The electronic line calling (ELC) system failed at Wimbledon on Sunday – provoking questions about whether to replay or award points based on human calls. CC-licensed photo by Leon Brocard on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. In. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
TikTok’s ‘ban’ problem could end soon with a new app and a sale • The Verge
Richard Lawler:
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Even with the TikTok divest-or-ban law officially in effect since January, the app has only shut down service in the US for one day. Now, The Information reports that an agreement for a sale satisfying the law’s requirements is close and would come with a new, separate version of the app.
Any deal, however, would need approval from the Chinese government, which is also still wrangling with the Trump administration over tariffs.
The outlet reports that the Trump administration says it’s close to working out a sale to a group of “non-Chinese” investors, including Oracle, with current majority owner ByteDance maintaining a minority stake that would satisfy the terms of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal reported that the General Services Administration says Oracle has reached a new agreement with the federal government that “is the first of its kind that provides the entire government with a discount on cloud infrastructure,” with a 75% discount on licensed software.
TikTok’s staff is reportedly working on a new version of the app — dubbed M2, to the current app’s internal M designation — for release in app stores on September 5th. Trump issued a third legally questionable extension of the deadline to ban TikTok from US app stores last month, which is set to expire in mid-September.
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The extension wasn’t “legally questionable”. It was illegal, like quite a few of the things the Trump administration has done.
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Wimbledon electronic line calling: Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova loses game after system “deactivated” • The Athletic
Charlie Eccleshare:
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Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova suggested her British opponent may have received preferential treatment as simmering tensions around Wimbledon’s use of electronic line calling (ELC) instead of line judges boiled over Sunday, when the technology malfunctioned at a crucial point on Centre Court.
Russia’s Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova was serving at 4-4, Ad-40 in the first set of her fourth-round match against Britain’s Sonay Kartal, when Kartal hit a backhand that clearly bounced out. There was no call from the ELC, which replaced line judges for the first time in Wimbledon’s 148-year history. Pavlyuchenkova was waiting for the call, and umpire Nico Helwerth called for play to stop, just before an automated sound saying “stop, stop” could be heard.
After a lengthy break while he spoke to tournament officials, Helwerth explained to the players and the Centre Court crowd that the technology had not been working during the point, which meant it would be replayed. This was despite television footage confirming that Kartal’s shot had been well long, and that the point and the game should have been Pavlyuchenkova’s.
A spokesperson for the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) said: “It is now clear that the live ELC system, which was working optimally, was deactivated in error on part of the server’s side of the court for one game by those operating the system.
“In that time there were three calls not picked up by live ELC on the affected part of the court. Two of these were called by the Chair Umpire, who was not made aware that the system had been deactivated. Following the third, the Chair Umpire stopped the match and consulted with the Review Official. It was determined that the point should be replayed. The chair umpire followed the established process.”
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What doesn’t make sense is that if the system wasn’t working for a whole game on “part” of the server’s side, then shouldn’t they have replayed the game? But that would be too embarrassing. It’s a real mess. Rely on the UK to screw things up!
Springer Nature book on machine learning is full of made-up citations • Retraction Watch
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Would you pay $169 for an introductory ebook on machine learning with citations that appear to be made up?
If not, you might want to pass on purchasing Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced, published by Springer Nature in April.
Based on a tip from a reader, we checked 18 of the 46 citations in the book. Two-thirds of them either did not exist or had substantial errors. And three researchers cited in the book confirmed the works they supposedly authored were fake or the citation contained substantial errors.
“We wrote this paper and it was not formally published,” said Yehuda Dar, a computer scientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, whose work was cited in the book. “It is an arXiv preprint.” The citation incorrectly states the paper appeared in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
Aaron Courville, a professor of computer science at Université de Montréal and coauthor on the book Deep Learning, was correctly cited for the text itself, but for a section that “doesn’t seem to exist,” he said. “Certainly not at pages 194-201.” And Dimitris Kalles of Hellenic Open University in Greece also confirmed he did not write a cited work listing him as the author.
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Just too fitting, honestly.
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Exclusive: Google’s AI Overviews hit by EU antitrust complaint from independent publishers • Reuters
Foo Yun Chee:
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Google has been hit by an EU antitrust complaint over its AI Overviews from a group of independent publishers, which has also asked for an interim measure to prevent allegedly irreparable harm to them, according to a document seen by Reuters.
