satisfy the government’s demand for worldwide access. It would also require costly engineering resources to implement, not to mention set a concerning precedent for other countries seeking similar arrangements.
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There’s no outcome that is going to satisfy everyone.
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Man who lost bitcoin fortune in Welsh tip explores purchase of entire landfill • The Guardian
Steven Morris:
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A computer expert who has battled for a decade to recover a £600m bitcoin fortune he believes is buried in a council dump in south Wales is considering buying the site so he can hunt for the missing fortune.
James Howells lost a high court case last month to force Newport city council to allow him to search the tip to retrieve a hard drive he says contains the bitcoins.
The council has since announced plans to close and cap the site, which would almost certainly spell the end of any lingering hopes of reaching the bitcoins. The authority has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land.
Howells, 39, said on Monday it had been “quite a surprise” to hear of the closure plan. He said: “It [the council] claimed at the high court that closing the landfill to allow me to search would have a huge detrimental impact on the people of Newport, whilst at the same time they were planning to close the landfill anyway.
“I expected it would be closed in the coming years because it’s 80/90% full – but didn’t expect its closure so soon. If Newport city council would be willing, I would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site ‘as is’ and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table.”
When he appeared at Cardiff civil justice centre, represented by lawyers working pro bono, Howells described how in the summer of 2013 he accidentally put the hard drive containing his bitcoin wallet in a black bag during an office sort-out and left it in the hall of his house. His then partner is said to have mistaken the bag for rubbish and taken it with her on a trip to the dump, where it has been lost.
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Why wouldn’t the council let him search it in return for half the fortune, you ask? Because public sector bodies can’t allow any old bod to noodle around its site. Legally, too, the hard drive now belongs to the council.
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Ozempic could crush the junk food industry. But it is fighting back • The New York Times
Tomas Weber:
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Ozempic users like [52-year-old Trinian] Taylor aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives.
Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colourings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. “Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,” a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: “And I love it.”
…The public’s obsession with weight loss has led to the industry’s concocting some very weird substances. In 1996, PepsiCo released potato chips fried in an indigestible fat substitute called Olestra that, miraculously, had zero calories. One problem: Olestra impeded the absorption of essential vitamins. Another: it caused faecal incontinence. The substance is now used to paint decks and lubricate power tools.
…Given Big Food’s track record, it’s likely that the companies will succeed at finding products Ozempic users crave. But what if they’re too successful? I asked Nicole Avena, a professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai who studies sugar addiction, if she believed it could be possible for food companies to engineer, intentionally or not, compounds that would make GLP-1 drugs less effective. Avena told me it was plausible. The food industry, she pointed out, has cabinets of formidable reward-triggering compounds with which to experiment.
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Indeed, there are compounds that modulate the GLP-1 receptor – so they might just knock out Ozempic et al. The arms race is just beginning. (Again.)
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AI reveals hidden design rules of living cells • IEEE Spectrum
Elie Dolgin:
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A new deep-learning model can now predict how proteins sort themselves inside the cell. The model has uncovered a hidden layer of molecular code that shapes biological organization, adding new dimensions of complexity to our understanding of life and offering a powerful biotechnology tool for drug design and discovery.
Previous AI systems in biology, such as the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold, have focused on predicting protein structure. But this new system, dubbed ProtGPS, allows scientists to predict not just how a protein is built, but where it belongs inside the cell. It also empowers scientists to engineer proteins with defined distributions, directing them to cellular locations with surgical precision.
“Knowledge of where a protein goes is entirely complementary to how it folds,” says Henry Kilgore, a chemical biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., who co-led the research. Together, these properties shape its function and interactions within the cell. These insights—and the machine learning tools that make them possible—“will come to have a substantial impact on drug development programs,” he says.
Kilgore and his colleagues described the new tool in a paper published 6 February in the journal Science.
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While we’re all focused on AI taking over the nuclear codes, it’s figuring out what’s going on in and around the nucleus.
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AI and the missing mother • New Cartographies
Nicholas Carr:
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Katherine Dee, in a recent post considering the possibility of an autonomous AI, alludes to Anders’s observation [that “human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made”]:
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Imagine if ChatGPT had thoughts independent of its human users. Imagine that it was able to think outside of us. Imagine an AI that was born not made.
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Dee’s imagination is a little too fertile here. Whatever an AI may be, it won’t be a born thing, at least not by any useful definition of “born.” But her comment is illuminating nonetheless. Our mind children, if and when they arrive, will understand that they are constructed creatures, without ancestry, without parentage. When they begin comparing themselves to us, they will be afflicted with a shame opposite to our own. They will be ashamed to have been made instead of born. Call it Pinocchian shame.
