Obliging providers of new car parks to cover them with solar panels seems a smart idea. Yet the UK government has rejected it, without explanation. CC-licensed photo by ATIS547 on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Hot in herre. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
How phones alerted millions before earthquakes shook Venezuela • The New York Times
Amy Graff and Martín González Gómez:
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Jose Flores was driving with his family to see “Toy Story 5” on Wednesday in Caracas, Venezuela, when a loud earthquake alert went off on his wife’s Google Android phone. Six seconds later, he felt the earth starting to shake.
Venezuela does not have a national early warning system of its own, but people with Android phones received alerts from Google’s Earthquake Alerts system, which can pull data from more than two billion phones equipped with built-in accelerometers. The same sensor that detects rotation on the screen can also sense vibrations from seismic waves.
Google said the system, which is available in nearly 100 countries, sent warnings that reached 11.4 million people on Wednesday, giving users seconds or up to two minutes notice before back-to-back powerful earthquakes struck.
Several countries, including Japan, Mexico, Canada and the United States, have government-operated early warning systems. These largely rely on widespread regional networks of underground sensors that detect earthquakes and can send alerts to most phones — iPhone or Android — via government alert settings that are often enabled by default.
When earthquakes hit, they send out two types of waves that travel at different speeds. The fast-moving and milder primary waves, or P-waves, travel at four miles per second and are less likely to cause destruction. The slower and stronger secondary waves, or S-waves, travel at about half that speed and produce shaking.
When P-waves start radiating from the earthquake underground, Android phones sense the vibrations, start collecting data and send it back to Google servers for processing. The servers use information from many phones to figure out if an earthquake is happening. The phones have to be stationary — on a tabletop or in a bag on the floor, for example, and not in the pocket of someone walking around — in order to sense an earthquake.
The system quickly estimates the earthquake’s location and magnitude and then pushes alerts to phones. All Android phones in the affected region receive the alerts.
…Google started sending out alerts for earthquakes detected by Android phones in 2021, initially in New Zealand, Greece, Turkey, the Philippines and central Asia. It had expanded to 98 countries by 2023.
It’s too early to tell if these early warnings saved lives on Wednesday. But several seconds can provide enough time for people to take action to protect themselves. Most countries recommend that people “drop, cover and hold on” before the shaking starts.
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There are videos showing families looking at their phones and getting out of buildings before the worst hits. Smartphones can save lives. It’s a tiny but brilliant innovation by Google.
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The memory shock: six readings from a supply-chain conversation • Asymco
Horace Dediu:
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Here is a summary of wide-ranging conversation about the 2026 memory-price shock and its consequences for Apple. Six of my answers worth separating out.
1. Why pick on memory? The politics of a commodity
My estimate is that Apple will increase by about $100 the average price of iPhones. Beyond that, I can’t analyze politics. What I do know is there are plenty of suppliers, and the memory is sourced from Asia anyway, which raises the question of why it matters so much that it not be Chinese. The memory makers are in South Korea, Taiwan supplies the processors, Japan is in there with lenses and batteries and camera modules, and there’s plenty of US content too. It’s a global train.If the decision is to pick memory out and call it “strategic”, I don’t see the logic, because the penalty for not doing something is simply that there’s no supply. How does that benefit Americans? Apple is a multinational with good customers everywhere, and of all the components you could single out, memory is a peculiar one to choose.
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Horace Dediu is back analysing Apple stuff! He’s always worth listening to. There are five more points. Of course if Apple is feeling the pinch, then so is everyone else: IDC is forecasting that PC volumes will fall 11% for the whole year, including 20% in Q4, while prices rise 18%.
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Google caps Meta’s Gemini use as AI demand strains capacity • Financial Times
Hannah Murphy and Stephen Morris:
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Google has put limits on Meta’s use of its Gemini AI models after the social media giant sought more computing capacity than the rival tech group could provide, in the latest evidence of the infrastructure constraints facing even the world’s largest AI providers.
Google told Meta around March that it could not provide all of the Gemini capacity the company wanted to purchase, according to three people familiar with the matter, in a move that has disrupted and delayed some of Meta’s internal AI projects.
Owing to the restrictions, which remain in place, as well as a broader push to streamline AI costs, Meta has encouraged staff to be more efficient with AI tokens — the units that measure AI usage, several people said.
