Folk singer Emily Portman was puzzled recently when fans welcomed her new album. She didn’t write it. CC-licensed photo by Paul Hudson on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Rhyming slang. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Putin tells Xi organ transplants could offer immortality • Financial Times
Anastasia Stognei:
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Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping discussed the potential for science to extend the lifespans of men of their age, with the Russian president even suggesting organ transports might allow them to live forever.
Russia’s president told a press conference in China on Wednesday that the leaders had talked about longevity in a conversation first inadvertently broadcast on a television audio feed.
“Modern means and methods of improving health, even various surgical [operations] involving organ replacement, allow humanity to hope that . . . life expectancy will increase significantly,” Putin said during a televised press briefing.
His comments came after small talk between Putin and Xi was caught by a mic and broadcast as they headed to the military parade in Beijing.
On the recording the voice of a Chinese-Russian interpreter is heard translating Xi as saying: “In the past, people rarely reached the age of 70; today, they say that at 70 you are still a child.”
A translator for Putin then says in Chinese that advances in biotechnology means that human organs could be continuously transplanted so that a person could “become younger” and “could even become immortal”.
Xi then replies that there are predictions that “in the current century, humans might live to 150”.
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Glad to say that nobody has figured out how to slow down nor reverse the degradation of collagen, which basically holds our bodies together, no matter what the beauty adverts tell you. Your body will eventually fall apart, whether or not you’re still alive in it. So future generations shouldn’t have to worry about Immortal Xi or Everlasting Putin.
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Emily Portman and musicians on the mystery of fraudsters releasing songs in their name • BBC News
Ian youngs and Paul Glynn:
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In July, award-winning singer Emily Portman got a message from a fan praising her new album and saying “English folk music is in good hands”.
That would normally be a compliment, but the Sheffield-based artist was puzzled.
So she followed a link the fan had posted and was taken to what appeared to be her latest release. “But I didn’t recognise it because I hadn’t released a new album,” Portman says.
“I clicked through and discovered an album online everywhere – on Spotify and iTunes and all the online platforms.
“It was called Orca, and it was music that was evidently AI-generated, but it had been cleverly trained, I think, on me.”The 10 tracks had names such as Sprig of Thyme and Silent Hearth – which were “uncannily close” to titles she might choose. It was something that Portman, who won a BBC Folk Award in 2013, found “really creepy”.
When she clicked to listen, the voice – supposedly hers – was a bit off but sang in “a folk style probably closest to mine that AI could produce”, she says. The instrumentation was also eerily similar.
…There’s now a growing trend, though, for established (but not superstar) artists to be targeted by fake albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services. Even dead musicians have had AI-generated “new” material added to their catalogues.
Portman doesn’t know who put the album up under her name or why. She was falsely credited as performer, writer and copyright holder. The producer listed in the credits was Freddie Howells – but she says that name doesn’t mean anything to her, and there’s no trace online of a producer or musician of that name.
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Very odd if she’s listed as the copyright holder (might want to check the fine print on that one) since she’d then get paid for the AI-generated stuff.
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Wi-Fi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed • University of California Santa Cruz
Emily Cerf:
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A team of researchers at UC Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering that included Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Katia Obraczka, Ph.D. student Nayan Bhatia, and high school student and visiting researcher Pranay Kocheta designed a system for accurately measuring heart rate that combines low-cost WiFi devices with a machine learning algorithm.
Wi-Fi devices push out radio frequency waves into physical space around them and toward a receiving device, typically a computer or phone. As the waves pass through objects in space, some of the wave is absorbed into those objects, causing mathematically detectable changes in the wave.
Pulse-Fi uses a Wi-Fi transmitter and receiver, which runs Pulse-Fi’s signal processing and machine learning algorithm. They trained the algorithm to distinguish even the faintest variations in signal caused by a human heart beat by filtering out all other changes to the signal in the environment or caused by activity like movement.
“The signal is very sensitive to the environment, so we have to select the right filters to remove all the unnecessary noise,” Bhatia said.
The team ran experiments with 118 participants and found that after only five seconds of signal processing, they could measure heart rate with clinical-level accuracy. At five seconds of monitoring, they saw only half a beat-per-minute of error, with longer periods of monitoring time increasing the accuracy.
The team found that the Pulse-Fi system worked regardless of the position of the equipment in the room or the person whose heart rate was being measured—no matter if they were sitting, standing, lying down, or walking, the system still performed. For each of the 118 participants, they tested 17 different body positions with accurate results
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OK, but what if you’ve got a dog? If you’ve got two people? Looking forward to this being a throwaway line in a spy thriller in a year or two. “Hack into the home Wi-Fi, see how many people are in there.” *frantic typing* “OK there are three people, two adults and a child.. no, a dog.”
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How microdosing GLP-1 drugs became a wellness “craze” • The Washington Post
Daniel Gilbert:
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As a 62-year-old grandmother in Maine, Christine Babb doesn’t identify with the biohacker bros who try experimental medications to optimize their health. But after side effects from her first dose of a weight-loss drug hit her “like a Mack truck,” she, too, decided to experiment.
