Non-business users in the UK and Europe calling HP for PC and print help will face a minimum wait of 15 minutes under a new policy. CC-licensed photo by Howard Lake on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, but there’s no new post at the Social Warming Substack. (Can recommend the new Bridget Jones film, though.)
A selection of 9 links for you. Patient. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The cryptocurrency scam that turned a small town against itself • The New York Times
David Yaffe-Bellany:
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Jim Tucker could hardly believe what he was hearing. It sounded like fiction, a nightmare too outlandish for an unassuming town like his.
It was July 2023, and Tucker was hosting a meeting of the board of Heartland Tri-State Bank, a community-owned business in a small Kansas town called Elkhart. Heartland was a beloved local institution and a source of Tucker family pride: Jim served on the board with his elderly father, Bill, who founded the bank four decades earlier. All the board members — the Tuckers and several other farmers and businesspeople — had known one another for years.
That evening, however, they were gathering to discuss what seemed, on its face, an epic betrayal. Over the past few weeks, the bank’s longtime president, a popular local businessman named Shan Hanes, had ordered a series of unexplained wire transfers that drained tens of millions of dollars from the bank. Hanes converted the funds into cryptocurrencies. Then the money vanished.
Tucker’s first inkling that something was wrong came from a friend, an investor in the bank who was close to Hanes. A few days before the board meeting, he confided to Tucker that Hanes had messed up: A wire transfer went out, supposedly to help a struggling customer, and now the bank was $30 million in the hole.
By the time the board members gathered, it was clear that Heartland was caught up in some sort of financial scam, a sophisticated grift that delivered its assets into the clutches of an overseas crypto crime network.
At the meeting, Hanes seemed oddly nonchalant, exuding the air of an overconfident salesman. Tucker had heard that he had spent the past week at an out-of-state leadership conference. “Guys, I’m sorry,” Hanes told the board. “But we’re going to get it fixed.”
Hanes promised that he could recover the money — a total of $47.1m. All he needed was the board’s approval to borrow another $18m.
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This first made the news last August, when Hanes was sentenced to 293 months (24 years plus) in prison. This gets into the detail.
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HP adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls • The Register
Paul Kunert:
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HP Inc is trying to force consumer PC and print customers to use online and other digital support channels by setting a minimum 15-minute wait time for anyone that phones the call center to get answers to troublesome queries.
The wait time was added on Tuesday, February 18, according to internal communications seen by The Register, and affects retail patrons in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Italy, though we anticipate more countries could be added.
“We want to inform you of a change in the NL IVR (natural language IVR) in some countries and languages for Consumer Print and Consumer PC customers in EMEA, effective today,” HP says in the memo.
IVR, for the uninitiated, is Interactive Voice Response; a phone menu system, basically. The missive continues:
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Objective is to influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.
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At the beginning of a call to telephone support, a message will be played stating: “We are experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience. The next available representative will be with you in about 15 minutes. To quickly resolve your issue, please visit our website support.hp.com to check out other support options or find helpful articles and assistant to get a guided help by visiting virtualagent.hpcloud.hp.com.”
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I guess that at least they’ve dropped the pretence of your call being important to them. I guess the next step is to get your AI agent to dial it, because it won’t mind hanging on for 15 minutes while you do actually useful things.
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Kuo: all iPhone 17 models will feature Apple-designed Wi-Fi chip to ‘enhance connectivity’ • MacRumors
Tim Hardwick:
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Apple will use its own custom-designed Wi-Fi chip in all upcoming iPhone 17 models, according to industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
Writing in a post on X (Twitter), Kuo said the switch to in-house Wi-Fi chips will “enhance connectivity across Apple devices” while also giving Apple a cost reduction.
All current iPhone models are equipped with a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip supplied by Broadcom, but Kuo has previously said he expects Apple to equip “nearly all” of its products with its own in-house Wi-Fi chip “within about three years.”
Kuo in October predicted that at least one iPhone 17 model launching next year will be equipped with an Apple-designed Wi-Fi chip. In the previous report, Kuo said Apple’s chip would support “the latest Wi-Fi 7 spec,” but he did not provide any further details, and his latest post does not mention a Wi-Fi version number.
All four iPhone 16 models already support Wi-Fi 7 with Broadcom’s chip, but they have some limited specifications.
Jeff Pu, another analyst who covers companies within Apple’s supply chain, said in November 2024 that only the iPhone 17 Pro models will be equipped with an Apple-designed Wi-Fi 7 chip, but Apple’s plans may have changed since then.
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Apple tends to lag on Wi-Fi implementations, but doing this will surely delight Tim Cook, who would rather pay manufacturing price rather than wholesale, or retail. The number of important (rather than pure commodity) chips that Apple uses is shrinking quite rapidly.
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Nikola electric truck company declares bankruptcy • News Australia
David McCowen:
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Nikola, a truck manufacturer spruiking battery and hydrogen-powered alternatives to the Tesla Semi, is the latest manufacturer to declare an end to its production run.
