Chip foundries are eyeing Colorado for more factories – but will the water supply be sufficient to satisfy them? CC-licensed photo by Rico S on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Got through another one. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook wants you to hold your next meeting in virtual reality • CNN

Rachel Metz:

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Workrooms allows up to 16 VR headset users to meet in a virtual conference room, with each of them represented by a customizable cartoon-like avatar that appears as just an upper body floating slightly above a virtual chair at a table. The app supports up to 50 participants in a single meeting, with the rest able to join as video callers who appear in a grid-like flat screen inside the virtual meeting room.

Headset-wearing meeting participants can use their actual fingers and hands to gesticulate in VR, and their avatars’ mouths appear to move in lifelike ways while they speak. A virtual whiteboard lets people share pictures or make presentations.

“The pandemic in the last 18 months has only given us greater confidence in the importance of this as a technology,” Andrew Bosworth, VP of Facebook Reality Labs, said while addressing a (virtual) room of about a dozen people on Tuesday. He said Facebook has been using the app internally for about a year.

…Headset wearers can view their real-life computer screen in VR via an accompanying desktop app. And Workrooms uses a combination of hand tracking and spatial audio — which accounts for room acoustics and makes sounds appear to come from specific directions — to allow users to interact with each other in ways that mimic real life, except for a sound cancellation feature that eliminates background noise.

But it’s clear Facebook is still working out some kinks. While Bosworth, the Facebook executive, was in the middle of describing how he sees Workrooms as a more interactive way to gather virtually with coworkers than video chat, his avatar froze mid-sentence, the pixels of its digital skin turning from flesh-toned to gray. He had been disconnected.

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It sounds a lot better than Zoom, except you have to wear the headsets. But the disconnection (or poor connection) problem, like the poor, will always be with us. Ben Thompson was quite keen on the fact that you can bring your (working avator of your) computer into the space, and make notes and browse on it. That’s pretty smart, assuming the screen is legible.

I expected to be very sceptical about this, but (if the headset comfort thing works out) it actually sounds like it could be rather useful. Show me to my seat in the metaverse!
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FTC says Facebook ‘bought and buried’ rivals in renewed antitrust fight • Reuters

Diane Bartz and Nandita Bose:

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The FTC’s high-profile case against Facebook represents one of the most significant challenges the agency has brought against a tech company in decades, and is being closely watched as Washington aims to tackle Big Tech’s extensive market power. read more

“Despite causing significant customer dissatisfaction, Facebook has enjoyed enormous profits for an extended period of time suggesting both that it has monopoly power and that its personal social networking rivals are not able to overcome entry barriers and challenge its dominance,” the amended complaint said.

In an effort to show Facebook’s dominance in personal social networking, the FTC’s complaint differentiated it from short video app TikTok and sites like Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest, which it said are not focused on connecting friends and family.

The amended complaint comes after Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in June that the FTC’s original complaint filed in December failed to provide evidence that Facebook had monopoly power in the social-networking market. read more

Beginning in 2007, Facebook invited apps to its platform to make it more attractive but realized that some could develop into competitors, and slammed the door in 2013 to any app that could become a rival but reversed itself in 2018 under pressure in Europe, the complaint said.

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They’re really going to try to define a “social network” as one that connects friends and family? I’ve made more friends via Twitter than I ever have via Facebook. Hope the judge throws this one out too, not because Facebook hasn’t acted anticompetitively, but because the FTC needs to get a workable definition of “social network” that encompasses, well, social networks.
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Facebook’s content report fails to deliver on the transparency it promises • Medium

Brian Boland is a former VP at Facebook:

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the press release references CrowdTangle as a complement to this report. I found that striking since CrowdTangle enables other people to learn from the data and make their own reports while this doesn’t enable any additional external insight.

Except maybe Ethan Zuckerman’s article which I found interesting specifically his breakdown of what’s actually in the report is interesting to say the least.

After reading through the press release and the report itself I came away believing that this entire effort is a PR stunt — similar to their earlier press release which I will get to in the future.
There have already been a number of questions raised about the report and I expect some more over the next couple of days as people dig in more. Either way we should push harder for transparency from Facebook and the other digital platforms.

As I have said elsewhere, Facebook could commit to making this public data available publicly in a searchable tool like CrowdTangle. Without those commitments and no demonstrated effort to be more transparent the solution likely needs to be a regulatory or legislative one. If that is what is needed we should move in that direction and do so quickly.

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The Zuckerman article definitely is interesting: he points out how generic much of it is, and also that Facebook seems to be including “Suggested Posts”, which people won’t actually engage with.
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“We do not feel safe”: a Kabul-based crisis alert app struggles to protect its own employees • Rest of World

Hajira Maryam:

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Ehtesab means “accountability” in Dari and Pashto, and the app, formally launched in March 2020, offers streamlined security-related information, including general security updates in Kabul to its users. With real-time, crowdsourced alerts, users across the city can track bomb blasts, roadblocks, electricity outages, or other problems in locations close to them. The app, which generates push notifications about nearby security risks, is supported by 20 employees working out of the company’s Kabul office, according to Wahedi. 

Despite the company’s single-minded focus on security, the Ehtesab team was caught off-guard by the sudden collapse of the Afghan government over the weekend. “It was inevitable that there would be a significant shift in governance … but we weren’t expecting the Taliban to come in within the first eight hours of the day,” Wahedi said.

Wahedi said her Kabul-based team is working around the clock monitoring and providing security updates across the city. But the nature of their service also makes it a target for any sort of crackdown. “We do not feel safe,” Wahedi told Rest of World. The service is currently avoiding any mention of the Taliban in its security notifications. In light of the security risks, the team is obscuring the identities of female staff members and the company’s entire staff is working remotely. Wahedi is currently out of the country.

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The interview that follows is as concerning as you’d expect. Sample:

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There are young Afghan women who are pursuing non-traditional roles such as in tech, and now, the right to safety and refuge for them is being disregarded. I have removed all evidence that there are women in my team. The morning we knew that the Taliban were near Kabul, we wiped their photos, videos, and digital information to mitigate any safety risks. The second measure we took was to make sure they were working remotely. We also limited their workload, so that they were not under added stress or being tracked.

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Everyone seems to have been surprised by how quickly the Taliban reached Kabul. Which honestly I find surprising. They were rolling up cities like they were collecting Monopoly properties on the first time round the board. The only limit was how long it took to drive between successive locations.
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Toyota succumbs to chip shortage and shuts factories • WSJ

Sean McLain:

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Japan’s largest car maker said Thursday it was cutting production in the country by 40% in September because of a shortage of semiconductors. The company declined to say whether it would shut down plants outside of Japan.

The cuts affect most of Toyota’s plants in Japan and some of its bestselling vehicles. One of Toyota’s main plants near its headquarters in Toyota City, which produces both the RAV4 sport-utility vehicle and Corolla sedan, will close from Sept. 1 to Sept. 17. The nearby Tsutsumi plant that produces the Camry and Lexus ES sedans faces a similar period of closure.

“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to our customers and suppliers,” Toyota said.

The latest problem to hit Toyota and other car makers is a resurgence in Covid-19 infections in southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia, where semiconductors are assembled into small components that control everything from engines to headlights. The spread of the highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus and relatively low vaccination rates have caused sharp production cuts because governments forced plants to limit operations.

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Five weeks ago Toyota beat General Motors for US sales in the second quarter, but was closemouthed on whether this was because it had beaten the chip shortage. Now we know why.

The bigger question: when and on which chips will this start affecting the consumer tech sector? Apple hinted it might affect iPhones and iPads, and if Apple is under pressure then the blast radius must be pretty big.
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Water shortages loom over future semiconductor fabs in Arizona • The Verge

Justine Calma:

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A factory or “fab” for making semiconductors needs a lot of water to operate. It’ll guzzle between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a day by some estimates, using the water to cool down equipment and clean silicon wafers. That’s about as much water as 13,698 to 27,397 Arizona residents might use in a day. Fabs are also pretty picky when it comes to water quality: they need to use “ultra-pure” water to prevent any impurities from damaging the chips.

Industries in the state used up 6% of Arizona’s water in 2019, but that could grow as chipmakers and other manufacturers move in. In March, Intel announced that it will spend $20bn to build two new semiconductor factories in Chandler, Arizona, an expansion of its existing campus there. [TSMC is also looking to build there.]

Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will restore and return more freshwater than it uses. It’s nearing that benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it cleaned up and returned 95% of the freshwater it used in 2020. It has its own water treatment plant at its Ocotillo campus in Chandler that’s similar to a municipal plant. There’s also a “brine reduction facility,” a public-private partnership with the city of Chandler, that brings 2.5 million gallons of Intel’s wastewater a day back to drinking standard. Intel uses some of the treated water again, and the rest is sent to replenish groundwater sources or be used by surrounding communities.

While Intel recycles much of its water, more fabs will mean it will need to send even more water through its systems. The company says that Arizona has been “vital” to Intel’s operations for more than four decades. The state is already home to its first “mega-factory network” and its newest semiconductor fab. Intel used more than 5.2 billion gallons of water in Arizona in 2020 — roughly 20% of which was reclaimed water, according to its most recent corporate responsibility report.

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The amount of recycling is definitely impressive, though note the contrast between that 95% “returned” and 20% “reclaimed”. The former will be a lot less pure. I guess the ideal is a quasi-closed system, where you’d constantly distil the outgoing water and return it – but losses are inevitable.
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Ah, that’s where I left the plug for Social Warming, my new book about how social networks are fuelled by, and amplify, our love of outrage.

Introducing Riverside 2.0: a powerful content creation platform • Riverside

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Since our debut in 2020—a year that surely created many stories to share—we’ve had the privilege of providing a platform for people to share their narratives, from media companies like Spotify and Marvel, to the vice president of the U.S., to everyday people like you and me. 

