A new theory suggests our universe might exist inside a black hole. The strangest thing? It’s not against the laws of physics. CC-licensed photo by brx0 on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Eventful. 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 UK is slogging through an online age-gate apocalypse • The Verge
Jess Weatherbed:
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Over the past several days, several large social media platforms have started requiring age verification in the UK to access certain features and types of content, in partnership with third-party software providers. Users typically have a choice between uploading bank card information, an image of government-issued ID, or a facial scan that estimates the user’s age.
Meta users likely won’t have seen a huge difference over the weekend, as Facebook and Instagram rolled out age verification requirements a few years ago. Bluesky users in the UK, however, now can’t access direct messaging capabilities until they complete the platform’s new age verification process. Reddit has also blocked access to specific subreddits for UK-based users who don’t complete its age verification process, some of which — r/periods, r/stopsmoking, r/stopdrinking, and r/sexualassault, for example — provide valued community support and resources for adults and minors alike.
People are already finding loopholes for these systems. The face scanning systems for Persona and k-ID — the third-party verification software used by Reddit and Discord, respectively — can both be easily tricked using Death Stranding’s photo mode. (Facebook and Instagram use a similar service called Yoti, which so far does not appear to have been fooled the same way.)
X doesn’t yet have a direct verification system, and is instead currently estimating age based on factors like account creation date, social connections, email addresses, and legacy verification. Accounts that don’t have any of these signals in place are locked out of accessing certain content until X rolls out the ID and facial scanner-based checkers it’s planning to release “in the following weeks.” That includes protest footage and video game clips that depict violence — and users who aren’t even based in the UK are reporting content restrictions as well.
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As the next link shows, there’s a huge problem implied in uploading personal data to a gazillion sites. So, we finally got the age verification system that everyone had been calling out for. And its biggest effect has been to drive people to start using VPNs, because given the choice between uploading your personally identifying information to a random site, and getting a VPN, the latter is always preferable.
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A second Tea breach reveals users’ DMs about abortions and cheating • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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A second, major security issue with women’s dating safety app Tea has exposed much more user data than the first breach we first reported last week, with an independent security researcher now finding it was possible for hackers to access messages between users discussing abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers they sent to one another.
Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.
It’s hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put Tea’s users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands. When signing up, Tea encourages users to choose an anonymous screenname, but it was trivial for 404 Media to find the real world identities of some users given the nature of their messages, which Tea has led them to believe were private. Users could be easily found via their social media handles, phone numbers, and real names that they shared in these chats.
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I’ve seen someone describe the Tea hack(s) as the worst PII (private identifying information) breach they’ve ever seen. The app demands people upload identifying images such as a driver’s licence, and of course doesn’t delete it. (Much easier to say “sure we deleted it!” and not do so.)
The recommendation now is for anyone who ever used it to put a block on their credit and monitor their bank statements. The class action lawsuits can only be a day away.
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The “have lots” and the “have nots” • Spyglass
MG Siegler:
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Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all had layoffs in recent months while at the same time also engaging in the crazy talent arms race that’s happening in AI. These companies are essentially saying to some employees that they’re so valuable that they’re worth paying not just a lot of money, but more money than basically anyone in the world gets paid – including, often, their own CEOs. And yet to others, they’re basically saying they’re worthless – I mean literally not worth paying anything to any longer. Just to put it in directionally stark terms: some employees are worth $100m a year while others are worth $0 a year.
There have always been pay discrepancies at companies – and it has long been most pronounced at tech companies because engineering talent is so vital to the literal job to be done. And yes, there exist the mythical “100x engineers” who can produce work that may actually be worth more than 100 other people because no other people could simply do the same work.
But AI has taken this up several notches. We now effectively have “100Mx engineers” – people so valuable to a company that there more or less is no limit to the amount they might be worth. I would say maybe a company’s overall market cap – but there would be push back against that because some would say that this talent can likely raise that market cap by billions. I mean, at least one report has Mark Zuckerberg throwing out the “B” word in such talent discussions.
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Om Malik makes much the same point (perhaps less brutally) in his analysis of Satya Nadella’s memo to staff. The old pact of “work for us, it’ll go great” is over in Silicon Valley.
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Google failed to warn ten million of Turkey earthquake severity • BBC News
James Clayton, Anna Foster and Ben Derico:
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Google has admitted its earthquake early warning system failed to accurately alert people during Turkey’s deadly quake of 2023.
Ten million people within 98 miles of the epicentre could have been sent Google’s highest level alert – giving up to 35 seconds of warning to find safety. Instead, only 469 “Take Action” warnings were sent out for the first 7.8 magnitude quake.
Google told the BBC half a million people were sent a lower level warning, which is designed for “light shaking”, and does not alert users in the same prominent way. The tech giant previously told the BBC the system had “performed well” after an investigation in 2023.
The alerts system is available in just under 100 countries – and is described by Google as a “global safety net” often operating in countries with no other warning system.
Google’s system, named Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA), is run by the Silicon Valley firm – not individual countries.
The system works on Android devices, which make up more than 70% of the phones in Turkey.
