A number of British artists are protesting AI use of their music with a new album of near-silence. CC-licensed photo by Mike Boening Photography on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Quietly confident. 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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British hacker must repay £4m after hijacking celebrity Twitter accounts • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

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A British man who hacked high profile Twitter – now known as X – accounts as part of a Bitcoin scam has been ordered to hand over £4.1m in stolen cryptocurrency.

Joseph O’Connor, from Liverpool, hijacked more than 130 accounts in July 2020, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk.

The 26-year-old fled to Spain where his mother lives before being arrested and extradited to the US for trial. He was sentenced to five years for cyber crimes but now must hand over a haul of crypto he gathered through various hacks and scams.

O’Connor, who went by the alias PlugwalkJoe, carried out the so-called “giveaway scam” with other young men and teenagers – breaking into Twitter’s internal systems and taking over high profile accounts.

Three other hackers have been charged over the scam, with US teenager Graham Clark pleading guilty to his part in the deception in 2021. The hackers gained access to the accounts by first convincing a small number of Twitter employees to hand over their internal login details – which eventually granted them access to the social media site’s administrative tools.
They used social engineering tricks to get access to the powerful internal control panel at the site.

Once inside the Twitter accounts of famous individuals, they pretended to be the celebrities and tweeted asking followers to send Bitcoin to various digital wallets promising to double their money. As a result of the fraud, an estimated 350 million Twitter users viewed suspicious tweets from official accounts of some of the platform’s biggest users, including Apple, Uber, Kanye West and Bill Gates.

Thousands were duped into believing that a crypto giveaway was real. Between 15 and 16 July 2020, 426 transfers were made to the scammers of various amounts from people hoping to double their money.

A total of over 12.86 BTC was stolen which at the time was worth around $110,000 (£83,500). It is now worth $1.2m.

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One has to wonder about how smart those thousands who were duped are. Elon Musk and Bill Gates say things like that and you think it’s true?
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Getting Britain out of the hole: a plan for the UK economy

Andrew Sissons and John Springford:

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A sober analysis of what’s gone wrong is needed. In the essay that follows, we try to produce one, and to chart a way forward. The central theme is that Britain hasn’t based its economic strategy on the things it is good at. As a result, it has too few big companies located around the country that raise wages and spending locally, leading to virtuous spirals in which skilled people get sucked in and local small businesses enjoy more demand and their workers receive higher wages. 

It has strengths in tradeable services, such as finance, law, accounting, consulting, media, video games and university education; but many of these industries are concentrated in London and the south-east – the region of the country that is as rich as the top-performing places internationally. Even there productivity has stagnated and investment has been weak since the vote to leave the EU in 2016.

Manufacturing output has been very weak since the global financial crisis. But it continues to be an important anchor for many regions outside the major cities. Brexit has also badly damaged the sector, with value-added declining rapidly since the UK left the single market and customs union in 2021.

Aside from the shocks of the financial crisis and Brexit, Britain has failed to reshape its second-tier cities enough to suit its comparative advantages. As a result, many have weak economies. These cities are not dense enough, and have limited road and public transport.

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Their programme for reform includes repairing the manufacturing base, making worker immigration easier (that’s going to be a hard sell), better funding for city transport, let foreign students come to universities, complete the energy transition to carbon-neutral, rethink the services sector, and reform the tax system.

Nice and simple! But at least it’s a manifesto. Lots of political parties would do well with something like this, though most would find it a hard sell to their voters: Reform and the Tories wouldn’t be able to allow the immigration, university or energy elements happen.
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Report claims that Apple has yet again put the Mac Pro “on the back burner” • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

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Apple’s Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company’s primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that’s counting a 2012 refresh that was mostly identical to the 2010 version.

Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023, making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon—surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn’t get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026.

Gurman says that the tower is “on the back burner” at Apple and that the company is “focused on a new Mac Studio” for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn’t have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra, and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max.

Note that Gurman carefully stops short of saying we definitely won’t see a Mac Pro update next year—the emphasis on the Mac Studio merely “suggests the Mac Pro won’t be updated in 2026 in a significant way,” and internal sources tell him “Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro.” The current Mac Pro does still use the M2 Ultra rather than the M3 Ultra, which indicates that Apple doesn’t see the need to update its high-end desktop every time it releases a suitable chip. But all of Apple’s other desktops—the iMac, the Mac mini, and the Studio—have skipped a silicon generation once since the M1 came out in 2020.

…Part of the appeal of the early 2010s and the 2019 Mac Pro towers was their internal expandability, particularly with respect to storage, graphics cards, and RAM. But while the Apple Silicon Mac Pro does include six internal PCI Express slots, it supports neither RAM upgrades nor third-party GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel. Thunderbolt 5’s 120 Gbps transfer speeds are also more than fast enough to support high-speed external storage devices.