We continue to strive to create the ultimate content creation platform, and as such, we are thrilled to announce some new features!

Ever wished you could find exact quotes from your interviewees without having to listen back to the whole recording? Or how about wanting to conduct an interview with someone who’s on-the-go with questionable wifi?

Well, we’ve heard you (through our HD recording quality of course) and are excited to make your wildest content creation dreams come true!

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Essentially a video podcast system, but the transcription part will be interesting to journalists and others. ( I haven’t tried otter.ai which is an audio transcription service, well regarded by many.) There’s a definite ramp in the number of automatic transcription services – and, in parallel, of text-to-speech services. Give it five years and human transcription just won’t be a thing.
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Apple defends its anti-child abuse imagery tech after claims of ‘hash collisions’ • Motherboard

Joseph Cox, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Samantha Cole:

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[Following claims of discovery of hash collisions] Apple however told Motherboard in an email that that version analyzed by users on GitHub is a generic version, and not the one final version that will be used for iCloud Photos CSAM detection. Apple said that it also made the algorithm public.

“The NeuralHash algorithm [… is] included as part of the code of the signed operating system [and] security researchers can verify that it behaves as described,” one of Apple’s pieces of documentation reads. Apple also said that after a user passes the 30 match threshold, a second non-public algorithm that runs on Apple’s servers will check the results.

“This independent hash is chosen to reject the unlikely possibility that the match threshold was exceeded due to non-CSAM images that were adversarially perturbed to cause false NeuralHash matches against the on-device encrypted CSAM database,” the documentation reads.

“If collisions exist for this function I expect they’ll exist in the system Apple eventually activates,” Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, told Motherboard in an online chat. “Of course it’s possible that they will re-spin the hash function before they deploy. But as a proof of concept this is definitely valid,” he added, referring to the research on GitHub.

Apple’s new system is not just a technical one, though. Humans will also review images once the system marks a device as suspicious after a certain threshold of offending pictures are identified. These people will verify that the images do actually contain CSAM.

“Apple actually designed this system so the hash function doesn’t need to remain secret, as the only thing you can do with ‘non-CSAM that hashes as CSAM’ is annoy Apple’s response team with some garbage images until they implement a filter to eliminate those garbage false positives in their analysis pipeline,” Nicholas Weaver, senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard in an online chat.

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Greene strikes me as always taking the extreme position (he knows that any hashing function will have collisions; the important question is how often), while Weaver offers the pragmatic one. I think I know which world we live in. If the Taliban take control of the US, then we should worry, but by then we’ll have other stuff to worry about first.
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Apple’s double agent • Motherboard

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

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For more than a year, an active member of a community that traded in illicitly obtained internal Apple documents and devices was also acting as an informant for the company. 

On Twitter and in Discord channels for the loosely defined Apple “internal” community that trades leaked information and stolen prototypes, he advertised leaked apps, manuals, and stolen devices for sale. But unbeknownst to other members in the community, he shared with Apple personal information of people who sold stolen iPhone prototypes from China, Apple employees who leaked information online, journalists who had relationships with leakers and sellers, and anything that he thought the company would find interesting and worth investigating.

​​Andrey Shumeyko, also known as YRH04E and JVHResearch online, decided to share his story because he felt that Apple took advantage of him and should have compensated him for providing the company this information. 

“Me coming forward is mostly me finally realizing that that relationship never took into consideration my side and me as a person,” ​​Shumeyko told Motherboard. Shumeyko shared several pieces of evidence to back up his claims, including texts and an email thread between him and an Apple email address for the company’s Global Security team. Motherboard checked that the emails are legitimate by analyzing their headers, which show Shumeyko received a reply from servers owned by Apple, according to online records.

​​Shumeyko said he established a relationship with Apple’s anti-leak team—officially called Global Security—after he alerted them of a potential phishing campaign against some Apple Store employees in 2017. Then, in mid-2020, he tried to help Apple investigate one of its worst leaks in recent memory, and became a “mole,” as he put it. 

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The problem with double agents is that they definitely have no loyalties to either side, and so will betray either for (usually financial) advantage. Here his complaint is that Apple didn’t pay him enough. So he’s clearly looking for someone who will – maybe NSO Group or similar who might want to get their hands on early releases? Sure isn’t journalists.
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OnlyFans has tons of users, but can’t find investors • Axios

Dan Primack:

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Any other company with growth like OnlyFans would be able to raise big money in a matter of minutes.

What follows is rounded data from a pitch-deck that was compiled at the end of March. The 2021 figures are based on run-rate through the end of Q1, while 2022 figures are OnlyFans projections:

Gross merchandise value (GMV): 2020: $2.2bn (fc 2021: $5.9bn, 2022: $12.5bn)

Net revenue: 2020: $375m (fc 2021: $1.2bn, 2022: $2.5bn)

Over 50% of OnlyFans revenue in March came from paid subscriptions, while more than 30% came via chats. The rest was a combination of tips/streams and paid posts for free accounts.

Free cash flow: 2020: $150 million (fc 2021: $620m, 2022: $1.2bn)

Total amount paid to creators since inception: $3.2bn. More than 300 creators earn at least $1m annually.
Around 16,000 creators earn at least $50,000 annually.

More than seven million “fans” spend on OnlyFans each month. It has even more users who only consume free content.

In short, OnlyFans has a porn problem, even though it never once mentions porn in its pitch-deck (something that multiple investors called “disingenuous.”).

Some VC funds are prohibited from investing in adult content, per limited partnership agreements. Several investors are concerned about minors creating subscription accounts, although the company says it has controls in place to prevent that.

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With free cash flow like that, one could wonder why it needs venture capital investment. A British success story, except nobody quite wants to admit it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Lunchtime on the Masaai Mara is a lot quieter with solar-powered electric vehicles – a neat adaptation.CC-licensed photo by Ray in Manila on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Syntactical. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are dealing with Taliban takeover • CNN

Diksha Madhok, CNN Business:

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On Tuesday, Facebook (FB) reiterated its ban on accounts praising, supporting, or representing the Taliban from its platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, and said that it would remove “accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban.”

“The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under US law and we have banned them from our services under our Dangerous Organization policies,” a company spokesperson said.

…other big social media platforms were less clear about their strategy to deal with content supporting the Taliban.

A Twitter spokesperson said that people in Afghanistan are using the platform to seek help, and the company promised to “remain vigilant” in enforcing its policies, including those that ban content that glorifies violence.

One of the Taliban’s spokesmen, Suhail Shaheen, has an active, unverified account on Twitter with 347,000 followers.

YouTube said Tuesday it will “terminate” accounts run by the Afghan Taliban, clarifying its earlier remarks that suggested the group is not banned from the video platform.

Following repeated questions by CNN, YouTube said in a statement that the company “complies with all applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws, including relevant U.S. sanctions. As such, if we find an account believed to be owned and operated by the Afghan Taliban, we terminate it. Further, our policies prohibit content that incites violence.”

YouTube told CNN that because the Afghan Taliban appears on the Treasury Department’s sanctions list, the platform will not allow accounts controlled by the group.

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Hilariously, Parler – billing itself as “the nation’s premier free-speech social media platform” – demanded that Twitter ban the Taliban on the basis that it’s “uninterested in the free exchange of ideas”. Although there is a lot to ponder in the tweet by CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan: “The former President of the United States is banned from Twitter but the Taliban is not.” (To which a number of people replied: “the Taliban haven’t broken Twitter’s terms of service yet.”)
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Facebook reveals top posts but still won’t share key data about disinformation • Ars Technica

Tim de Chant:

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Facebook released its first report today detailing which content it says is widely viewed on the site and Instagram. The report comes as research and news stories have highlighted how misleading posts and outright disinformation can draw intense engagement on the company’s platforms.

Much of the scrutiny has focused on far-right accounts, which according to Facebook’s own tool, CrowdTangle, receive the most engagement—likes, shares, and comments. For example, Kevin Roose, a reporter at The New York Times, uses CrowdTangle to tweet out a list of the “10 top-performing link posts by US Facebook pages every day, ranked by total interactions.” What his experiment has revealed is that, day after day, far-right accounts and pages from the likes of Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Newsmax appeared on the list, sometimes occupying multiple spots. Critics have pointed to the list as evidence that the platform has become a right-wing media machine.

The Twitter account, Roose said, “drove executives crazy” at Facebook. They felt it was making Facebook look like it favored right-wing accounts. All of that brings us to today.

Facebook released the first of what will be a quarterly “Widely Viewed Content Report”. The report will appear alongside its Community Standards Enforcement Report, an existing release which includes data on hate speech and child endangerment. The newest report is Facebook’s attempt to provide more “transparency and context,” said Anna Stepanov, the company’s director of product management.

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The top 20 viewed content links for the quarter are not at all right wing, and make an odd comparator with the top 10 engagement posts. One feels that something’s just not right about this. Interactions are surely where the real action (haha) is, and even if it’s a tiny fraction of total views in the country/continent/globe/galaxy, it still matters for how it drives American thinking, or just maintains it. “Widely viewed” content might leak across borders, but that’s not quite the same thing. (Roose thinks it’s odd too, unique link to this extract

A CGI replica of Nvidia’s CEO delivered his keynote and no one knew • Input Mag

Tom Maxwell:

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Most people hate giving presentations, but thankfully someday you might be able to give one without actually delivering it yourself at all. Nvidia, the maker of popular graphics cards, revealed yesterday that parts of a keynote speech made by its CEO were actually computer-generated animation — an entire virtual replica of Jensen Huang and his kitchen in the background.