Google’s AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages and are shown to users in more than 100 countries. It began adding advertisements to AI Overviews last May.
The company is making its biggest bet by integrating AI into search but the move has sparked concerns from some content providers such as publishers.
The Independent Publishers Alliance document, dated June 30, sets out a complaint to the European Commission and alleges that Google abuses its market power in online search. “Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,” the document said.
It said Google positions its AI Overviews at the top of its general search engine results page to display its own summaries which are generated using publisher material and it alleges that Google’s positioning disadvantages publishers’ original content.
“Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google’s AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google’s general search results page,” the complaint said.
The Commission declined to comment. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority confirmed receipt of the complaint.
Google said it sends billions of clicks to websites each day.
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This is very similar to the “snippets” complaint that companies like Yelp brought (and lost). The question is, can publishers determine how their content is used by a third party? Put that way, it sounds like.. no.
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How fake-will fraudsters steal millions from the dead • BBC News
Sue Mitchell and Ben Milne:
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In late 2023, sisters Lisa and Nicole were told they had inherited a substantial sum from their late Aunt Christine. But while they were absorbing this life-changing news, the windfall was just as quickly snatched away.
A man unknown to Christine’s family, friends or neighbours, appeared – apparently from nowhere – and produced a will, naming him sole heir to her entire estate.
Doubts about the man’s claim grew as troubling details emerged. However, the police and probate service said they would not investigate.
Lisa and Nicole’s is one of several similar cases investigated by BBC News in the south of England.
We found mounting evidence that a criminal gang has been carrying out systematic will fraud by exploiting weaknesses in the probate system, stealing millions of pounds from the estates of dead people, and committing serious tax fraud.
…Stealing a dead person’s property and financial assets appears to be extremely easy under UK law, if no will can be located.
The official government register of unclaimed estates in England and Wales is called Bona Vacantia, external (Latin for “vacant goods”), and is freely accessible online. It currently contains about 6,000 names and is updated daily.
Legitimate heir-hunting companies use Bona Vacantia to research potential clients, but it also appears to have become a valuable resource for criminals.
To claim an estate where there is no known heir, a fraudster simply has to find a promising name on Bona Vacantia, produce a will quickly enough, and be awarded grant of probate.
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The story is full of examples. It’s obvious enough that this should be more carefully investigated. But they don’t. Just another little example of how the system is just gummed up with people who don’t care enough about getting it right.
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Measles “out of control”, experts warn, as Alberta case counts surpass 1,000 • CBC News
Jennifer Lee:
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Alberta’s measles outbreaks have now eclipsed the 1,000-case mark and infectious disease specialists are warning the virus is “impossible to contain,” given the current level of transmission.
The province reported another 24 cases on Friday, including 14 in the north zone, nine in the south and one in the Edmonton zone.
This brings the total confirmed cases since the outbreaks began in March to 1,020.
“It is a very grim milestone,” said Dr. Karina Top, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton, which has been treating children with measles.
“I’m very worried we’re going to see more hospitalizations and some deaths soon because we know the death rate is about one to two per thousand. So it’s likely that we’re going to see that and that will be a very tragic day.”
Measles is highly contagious and can lead to serious complications including pneumonia, brain inflammation — which can trigger seizures, deafness and brain damage — as well as premature delivery.
A premature baby who was born with measles died in Ontario recently. And another young child died of measles in that province last year.
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You were expecting all the measles stories to be about the US, and instead all the action is in Canada.
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The wide open road too often needs a wide open wallet • The Times
Harry Wallop:
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The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) duly looked into those selling petrol and diesel and found that they had indeed charged too much: an extra £900m between 2019 to 2022 as a result of inflating their margins.
This was not illegal: the likes of Shell or Tesco can charge what they want. But fuel is a key commodity and the [5p] fuel duty cut was meant to help consumers suffering from cost of living pressures, not bolster the already substantial profits of oil giants or large supermarkets. The CMA declared that fuel sellers would have to publish live prices, which could then be displayed on road-side billboards or on a phone app, allowing people to shop around.