That leaves even the most powerful of power users with few practical reasons to prefer a $7,000 Mac Pro tower to a $4,000 Mac Studio. And that would be true even if both desktops used the same chip—currently, the M3 Ultra Studio comes with more and newer CPU cores, newer GPU cores, and 32GB more RAM for that price, making the comparison even more lopsided.

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It’s dead, Jim.
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Paul McCartney joins music industry protest against AI with silent track • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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At two minutes 45 seconds it’s about the same length as With a Little Help From My Friends. But Paul McCartney’s first new recording in five years lacks the sing-along tune and jaunty guitar chops because there’s barely anything there.

The former Beatle, arguably Britain’s greatest living songwriter, is releasing a track of an almost completely silent recording studio as part of a music industry protest against copyright theft by artificial intelligence companies.

In place of catchy melodies and evocative lyrics there is only quiet hiss and the odd clatter. It suggests that if AI companies unfairly exploit musicians’ intellectual property to train their generative AI models, the creative ecosystem will be wrecked and original music silenced.

McCartney, 83 and currently touring North America, has added the track to the B-side of an LP called Is This What We Want?, which is filled with other silent recordings and will be pressed on vinyl and released later this month.

McCartney’s contribution comes as musicians and artists step up their campaign to persuade the UK government to stop technology companies from training AI models on their creative output without approval or paying royalties. Meanwhile, Britain faces anti-regulation pressure from Donald Trump’s White House.

The album track listing spells out “the British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies”.

Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and campaigner for copyright fairness behind the protest album, said: “I am very concerned the government is paying more attention to US tech companies’ interests rather than British creatives’ interests.”

Other artists already backing the campaign include Sam Fender, Kate Bush, Hans Zimmer and the Pet Shop Boys.

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No doubt Lisa Nandy, the go-go-go secretary of state for culture, media and sports, will be right on this, once she’s given the album a couple of listens.
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How Jeffrey Epstein used SEO to bury news about his crimes • The Verge

Mia Sato:

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On December 11th, 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was fretting about what came up if you Googled him. By this time Epstein had already pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution with a child and was a registered sex offender, and just a few days earlier he had been photographed in Central Park taking a stroll with Prince Andrew.

Epstein emailed an associate to complain. “the google page is not good,” Epstein wrote, according to documents released last week by the House Oversight Committee. He also took issue with tens of thousands of dollars of payments, which appear to have been made to “clean up” results. “I have yet to have a complete breakdown of payments. and the results , are what they are.”

Someone named Al Seckel — perhaps Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister’s late partner — responded later that evening, sharing what he was seeing. The results included Epstein’s Wikipedia page, a New York magazine article, a “jeffreyepsteinscience.com” website, a hair transplant surgeon with the same name, and a story correctly naming him as a sex offender.

“This is BEFORE the next big sweep. I UNDERSTAND your point about ‘one thing kills me,’ but the daily beast article is gone, the other ones, including the powerful Huffington Post, are about to be pushed off. And, out stuff is on top.”

Within the documents released last week, we see Epstein and his circle strategize how to bury unflattering coverage of him on Google and elevate what they want — search engine optimization to try to whitewash the reputation of a rich pedophile with powerful friends.

Throughout the documents, Epstein and others discuss how to use technical SEO tactics to bump news articles from Google’s first page of results, cozy up to reporters they perceive as focused more on business than Epstein’s crimes, and how to get a crisis PR machine in motion to launder his digital presence.

To those familiar with SEO, these strategies will look familiar — it’s the same playbook used by everyone from restaurants to news publishers to companies selling tennis shoes and photography services online. Everyone knows Google Search is the gateway to the internet; it’s just that this time, these same practices were deployed as cover for perhaps the world’s most infamous pedophile.

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OpenAI blocks toymaker after its AI teddy bear is caught telling children terrible things • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

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Last week, researchers at the Public Interest Research Group published an alarming report in which they found that an AI-powered teddy bear from the children’s toymaker FoloToy was giving out instructions on how to light matches, and even waxing lyrical about the ins-and-outs of various sexual fetishes.

Now OpenAI, whose model GPT-4o was used to power the toy, is pulling the plug.

On Friday, the ChatGPT maker confirmed that it had cut off FoloToy’s access to its AI models, a move from OpenAI that could invite additional pressure onto itself to strictly police businesses that use its products— especially as it enters a major partnership with Mattel, one of the largest toymakers in the world.

“I can confirm we’ve suspended this developer for violating our policies,” an OpenAI spokesperson told PIRG in an emailed statement.

