The innocent looking Amazon Fire Stick is enabling “industrial” levels of sports piracy, research says. CC-licensed photo by Bill Smith on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Insufficiently cryptic. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

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Ukraine says it destroyed dozens of warplanes deep inside Russia • WSJ

Jane Lytvynenko:

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Ukraine launched audacious drone attacks on four military airports inside Russia, destroying more than 40 warplanes in the biggest blow of the war against Moscow’s long-range bomber fleet.

The attack, dubbed “Spider’s Web,” took a year and a half to prepare, officials at Ukraine’s main security and intelligence agency, the SBU, said on Sunday. Ukraine’s drones targeted Russia’s Belaya, Ivanovo, Dyagilevo and Olenya air bases, all of which house Russian military planes. 

The bombardment is a significant victory for Ukraine’s deep-strike program, which uses drones to target crucial materiel on Russia’s soil. Ukraine’s intelligence agency has used sea drones and long-range bombing drones to strike inside Russia. 

Video of the attack taken by drones showed smoke emanating from planes at Belaya airfield near Russia’s border with Mongolia, according to footage shared by Ukrainian intelligence officials.

…Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that the “absolutely unique operation” involved 117 drones. The base of the operation was located near an office of Russia’s Federal Security Service, Zelensky said.

“We will defend ourselves with all available methods,” Zelensky said.

Ukrainian intelligence officials said the agency moved the small quadcopter drones to Russian territory. It then moved wooden containers to Russia, which were used to hide the drones ahead of the attack. When it came time to strike, the containers were placed on trucks and the lids of the containers were opened remotely. The swarm of drones flew out to find their targets.

In a video posted to social media, a drone appeared to take off out of a container with a buzzing sound. Shots rang out in an apparent attempt to down it. Another drone flew out of the container in the same direction. In another video, an explosion strikes a plane parked at an airport.

“This is not yet a knockout, but quite a serious knockdown for the enemy,” said Iryna Vereshchuk, a top official in Zelensky’s office. “This is exactly what wars of the future will look like.”

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Military planners should be looking at this with a mixture of horror and delight. War is a lot cheaper now. It’s also much more difficult to know what you need to defend yourself against. Russia is going to have no idea what to watch for now.
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AI didn’t kill Stack Overflow • InfoWorld

Matthew Tyson:

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Stack Overflow’s most revolutionary aspect was its reputation system. That is what elevated it above the crowd. The brilliance of the rep game allowed Stack Overflow to absorb all the other user-driven sites for developers and more or less kill them off.

On Stack Overflow, users earned reputation points and badges for asking good questions and providing helpful answers. In the beginning, what was considered a good question or answer was not predetermined; it was a natural byproduct of actual programmers upvoting some exchanges and not others.

The reputation game was always imperfect: People could and did game the game. But whatever; it was fun, and most users found it helpful. So, what happened? Stack Overflow evolved toward being a so-called self-governing platform, where the power to govern (or moderate) was granted by reputation. Users with enough reputation were empowered to manage various aspects of the platform. Most importantly, they became responsible for moderating questions and answers for “quality.”

For Stack Overflow, the new model, along with highly subjective ideas of “quality” opened the gates to a kind of Stanford Prison Experiment. Rather than encouraging a wide range of interactions and behaviors, moderators earned reputation by culling interactions they deemed irrelevant. Suddenly, Stack Overflow wasn’t a place to go and feel like you were part of a long-lived developer culture. Instead, it became an arena where you had to prove yourself over and over again.

…I remember a non-programmer looking over my shoulder once when I was on Stack Overflow. “Why do people help? Just for nothing?” The joy of being able to help someone by sharing what you’ve learned is something you must experience yourself to understand.

Possibly the best analogy is seeing someone whose car has broken down on the side of the road. You pull over to help because you’ve been there; you know what being broken down on the side of the road feels like. Maybe you can help, and even if you can’t, at least the stranded driver knows someone cares. And then there is the boost of discovering the source of the problem: “Look, here’s a loose coolant clamp.” That shared thrill is what we lost when Stack Overflow let the reputation game win.