The speech happened in April, and only about 14 seconds of the nearly two-hour presentation were animated. But part of the presentation showed Huang magically disappear and his kitchen explode, which made viewers wonder what exactly was real or rendered. It’s hard to actually identify the fake portion, however, which is the most impressive part.

Granted, creating the rendered version of Huang involved a lot of work. Using a truck full of DSLR cameras, a full face and body scan was captured to create a 3D model, and then artificial intelligence was trained to mimic his gestures and expressions. Nvidia says it also applied some other “AI magic” to make his clone look realistic. Even still, it’s quite an impressive feat that one can watch the presentation and still not be sure what parts of actual, recorded video, and which are fake.

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Impressive, though they must have known just how good it would look. It’s not a risk if you can prepare sufficiently.
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Yes, yes, it’s the plug for
Social Warming, my latest book. Social media, outrage, amplification, and how they interact and make us behave worse and worse.

Leaps, bounds, and backflips • Boston Dynamics

Calvin Hennick on the latest video showing two humanoid Boston Dynamics robots doing kinda-sorta parkour:

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Simulation is an essential development tool for the Atlas controls team, both for evaluating new behaviors prior to robot testing and for ensuring that new software changes don’t negatively impact existing capabilities. But there’s still no replacement for hardware testing, particularly in performance-limiting motions like vaulting.

About that vault: unlike high-flipping gymnastics vaults, a parkour vault is a slightly less flashy method designed to get a runner over a low wall or obstacle – in this case the balance beam, only a few feet high. Atlas places its arm on the beam and then hoists its body over the structure. For many humans, this sort of vault would be relatively easy (especially in comparison to a backflip), but for the Atlas team, it represented a formidable new challenge.

“If you or I were to vault over a barrier, we would take advantage of certain properties of our bodies that would not translate to the robot,” Kuindersma notes. “For example, the robot has no spine or shoulder blades, so it doesn’t have the same range of motion that you or I do. The robot also has a heavy torso and comparatively weak arm joints. Extending our tools to help us find solutions that worked within these constraints was what made the vault an interesting challenge.”

via GIPHY

During filming, Atlas gets the vault right about half of the time. (A natural consequence of pushing robots to their limit is that, sometimes, those limits are met.) On the other runs, Atlas makes it over the barrier, but loses its balance and falls backward, and the engineers look to the logs to see if they can find opportunities for on-the-fly adjustments.

“There are a lot of pretty exciting behaviors here, and some of them are not totally reliable yet,” says Ben Stephens, the Atlas controls lead. “Every behavior here has a small chance of failure. It’s almost 90 seconds of continuous jumping, jogging, turning, vaulting, and flipping, so those probabilities add up.”

Stephens adds that this is the first time Boston Dynamics has filmed two robots performing parkour together. “We had never actually done the two robots together until two weeks ago,” he says on the day the routine is being filmed. “We’re in a place now where it should work. We think we’ve caught all of the major failures, and now it’s just down to those small probabilities.”

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Doesn’t quite inspire the feeling that these are really autonomous robots, though.
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DDoSecrets is the new WikiLeaks • The New Republic

Jacob Silverman:

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Whereas WikiLeaks cultivated an anti-imperialist mystique centered on the cultish figure of Assange, DDoSecrets professes something more modest: an unvarnished commitment to providing information useful to journalists and concerned citizens. As the DDoSecrets website puts it, data must fulfill two criteria: “Is it in the public interest?” and “Can a prima facie case be made for the veracity of its contents?” If it passes that test—and the group, which now has approximately 10 members along with an advisory board and volunteer contributors, decides collectively that they can protect their sources—then they publish the archive, sometimes as an easily downloadable torrent, other times through its slightly more difficult to reach onion site, which requires using the Tor browser. While many archives are published for a wide audience, others are withheld and only offered to journalists upon request; and in some cases, the organization will write about data it receives without publishing its contents.

At its best, the work of DDoSecrets reveals the limits of official transparency, of authorized government leaks and incrementalist beat reporting and FOIA requests that yield pages of useless redactions. Nowhere is this more visible than with BlueLeaks. “Reading the unredacted, hacked documents gives a very different picture than the selections you get from an open records officer,” said Brendan McQuade, author of Pacifying the Homeland, a book about the modern surveillance state. Based on BlueLeaks information [269GB of data about US police lawbreaking and surveillance overreach], he wrote articles that exposed police malfeasance and brought attention to a federal whistleblower suit against the Maine Information and Analysis Center, or MIAC. Maine’s state house later voted to close the site (although the bill never cleared the Senate). To McQuade, and to the members of DDoSecrets, hacked data provides what official channels cannot: truth and the potential for accountability.

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Twitter bans DDoSecrets, and you can’t post a URL to it on there without it being removed, because it uses hacked material. (How does that not apply to Wikileaks, exactly?) Lucky for the Taliban they didn’t take over Afghanistan by hacking anything, I guess.
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Galaxy Watch 4 review: welcome to Samsung’s garden • The Verge

Dieter Bohn reviews the offspring of Google and Samsung’s semi-forced Wear OS marriage:

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I really enjoyed using the Galaxy Watch 4. It has been a genuine pleasure to have a competent and capable smartwatch paired to my Android phone — one that doesn’t have any show-stopping problems.

But the reason I had that nice experience was because I was using the Galaxy Watch 4 with a Samsung phone. If you’re a Samsung user, the Galaxy Watch 4 is an excellent smartwatch. If you’re not, the Galaxy Watch 4 all but forces you into Samsung’s ecosystem. Samsung’s ecosystem is better than it often gets credit for, but it’s limiting. Just as the Apple Watch keeps people on the iPhone, Samsung’s watch will keep people on Samsung phones (or at least get them to install Samsung software and use Samsung services on their Android phones).

If you’d like to use a Wear OS 3 smartwatch that isn’t tied to Samsung, I wish I knew what to tell you. There are no Wear OS 3 smartwatches from other manufacturers on the horizon. After so many years of waiting for a good smartwatch for Android users, it’s finally here — but only for some of us.

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Smartwatches are yet another illustration of how the modular approach (different companies making the chips, hardware, software, OS) is not always the path to dominance in technology. (See also: MP3 players, tablets.)
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Eco-friendly vehicles offer quieter, cleaner safaris in Kenyan reserve • Reuters

Monicah Mwangi:

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In Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve, the Toyota 4×4 Landcruiser of tour guide and driver Sylvester Mukenye glides silently past a herd of grazing elephants, then past a pride of lions lying in the grass.

The animals are completely unperturbed by the proximity of the vehicle because its diesel engine has been replaced by an electric one that eliminates the rumbling noise and, just as importantly, reduces the emission of diesel fumes.

“If you drive here silently, you will of course get much closer to animals, especially the elephants that we are next to right now, because there are no vibrations on the ground and there are no fumes that they get the smell from like in other cars,” Mukenye said.

His vehicle was converted by Opibus, a Nairobi-based Kenyan-Swedish company founded in 2017. It is, for now, the only company in Kenya that converts off-road safari vehicles from diesel and petrol to electric power.

Off-road vehicles are a common sight in Maasai Mara, world-famous for the annual wildebeest migration but these are the first in the usually carbon-heavy business of safari tours to be entirely powered by electric batteries.

Wanjiru Kamau, an electrical engineer at Opibus, said the company had so far converted 10 vehicles used in Kenyan game parks, including three in the Maasai Mara. As well as being more environmentally friendly than diesel engines, the electric motors cut operating costs by half, she added.

“In Kenya our fuel prices are always rising… Why not save on that?” she told Reuters at the Opibus workshop, where assembled vehicles were in various stages of electrification.

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And of course you’d use solar power in Kenya. The accompanying video is a great watch as well.
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Evidence of fraud in an influential field experiment about dishonesty • Data Colada

An anonymous group of three researchers – “Uri, Joe and Leif”:

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In 2012, Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman published a three-study paper in PNAS reporting that dishonesty can be reduced by asking people to sign a statement of honest intent before providing information (i.e., at the top of a document) rather than after providing information (i.e., at the bottom of a document). In 2020, Kristal, Whillans, and the five original authors published a follow-up in PNAS entitled, “Signing at the beginning versus at the end does not decrease dishonesty”.  They reported six studies that failed to replicate the two original lab studies, including one attempt at a direct replication and five attempts at conceptual replications.

Our focus here is on Study 3 in the 2012 paper, a field experiment (N = 13,488) conducted by an auto insurance company in the southeastern United States under the supervision of the fourth author. Customers were asked to report the current odometer reading of up to four cars covered by their policy. They were randomly assigned to sign a statement indicating, “I promise that the information I am providing is true” either at the top or bottom of the form. Customers assigned to the ‘sign-at-the-top’ condition reported driving 2,400 more miles (10.3%) than those assigned to the ‘sign-at-the-bottom’ condition.

The authors of the 2020 paper did not attempt to replicate that field experiment, but they did discover an anomaly in the data: a large difference in baseline odometer readings across conditions, even though those readings were collected long before – many months if not years before – participants were assigned to condition. The condition difference before random assignment (~15,000 miles) was much larger than the analyzed difference after random assignment (~2,400 miles):

In trying to understand this, the authors of the 2020 paper speculated that perhaps “the randomization failed (or may have even failed to occur as instructed) in that study” (p. 7104).

On its own, that is an interesting and important observation. But our story really starts from here, thanks to the authors of the 2020 paper, who posted the data of their replication attempts and the data from the original 2012 paper (.htm). A team of anonymous researchers downloaded it, and discovered that this field experiment suffers from a much bigger problem than a randomization failure: there is very strong evidence that the data were fabricated.