More than 55,000 people died when two major earthquakes hit south-east Turkey on 6 February 2023, more than 100,000 were injured. Many were asleep in buildings that collapsed around them when the tremors hit.
Google’s early warning system was in place and live on the day of the quakes. However it underestimated how strong the earthquakes were.
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Reminiscent of the “Google Flu Trends” system, which turned out to seriously overestimate levels of flu in the US after its launch in 2008.
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Did our cosmos begin inside a black hole in another universe? • Space
Victoria Corless:
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A team of scientists is proposing a bold alternative to the Big Bang theory, suggesting that our universe may have formed inside a colossal black hole residing in a larger, parent universe. The Big Bang theory, along with Einstein’s general relativity, has successfully explained major cosmological phenomena, including the cosmic microwave background, the universe’s large-scale structure, and its accelerating expansion often linked to dark energy.
Yet, fundamental problems remain with this theory, such as the unexplained nature of dark energy and dark matter, the singularity at the Big Bang, and inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum mechanics. “Most scientists have responded by proposing either a mysterious new form of energy — [called] dark energy — or by modifying the laws of physics,” Enrique Gaztañaga, professor at the University of Portsmouth, told Space.com. “But these are drastic steps.”
Gaztañaga says he and his colleagues wondered if a simpler explanation might suffice. “[Our study] began with a simple but profound question: Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?” he said. “Our entire observable universe lies inside its own gravitational radius, meaning that from the outside, it would appear like a black hole. That led to a radical idea: What if the universe formed in the same way a star collapses into a black hole?”
…The new study explores the idea that the universe may not have begun with a singularity but instead emerged from the collapse of a massive cloud of matter in another universe. To investigate, the research team ran simulations in search of a solution that could address some of the inconsistencies in current cosmological theories — and unexpectedly found that an exact, analytical solution describing the fundamental principles of this process already exists.
“Under the right conditions, this collapse doesn’t end in a singularity — instead, it bounces and begins expanding again,” said Gaztañaga. “That bounce mimics what we call the Big Bang.”
While “bouncing scenarios” have been proposed in the past, this model stands out by relying solely on known laws of physics. It avoids introducing speculative particles or forces and describes a purely gravitational collapse occurring within a black hole.
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Sounds bonkers, and yet if it doesn’t violate the laws of physics.. then it’s passed the first test of a scientific theory. There’s plenty more in the article.
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Exclusive: Napster (formerly Infinite Reality) lays off some of its team • GamesBeat
Dean Takahashi:
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Infinite Reality recently bought Napster for $207m, and the Infinite Reality renamed itself as Napster Corp. in the wake of its $500m acquisition of Touchcast. Now it is focusing on providing the next generation of digital media and e-commerce.
…the company raised a lot of money — reportedly several billion dollars — in pursuit of acquisitions to build a metaverse company. It’s more fashionable to say immersive virtual worlds, but you get the idea.
The deals under Infinite Reality included acquisitions of Obsess, Stakes, Drone Racing, Ethereal and Action Face. It also sought but didn’t acquire a majority stake in Super League Gaming. Back in January, Infinite Reality said it raised $3bn at a valuation of $12.25bn. And in 2024, the company raised $350m and bought Landvault.
After some pressure from investors and others, Napster said that Sterling Select, a venture development firm associated with Sterling Equities and the Katz family, represented the investor who invested a significant portion of the $3bn investment that the company announced earlier this year.
The spokesperson said, “These are difficult but expected steps in the course of integrating teams and streamlining operations. We continue to employ hundreds of full-time team members around the world—including nearly 100 engineers and hundreds of talented professionals across product development, marketing, and operations—and we remain focused on executing against our vision with clarity and momentum.”
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Amazing that they could raised $3bn to build “immersive virtual worlds”. Don’t they know all the play is in chatbots? Anyway, this feels like the latest in Napster’s long, slow slide into vanishment.
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Economists are struggling to find jobs. It’s an ominous sign for the economy • The New York Times
Noam Scheiber:
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Last year, the average base salary for newly hired economics professors at major research universities was more than $150,000, according to the American Economic Association, and their compensation swelled to about $200,000 once bonuses and summer teaching were included. As recently as the 2023-24 academic year, the employment rate for Ph.D. economists within a few months of graduation was 100%, said John Cawley, the chair of the association’s Committee on the Job Market, citing the group’s surveys. Job satisfaction topped 85%.
Those glory days seem to be ending. Universities and nonprofits have scaled back hiring amid declining state budgets and federal funding cuts. At the same time, the Trump administration has laid off government economists and frozen hiring for new ones.
Tech companies also have grown stingier, and their need for high-level economists — once seemingly insatiable — has waned. Other firms have slowed hiring in response to the economic uncertainty introduced by President Trump’s tariffs and the possibility that artificial intelligence will replace their workers, even if those workers have a doctoral degree.
“The advent of A.I. is also impacting the market for high-skilled labor,” said Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan, in an email. “So the whole thing is kind of a mess.”