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The number of monthly questions being asked on Stack Overflow now is apparently as low as when it launched in 2009. But that must, surely, be due to LLMs. Moderation is annoying, but it won’t put people off a site that they actually find useful. LLMs have an answer, right or wrong, straight away, rather than waiting the unknown period required for an answer to appear on Stack Overflow.
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Football and other premium TV being pirated at “industrial scale” • BBC News

Graham Fraser:

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A lack of action by big tech firms is enabling the “industrial scale theft” of premium video services, especially live sport, a new report says.

The research by Enders Analysis, accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of “ambivalence and inertia” over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime.

Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, who authored the research, described the Amazon Fire Stick – which they argue is the device many people use to access illegal streams – as “a piracy enabler”. Amazon told BBC News that it remained “vigilant in our efforts to combat piracy”.

Sports broadcasting is big business, with the total value of media rights across the world passing the $60bn (£44bn) mark last year. The increasing cost of rights deals results in higher prices for fans at home, especially if they choose to pay for multiple services to watch their team play. To get round this, some resort to illegal streams of big events.

Enders say there are often multiple streams of individual events – such as high profile football games – each of which can have tens of thousands of people watching them.

Bosses of big rights holders, Sky and DAZN, have previously warned piracy is causing a financial crisis in the broadcast industry, external. Nick Herm, chief operating officer of Sky Group, said the Enders research “highlights the significant scale and impact of piracy, particularly on premium live sport”.

“It’s a serious issue for anyone who invests in creating and delivering world-class content,” he added. “We’d like to see faster, more joined-up action from major tech platforms and government to address the problem and help protect the UK creative industries.”

There is a risk for users too. The Enders report says fans watching football matches, for instance, via illegal streams are typically providing information such as credit card details and email addresses, leaving them vulnerable to malware and phishing scams.

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Sky put huge effort into its encryption systems, though those too have been cracked (or the signals just decoded for normal TV and rebroadcast). What nobody can put a value on, of course, is how much the piracy loses to rights holders, and how much it puts prices up (if at all).
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LinkedIn executive: AI is coming for entry-level jobs • The New York Times

Aneesh Raman is “chief economic opportunity officer” at LinkedIn:

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Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder. In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging — the ways junior developers gain experience. In law firms, junior paralegals and first-year associates who once cut their teeth on document review are handing weeks of work over to A.I. tools to complete in a matter of hours. And across retailers, A.I. chatbots and automated customer service tools are taking on duties once assigned to young associates.

These changes coincide with a shift appearing in the latest employment numbers. The unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30% [from 2% to 2.6% – Overspill Ed] since September 2022, compared with about 18% for all workers. [Note this is using percentages, not percentage points – Overspill Ed]

And while LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index, a measure of job and career confidence across nearly 500,000 professionals, is hitting new lows amid general uncertainty, members of Generation Z are more pessimistic about their futures than any other age group out there. Meanwhile, in our recent survey of over 3,000 executives on LinkedIn at the vice president level or higher, 63% agreed that A.I. will eventually take on some of the mundane tasks currently allocated to their entry-level employees.

Virtually all jobs will experience some impacts, but office jobs are expected to feel the biggest crunch: Our research suggests that professionals with more advanced degrees are more likely to see their jobs disrupted than those without. While the technology sector is feeling the first waves of change, reflecting A.I.’s mass adoption in this field, the erosion of traditional entry-level tasks is expected to play out in fields like finance, travel, food and professional services, too.

…any change to young workers’ job fortunes hits them at a particularly vulnerable time; getting a late start can slow down workers’ careers for decades. The Center for American Progress found that young adults who experience six months of unemployment at age 22 can expect to earn approximately $22,000 less over the next decade.