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Paper about dishonesty may be dishonest. No wonder it couldn’t be replicated.
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[P] AppleNeuralHash2ONNX: Reverse-Engineered Apple NeuralHash, in ONNX and Python • Reddit MachineLearning

Asuhariet Ygvar:

»

As you may already know Apple is going to implement NeuralHash algorithm for on-device CSAM detection soon. Believe it or not, this algorithm already exists as early as iOS 14.3, hidden under obfuscated class names. After some digging and reverse engineering on the hidden APIs I managed to export its model (which is MobileNetV3) to ONNX and rebuild the whole NeuralHash algorithm in Python. You can now try NeuralHash even on Linux!

Source code: https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX

No pre-exported model file will be provided here for obvious reasons. But it’s very easy to export one yourself following the guide I included with the repo above. You don’t even need any Apple devices to do it.

Early tests show that it can tolerate image resizing and compression, but not cropping or rotations.
Hope this will help us understand NeuralHash algorithm better and know its potential issues before it’s enabled on all iOS devices.

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To be clear, this is the system that detects CSAM in your photo library before upload. The writer does explain why s/he is confident the system as recreated is what’s there. Apparently there are 200 “layers” of neural network in the hashing system, though I don’t know if that’s a lot or a little (I suspect “a lot”).

The discovery opens up lots of possibilities, such as (one person suggested) training a generative adversarial network (GAN) to create images that trip it yet aren’t CSAM. (One collision of two non-CSAM photos has already been found.) But of course Apple will just check them manually, and if there are too many innocent collisions it will raise the threshold above 30 photos.
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Brazilian stripe adventure • Dave Birch’s blog

Dave Birch on Mastercard’s announcement that it will stop issuing cards with magnetic stripes from 2024:

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A few years ago, and already a few years after I had been enjoying the fact that Kazakhstan was migrating to chip and pin when Kansas wasn’t, I had to go to São Paulo for a few days to work with some of the Brazilian banks. I can’t remember why, exactly ,but I think it was something to do with mobile payments. Anyway, when it came time for me to leave I found a taxi and set off for the airport.

While pottering along the freeway I remembered that I didn’t have any cash with me, because I never do, and so I wanted to know if the taxi could take payment by card. I took out my wallet and gestured at a credit card and looked quizzically at the driver. The driver signalled and turned off of the freeway onto some side roads. After a few minutes of driving through a retail area, which is mainly shoe shops as I recall, we turned off again onto some smaller roads and went into a distinctly shady part of town.

At this point I began to panic slightly.

Cursing my stupidity for waving around a wallet full of cards and naturally assuming that I was about to be robbed, I began to calmly assemble my tactics. I figured that so long as I could retain my passport then things would be okay. After all, credit cards could be replaced by the banks (as indeed they often were at though at that time) and the computer belonged to the company not me, so whatever. I surreptitiously removed my passport from my jacket pocket and hoping that the driver would not notice, slid it down my leg and into one of my socks where I hoped it would remain throughout my impending ordeal.

The car pulled up at a shack that looked for all the world like a bandit headquarters from Mad Max and the driver shouted something to the unseen denizens. I thought for a moment about trying to make a run for it but realised I wouldn’t really get very far and would likely only inflame the situation, so I stayed put to await the inevitable. Sure enough, a young man dressed in jeans and some sort of football shirt came out from behind the shack and jogged towards the car with something metallic in his hand.

He reached the car and pulled open the door and thrust toward me, glinting in the sunlight… a chip and pin terminal.

I put the card in, punched in my pin, waited for my receipt and continued to the airport.

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Americans have no idea how backward their financial systems are. He also had this post from 2014 asking why his cards have mag strips at all.
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How extreme weather is hitting airlines • Financial Times

Claire Bushey and Philip Georgiadis:

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This month, storms forced the cancellation of more than 300 flights at both Chicago’s O’Hare airport and Dallas/Fort Worth airport in Texas. In July, eight flights in Denver were cancelled and another 300 delayed due to smoke from forest fires burning in the US Pacific Northwest. Extreme heat affected take-offs in Las Vegas and Colorado earlier this summer.

The disruptions are in line with a trend: weather-related flight cancellations and delays have increased over the past two decades in the US and Europe, regulatory data shows. While it is difficult to link any individual storm or heatwave to climate change, scientific studies have found they will become more frequent or intense as Earth grows warmer.

The International Civil Aviation Organization, the UN standard-setting body, found in a 2019 poll of member states that three-quarters of respondents said the airline industry already was experiencing some impact from climate change.

“It is something that is absolutely on our minds, as far as how we’re going to be able to continue to run the flight schedule, especially with the growth that we have planned for the future,” said David Kensick, managing director of global operations at United Airlines. “With climate change, we are seeing some of that weather that’s hard to predict, so we need to be better at dealing with it.”

Airlines contribute about 2% of global carbon-dioxide emissions globally, though counting other substances spewed from aircraft, some studies indicate their climate impact is bigger.

The potential impacts of climate change on the industry are far-reaching. In the short term, intense weather conditions present an operational headache. Forced flight diversions and cancellations add costs to an industry that haemorrhaged billions of dollars during the pandemic.

In the longer term, airlines believe changing wind patterns will alter flight routes and fuel consumption. It will probably take longer to fly from Europe to the US as the jet stream above the north Atlantic changes, for example.

“Aviation will be a victim of climate change as well as, in many people’s eyes, a villain,” said Paul Williams, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in the UK.

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Once again, the thing of not seeing the problem if your salary depends on not seeing it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The inventor of the sudoku has died, leaving a legacy of satisfied commuters and logicians. CC-licensed photo by Pedro Vera on Flickr.

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We have hit “peak car” • Big Think

Tom Standage, arguing that we have hit “peak car”:

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Peak-car theorists attribute it to several overlapping factors. Most people now live in cities, most vehicle miles are driven in cities rather than rural areas, and the decline in driving is chiefly a decline in urban driving. The cost and hassle of car ownership has increased as traffic congestion has increased and cities have introduced congestion charging zones and pedestrianized parts of city centers and made parking scarcer and more expensive. For many urbanites, but particularly the young, cars are no longer regarded as essential, as smartphones let them shop and socialize online. The steady shift toward e-commerce also means cars are needed for fewer shopping trips. And when a car is needed, for a weekend away or to help a friend move house, car-sharing and rental services are readily accessible.

In recent years restrictions on car use in cities have become more severe, with the closure of some roads, or some areas, to private cars altogether. This has even been the case in car-loving America, as shown by the closures to private cars of Market Street in San Francisco and Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, to make more room for public transport. Some cities have announced that they will ban nonelectric cars altogether in the 2030s or 2040s, to improve air quality and reduce carbon emissions. Such moves are sometimes decried as a “war on the car.”

But even many motorists now support them: a survey of ten thousand people carried out in 2017 in ten European capital cities, for example, found that 63% of residents owned a car, but 84% said they would like to see fewer cars on the roads in their city. And just as car ownership has become less convenient, alternatives to car use — ride-hailing, bike-sharing, and other mobility services — have proliferated. Travel-planning apps also make public transport a more attractive option, by showing when buses, trains, or trams will arrive, and how to combine them to complete a journey. But the arrival of those alternatives seems merely to have accelerated what was, in Western countries at least, an existing trend that had been going on for some years.

The coronavirus pandemic seems likely, on balance, to accelerate it further. Fear of contagion has discouraged use of public transport and prompted some people to commute by car instead. But this seems unlikely to herald a global boom in car sales.

«

Opposition to cars partly comes from the congestion but also the pollution. Ironic if it’s the tangible effect on the atmosphere at ground level that help lead to change that the rest of the atmosphere needs.
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Afghans scramble to delete digital history, evade biometrics • News Trust

Rina Chandran:

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Thousands of Afghans struggling to ensure the physical safety of their families after the Taliban took control of the country have an additional worry: that biometric databases and their own digital history can be used to track and target them.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned of “chilling” curbs on human rights and violations against women and girls, and Amnesty International on Monday said thousands of Afghans – including academics, journalists and activists – were “at serious risk of Taliban reprisals”.

After years of a push to digitise databases in the country, and introduce digital identity cards and biometrics for voting, activists warn these technologies can be used to target and attack vulnerable groups.

“We understand that the Taliban is now likely to have access to various biometric databases and equipment in Afghanistan,” the Human Rights First group wrote on Twitter on Monday. “This technology is likely to include access to a database with fingerprints and iris scans, and include facial recognition technology,” the group added.

The US-based advocacy group quickly published a Farsi-language version of its guide on how to delete digital history – that it had produced last year for activists in Hong Kong – and also put together a manual on how to evade biometrics.

Tips to bypass facial recognition include looking down, wearing things to obscure facial features, or applying many layers of makeup, the guide said, although fingerprint and iris scans were difficult to bypass.

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Why governments shouldn’t store biometrics. A lesson that we have to learn again and again.
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WhatsApp shuts down Taliban helpline in Kabul • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia:

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WhatsApp has shut down a complaints helpline set up by the Taliban when it took control of Kabul, after the messaging app came under pressure to block the group from using its services.

The complaints number was supposed to act as an emergency hotline for civilians to report violence, looting or other problems. The Taliban advertised the helpline on Sunday when it captured the city, and has used similar WhatsApp hotlines in the past, for example when it took over the city of Kunduz in 2016.

After taking Kabul, the Taliban pledged to create a stable government and not to harm the “life, property and honour” of citizens.

Facebook, the owner of WhatsApp, said it had blocked the number on Tuesday, along with other “official Taliban channels”, and added that it was actively scanning group names, descriptions and profile pictures on the messaging app to try to prevent the Taliban from using it. It added that its team of native Dari and Pashto speakers were “helping to identify and alert us to emerging issues on the platform”.