She drew up a syringe of the GLP-1 drug tirzepatide in June that was just 40% of the standard starting dose. The side effects she’d felt — constipation and extreme fatigue — went away with the smaller shot, she said, while her blood pressure, joint pain and inflammation improved. That experience, coupled with reading studies about the potential of GLP-1 drugs to protect brain health, has persuaded Babb to take a small dose indefinitely in a bid to fend off diseases that come with age.
There is virtually no published scientific evidence that proves taking smaller-than-standard doses of tirzepatide or semaglutide — the active ingredients in Zepbound and Ozempic, respectively — is safe or effective. But that hasn’t stopped patients like Babb from trying nonstandard doses for a broad array of reasons, including expectations of improved wellness and longevity.
…There is also evidence that stimulating the GLP-1 hormone can guard against inflammation in the brain itself, which is linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
In interviews, patients and medical providers say they’ve seen real benefits in microdosing. Taking less medicine, they reason, should also reduce the gastrointestinal side effects that are common with GLP-1 drugs. It’s also undeniably cheaper to use less of the brand-name medications, which have list prices upward of $1,000 a month.
But anecdotal patient experiences, outside of controlled clinical trials, don’t prove that microdosing works, scientists say.
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AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America • Forbes
Thomas Brewster:
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38-year-old CEO and cofoun der Garrett Langley presides over the $300m (estimated 2024 sales) company responsible for it all. Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5bn in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways, thoroughfares and parking lots across the U.S.
They record not just the license plate numbers of the cars that pass them, but their make and distinctive features—broken windows, dings, bumper stickers. Langley estimates its cameras help solve 1 million crimes a year. Soon they’ll help solve even more. In August, Flock’s cameras will take to the skies mounted on its own “made in Amer ica” drones. Produced at a factory the company opened earlier this year near its Atlanta offices, they’ll add a new dimension to Flock’s business and aim to challenge Chinese drone giant DJI’s dominance.
Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. (He acknowledges that programs to boost youth employment and cut recidivism will help.) It sounds like a pipe dream from another AI-can-solve- everything tech bro, but Langley, in the face of a wave of opposition from privacy advocates and Flock’s archrival, the $2.1 billion (2024 revenue) police tech giant Axon Enterprise, is a true believer. He’s convinced that America can and should be a place where everyone feels safe. And once it’s draped in a vast net of U.S.-made Flock surveillance tech, it will be.
“I’ve talked to plenty of activists who think crime is just the cost of modern society. I disagree,” Langley says. “I think we can have a crime-free city and civil liberties. . . . We can have it all.” In municipalities in which Flock is deployed, he adds, the average criminal—those between 16 and 24 committing nonviolent crime—“will most likely get caught.”
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This is, surely, the setup of one of the strands of the TV series Elementary. Or possibly The Dark Knight. Something Gotham-y, anyway.
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The dirty truth behind the e-waste recycling industry • Rest of World
Yashraj Sharma:
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India is the world’s third-largest producer of e-waste, having generated approximately 1.75 million metric tons in the fiscal year ending 2024, an increase of nearly 75% over the last five years. Close to 60% of e-waste in the country remains unrecycled — which represents both an environmental concern and a financial opportunity. In addition to domestic e-waste, the country is also a magnet for e-waste from countries such as Yemen, the United States, and the Dominican Republic, making India the third-largest importer of it in the world, from both legal and illegal sources.
Used electronics contain a treasure trove of recoverable raw materials including gold, silver, copper, and rare earth elements. These can be reused in new electronic devices or repurposed entirely. Thanks to government regulation, there’s also money to be made in just processing the recycled materials. Altogether, that adds up to a $1.56bn industry, according to one 2023 measure by an Indian market analytics firm.
A small fraction of those who work in e-waste recycling in India are employed within the country’s regulated industry. In shiny facilities owned by companies like Attero, Ecoreco, and Recyclekaro, workers often have the benefit of well-managed operations that implement protective measures.
But nearly 95% of those working in the e-waste industry — at least a million people, by some estimates — are in the informal sector. These include big traders, dismantlers, smelters, and small-time refurbishers. The lawless conditions of India’s e-waste recycling industry have given rise to a complex economy, which includes shadowy organizations that call the shots, recycling dons who control swaths of the network, and workers like Khan and Iqrar.
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The Instagram iPad app is finally here • WIRED
Julian Chokkattu:
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Even before Apple began splitting its mobile operating system from iOS into iOS and iPadOS, countless apps adopted a fresh user interface that embraced the larger screen size of the tablet. This was the iPad’s calling card at the time, and those native apps optimized for its precise screen size are what made Apple’s device stand out from a sea of Android tablets that largely ran phone apps inelegantly blown up to fit the bigger screen.