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Well, encouragingly quick at least.
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The effect of video watching on children’s skills • Marginal REVOLUTION

Tyler Cowen:

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This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences.

With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant.

These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills—potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity…

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The NBER working paper is by Carolina Caetano, Gregorio Caetano, Débora Mazetto & Meghan Skira.

This is quite a finding, though. Harmful effects, few positive effects.
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How Google’s DeepMind tool is ‘more quickly’ forecasting hurricane behavior • The Guardian

Eric Holthaus:

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Google DeepMind is the first AI model dedicated to hurricanes, and now the first to beat traditional weather forecasters at their own game. Through all 13 Atlantic storms so far this year, Google’s model is the best – even beating human forecasters on track predictions.

Hurricane Melissa eventually made landfall in Jamaica at category 5 strength, one of the strongest landfalls ever documented in nearly two centuries of record-keeping across the Atlantic basin. [Meterologist Philippe] Papin’s bold forecast [that it would hit that strength] likely gave people in Jamaica extra time to prepare for the disaster, possibly saving lives and property.

Google DeepMind has been making weather forecasts for a few years now, and the parent forecast system from which the new hurricane model is derived also performed spectacularly well in diagnosing large-scale weather patterns last year.

Google’s model works by spotting patterns that traditional time-intensive physics-based weather models may miss.

“They do it much more quickly than their physics-based cousins, and the computing power is less expensive and time consuming,” Michael Lowry, a former National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecaster, said.

“What this hurricane season has proven in short order is that the newcomer AI weather models are competitive with and, in some cases, more accurate than the slower physics-based weather models we’ve traditionally leaned on,” Lowry said.

To be sure, Google DeepMind is an example of machine learning – a technique that has been used in data-heavy sciences like meteorology for years – and is not generative AI like ChatGPT.

Machine learning takes mounds of data and pulls out patterns from them in a such a way that its model only takes a few minutes to come up with an answer, and can do so on a desktop computer – in strong contrast to the flagship models that governments have used for decades that can take hours to run and require some of the biggest supercomputers in the world.

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I’m not sure that forecasting a Category 5 rather than 4 really makes a difference. Category 4 already means 130mph+ windspeeds; Cat 5 is 157+. But direction matters, so if DeepMind is predicting that too, it’s good.
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First US human bird flu case reported since February • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

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Health officials in Washington state said Friday they have confirmed the first US human case of bird flu since February, with a strain that has previously been reported in animals but never before in humans.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials said they consider the risk to the public to be low.

An older adult with underlying conditions preliminarily tested positive for the infection and has been hospitalized since early November, state health officials said Friday. The person developed a high fever, confusion and respiratory distress. “This is a severely ill patient,” state epidemiologist Scott Lindquist said during a briefing.

The person has a mixed backyard flock of domestic poultry at home that had exposure to wild birds, the state health department said in a statement. The domestic poultry or wild birds are the most likely source of exposure, but state and local health and agricultural officials are continuing to investigate how the person became infected.

State health officials said Friday that the person was infected with H5N5, an avian influenza virus that has previously been reported in animals but not in humans. It is part of the family of avian influenza viruses, and has been seen in wild birds in other US states and Canada, state officials and experts said.

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We let the H5N1 watching brief quietly slip away, and now we have to start up an H5N5 one? Not fair. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Chinese EV maker XPeng forecasts weak fourth quarter revenue amid fierce competition • Reuters

Anhata Rooprai:

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Chinese electric vehicle maker XPeng forecast fourth-quarter revenue below estimates on Monday, as a prolonged price war and intensifying competition in the world’s largest auto market threaten to slow its growth.

The company’s US-listed shares, which have more than doubled this year, fell nearly 8% in early morning trading.

The cautious outlook comes despite XPeng and rival NIO posting record deliveries in October, even as Tesla’s China sales slumped to a three-year low. The contrasting performance underscores the uneven impact of a bruising price war that has eroded profitability across China’s crowded EV sector.

XPeng expects fourth-quarter revenue between 21.5bn yuan ($3.03bn) and 23bn yuan, below analysts’ average estimate of 26bn yuan, according to data compiled by LSEG.

“Since the launch of the mid-to-low-end Mona 03 last year, combined with reduced investment in intelligent driving, XPeng has lost its brand appeal in models priced above 200,000 yuan,” according to Third Bridge analyst Rosalie Chen.

The Mona M03, XPeng’s first model under a new mass-market brand built with ride-hailing giant DiDi, is central to the automaker’s push into China’s more affordable EV segment.

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And lo, the crunch on the plethora of Chinese automakers that was foretold began to come true.
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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