That was two years ago. What has happened since then? Yes, that’s the sound of tumbleweed skittering across a forecourt towards the Wild Bean Café. We seem incapable in the UK of building or fixing anything quickly.
This week the CMA said margins remained high and the “fuel finder scheme” should be available by the end of this year “subject to legislation and parliamentary time”.
Why does it need legislation? The supermarkets already declare their prices daily to the CMA, but they represent 40% of the market: the remaining 60% are not doing so. The CMA was given powers to force retailers to hand over data. Just name and shame the laggards.
The reason this matters is that prices can vary enormously. Within five miles of where I am sitting I can fill up for 126.7p at Asda or 138.9p at Shell. Because I have a gas-guzzling Volvo XC90 (such a cliché, I know), the difference is £8.66 between the cheapest and the most expensive.
Many argue that this price discrepancy is a consequence of price opacity. You usually do not know what you will be charged until you approach the petrol station. I frequently curse as I realise, too late, that I have filled up expensively, three miles before I could have bagged a bargain.
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If 12.2p/l translates into £8.66, he’s buying 70 litres. The 5p cut not passed on translating into £900m of extra profit is 18 billion litres, or 250m fillups of 70 litres. Slow way to make a killing.
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Lab-grown food could be sold in UK in two years • BBC News
Pallab Ghosh:
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Meat, dairy and sugar grown in a lab could be on sale in the UK for human consumption for the first time within two years, sooner than expected.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is looking at how it can speed up the approval process for lab-grown foods.
Such products are grown from cells in small chemical plants.UK firms have led the way in the field scientifically but feel they have been held back by the current regulations.
Dog food made from meat that was grown in factory vats went on sale in the UK for the first time last month.In 2020, Singapore became the first country to authorise the sale of cell-cultivated meat for human consumption, followed by the United States three years later and Israel last year. However, Italy and the US states of Alabama and Florida have instituted bans.
The FSA is to develop new regulations by working with experts from high-tech food firms and academic researchers. It says it aims to complete the full safety assessment of two lab-grown foods within the two-year process it is starting. But critics say that having the firms involved in drawing up the new rules represents a conflict of interest.
The initiative is in response to concerns by UK firms that they are losing ground to competition overseas, where approvals processes take half the time.
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I find this topic interesting – if you don’t have to devote huge areas to farming, is it more efficient to do it in vats? The story is from March, but nothing seems to have happened since.
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Samsung is about to find out if Ultra is enough • The Verge
Allison Johnson:
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My anecdotal data matches the actual sales figures; there are many more people curious about folding phones than there are buyers of folding phones. Samsung would very much like that to not be the case, and, by all indications, it’s about to pull out all the stops at at its Unpacked event on July 9th. But is putting the Ultra name on a folding phone enough?
The weak sales are not for lack of trying — Samsung has been trying to sell us on foldables for a good chunk of the last decade, and Google also got in the game a couple of years ago. Motorola has had substantial success selling clamshell-style flip phones; Counterpoint Research found that the brand’s foldable market share grew 253% year-over-year in 2024. But that’s a bigger piece of a very small pie. TrendForce estimated that foldables made up just 1.5% of the overall smartphone market in 2024. In the US, Samsung was the earliest and loudest folding phone maker, but a half dozen iterations of folding phones hasn’t managed to make a significant dent.
…The company has all but confirmed that we’ll get an Ultra-branded Fold for the first time, with a thinner profile to rival the recent efforts from Honor and Oppo. The Z Flip 7 is likely to get a bigger, Razr-style screen that covers most of the front panel, and we might see a cheaper FE version with the old cover screen design. That all seems to address a couple of common complaints about foldables: they’re too pricey and come with too many tradeoffs compared to a slab-style phone.
I’m not quite sure it’ll be enough, though. Foldables remain more susceptible to damage from dust than a standard flagship phone — and repairs can be pricier. Despite saying years ago that it’s pursuing full dustproofing, Samsung doesn’t seem to have cracked the code on a fully IP68-rated foldable just yet. Taking a chance on an expensive phone that’s less durable than your typical $1,000 flagship? That’s kind of a big ask, especially with prices on everything else we buy going up, too.
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Do we really, really think Apple is going to offer one of these in 2026? I remain dubious.
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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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