Critics in the US have attacked WhatsApp, along with other social media platforms, for not taking more action to shut down Taliban communications.

But experts in the region said that shutting down the WhatsApp numbers was “absurd” and “unhelpful” at a time when the military group was in effect governing the country, and citizens in Kabul were facing looting, panic and chaos. 

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That’s certainly a poser for Facebook. If the Taliban is proscribed in the US, can it use WhatsApp officially? (No, Facebook thinks.)
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Shipping bottlenecks set to prolong supply chain turmoil • Financial Times

Harry Dempsey, Chris Giles and Primrose Riordan :

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The closure of a terminal at the world’s third-busiest container port is only the latest sign that turmoil in ocean shipping could run into next year, posing a threat to global economic growth as chronic delays and soaring transport costs may leave demand unmet and push up consumer prices.

A coronavirus outbreak led to a partial shutdown at Ningbo-Zhoushan port last week and the resulting suspension of inbound and outbound container ships reduced the port’s capacity by a fifth. It follows another Chinese outbreak in May, which led to a three-week long closure of the Yantian terminal in Shenzhen and created knock-on effects in international shipping.

A relentless surge in shipping prices and persistent bottlenecks at ports around the world have added to the barrage of problems affecting supply chains. These include the semiconductor crunch and the rising price of raw materials, to truck driver shortages as retailers stock up ahead of the peak shopping season.

Importers and exporters are fighting to recoup costs caused by a rise in shipping costs, which have soared to about $15,800 to move a 40-foot container from China to the US west coast — a tenfold jump on pre-pandemic levels and up by half on last month, according to data provider Freightos.

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This, probably more than the Taliban, is what’s going to really affect us in the coming year.
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Culture change and conflict at Twitter • SF Gate

Kate Conger:

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Soon after joining Twitter in 2019, Dantley Davis gathered his staff in a conference room at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Twitter was too nice, he told the group, and he was there to change it.

Davis, the company’s new vice president of design, asked employees to go around the room, complimenting and critiquing one another. Tough criticism would help Twitter improve, he said. The barbs soon flew. Several attendees cried during the two-hour meeting, said three people who were there.

Davis, 43, has played a key role in a behind-the-scenes effort over the past two years to remake Twitter’s culture. The company had long been slow to build products, and under pressure from investors and users, executives landed on a diagnosis: Twitter’s collaborative environment had calcified, making workers reluctant to criticize one another. Davis, the company believed, was one of the answers to that problem.

The turmoil that followed revealed the trade-offs and conflicts that arise when companies attempt dramatic cultural shifts and put the onus on hard-nosed managers to make that change happen.

Davis repeatedly clashed with employees because of his blunt style. His treatment of workers was also the subject of several investigations by Twitter’s employee relations department, and of complaints to Jack Dorsey, the CEO, that too many people were leaving.

Company officials acknowledge that Davis may have gone too far at times, and he has promised to tone down the way he criticizes people. But they make no apologies and have even given him a more senior job title. Employee dissatisfaction, they said, is sometimes the cost of shaking things up.

“This is actually a Twitter culture change that we’ve been trying to drive,” said Jennifer Christie, Twitter’s head of human resources.

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Since you’re wondering, Dantley has black and Korean heritage. Sounds like it has been quite the bracing experience at Twitter. Makes it sound more like the average newspaper office now.
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Why is it so hard to be rational? • The New Yorker

Joshua Rothman met his friend Greg, the most rational person he’d ever known, at college:

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When I was looking to buy a house, Greg walked me through the trade-offs of renting and owning (just rent); when I was contemplating switching careers, he stress-tested my scenarios (I switched). As an emotional and impulsive person by nature, I found myself working hard at rationality. Even Greg admitted that it was difficult work: he had to constantly inspect his thought processes for faults, like a science-fictional computer that had just become sentient.

Often, I asked myself, How would Greg think? I adopted his habit of tracking what I knew and how well I knew it, so that I could separate my well-founded opinions from my provisional views. Bad investors, Greg told me, often had flat, loosely drawn maps of their own knowledge, but good ones were careful cartographers, distinguishing between settled, surveyed, and unexplored territories. Through all this, our lives unfolded. Around the time I left my grad program to try out journalism, Greg swooned over his girlfriend’s rational mind, married her, and became a director at a hedge fund. His net worth is now several thousand times my own.

Meanwhile, half of Americans won’t get vaccinated; many believe in conspiracy theories or pseudoscience. It’s not that we don’t think—we are constantly reading, opining, debating—but that we seem to do it on the run, while squinting at trolls in our phones. This summer, on my phone, I read a blog post by the economist Arnold Kling, who noted that an unusually large number of books about rationality were being published this year, among them Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” (Viking) and Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t” (Portfolio). It makes sense, Kling suggested, for rationality to be having a breakout moment.

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It really does, though it would be nice if it were even more widespread.
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Alligator handler recovering after attack, daring rescue • Associated Press

Sophia Eppolito:

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A Utah reptile center employee is recovering after an alligator yanked her into its enclosure during a presentation, thrashing her around before a fast-acting visitor leapt inside and helped free her from its jaws.

Video taken by a guest shows an unidentified handler at Scales & Tails Utah, in suburban Salt Lake City, talking to some adults and children about the alligator Saturday when it bit her hand and dragged her into the water.

Shane Richins, the company’s owner, said in an interview Monday that the handler was opening the enclosure to feed the alligator as usual, but this time the reptile “got a little extra spunky.”

He said the center normally has a strict policy for a second handler to be nearby when employees are working with the alligators. But that hasn’t been enforced in recent years if the worker isn’t planning to enter the enclosure, he said.

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The video is quite the watch: the alligator is a bit nonplussed at first but then the visitor discovers he has a tiger by the tail, so to speak.
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Sudoku creator Maki Kaji dies aged 69 in Japan • ITV News

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Sudoku creator Maki Kaji has died aged 69 at his home in Japan.

Mr Kaji, who had been suffering from bile duct cancer, died on 10 August near Tokyo.

Known as the Godfather of Sudoku, Mr Kaji created the puzzle to be easy for children and for those who did not want to think too hard.

The puzzle became a huge hit in the UK after a fan from New Zealand pitched it and got it published in The Times in 2004.

It soon became a national obsession and a popular pastime on commutes.

The term ‘Sudoku’ is made up of the Japanese characters for “number” and “single”.

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Died aged 69, going to be buried on 23/8 at 14:57.
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T-Mobile confirms it was hacked • Vice

Joseph Cox:

»

The seller told Motherboard that 100 million people had their data compromised in the breach. In the forum post, they were offering data on 30 million people for 6 bitcoin, or around $270,000.

They told Motherboard at the time that T-Mobile had seemingly kicked them out of the company’s networks. T-Mobile’s announcement corroborates that somewhat, saying, “We are confident that the entry point used to gain access has been closed, and we are continuing our deep technical review of the situation across our systems to identify the nature of any data that was illegally accessed.”

Motherboard has seen samples of the data, and confirmed they contained accurate information on T-Mobile customers. The data includes social security numbers, phone numbers, names, physical addresses, unique IMEI numbers, and driver license information, the seller said.

“We have been working around the clock to investigate claims being made that T-Mobile data may have been illegally accessed. We take the protection of our customers very seriously and we are conducting an extensive analysis alongside digital forensic experts to understand the validity of these claims, and we are coordinating with law enforcement,” T-Mobile’s announcement added.

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Every database gets hacked eventually. Enough people trying, in time they’ll find a hole. It’s like the infinite monkeys, but they only have to get one word right.
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‘Bad News’: selling the story of disinformation • Harper’s Magazine

Joseph Bernstein:

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When dezinformatsiya appeared as an entry in the 1952 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, its meaning was ruthlessly ideological: “Dissemination (in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended to mislead public opinion. The capitalist press and radio make wide use of dezinformatsiya.” Today, journalists, academics, and politicians still frame the disinformation issue in martial language, as a “war on truth” or “weaponized lies.” In the new context, however, bad information is a weapon wielded in an occasionally violent domestic political conflict rather than a cold war between superpowers.

Because the standards of the new field of study are so murky, the popular understanding of the persuasive effects of bad information has become overly dependent on anecdata about “rabbit holes” that privilege the role of novel technology over social, cultural, economic, and political context. (There are echoes of Cold War brainwashing fears here.) These stories of persuasion are, like the story of online advertising, plagued by the difficulty of disentangling correlation from causation. Is social media creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them? The latter possibility has embarrassing implications for the media and academia alike.

An even more vexing issue for the disinformation field, though, is the supposedly objective stance media researchers and journalists take toward the information ecosystem to which they themselves belong. Somewhat amazingly, this attempt has taken place alongside an agonizing and overdue questioning within the media of the harm done by unexamined professional standards of objectivity.

Like journalism, scholarship, and all other forms of knowledge creation, disinformation research reflects the culture, aspirations, and assumptions of its creators. A quick scan of the institutions that publish most frequently and influentially about disinformation: Harvard University, the New York Times, Stanford University, MIT, NBC, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc. That the most prestigious liberal institutions of the pre-digital age are the most invested in fighting disinformation reveals a lot about what they stand to lose, or hope to regain.

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He seems to be saying that people who worry about disinformation are fooling themselves and just want the old certitudes back. I’m not sure it’s that simple.
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Technology may be wreaking havoc on our morality • Vox

Sigal Samuel:

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It was on the day I read a Facebook post by my sick friend that I started to really question my relationship with technology.

An old friend had posted a status update saying he needed to rush to the hospital because he was having a health crisis. I half-choked on my tea and stared at my laptop. I recognized the post as a plea for support. I felt fear for him, and then … I did nothing about it, because I saw in another tab that I’d just gotten a new email and went to check that instead.