It follows failures for fellow US brands Fisker, Canoo and Faraday Future that have [also] failed to match Tesla’s stratospheric rise.
While Nikola – a company named after electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla – promised to revolutionise the world of road transportation with green trucks, the brand is more famous for the dodgy dealings of company founder Trevor Milton.
Milton was sentenced to four years in prison in December 2023 for misleading shareholders about the capability of his trucks – including a video that purported to show a truck propelled by electricity when it was really just rolling down a hill.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in 2023 that “Trevor Milton lied to investors again and again — on social media, on television, on podcasts, and in print … today’s sentence should be a warning to start-up founders and corporate executives everywhere — ‘fake it till you make it’ is not an excuse for fraud, and if you mislead your investors, you will pay a stiff price.”
A statement published by the US Attorney’s Office said Milton “engaged in a scheme to defraud investors by inducing them to purchase shares of Nikola Corporation”, with false presentations that misrepresented the trucks’ capabilities.
“To film these clips, the Nikola One was towed to the top of a hill, at which point the ‘driver’ released the brakes, and the truck rolled down the hill until being brought to a stop in front of the stop sign,” the statement said.
The company defended itself in 2020 by saying that “Nikola never stated its truck was driving under its own propulsion in the video”.
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Peak valuation of Nikola: nearly $30bn. Peak revenue at the time: $0. Value now: definitely not $30bn. The tide is going out, and we’re definitely finding out who was swimming naked.
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Microsoft says it’s made a major quantum computing breakthrough with new chip • CNet via MSN
Samantha Kelly:
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The race to shape the future of computing is heating up among tech companies, with Microsoft saying on Wednesday it has made a major breakthrough in quantum computing, potentially paving the way for the technology to address complex scientific and societal challenges.
Scientists at the tech giant have spent 17 years developing a new material and framework for quantum computing to help power its new Majorana 1 processor. Microsoft is calling the advancement the world’s first quantum processor powered by topological qubits, the fundamental units of quantum computation. The company published its latest research in the journal Nature.
Unlike traditional computers, quantum computers can process massive amounts of data at the same time in ways that could revolutionize fields such as science, medicine, energy and artificial intelligence. However, quantum computing is prone to errors because of the instability of qubits.
But Microsoft said its new topoconductor – made of a new material that combines indium arsenide (a semiconductor) and aluminum (a superconductor) – can perform tasks with greater speed and accuracy than traditional qubits. The Majorana 1 chip is designed to scale up to 1 million qubits on a single, compact chip.
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OK, so let’s have a look at the Nature paper. Title: “Interferometric single-shot parity measurement in InAs–Al hybrid devices”. Hmm, OK, how about the Abstract? “The fusion of non-Abelian anyons is a fundamental operation in measurement-only topological quantum computation. In one-dimensional topological superconductors (1DTSs), fusion amounts to a determination of the shared fermion parity of Majorana zero modes (MZMs). Here we introduce a device architecture that is compatible with future tests of fusion rules.”
Got that? Unsurprisingly, none of the media writeups has the least clue what Microsoft’s claim of “a new form of matter” actually means (Satya Nadella says that’s what they’ve created in a long post on X) nor what the hell is new or special or different about this chip. Microsoft could be saying that the gloobles summit the arglebargs, and everyone would nod and write it down. Quantum computing has become a field of mutual misunderstanding, where everyone makes claims and nobody outside it has any idea what relevance they have, if any.
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Inside the Humane acquisition: HP offers big raises to some, others immediately laid off • TechCrunch
Maxwell Zeff:
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Hours after the acquisition was announced, several Humane employees received job offers from HP with pay increases between 30% and 70%, plus HP stock and bonus plans, the sources revealed. Multiple employees who received offers worked on the company’s core software, though sources also indicated that not all of the people who worked on software got job offers.
Meanwhile, other Humane employees — especially those who worked closer to the AI Pin devices, including in quality assurance, automation, and operations — were notified they were out of a job on Tuesday night, the sources said.
These job offers highlight HP’s interest in obtaining Humane’s pool of AI-focused software engineers as part of the acquisition. Engineers who can build around AI systems are some of the hottest commodities in Silicon Valley today. While Humane’s team wasn’t training AI foundation models from scratch — as do engineers at OpenAI, Google, and other AI labs — such employees are still highly sought after. This makes it difficult even for giant legacy players, such as HP, to hire.
The companies announced on Tuesday that a newly formed innovation lab at HP — HP IQ — will not only be home to Humane’s co-founders, Imran Chaudhri and CEO Bethany Bongiorno, but also the startup’s AI operating system, CosmOS. The new unit will focus on integrating artificial intelligence into HP’s personal computers, printers, and connected conference rooms.
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The devices will all be bricked at the end of this month. John Gruber’s sources tell him that Chaudri was not flavour of any month when he worked at Apple, so it’s going to be fun hearing how things go once he’s inside HP – different politics, different size, different organisation. Still, he has a remarkably favourable Wikipedia entry which.. seems to have been positively updated from an unknown IP address.