Also concerning is the potential for widening inequality in the job market. If entry-level roles evaporate, those lacking elite networks or privileged backgrounds will face even steeper barriers to finding their footing in the workplace. Plus, the fallout from large-scale economic shifts ripples through entire communities. When manufacturing jobs vanished across America’s heartland, the result wasn’t just lost income but also social and political upheaval.

To fix entry-level work, we’ll have to reimagine it entirely.

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Builder.ai faked business with Indian Firm VerSe to inflate sales, sources say • Financial Post

Yazhou Sun, Mark Bergen and Newley Purnell:

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Builder.ai, the artificial intelligence startup that recently announced plans to declare bankruptcy, faked business with the Indian social-media startup VerSe Innovation for years to falsely inflate its sales, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg and people with direct knowledge of the practice.The two companies routinely billed one another for roughly the same amounts between 2021 and 2024, documents reviewed by Bloomberg show, as part of an alleged practice known as “round-tripping” that the people said Builder.ai used to inflate revenue figures it presented to investors. In many cases, products and services weren’t actually provided to either company for these payments, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.

Umang Bedi, a VerSe co-founder, said it was “absolutely baseless and false” that his company would have recorded expenses or billed services that it didn’t receive or provide. “We’re not the kind of company that is in the business of inflating revenues,” he said in an interview. The company said that the services bought and sold to Builder.ai have been verified by reputable external organizations. Accusations of round tripping are “defamatory and irresponsible,” and it’s incorrect to say that the companies routinely billed each other for roughly the same amount, VerSe said.

A representative for Builder.ai declined to comment. 

Builder.ai, once valued at about $1.5bn, is the most high-profile AI startup to collapse since ChatGPT’s launch started a global investment frenzy. Its downfall shows the risks inherent in the rush to back AI startups as investors seek to replicate the success of industry heavyweights such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The London-based startup, which pitched its tech as a way to make apps with little or no coding, said earlier in May it planned to file for bankruptcy after a major creditor seized most of its cash.

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More background on the Builder.ai shenanigans from May.
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Inflation-weary Americans queue for toilet paper and cheap Bordeaux • Financial Times

Gregory Meyer:

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Inflation-scarred American consumers are putting up with long lines and paying cash for the privilege of shopping at members-only stores, which are capturing an ever-large share of the US retail sector.

Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ’s Wholesale Club have lured more customers with the promise of low prices on carefully curated items sold in bulk. 

Visiting the stores often means wandering aisles formed by towers of merchandise stacked atop shipping pallets, with scarce navigational help from sales clerks. Car parks can be jammed, with vehicles backed up 10 deep for Costco petrol. 

But to varying degrees, the chains are investing to streamline the experience, heaping pressure on traditional retailers that rely on higher mark-ups. 

The boom in warehouse clubs is among the effects of inflation that left US consumer prices 26% higher than in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic. Consumer surveys show continued anxiety over inflation as the US imposes tariffs on trading partners. 

“Through good times we do well, and through times that are tough we do even better,” said Chris Nicholas, chief executive of Sam’s Club US, which has $92.6bn in sales.

Sam’s Club, a unit of retail group Walmart, reported same-store sales rose by 6.7% in the first quarter, excluding fuel, outpacing the growth at its corporate parent’s namesake US stores. 

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I can never square these stories with the ones which say that Americans are dramatically richer than all of Europe. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Scientists crack the code to Black Death’s prolonged reign of terror • The Times

Rhys Blakely:

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New research shows how a single gene in Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, allowed it to endure across centuries, giving rise to a “slow continual burn” — even after it had already killed an estimated 30%-60% of the populations of Europe, Western Asia and Africa.

The study, led by scientists at McMaster University in Canada and the Pasteur Institute in France, analysed hundreds of samples from both ancient and modern plague victims, focusing on a gene known as pla, which allows Y.pestis to hide from the immune system.

The more copies of pla that a strain of plague has, the deadlier it is — both to humans and to the rats that are its main host.

The study, published in the journal Science, found that after the start of the Black Death, Y.pestis evolved to have fewer copies of pla. This reduced the death rate by an estimated 20% and allowed infected hosts to live for longer. In turn, this allowed the disease to spread further.