After a few minutes scrolling my Gmail, I realized something was messed up. The new email was obviously not as urgent as the sick friend, and yet I’d acted as if they had equal claims on my attention. What was wrong with me? Was I a terrible person? I dashed off a message to my friend, but continued to feel disturbed.

Gradually, though, I came to think this was less an indication that I was an immoral individual and more a reflection of a bigger societal problem. I began to notice that digital technology often seems to make it harder for us to respond in the right way when someone is suffering and needs our help.

Think of all the times a friend has called you to talk through something sad or stressful, and you could barely stop your twitchy fingers from checking your email or scrolling through Instagram as they talked. Think of all the times you’ve seen an article in your Facebook News Feed about anguished people desperate for help — starving children in Yemen, dying Covid-19 patients in India — only to get distracted by a funny meme that appears right above it.

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One of the people I quoted in passing in Social Warming pointed this out: social networks make no distinction between the most and the least important. The world is flat – unlike, say, a newspaper where you get bigger and smaller stories.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Yes, saved it for later: the plug for
Social Warming, my newest book.

Water levels in the Colorado river have dropped so far that farmers face mandatory cuts in use – and that could become permanent. CC-licensed photo by John Morton on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Impactful. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

We are no longer a serious people • The Pull Request

Antonio García Martínez thinks about Afghanistan; in the line above he quotes someone who describes himself as a “MAGA leftist” (🤔) saying “Has anyone thought to cancel the Taliban takeover by digging up all its old tweets?”:

»

This might seem flip and ‘too soon’, but the irony [of the tweet] highlights the real civilizational difference here: one where combat is via prissy morality and pure spectacle, and one where the battles are literal and deadly. One where elites contest power via spiraling purity and virality contests waged online, and where defeat means ‘cancelation’ or livestreamed ‘struggle sessions’ around often imaginary or minor offenses. And another place where the price of defeat is death, exile, rape, destitution, and fates so grim people die dangling from airplanes in order to escape.

In short, an unserious country mired in the most masturbatory hysterics over bullshit dramas waged war against an insurgency of religious zealots fired by a 7th-century morality, and utterly and totally lost.

And all we can do in the wake of it, with our brains melted like butter in a microwave by four years of Trump and Twitter and everything else, is to once again try and understand in our terms a hyper-violent insurgency of fanatics, guilty of every manner of cultural barbarism, now running a country with the population of Texas.

What we should have been asking ourselves through four presidents’ worth of Afghanistan involvement, and 2,400 American lives (and God knows how many maimed and traumatized), and almost a trillion dollars, is this: what is our role there? What was the plan, if there ever was one? More specifically, how much are we willing to pay, in American lives and tax money, to impose (for imposing is what we’ll have to do) something vaguely resembling a liberal order in a country more than a few milestones behind us in the real-world Civilization game we’re all playing.

These are the questions a serious people, armed with all the wealth and power of global empire, ask themselves as they administer their dominion. But those are the questions we are not asking, for we are no longer a serious people.

«

The US can break, but it can’t build. (You can also see how Garciá Martinez might not have quite been a great culture fit for Apple.)
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GOP scrubs webpage touting Trump’s ‘historic’ Taliban deal • Gizmodo

Shoshana Wodinsky:

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In the wake of the Taliban’s recent capture of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, it looks like the Republican Party is quietly scrubbing traces of the former president’s deals with the militant Islamist group.

The GOP has pulled a webpage praising Donald Trump over his administration’s “historic peace agreement with the Taliban.” The page, which has been archived here, was first instated in the midst of last year’s presidential election.

“Trump has continued to take the lead in peace talks as he signed a historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which would end America’s longest war,” the now-deleted page read. It also noted that while the now ex-president has “championed peace,” Joe Biden had pushed “endless wars.” Elsewhere on the page, the GOP noted that Trump had “taken action to defeat ISIS and eliminate dangerous leaders.”

It’s worth noting here that Abdul Ghani Baradar, who co-founded the Taliban in Afghanistan and went on to become the organization’s top-ranking political chief, was released from Pakistani jail at the US’s request while Trump was in office.

«

We have never been at war with Eastasia.
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Sonos win booms for small tech • Reuters

Lauren Silva Laughlin:

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A patent ruling in favor of Sonos is being heard by investors. Shares of the wireless-speaker company opened up more than 10% on Monday after a US trade judge said in a preliminary ruling that Alphabet’s Google infringed its patents. Such fights are background noise for US technology firms, but they can help smaller players keep up.

Sonos uses voice technology from Google, and the giant says the $5bn speaker firm sought its help. Meanwhile, with its move into connected devices, it’s no surprise Google encroached on Sonos’ turf.

The stakes are disproportionate. The roughly $500m in equity value Sonos gained early on Monday equates to an irrelevant 0.03% of Alphabet’s market capitalization.

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Originally began in January 2020 – ah, innocent times – when Sonos sued.
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Find out which groups get big tech funding • Tech Transparency Project

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Google, Facebook, and Amazon have built massive influence operations, in part by funding an array of third-party groups. A new tool from TTP shows where the tech money is going.

Big Tech companies are spending record sums on lobbying as they face growing regulatory scrutiny in Washington and the states. But the companies have also engaged in a more subtle form of influence building, funding everything from think tanks to advocacy groups to local chambers of commerce—which are involved in key policy debates and often serve to amplify the tech giants’ views.

It’s not always clear which groups get tech funding, making it difficult to see the hidden hand of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Now, a new tool from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) is shedding light on Big Tech’s extensive reach with these groups. This searchable database gives a quick readout on whether organizations have received funding from the tech companies since 2015.

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The alphabet soup of think tanks around tech that need funding is remarkable. Though it would be more helpful if the “more detail” links actually provided more detail. They don’t – they just link to the companies’ disclosure pages, which are hefty. What would really be helpful would be knowing what proportion of the think tanks’ funding comes from those sources.
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Local and anonymous social media app Yik Yak is back • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

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The new app resembles the original version of Yik Yak from 2014: users can post and comment on short text posts that are only able to be viewed within a five-mile radius. Like Reddit, posts can be upvoted and downvoted, and a separate “hot” feed compiles the top post from the past 24 hours.

Originally launched in late 2013, the app was a flash-in-the-pan success (particularly at college campuses) for most of 2014, when it was valued at $400m by investors. But while the anonymity made it popular for college students, Yik Yak also was rife with bullying and harassment. In early 2016, in an effort to get things back on track, Yik Yak added optional social media handles, which were made mandatory in August of that year, effectively removing what had made the service unique. The original incarnation of Yik Yak ended up shutting down in early 2017, when it was sold for $1 million to Square for its engineering talent and IP.

The new Yik Yak looks to be taking a serious stance on bullying and harassment on its platform, though — something that the original incarnation of the app failed to do. The new owners have posted an extensive list of its “community guardrails,” which include prohibiting sharing of personal information, “anything that could be construed as bullying, abuse, defamation, harassment, stalking, or targeted hate or public humiliation,” and more.

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And you can get kicked off for breaking those rules. American schools are already back, so let’s see how big their moderation team is forced to get (or how big the backlog gets) before the stories start breaking through about people being, yes, bullied on YikYak. (Or maybe they’ll just stay on Snapchat and TikTok, which have risen to prominence in the meantime.)
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Niantic CEO: the metaverse could be a ‘dystopian nightmare’ • Fast Company

Mark Sullivan interviews John Hanke, CEO of the company that created the augmented reality game Pokemon Go:

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There’s this concept of an avatar, or a digital twin, representing you within a digital space. How does that figure into Niantic’s vision for the metaverse?

JH: It’s not as big of a part because when you meet other people in the game you are physically standing in front of them. In some of our games, like Pokémon Go, there is an avatar and you can see your own avatar. We don’t actually even show you other people’s avatars in the game unless somebody has taken over a Pokémon Go gym, and then there’s a version of their avatar that’s standing there, like Marcus Aurelius or something, like the champion of the gym. So you would get to know people a bit through that.

It’s the same for chat. Chat is such a huge part of most of these [virtual] experiences, and by chat I mean online text chat. And it’s never really been a big part of our games because it’s so much easier when people are playing together just to talk to the person next to you. It’s faster and higher bandwidth.

And that’s where the enhanced-vs.-replacement idea comes in. So just making the normal biological stuff better—enhancing or augmenting it. So I sure hope we can affect the industry and get it really fully headed in that direction. I feel like it’s inevitable, like it’s just a better, more natural way to use tech.

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Hanke doesn’t suggest it’s going to be dystopian at all, to my reading.
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Here it is, the plug for Social Warming, my latest book, about why social media drives everyone a little mad – even if they don’t use it.

The underrated material: concrete • Thread Reader App

Ed Conway, a Sky News correspondent, wrote a substantial thread on Twitter:

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What’s the most underrated material in the modern world?

How about CONCRETE?

Often dismissed as boring, ugly & inert.

Concrete is actually surprising, dynamic & incredibly complex.

With that in mind here are a few reasons why we need to start talking about concrete

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We do indeed. It’s a terrific thread (this is on a single page, with photos, no login required). You might know some of the details about concrete, but I’m fairly sure there’ll be something here that surprises you – even if it’s only the scale of the people standing beside the pipe that must be kept turning because if it stops then the heat of the materials inside will melt it.
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California’s dry season is turning into a permanent state of being • Phys.org

David Baker, Brian Sullivan and Josh Saul:

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Drought across the Western US has forced California to ration water to farms. Hydroelectric dams barely work. The smallest spark—from a lawnmower or even a flat tire—can explode into a wildfire.

While this region has always had dry summers, they’re supposed to follow a pattern that leads to relief with the arrival of the annual rainy season in November. But a break is no longer guaranteed.