Several other Google clients have been affected by the restrictions, although to a lesser extent, according to one person familiar with the matter. Meta has been particularly impacted because of its exceptionally high demand for Google’s models, the person said.
The decision by Google to cap a large customer’s access to its models offers a rare glimpse into the infrastructure pressures and bottlenecks building across the AI industry.
Despite spending tens of billions of dollars on chips, data centres and power, even the largest tech companies are struggling to secure enough computing power to support surging demand for advanced models and AI services.
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The pinch here is likely to go on for a long time, because there’s no way that demand is going to fall without severe rationing, and the supply isn’t going to be here for months. Data centres don’t appear overnight.
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As Britain bakes, ministers quietly park plans for solar carports • East Anglia Bylines
East Anglia Bylines:
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Last year, the Government launched a consultation on whether new large outdoor car parks should be required to include solar canopies. According to its own figures, a typical 80-space car park could save around £28,000 a year in electricity costs while generating renewable energy on land that has already been developed.
Unlike solar farms, these structures wouldn’t need additional countryside. The parking spaces remain exactly where they are. The only difference is that the empty air above them starts working too.
The consultation had highlighted concerns over costs, differing site conditions and whether a single national requirement was appropriate.
Despite those potential benefits, ministers concluded in a single-sentence update on the consultation page that the proposal “will not be taken any further at this point“. The decision was so understated, it attracted little attention outside specialist energy publications.
The update appeared on the Government’s website the day before Britain entered a record-breaking May heatwave. Now, as another spell of exceptional heat grips large parts of the country, the decision suddenly feels rather more relevant.
This isn’t a concept that has to be invented from scratch. They can already be found in corporate and council car parks, but they remain an exception rather than the rule. France has introduced legislation requiring them over many large outdoor car parks, with at least half of their surface expected to be covered unless exemptions apply. The aim is straightforward: generate renewable electricity without taking additional land, while making car parks more pleasant places to use.
…The countryside charity CPRE was among those disappointed by the government’s decision. Although often critical of large solar developments on agricultural land, it has consistently argued that more solar panels should be installed on rooftops, warehouses, car parks and other previously developed sites instead.
For regions such as East Anglia, where debates over large solar farms have become increasingly contentious, the idea has an obvious attraction.
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Really want to see what evidence tipped the government’s thinking on this. There’s no clue on the response page.
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Mark Zuckerberg urges Meta to explore working with Polymarket and Kalshi • The New York Times
Mike Isaac:
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Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has urged his lieutenants to explore partnerships with the popular prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi as his company builds a similar app, three employees with knowledge of the matter said.
The app that Meta is creating, called Arena, could allow people to make bets on practically anything, aiming to capitalize on how prediction markets have become an increasingly big business. Internally, Meta’s executives have said Arena is different from Polymarket and Kalshi, which accept real-money wagers, because it will instead rely on video-game-like “points.”
But Mr. Zuckerberg has made Arena a top priority, and his plans for it go deeper than previously known. He has asked Meta executives to talk with Polymarket and Kalshi, though it is unclear how partnerships with them might work, said the three employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s target demographic for Arena is 18- to 34-year-olds, the employees added, and Meta is aiming to reach at least 100 million monthly active “predictors” for the app. Arena is being positioned as a place where people can bet on sports, culture, entertainment, politics and finance against friends and family. Executives have called it an app “designed for everyone,” they said.
“We believe that prediction markets are one of the more interesting new content types,” Ime Archibong, a Meta vice president of product who is leading the Arena initiative, said in an internal post last month introducing the app, which was relayed to The New York Times. “With the right containers, the social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.”
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“It’s not betting, it’s not real money!” Pull the other one. There is a smell of desperation; Meta needs more engagement, and desperately wants to find a way to get the young demographic that is abandoning its platforms to come back. And Meta never saw a briefly successful idea it didn’t want to copy badly. Remember when it was going to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra, which wouldn’t actually be a cryptocurrency, just available across Meta’s platforms for its users? That didn’t come to much. Ditto the Metaverse.
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Why carbon capture can’t conceivably solve climate change • ProPublica
Katie Worth, Lucas Waldron, Amy Westervelt and Maddie Stone:
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For more than 40 years, oil companies have been funding research at prestigious universities into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. Among their favored fixes is carbon capture and storage.