Except Instagram never went iPad-native. Open the existing app right now, and you’ll see the same phone app stretched to the iPad’s screen size, with awkward gaps on the sides. And you’ll run into the occasional problems when you post photos from the iPad, like low-resolution images. Weirdly, Instagram did introduce layout improvements for folding phones a few years ago, which means the experience is better optimized on Android tablets today than it is on iPad.
Instagram’s chief, Adam Mosseri, has long offered excuses, often citing a lack of resources despite being a part of Meta, a multibillion-dollar company. Instagram wasn’t the only offender—Meta promised a WhatsApp iPad app in 2023 and only delivered it earlier this year. (WhatsApp made its debut on phones in 2009.)
The fresh iPad app (which runs on iPadOS 15.1 or later) offers more than just a facelift. Yes, the Instagram app now takes up the entire screen, but the company says users will drop straight into Reels, the short-form video platform it introduced five years ago to compete with TikTok. The Stories module remains at the top, and you’ll be able to hop into different tabs via the menu icons on the left. There’s a new Following tab (the people icon right below the home icon), and this is a dedicated section to see the latest posts from people you actually follow.
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At very, very long last. But this is also a puzzle: why (a) has it taken SO long to get WhatsApp and Instagram on the iPad (b) have the iPad versions of both apps appeared within a few months of each other?
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The AI breakthrough that uses almost no power to create images • Techxplore
Paul Arnold:
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In a paper published in the journal Nature, Aydogan Ozcan, from the University of California Los Angeles, and his colleagues describe the development of an AI image generator that consumes almost no power.
AI image generators use a process called diffusion to generate images from text. First, they are trained on a large dataset of images and repeatedly add a statistical noise, a kind of digital static, until the image has disappeared.
Then, when you give AI a prompt such as “create an image of a house,” it starts with a screen full of static and then reverses the process, gradually removing the noise until the image appears. If you want to perform large-scale tasks, such as creating hundreds of millions of images, this process is slow and energy intensive.
The new diffusion-based image generator works by first using a digital encoder (that has been trained on publicly available datasets) to create the static that will ultimately make the picture. This requires a small amount of energy. Then, a liquid crystal screen known as a spatial light modulator (SLM) imprints this pattern onto a laser beam. The beam is then passed through a second decoding SLM, which turns the pattern in the laser into the final image.
Unlike conventional AI, which relies on millions of computer calculations, this process uses light to do all the heavy lifting. Consequently, the system uses almost no power.
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It would be lovely if this were to become widespread, but one has to have slight doubts.
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Apple revokes EU distribution rights for torrent client, leaving developer left in the dark • TorrentFreak
Ernesto Van der Sar:
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While alternative app stores operate independently and are required by EU law, Apple is still in a position to exert some control. This became apparent a few weeks ago, when iTorrent users suddenly ran into trouble when installing the app.
In July, several users complained that they were unable to download iTorrent from AltStore PAL. Initially the cause of the problem was unclear but the app’s developer, XITRIX, later confirmed that Apple itself had stepped in.
Apparently, Apple had revoked the developer’s “alternative distribution” right, which is required to publish apps in alternative stores, including AltStore PAL.
Given Apple’s long history of banning torrent apps from its own store, it’s tempting to conclude that the company stepped in for the same reason here. For now, however, there’s no confirmation that’s indeed the case.
Speaking directly with TorrentFreak, iTorrent developer Daniil Vinogradov (XITRIX) says that Apple did not reach out to him regarding the revocation of his alternative EU distribution rights.
Soon after the issues appeared, Vinogradov sent a support request to Apple seeking clarification, but that wasn’t helpful either. Instead, Apple responded with a generic message related to App Store issues.
After another follow-up last week, Apple informed the developer that their escalation team is looking into it, but nothing further. “I still have no idea if it was my fault or Apple’s, and their responses make no sense,” Vinogradov says.
…A day after publication, Apple informed us that the distribution rights (notarization) were revoked due to sanctions-related rules.
“Notarization for this app was removed in order to comply with government sanctions-related rules in various jurisdictions. We have communicated this to the developer,” Apple told us.
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“Sanctions-related rules” to me sounds like Russia, or possibly Iran.
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Fantasy football nerds are using AI to get an edge in their leagues this year • Fast Company
Marty Swant:
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This fantasy football season, Aaron VanSledright is letting his bot call the shots.
Ahead of the NFL season, the Chicago-based cloud engineer built a custom AI draft agent that pulls real-time data from ESPN and FantasyPros, factoring in last-minute intel like injuries and roster cuts.
Using his background in coding and cloud computing, VanSledright spun up the agent in just a week with Anthropic’s Claude large language models. He also tapped Amazon Web Services tools, including the new Strands SDK, which helps developers launch agents with just a few lines of code.
“Let’s see how well the AI performs against other humans, because nobody else in my league is doing this,” he tells Fast Company.
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That’s all one can read of the story if you’re not a premium subscriber, but even so, that’s enough for one to say: isn’t the point of doing these leagues to do it personally? For sort-of fun? Is there nothing AI can’t ruin?
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 