In fact, there are now both short- and long-term factors drying out the Western U.S. Under the influence of fast-warming temperatures, as documented in detail by this week’s report from the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the region may be entering a drier state. Drought season might be giving way to a drought era.

Here are three forces desiccating the region.

«

Sea currents (La Niña), warmer air drying the ground, and dry air being driven downwards. Telling quote:

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“Modern society really developed in the Western U.S. in the 1900s—that’s when all the infrastructure was built—and we’re experiencing conditions it wasn’t built to handle,” [UCLA climate scientist Park] Williams said. “In the 1900s, society was able to really evolve in a period of ignorant bliss.”

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No more ignorance, no more bliss.
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Colorado river woes: first water supply cuts to hammer Arizona farmers • Sentinel Colorado

Felicia Fonseca:

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A harvester rumbles through the fields in the early morning light, mowing down rows of corn and chopping up ears, husks and stalks into mulch for feed at a local dairy.

The cows won’t get their salad next year, at least not from this farm. There won’t be enough water to plant the corn crop.

Climate change, drought and high demand are expected to force the first-ever mandatory cuts to a water supply that 40 million people across the American West depend on — the Colorado River. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s projection next week will spare cities and tribes but hit Arizona farmers hard.

They knew this was coming. They have left fields unplanted, laser leveled the land, lined canals, installed drip irrigation, experimented with drought-resistant crops and found other ways to use water more efficiently.

Still, the cutbacks in Colorado River supply next year will be a blow for agriculture in Pinal County, Arizona’s top producer of cotton, barley and livestock. Dairies largely rely on local farms for feed and will have to search farther out for supply, and the local economy will take a hit.

The cuts are coming earlier than expected as a drought has intensified and reservoirs dipped to historic lows across the West. Scientists blame climate change for the warmer, more arid conditions over the past 30 years.

Standing next to a dry field, his boots kicking up dust, farmer Will Thelander said “more and more of the farm is going to look like this next year because we won’t have the water to keep things growing everywhere we want.”

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Big oil is vulnerable to climate change. Literally • WSJ

Jinjoo Lee:

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Alaska seems like one of the last places on the planet that could use extra cooling. That is exactly what it will soon need, though, to prevent one of the world’s largest oil pipeline systems from sinking into melting permafrost.

Recent wildfires, floods and droughts across the world are bringing the spotlight once again to the contribution that the oil-and-gas industry has made to climate change. Less talked about is how exposed the industry is itself to unusual and extreme weather. It doesn’t quite threaten the industry’s existence and could even benefit some producers. Shareholders and consumers could be left with the tab, though.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System received permission earlier this year to construct a cooling system to keep permafrost on parts of its pipeline frozen, according to a report from Inside Climate News. Billions of dollars of oil and gas infrastructure has been built on frozen ground. In Russia, roughly 23% of technical failures and almost a third of loss in fossil-fuel extraction are caused by melting permafrost, Russia’s Natural Resources and Environment Minister Alexander Kozlov said at a conference earlier this year, according to a report from the Moscow Times. All told, the Russian economy could lose more than $67bn by 2050 due to permafrost damage on infrastructure, according to the report.

…There is no shortage of ways in which the oil-and-gas industry is impacted by climate change. Floods can disrupt fossil-fuel transportation by barge and rail. A drought can impact oil production too. Reduced water availability can affect fracking and refining operations, both of which require a lot of it.

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Did they ever think of just not doing it? Good grief. Turns out the fossil fuel industry also produces more irony than can possibly be absorbed by the planet.
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Nestflix

Lynn Fisher:

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Welcome to Nestflix: the platform for your favourite nested films and shows.

Fictional movies within movies? Got ‘em. Fake shows within shows? You bet. Browse our selection of over 400 stories within stories.

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It’s a neat idea – you see something flash up on the screen or a billboard in a film or TV programme, usually as a smart little joke. I particularly liked this one. Each one says where it is referenced. (Via Ryan Broderick.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

WhatsApp’s rise has transformed politics, but also presents a challenge for those looking to archive how politicians communicate. CC-licensed photo by Фотобанк Moscow-Live on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. Do not overheat. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

Why nobody’s ever going to do anything about the planet dying • Eudaimonia and Co

Umair Haque:

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Why is China the world’s largest carbon emitter?

It’s not because all those people in China are consuming stuff of their own. China’s level of consumption is about 30% of its economy. That’s a remarkably low figure. For comparison — and these are points we’re going to revisit — in Europe, it’s a moderate 50%, while consumption is 80% of the American economy, which is an astonishingly high figure.

Why is China’s level of consumption so low? Well, first let me point out that it is so low that economists have repeatedly warned it’s too low. They’re right — but in the wrong way. They mean that China should be encouraging people to live like Americans — overfed, undernourished, materialistic, and indifferent. They’re right to note the anomaly — but wrong to say that becoming American is the wrong answer.

China’s level of consumption is so low for a very simple reason. China is the rich world’s factory. America’s in particular. All those Chinese people aren’t working so hard to consume stuff themselves — they don’t and can’t. They’re working away to make stuff for Americans, mostly, to consume. Other rich countries, too, but mostly Americans — remember how America’s consumption is 80%, and Europe’s is 50%?

Now think of America. Think of Americans, selfish, greedy, gorging themselves on stuff. Where does all that stuff come from? Well, it comes from China, mostly.

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OK, this isn’t the most uplifting piece you’ll read this week. But it rings brutally, uncompromisingly true. (There are people who say Haque is “the master of catastrophe“, but I think it’s useful in trying to address global heating to know what we’re up against at the extreme.)
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‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online • YaleNews

Bill Hathaway:

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Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter argue that they merely provide a neutral platform for conversations that would otherwise happen elsewhere. But many have speculated that social media amplifies outrage. Hard evidence for this claim was missing, however, because measuring complex social expressions like moral outrage with precision poses a technical challenge, the researchers said.

To compile that evidence, [Bill] Brady and [Molly] Crockett assembled a team which built machine learning software capable of tracking moral outrage in Twitter posts. In observational studies of 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users, they used the software to test whether users expressed more outrage over time, and if so, why.

The team found that the incentives of social media platforms like Twitter really do change how people post. Users who received more “likes” and “retweets” when they expressed outrage in a tweet were more likely to express outrage in later posts. To back up these findings, the researchers conducted controlled behavioral experiments to demonstrate that being rewarded for expressing outrage caused users to increase their expression of outrage over time.

The results also suggest a troubling link to current debates on social media’s role in political polarization. Brady and his colleagues found that members of politically extreme networks expressed more outrage than members of politically moderate networks. However, members of politically moderate networks were actually more influenced by social rewards.

“Our studies find that people with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their outrage expressions,” Crockett said. “This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radicalized over time — the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage.”

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Crockett’s work in particular was a fundamental discovery for me in writing Social Warming. And Bill Brady was a very helpful interviewee. This new paper confirms, scientifically, a lot of what was anecdotally obvious. Likes and shares condition us around outrage. There’s the feedback loop.
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WhatsApp with that? How communications in Whitehall and Westminster is changing • Medium

Gavin Freeguard used to work in British politics, pre-WhatsApp:

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What is the intent, incentive, context behind every seemingly throwaway message (‘speech act’ if you want to be technical)? They may be very different for all those group chat participants (one wants a conversation, the other wants a screenshot leaked). Look at some of the Cummings/Johnson exchanges: the former seems keen to discuss (and document) detail (and as much of it as possible), the latter to move on. Advisers can advise at length; politicians have decisions to make.

Two participants having very different intentions in and impressions of the same private conversation, which is then shared more widely, feels like a particular form of context collapse. This is where the new audiences may fail to appreciate the original context, having no idea what else was going on at the time or what the different participants were thinking. The internet is flat. But it is simultaneously very hilly, sheltering niche and expert groups ready to pore over each and every political detail. They may see deeper meaning in the disposable, intent in the incidental, cause in the casual. Something that appears black and white may actually be many shades of grey.

The above is a mass of contradictions and tensions. Platforms like WhatsApp are private and used to avoid accountability — but can sometimes end up being very public. Fleeting, but fixed, in how they formalise informal groups; instant, but indelible, turning throwaway remarks into tablets of stone. With endless messages but no official record, there is both a deluge of information and a drought.

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In Social Warming, I do show how WhatsApp (which invaded British politics from 2015 onwards) has radically changed the form and nature of intra-political discourse. Freeguard’s piece is about the question of archiving: how do we capture those discussions between ministers and others?
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Excerpt: How Google bought Android—according to folks in the room • Ars Technica

Chet Haase has written a book about the events of 2005, including the time when Android was just a scrappy startup pitching to VCs:

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The final part of the pitch (and the most important part, for the VCs they were pitching to) was how Android was going to make money. The open source platform described in the slides is essentially what the Android team eventually built and shipped. But if that was all there was, the company would not have been worth funding for VCs. Developing and giving away an open source platform sounds great from a save-the-world standpoint, but where’s the payoff? Where’s the upside for investors? That is, how did Android plan to make money off of a product that they planned to simply give away? Venture capitalists fund companies that they hope will make more (far more) than their investment back.

The path to revenue was clear for the other platform companies in the game. Microsoft made money by licensing its platform to Windows Phone partners; every phone sold contributed a per-device cost back to Microsoft. RIM made money both on the handsets they sold as well as the lucrative service contracts that their loyal enterprise customers signed up for. Nokia and the other Symbian adopters made money by selling the phones that they manufactured with variations of that operating system. Similarly, all of the other handset manufacturers funded their own software development through the revenue generated by the phones they sold.

So what was Android’s play that would fund the development of this awesome platform that they had yet to build and which they would give away free to other manufacturers to build their own devices?