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Turkey’s translators are training their AI replacements • Rest of World
Kaya Genç:
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Turkey’s sophisticated translators are moonlighting as trainers of artificial intelligence models, even as their profession shrinks with the rise of machine translations. As the models improve, these training jobs, too, may disappear.
“Translation has become a job for a limited number of translators who are really good at it. Machines translate the rest,” Mehmet Şahin, head of the translation department at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, told Rest of World. Translators will become less skilled in the future as AI eats up entry-level work, he said.
As a teenager, Pelin Türkmen dreamed of becoming an interpreter, translating English into Turkish, and vice versa, in real time. She imagined jet-setting around the world with diplomats and scholars, and participating in history-making events.
Her tasks one recent January morning didn’t figure in her dreams. The 28-year-old translator’s computer displayed a dashboard for AI training provided by Outlier, a San Francisco-based company that hires contractors to train large language models. Outlier’s clients include OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta, among others.
The dashboard displayed a prompt for training an LLM powering either ChatGPT, Gemini, or Preplexity AI.
The AI chatbot provided three menus. Türkmen rated them on accuracy, ethics, and relevance. She checked for grammar, fluency, tone, and structure. She looked for language that would reveal an AI author — phrases like “As an AI assistant …” or “Certainly!” She explained her reasoning so that the machine could learn.
Türkmen has earned several thousand dollars over the past nine months training AI. In the tech industry, this kind of work is known as reinforcement learning from human feedback, and it helps LLMs respond with intuition and context.
…Translators and scholars in Turkey told Rest of World the nature of translation work has changed. Before AI, young translators worked in translation bureaus tackling everything from administrative documents to trade reports and literary classics.
Today, most entry-level positions involve editing AI-generated content as a machine translation “post editor,” they said. Others involve training AI.
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As egg prices soar, Trump administration plans new strategy to fight bird flu • AP News
Steve Karnowski:
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With egg prices soaring, the Trump administration is planning a new strategy for fighting bird flu that stresses vaccinations and tighter biosecurity instead of killing off millions of chickens when the disease strikes a flock.
The federal government will seek “better ways, with biosecurity and medication and so on” rather than the current standard practice of destroying all the birds on a farm when an infection is detected, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”
Hasset said the administration planned to announce further details this week. He said they were “working with all the best people in government, including academics around the country and around the world,” to get the plan ready.
Spokespeople for the U.S. Department of Agriculture did not immediately respond to messages Tuesday seeking more information.
Normally when chickens or turkeys start dying from the disease, officials will “depopulate,” or destroy all the birds on the farm to prevent it from spreading.
But the resulting culling of millions of chickens per month has caused egg prices to skyrocket, with shortages that have led some retailers to ration sales. The average price of a dozen Grade A eggs in U.S. cities hit $4.95 in January, and the USDA predicts it will soar another 20% this year.
Hassett didn’t provide many details of how the Trump administration’s new approach would work. But he said it would involve a “better, smarter perimeter” around poultry farms. He said it doesn’t make sense to kill all the chickens inside that perimeter when the disease is being spread by wild ducks and geese.
…The poultry industry has long resisted vaccinating flocks against bird flu because of the potential impacts on export markets, as well as the expense. Most U.S. trading partners won’t accept exports from countries that allow vaccinations due to concerns that vaccines can mask the presence of the virus.
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Well, let’s see those “better, smarter perimeters” then. Because apparently it’s egg prices which decide who gets elected?
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With explosive goggles, Ukraine sought to blast Russian drone operators • The New York Times
Kim Barker and Michael Schwirtz:
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It was a novel Ukrainian spy plot, inspired by what Israeli intelligence had pulled off with exploding wireless devices and Hezbollah militants: Hide tiny bombs in the goggles that Russian soldiers use to control drones. Donate those goggles to the Russian military, under the guise of humanitarian aid. Then wait for the explosions.
The Russian news agency TASS reported the suspected sabotage of the goggles earlier this month, and on Thursday, a senior Ukrainian official confirmed that Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, known as the HUR, developed the scheme. The Ukrainian news outlet Suspilne reported on the explosions earlier Thursday.
The Ukrainian plot did not have the same public results as the Israeli one, which killed dozens of people and wounded thousands across Lebanon, including civilians. While many goggle explosions were reported this month, the plot seemed mainly to make Russian soldiers wary about using goggles in the future, at least according to social media posts.
No one was reported injured or killed, although the Russian military does not often disclose casualty figures. The senior Ukrainian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, told The New York Times that there were casualties, but he would not disclose numbers because the operation is ongoing.
The booby-trapped goggles were just the latest salvo in a long-running spy-vs-spy battle between Russia and Ukraine. Both sides have used been accused of using operatives to kill military leaders and activists.
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The brutality of technological war. Have we really moved on from catapulting the dead bodies of disease victims into sieged cities? Not very much.
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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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