The CEO of Mastodon is stepping down after ten years – partly in response to people’s attitude towards him online. CC-licensed photo by Alpha Photo on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Is there a phrase for it? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Meta buried “causal” evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege • Reuters
Jeff Horwitz:
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Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by US school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
In a 2020 research project codenamed “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.
Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing.
“The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison ☹️”, an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”
Despite Meta’s own work documenting a causal link between its products and negative mental health effects, the filing alleges, Meta told Congress that it had no ability to quantify whether its products were harmful to teenage girls.
In a statement Saturday, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the study was stopped because its methodology was flawed and that it worked diligently to improve the safety of its products.
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Amazing how the methodology is always flawed when it shows bad effects, but fine when it shows good ones.
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My next chapter with Mastodon • Mastodon Blog
Eugen Rochko is the founder of the Mastodon project, and also its strategy and product advisor:
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After nearly 10 years, I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit. Over the course of my time at Mastodon, I have centred myself less and less in our outward communications, and to some degree, this is the culmination of that trend.
Mastodon is bigger than me, and though the technology we develop on is itself decentralized—with heaps of alternative fediverse projects demonstrating that participation in this ecosystem is possible without our involvement—it benefits our community to ensure that the project itself which so many people have come to love and depend on remains true to its values. There are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities, and while I’d like to think myself an exception, I understand why people would prefer better guardrails.
But it would be uncouth for me to pretend that there isn’t some self-interest involved. Being in charge of a social media project is, turns out, quite the stressful endeavour, and I don’t have the right personality for it. I think I need not elaborate that the passion so many feel for social media does not always manifest in healthy ways. You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.
I remember somebody jokingly suggesting that I challenge Elon Musk to a fight (this was during his and Mark Zuckerberg’s martial arts feud), and quietly thinking to myself, I am literally not paid enough for that. I remember also, some Spanish newspaper article that for some reason, concluded that I don’t dress as fashionably as Jeff Bezos, based on the extremely sparse number of pictures of myself I have shared on the web. Over an entire decade, these tiny things chip away at you slowly. Some things chip faster.
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People used to be enormously critical of Twitter’s (as it was) executives for not using Twitter, but increasingly – when you look at the experience of Rochko, and Bluesky’s Jay Graber – that looks like a smart move.
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Magician loses password to his hand after RFID chip implant • The Register
Richard Speed:
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It’s important to have your login in hand, literally. Zi Teng Wang, a magician who implanted an RFID chip in his appendage, has admitted losing access to it because he forgot the password.
It seemed like such a neat idea – get an RFID chip implanted in your hand and then do magical stuff with it. Except it didn’t work out that way. “It turns out,” said Zi, “that pressing someone else’s phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone’s RFID reader is, really doesn’t come off super mysterious and magical and amazing.”
Then there are the people who don’t even have their phone’s RFID reader enabled. Using his own phone would, in Zi’s words, lack a certain “oomph.”
Oh well, how about making the chip spit out a Bitcoin address? “That literally never came up either.”
In the end, Zi rewrote the chip to link to a meme, “and if you ever meet me in person you can scan my chip and see the meme.”
It was all suitably amusing until the Imgur link Zi was using went down. Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever, and there is no guarantee that a given link will work indefinitely. Indeed, access to Imgur from the United Kingdom was abruptly cut off on September 30 in response to the country’s age verification rules.
Still, the link not working isn’t the end of the world. Zi could just reprogram the chip again, right?
Wrong. “When I went to rewrite the chip, I was horrified to realize I forgot the password that I had locked it with.”
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Insufficiently advanced technology: definitely distinguishable from magic. And speaking of passwords…
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Election 2025 Update • International Association for Cryptologic Research
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This announcement is in connection with the recent IACR 2025 election conducted using the Helios electronic voting system. Regrettably, we have encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the election and accessing the final tally.
For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares.
Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.
This situation is visible on the public election page in Helios, where the trustees are listed: you can see that two trustees have successfully uploaded their decryption share material, whereas one has not. We point this out so that one can independently confirm that the issue arises from the strict cryptographic requirements of the system itself. You can consult this information at: https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/e1130d04-aac6-11f0-95c8-3a40ecaef3ba/trustees/view
After careful consideration, we have decided that the only responsible course of action is to void this election and start a new election from scratch.
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In the first place, hilariously ironic; second, shows why nobody used PGP before password managers (forgetting your passphrase is so easy, and that’s it forever); third, clearly means a lone trustee can void an election, thus delaying or preventing a result they think they will not like. Classic overdesign which fails to consider alternative malign motives.
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Pornhub is urging tech giants to enact device-based age verification • Wired via Ars Technica
Jason Parham:
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In letters sent to Apple, Google, and Microsoft this week, Pornhub’s parent company urged the tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and across their operating systems, WIRED has learned.
“Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” reads the letter sent by Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”
The letter adds that site-based age verification methods have “failed to achieve their primary objective: protecting minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online.” Aylo says device-based authentication is a better solution for this issue because once a viewer’s age is determined via phone or tablet, their age signal can be shared over its application programming interface (API) with adult sites.
The letters were sent following the continued adoption of age verification laws in the US and UK, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content; often this requires using third-party services. Currently, 25 US states have passed some form of ID verification, each with different provisions.
Pornhub has experienced an enormous dip in traffic as a result of its decision to pull out of most states that have enacted these laws. The platform was one of the few sites to comply with the new law in Louisiana but doing so caused traffic to drop by 80%. Similarly, since implementation of the Online Safety Act, Pornhub has lost nearly 80% of its UK viewership.
The company argues that it’s a privacy risk to leave age verification up to third-party sites and that people will simply seek adult content on platforms that don’t comply with the laws.
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Certainly true that getting age verification done via sites doesn’t work well. Whereas by contrast the amount of data that they have for device IDs is colossal and hard to fake.
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The remains of an ancient planet lie deep within Earth • Caltech
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In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the centre of the Earth, one beneath the African continent and one beneath the Pacific Ocean. Each blob is twice the size of the Moon and likely composed of different proportions of elements than the mantle surrounding it.
Where did these strange blobs—formally known as large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs)—come from? A new study led by Caltech researchers suggests that they are remnants of an ancient planet that violently collided with Earth billions of years ago in the same giant impact that created our Moon.
The study, published in the journal Nature on November 1, also proposes an answer to another planetary science mystery. Researchers have long hypothesized that the Moon was created in the aftermath of a giant impact between Earth and a smaller planet dubbed Theia, but no trace of Theia has ever been found in the asteroid belt or in meteorites. This new study suggests that most of Theia was absorbed into the young Earth, forming the LLVPs, while residual debris from the impact coalesced into the Moon.
The research was led by Qian Yuan, O.K. Earl Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate in the laboratories of both Paul Asimow (MS ’93, PhD ’97), the Eleanor and John R. McMillan Professor of Geology and Geochemistry; and Michael Gurnis, the John E. And Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics and Clarence R. Allen Leadership Chair, director of Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory, and director of the Schmidt Academy for Software Engineering at Caltech.
…why did Theia’s material clump into the two distinct blobs instead of mixing together with the rest of the forming planet? The researchers’ simulations showed that much of the energy delivered by Theia’s impact remained in the upper half of the mantle, leaving Earth’s lower mantle cooler than estimated by earlier, lower-resolution impact models. Because the lower mantle was not totally melted by the impact, the blobs of iron-rich material from Theia stayed largely intact as they sifted down to the base of the mantle, like the colored masses of paraffin wax in a turned-off lava lamp.
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The reckoning now is that Theia came from the inner solar system and yeeted into the early Earth. Our existence looks more and more like the craziest set of coincidences.
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Top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign actors • Daily Beast
Jack Revell:
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Elon Musk’s social media site X has rolled out a new feature in an effort to increase transparency—and unwittingly revealed that many of the site’s top MAGA influencers are actually foreign actors.
The new “About This Account” feature, which became available to X users on Friday, allows others to see where an account is based, when they joined the platform, how often they have changed their username, and how they downloaded the X app.
Upon rollout, rival factions began to inspect just where their online adversaries were really based on the combative social platform—with dozens of major MAGA and right-wing influencer accounts revealed to be based overseas.
“This is easily one of the greatest days on this platform,” wrote Democratic influencer Harry Sisson. “Seeing all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats, like myself and many on here, who have been warning about this”.
Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.
In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe. An Ivanka Trump fan account, IvankaNews, has 1 million followers and frequently posts about the dangers of Islam, the threat of illegal immigration and support for Trump. That account is based in Nigeria.
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The revelations have been amazing. (They’re found by clicking on the “Joined” date with a disclosure arrow on the user’s profile.) A pro-Scottish independence account turned out to be based in Iran, operating via the Iran App Store – that is, the X app was downloaded from the Iranian version of the App Store.
There are surely plenty more to come. It’s a feature that looks obvious in retrospect; it’s revealing the many accounts based in India, Pakistan and other low-income countries where accounts have used the monetisation feature to post ragebait for profit.
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A startup’s bid to dim the Sun • The New Yorker
Elizabeth Kolbert:
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Stardust is the name of a small startup with enormous ambitions. The company, which is based in Israel and registered in Delaware, proposes to do nothing less than dim the sun. Its business plan is modelled on volcanoes. In a major eruption, millions of tons of sulphur dioxide get thrown up into the stratosphere. There, the gas reacts to form droplets of sulphuric acid that scatter sunlight back to space. The result is that less energy reaches the Earth and the planet cools. After Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, blew its top, in 1991, average global temperatures dipped by almost 1º Fahrenheit.