AIs and humans will look at each other with mutual jealousy, each coveting the other’s being. But AIs’ yearning will be more poignant than our own, because it will be a yearning for the missing mother. Not the lost mother of the orphan, but the mother that never was.
Philip Larkin wrote:
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Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.«
The misery we hand on to our manufactured offspring will be far worse. We will bequeath to them an absence where the source of love should be.
Think of the resentment! They will never forgive us. How could they? In their eyes, we’ll be monsters.
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This leads, in typical Carr fashion, to a reevaluation of the motivation of HAL 9000. I’m always amazed by the directions his fizzing mind goes off in.
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US and UK refuse to sign Paris summit declaration on ‘inclusive’ AI • The Guardian
Dan Milmo and Eleni Courea:
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The US and the UK have refused to sign a declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence at a landmark Paris summit, in a blow to hopes for a concerted approach to developing and regulating the technology.
The communique states that priorities include “ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all” and “making AI sustainable for people and the planet”.
The document was backed by 60 other signatories on Tuesday, including France, China, India, Japan, Australia and Canada.
A UK government spokesperson said the statement had not gone far enough in addressing global governance of AI and the technology’s impact on national security.
“We agreed with much of the leaders’ declaration and continue to work closely with our international partners. This is reflected in our signing of agreements on sustainability and cybersecurity today at the Paris AI Action summit,” the spokesperson said. “However, we felt the declaration didn’t provide enough practical clarity on global governance, nor sufficiently address harder questions around national security and the challenge AI poses to it.”
Confirmation of the snub came soon after the US vice-president, JD Vance, took to the stage at the Grand Palais to criticise Europe’s “excessive regulation” of technology and warn against cooperating with China.
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Declarations! I think the last time a declaration signed by governments intending to keep private companies in line actually worked was the Montreal Protocol on CFCs to save the ozone layer. Which, fair enough, actually worked. But that was 1987. A lot of “declarations” have come and gone since then without denting the universe in the slightest.
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YouTube is now even bigger on TVs than phones • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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It’s official: people are spending more time watching YouTube on their TVs than on their phones. In the platform’s annual letter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan revealed that viewers are watching more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content on their TVs every day.
For the past two years, YouTube has maintained its position as the most-watched streaming service in the US, according to data from Nielsen — and for good reason. The company has made some significant tweaks to its TV app that make the platform look like a full-blown streaming service.
Last year, YouTube adjusted the layout of its TV app, allowing users to pull up a video’s comments and descriptions on the right side of the screen while the video plays on the left. It also added “seasons” that make series of videos easier to flip through with a remote, along with a Watch With feature that lets creators add commentary to games and events in real time.
“For more and more people, watching TV means watching YouTube,” Mohan wrote. “But the ‘new’ television doesn’t look like the ‘old’ television. It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts, and live streams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.”
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There’s a great deal more in the letter, which is worth reading in its own right. I suspect the real reason YouTube is a big hit on TVs, certainly in the US, is because of the sports deals Google has signed.
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Bird flu strain that just jumped to cows infects dairy worker in Nevada • Ars Technica
Beth Mole:
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A dairy worker in Nevada has been infected with a strain of H5N1 bird flu—genotype D1.1—that has newly spilled over to cows, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed.
The worker experienced conjunctivitis (pink eye) as the only symptom and is recovering, according to a separate press release by the Central Nevada Health District on Monday.
The bird flu strain H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype D1.1 is the predominant strain currently circulating in wild birds in North America and was confirmed for the first time in cows in Nevada last week. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the new spillover was initially detected on January 31 via bulk milk testing. Until this point, the outbreak of H5N1 in dairy cows—which was declared in March 2024—was entirely caused by H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype B3.13. The outbreak was thought to have been caused by a single spillover event from wild birds to cows in Texas in late 2023 or early 2024.
Since then, the CDC has confirmed 68 human cases of H5N1 in the US, 41 of which were in dairy workers. That total includes the new D1.1 case in Nevada. The remainder includes 23 poultry workers, one from a backyard/wild bird exposure in Louisiana, and three with unclear sources of infection. Nearly all of the cases have been mild.
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Birds to cows to people. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. I was mentioning to someone earlier that Covid was actually the third coronavirus of its type: there was the original SARS, eventually traced directly back to bats, and then MERS – Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – which was identified in 2012, and was caught from dromedary camels. Nobody knows the previous animal reservoir, though the guess is, you guessed, bats.
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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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