An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that boosters of CCS have ignored evidence of the technology’s limitations, or overstated its potential, and convinced the world it could be effective.
They’ve promoted this idea despite the fact that for CCS to work at the scale now envisioned, the world would need to devote almost unimaginable resources. Even if that were done, it might still prove impossible to trap so much carbon dioxide inside the earth.
Optimism has reigned, however, because small tests have worked and because slow global response to climate change has left few other options.
In 2008, the International Energy Agency projected that to stave off dangerous levels of warming, we would have to be burying around 1.6 billion tons, or 1,600 megatons, of CO2 per year by 2025.
Since then, its optimistic projections have continued.
But deployment of the technology has never come close to those ambitions.
Right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.
Some experts point to the CO2 that gets pumped into the ground to help extract oil as proof CCS works. But that process, called enhanced oil recovery, isn’t designed to function the same way and isn’t monitored as stringently.
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It’s fine – all we need to do is get fusion power stations working, and they’ll generate so much energy they can easily filter out the 415 parts per million – yes, .0415% – of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Oh, fusion isn’t available? At all?
The IEA’s rosy projections for how much CCS will be achieved is in stark contrast to its gloomy forecasts about solar. Strange, that.
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Sony PlayStation is deleting 551 movies from customers’ accounts, reminding us nothing digital is ever truly ours • Kotaku
John Walker:
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Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.
This news was brought to people’s attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week. Along with the unapologetic news that the purchased movies would be deleted from their account on September 1, the message concluded with, “Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.” The same warning is now reproduced in full on the PlayStation website, along with the list of 551 films and TV series that are being pulled from people’s libraries.
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Just incredible. People might have handed their money to Sony yesterday; today, poof! And people wonder why piracy still has a foothold (and Blu-rays/DVDs slightly less so).
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A $2.5 billion whodunit: the hack that dented the UK economy • The New York Times
Adam GoldmanJane BradleyDustin Volz and Michael Schwirtz:
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Last year, hackers burrowed into the computer systems of Jaguar Land Rover, a crown jewel of British manufacturing. It was a devastating attack that forced Jaguar to lock down its computers and suspend production for five weeks. The hack even put a dent in the broader economy, making it the costliest cyberattack in the nation’s history.
The hack was alarming, but also mysterious. There was never a demand for money, as is common in such intrusions. A loose collective of hackers that included some in Britain took credit. Their claim led to news media speculation that they were the culprits.
They were not. A group of Russian hackers was responsible, according to five people familiar with an investigation into the hack. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
Law enforcement and private-sector cyber-response specialists from Britain and the United States determined that the attack was different in methodology and motivation from the hacking collective, said four of the people.
Authorities are still sorting through the murky details trying to determine whether the attackers were operating at the behest of the Kremlin, or with its tacit assent.…New reporting by The New York Times uncovered other details of the investigation. Microsoft, for instance, had been tracking the Russian group and alerted Jaguar to who had breached its systems, according to four of the people familiar with the case. The hackers had used novel ransomware with an encryption algorithm that some cybersecurity experts had not seen in previous attacks. One described it as “mind-blowing.”
…Some clues emerged as the investigation continued. The attack was highly orchestrated. The hackers exploited vulnerabilities in aging technology, then unleashed advanced ransomware meant to hijack the company’s networks.
Experts say these types of techniques are more common among nation states than cyber criminals who are looking for a big payday without spending much money. Nation states can also fund cybercriminals or provide them with hacking tools.
Russia is the biggest source of cybercrime in the world and its intelligence services have long worked hand in glove with cybercriminals to conduct espionage and carry out attacks, according to western security agencies.
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Om • Daring Fireball
John Gruber:
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Om [Malik] died two days ago, after a long battle against a bum heart.
Om and I often sat next to each other at Apple keynotes. This was not at all surprising or odd, insofar as we’d been friends for 20 years. Folks at Apple PR knew that we were close, and would often pair us together in post-keynote media briefings. I always enjoyed being paired with him. He asked keen questions. He saw through bullshit. He found holes in arguments. He took everything in. When I felt overwhelmed, he seemed serene. Om always seemed serene, period. His own photography reflects his presence.
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Malik was clearly a very popular person within Silicon Valley and the reporting groups around it. The only visibility I had of him was via Gigaom (the blog he ran) and then his personal blog. So it seems appropriate to let John Gruber, who knew him well, write his eulogy.
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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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