Of course, if it were only some egghead economists scrambling to find work, that might be not be terribly consequential. But the same forces bedeviling economists are crimping employment for other highly trained scientists and social scientists, as well as for many recent college graduates, whose jobless rate has been unusually high for an otherwise strong economy.
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Economic uncertainty? Employability uncertainty? It’s hard to know which; all one sees is the pattern.
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The world is run by old men in a hurry • Financial Times
Janan Ganesh:
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The numbers should amaze us. Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin are all in their seventies. So are Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. The president and supreme leader of Iran are 70 and 86 respectively. The presidents of Nigeria and Indonesia are each 73. More than half of the world’s population, and much of its land area and military capacity, is in the hands of men who are older than Ronald Reagan was when he entered the White House at what seemed a dicey 69.
One of the destabilising forces in the world today is the advanced age of those who run it.
For one thing, old leaders have an incentive to secure a legacy — a defining achievement — before time runs out for them. The unification of mainland China with Taiwan is an example of such a project. So is avenging the loss of Russia’s prestige and “strategic depth” after the cold war. Even Trump’s haste to find a settlement in Ukraine, however invidious the details of such a peace might be to that nation, and to end world trade as we have known it, whatever the economic cost, suggests an old man in a hurry.
The problem with aged leaders is not their health — almost all those named above are robust and lucid — but their incentives. As well as not having much time to leave a mark, they won’t have decades of retirement in which to suffer the legal and reputational penalties of any disastrous act committed in office.
We have to get our heads around, if not a paradox, then a surprise. Age, which “should” instil caution and restraint in people, quite often emboldens them.
…Either way, the world is living through a lesson in the perverse consequences of age. It seems that age confers wisdom, but also a certain liberation. It imposes a sense of social duty, but also a deadline for personal achievement. To explain the disorder of the modern world, it is far more intellectually proper to cite economic trends and grand historical forces. But perhaps part of the story is that a few old men are striving for a legacy in the time that is left to them.
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North Korean hackers ran US-based “laptop farm” from Arizona woman’s home • Ars Technica
Nate Anderson:
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Christina Chapman, a 50-year-old Arizona woman, has just been sentenced to 102 months [8.5 years] in prison for helping North Korean hackers steal US identities in order to get “remote” IT jobs with more than 300 American companies, including Nike. The scheme funneled millions of dollars to the North Korean state.
Why did Chapman do it? In a letter sent this week to the judge, Chapman said that she was “looking for a job that was Monday through Friday that would allow me to be present for my mom” who was battling cancer. (Her mother died in 2023.) But “the area where we lived didn’t provide for a lot of job opportunities that fit what I needed. I also thought that the job was allowing me to help others.”
She offered her “deepest and sincerest apologies to any person who was harmed by my actions,” thanked the FBI for busting her, and said that when she gets out of prison, she hopes to “pursue the books that I have been working on writing and starting my own underwear company.”
Managing all this fraud required plenty of tedious bureaucracy. The North Koreans had to steal US identities, of course, but then they also had to get hired. This involved endless paperwork, such as writing resumes and filling out I-9 forms to show eligibility to work in the US. (In one chat, Chapman said that she was happy to send I-9 forms from her home address but that she would prefer not to “do the paperwork” herself because “I can go to FEDERAL PRISON for falsifying federal documents.”)
Chapman was also key to the less obvious, more technical part of the scheme—how to make it appear like all these remote workers were actually living in the country.
When her clients got hired, Chapman would receive their corporate laptops in the mail. Sometimes she would re-ship them to “a city in China on the border with North Korea.”
But she kept more than 90 of the machines at her place in Arizona. Using proxies, VPNs, and remote-access software like Anydesk, the North Koreans logged in to their “American” computers from afar and then appeared to be normal, US-based remote employees, showing up to staff meetings on Zoom, collecting paychecks, and occasionally exfiltrating data or installing ransomware.
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The first planned migration of an entire country is underway • WIRED
Fernanda González:
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Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to consider migration as an urgent survival measure.
This island nation in Oceania is made up of nine coral islands and atolls inhabited by just over 11,000 people. The country’s average altitude is just two metres above sea level, making it extremely vulnerable to rising oceans, flooding, and storm surges, all exacerbated by the climate crisis.
A study by NASA’s Sea Level Change Team revealed that, in 2023, the sea level in Tuvalu was 15cm higher than the average recorded over the previous three decades. If this trend continues, it’s projected that most of the territory, including its critical infrastructure, will be below the high-tide level by 2050.
In the face of this existential threat, an unprecedented climate visa program has begun. In 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union Treaty, an agreement that provides for a migration scheme that will allow 280 Tuvaluans per year to settle in Australia as permanent residents.
The visas will be allocated through a ballot system and will grant beneficiaries the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. In addition, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country if conditions permit.
…The agreement with Australia is not the only action taken by Tuvalu in the face of the threat of disappearing. In 2022, the country launched an ambitious strategy to become the world’s first digital nation. This initiative includes 3D scanning its islands to digitally re-create them and preserve their cultural heritage, as well as moving government functions to a virtual environment. In order to protect national identity and sovereignty, the project is also contemplating constitutional reforms to define the country as a virtual state, a concept already recognized by 25 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.
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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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