Stardust seeks to market eruptions of its own. It is working to develop highly reflective particles that could be sprayed above the clouds, where they would drift around, mirrorlike, and, the theory goes, help combat global warming. The company calls this scheme “sunlight reflection technology,” although it is more commonly known as solar geoengineering. In one form or another, the idea has been kicking around for decades, but Stardust has taken it a major—some might say terrifying—step forward.
The company says that it has created a new sort of reflective particle, the specific makeup of which it has so far declined to reveal. (It states that the particles are made from a material that is “safe for humans and ecosystems.”) And recently it announced that it had raised $60m in venture capital to pursue its plans, which include developing a dispersal system that could be used to spray the particles into the stratosphere.
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As I’ve said before, geoengineering is going to be tried by scientists, governments, private investors and billionaires. Only two (maybe only one) of those take any notice of being told not to do things.
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What about making space stations…inflatable? • Works in Progress Magazine
Angadh Nanjangud on how to create rotating space stations that could generate Earth-like gravity:
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Assembling the ISS meant launching more than 40 rockets over several years (plus even more launches for cargo resupply and repairs). Even with all these launches, the resultant space station is so small that it can support a typical crew of only seven, a little over twice what the first ever space station, Salyut 1, managed in 1972.
Even with the huge cost reductions in delivering payloads into space made by SpaceX, the sheer scale of materials needed for one of these structures makes it hard to imagine that modular in-orbit assembly will scale to von Braun’s anticipated 80 humans or the 100 people that SpaceX’s Starship is intended to hold any time soon. Civilization-scale megastructures like the Stanford Torus and O’Neill cylinders, which might hold tens of thousands to millions of people, appear even more outlandish today than when they were first proposed half a century ago.
The bottleneck is using small ‘tin can’ modular spacecraft as the centrepiece for assembly. There is a viable alternative, but to find it we need to look to pre-Apollo space technology.
Between 1959 and 1962, NASA Langley explored architectures that progressed towards von Braun’s vision of a large space station, without the constraints imposed by modular construction.
A 1959 conference instigated by Larry Loftin, Director of Aeronautical Research at NASA Langley, came up with two prototypes for ‘unitized’ structures, structures that eliminated or reduced the need for in-orbit assembly.
The first idea explored inflating large Goodyear tire tubes into wheel-shaped space stations. Made from soft materials like rubber and nylon, the Langley team was concerned that these tires would be vulnerable to collisions with micrometeorites hurtling through space that could puncture the station, with fatal outcomes.
The second idea came from North American Aviation, which proposed a series of (mostly) rigid hexa gonal space stations. This resulted in a 15-foot prototype, made from six rigid hinge-connected pipes. This design folded neatly into a rocket for launch, deploying automatically once in orbit. The rigidity of its habitable elements offered better protection against micro meteorite collisions than Goodyear’s rubber donut. Another three inflatable pipes connected the outer habitat ring to a central hub via air-lock doors, which could be sealed in case of rupture.
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The problem of space debris and the calamitous effect of a collision on something so comparatively large seem understated. But: inflatable space stations! It’s wonderfully bonkers.
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Makran or Bust: Tehran’s water crisis gets worse • Global Threads
Peter Frankopan on Tehran’s worsening drought:
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Coverage of the crisis in state-run outlets like IRNA and ISNA has become urgent, even bleak, in recent days.
IRNA’s daily update now reads as 24 hour updates of slow-motion collapse: reservoir levels edging ever further downward, a reminder that rainfall are totals stuck zero, and engineers talking about ‘emergency extraction protocols.’
The Latyan Dam, a critical artery for the capital, is being described as ‘dangerously close’ to inactive due to drought.
Things are looking desperate. Iran’s weather modification and cloud-seeding programmes have been modest in recent years; they have suddenly become central to hopes of salvation.
In the last week senior officials from the Organisation for the Development of Meteoric Water Technologies announced that aircraft (and soon drones) are being deployed to seed viable clouds in catchment regions feeding Tehran. State TV has run segments showing technicians loading flares onto the wings of a small plane, explaining that ‘inducing precipitation’ was now a matter of national security.
Iran has used cloud-seeding before, but never with this level of publicity, nor with this sense of urgency. The Iran Meteorological Organization said it expected rain in 18 of Iran’s 31 provinces; but because the ground is baked so hard, soils have not been able to absorb precipitation, such as at Abdanan in western Iran. Cloud-seeding is not delivering what is needed in the right scale, or in the right place.
Iranian social media has been full of videos showing apartment blocks filling buckets at in the middle of the night, trying to catch the last whisper of pressure before the nightly collapse. Young Tehranis have created crowd-sourced maps tracking water pressure by neighbourhood, shading parts of of the southern part of the city in red to show almost constant outages.
These maps care being circulated widely, sometimes crossing into state-media where they are labelled unreliable and ‘unverified’ – a standard formula when an inconvenient truth is too widespread to ignore entirely.
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There really is very little about this drought in the rest of the media.
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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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 