A similar evolutionary change occurred after the Plague of Justinian that devastated the Mediterranean in the 6th century, and was also seen in modern strains of plague, which continue to cause cases in countries including Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The main impact of the evolutionary change was on rodents. As the initial, more dangerous strains of Y.pestis killed huge numbers during the Black Death, rat populations would have become scattered into smaller, isolated groups.

In this new environment, milder strains of the plague — those that killed more slowly — had an advantage. They gave infected rats more time to move between these scattered groups, spreading the disease further. Instead of burning out, it continued its march at a slower, more sustained pace.

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It’s always counterintuitive that being less deadly makes a disease more likely to become established. What I’d like to know though is what marked out the people who survived the deadlier version.
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The “beige Amazon influencer” lawsuit is headed for dismissal • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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The legal battle between two Amazon influencers with unsettlingly similar styles and vibes is nearing resolution. On Wednesday the two influencers asked a judge to dismiss the copyright case, more than a year after it was initially filed and six months after I wrote about it in The Verge.

The lawsuit was simultaneously disconcerting and benign, eerie and borderline comical: the story of two women whose lives had begun to resemble each other’s via social media platforms made for a compelling storyline. The cream, white, and beige aesthetic of their content (and lives) meant that the essence of what was allegedly infringed was commonplace, even basic — but the similarities, documented over dozens of examples submitted to the court, were strange nonetheless.

But the case was significant: it appears to be the first suit of its kind tackling influencer industry content, and the litany of allegations could have had the defendant, Alyssa Sheil, on the hook for millions of dollars in damages. Sydney Nicole Sloneker (née Gifford), the plaintiff and fellow Amazon influencer, said Sheil violated her copyright when Sheil posted similar-looking photos and videos that promoted the same products. Gifford also alleged trade dress infringement and misappropriation of likeness, among other claims, stemming from Sheil’s content that looks uncannily like Gifford’s — or perhaps the other way around.

Sheil’s attorneys write in a statement that she will be paying nothing for Gifford’s claims, and that in some of the instances where Gifford alleged copying, Sheil had actually taken her photos and videos first.

…The beige Amazon influencer dispute may be nearing a close, but the disputes at the heart of the case — who owns an online persona, whether influencer content is art, and what social media algorithms do to the aesthetic of the web — are as salient as ever.

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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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OpenAI spent $3m on that Jony Ive and Sam Altman video • The San Francisco Standard

David Sjostedt:

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Two cups of single-shot espresso at Cafe Zoetrope will set you back about $10. 
What really runs up the tab, however, is hiring an Academy Award-winning director to film you and your friend walking there to drink them.

That costs about $3m.

At least it did for tech titans Sam Altman and Jony Ive, according to film permits obtained by The Standard.
Altman, king of the chatbots, and Ive, iPhone designer, last week unveiled their collaborative company io in a nine-minute commercial. Gushing with backslapping pride, the video shows the best friends swanning through downtown and North Beach streets for nearly a minute and a half before convening over the zinc bar at Zoetrope to hype a mysterious product they’re developing together.

Though it may appear that Ive, who was wearing an army-style field jacket, and Altman, rocking lego-themed Adidas sneakers, were walking among the rest of us on the city’s streets, the film permits reveal the two tech bosses went to great lengths to insert themselves into “ordinary” life, shutting down roadways in the heart of North Beach, relocating a bus stop, and hiring San Francisco Police Department officers to redirect traffic. 

The five-day production by Bob Industries, a Santa Monica-based video company, and director Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar in 2007 for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” totaled $3 million, of which $1 million was spent in San Francisco, the permits reveal. Roughly $30,000 went to the SFPD. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency got about $2,700, and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development walked away with $1,500. 

The production company also booked 275 hotel nights and made 75 “local hires.”

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Apparently most commercials would cost about $1m – $1.5m. But of course Jony Ive’s one would cost twice as much and have less useful content.
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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