Carrier services.

Carriers would provide applications, contacts, and other cloud-based data services to their customers for Android-based handsets. The carriers would pay Android for providing these services. Swetland explained: “Rather than running and hosting the services [like Danger did for its Hiptop phones], we would build the services and sell them to the carriers.”

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Imagine what things would have been like if Google hadn’t had the foresight to buy it. You’d have the iPhone ignoring the carriers, and then you’d have Nokia and Microsoft, and carrier-versioned Android handsets. The internet landscape would be nothing like it is now. Sometimes history works out OK.
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Why the Afghan military collapsed so quickly • The New York Times

Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Fahim Abed and Sharif Hassan:

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It began with individual outposts in rural areas where starving and ammunition-depleted soldiers and police units were surrounded by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left behind their equipment, slowly giving the insurgents more and more control of roads, then entire districts. As positions collapsed, the complaint was almost always the same: There was no air support or they had run out of supplies and food.

But even before that, the systemic weaknesses of the Afghan security forces — which on paper numbered somewhere around 300,000 people, but in recent days have totalled around just one-sixth of that, according to US officials — were apparent. These shortfalls can be traced to numerous issues that sprung from the West’s insistence on building a fully modern military with all the logistical and supply complexities one requires, and which has proved unsustainable without the United States and its NATO allies.

Officials often turned a blind eye to what was happening, knowing full well that the Afghan forces’ real manpower count was far lower than what was on the books, skewed by corruption and secrecy that they quietly accepted.

And when the Taliban started building momentum after the United States’ announcement of withdrawal, it only increased the belief that fighting in the security forces — fighting for President Ashraf Ghani’s government — wasn’t worth dying for. In interview after interview, soldiers and police officers described moments of despair and feelings of abandonment.

On one frontline in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar last week, the Afghan security forces’ seeming inability to fend off the Taliban’s devastating offensive came down to potatoes.

After weeks of fighting, one cardboard box full of slimy potatoes was supposed to pass as a police unit’s daily rations. They hadn’t received anything other than spuds in various forms in several days, and their hunger and fatigue were wearing them down.

“These French fries are not going to hold these front lines!” a police officer yelled, disgusted by the lack of support they were receiving in the country’s second-largest city.

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The “Afghan military” has been a lie all along, propped up by the west. A mixture of corruption, tribalism (including loyalty to local warlords) and, finally, abandonment gave the Taliban all they needed.
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‘Easy money’: how international scam artists pulled off an epic theft of US Covid benefits • NBC News

Ken Dilanian, Kit Ramgopal and Chloe Atkins:

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Last June, the FBI got a warrant to hunt through the Google accounts of Abedemi Rufai, a Nigerian state government official.

What they found, they said in a sworn affidavit, was all the ingredients for a “massive” cyber fraud on U.S. government benefits: Stolen bank, credit card and tax information on Americans. Money transfers. And emails showing dozens of false unemployment claims in seven states that paid out $350,000.

Rufai was arrested in May at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport as he prepared to fly first class back to Nigeria, according to court records. He is being held without bail in Washington state, where he has pleaded not guilty to five counts of wire fraud.

Rufai’s case offers a small window into what law enforcement officials and private experts are calling the biggest fraud ever perpetrated against the United States, a significant portion of it carried out by foreigners.

Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers and Nigerian scammers have used stolen identities to plunder tens of billions of dollars in COVID benefits, spiriting the money overseas in a massive transfer of wealth from American taxpayers, officials and experts say. And they say it’s still happening.

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Oh, just somewhere between $87bn and $400bn.
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Kuo: redesigned MacBook Air with mini-LED display and several colour options to launch in mid 2022 • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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Apple plans to launch a new MacBook Air with a mini-LED display and several colour options around mid 2022, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said today in a research note obtained by MacRumors. These details line up with previous rumours about the new MacBook Air from sources like Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and YouTube tech personality Jon Prosser.

Kuo said the new MacBook Air will feature an “all-new design” with a similar form factor as the next MacBook Pro models, which are also expected to feature a mini-LED display and flatter top and bottom edges. Previous rumours have suggested the new MacBook Air will also feature a faster Apple silicon chip and a MagSafe-branded magnetic power cable.

Kuo said it is not yet certain whether the existing M1 MacBook Air will be discontinued after the mini-LED model enters mass production, and this could have an effect on pricing. If the M1 MacBook Air is discontinued, Kuo said the mini-LED model will probably start at the same $999 price. If the M1 MacBook Air does remain available for purchase alongside the mini-LED model, Kuo believes it could receive a price cut.

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Having the range of colours would fit in with the new iMac scheme, and the timing – giving the current version plenty of time to amortise any costs from shifting to the M1 chip – makes sense too. Only question is whether the forthcoming MacBook Pro will come in colours. If not, why not?
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Apple executive defends tools to fight child abuse material, acknowledges privacy backlash • WSJ

Joanna Stern and Tim Higgins:

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“If and only if you meet a threshold of something on the order of 30 known child pornographic images matching, only then does Apple know anything about your account and know anything about those images, and at that point, only knows about those images, not about any of your other images,” Mr. Federighi said. “This isn’t doing some analysis for, did you have a picture of your child in the bathtub? Or, for that matter, did you have a picture of some pornography of any other sort? This is literally only matching on the exact fingerprints of specific known child pornographic images.”

Beyond creating a system that isn’t scanning through all of a user’s photos in the cloud, Mr. Federighi pointed to another benefit of placing the matching process on the phone directly. “Because it’s on the [phone], security researchers are constantly able to introspect what’s happening in Apple’s [phone] software,” he said. “So if any changes were made that were to expand the scope of this in some way—in a way that we had committed to not doing—there’s verifiability, they can spot that that’s happening.”

Critics have said the database of images could be corrupted, such as political material being inserted. Apple has pushed back against that idea. During the interview, Mr. Federighi said the database of images is constructed through the intersection of images from multiple child-safety organizations—not just the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He added that at least two “are in distinct jurisdictions.” Such groups and an independent auditor will be able to verify that the database consists only of images provided by those entities, he said.

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First time Apple has put a figure on the approximate number that will trip its detection systems. (How the figure is arrived at is explained in the Threat Security Model, below the next link.) The point about separate jurisdictions is also new. Although quite who is going to have the insight into what’s running on the phone is new to me; who are these “researchers”?
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Decrypting Apple’s plan to scan photos on your phone • Revue

Julia Angwin talks to former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos (who has been *very* busy in the past week) about, yes, that:

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Angwin: The [privacy] advocates are calling it a backdoor. Others have said it’s hypocritical because, in the San Bernardino case, they refused to comply with a court order to bypass the phone’s four-digit login. They said at that time that this order would be like creating a master key to open all iPhones. Is this a backdoor? 

Stamos: I would not call this a backdoor, but I do believe that the way Apple has rolled out device-side scanning has created the possibility of a new type of surveillance becoming popular globally. Most of my concerns are actually outside the United States. If you look at the existing child safety framework in the U.S., the jurisprudence has actually been going against it. 

But elsewhere in the world, there are already bills requiring preemptive scanning for illegality, so this might be part of the EU Digital Services Act, the U.K. Online Harms bill, and a variety of bills in India, for example. 

So while I wouldn’t call this itself a backdoor, my biggest concern is that Apple has effectively opened the door to a type of searching on devices. 

Angwin: Could you flesh out what it would look like if, for instance, India were to start using this capability? 

Stamos: In India, the Hindu nationalist government. Narendra Modi, the head of the BJP and the prime minister, is currently in a big fight with Silicon Valley trying to suppress the speech of his political enemies and to push rules that are seen as oppressive of the Muslim minority. 

India has incredibly broad laws that make speech illegal, such as laws around blasphemy that we don’t have. They have already been creating bills that would require the filtering of speech that is considered illegal in India. 

One of my concerns would be that those bills will now include that phones that are sold in India have the ability to filter out that content [deemed illegal] by the government in the same way NCMEC provides child safety fingerprints to Apple.

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Well, except that Apple posted a “Security Threat Model” paper on Friday which says that it will only include hashes of photos that are in the databases of two separate jurisdictions. So the Indian model won’t work. India could mandate that Apple includes NSO’s Pegasus monitoring software. Apple could tell India to go whistle, and publicise its refusal. The Indian government might face a problem if its citizens really thought it was monitoring them.
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These people who work from home have a secret: they have two jobs • WSJ

Rachel Feintzeig:

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They were bored. Or worried about layoffs. Or tired of working hard for a meager raise every year. They got another job offer.

Now they have a secret.

A small, dedicated group of white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, say they have found a way to double their pay: Work two full-time remote jobs, don’t tell anyone and, for the most part, don’t do too much work, either.

Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play “Tetris” with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off—in some cases, unlimited—to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don’t work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don’t apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.

“It’s two jobs for one,” says a 29-year-old software engineer who has been working simultaneously for a media company and an events company since June. He estimates he was logging three to 10 hours of actual work a week back when he held down one job. “The rest of it is just attending meetings and pretending to look busy.”

He was emboldened by a new website called Overemployed. Started by two tech workers this spring, it aims to rally workers around the concept of stealthily holding multiple jobs, framing it as a way to wrest back control after decades of stalled wages for some and a pandemic that led to unpredictable layoffs.

Gig work and outsourcing have been on the rise for years. Inflation is now ticking up, chipping away at spending power. Some employees in white-collar fields wonder why they should bother spending time building a career.

“The harder that you work, it seems like the less you get,” one of the workers with two jobs says. “People depend on you more. My paycheck is the same.”

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White-collar people working two jobs in the US is just an extension of what lots of blue-collar workers in the US have to do. So it’s a sort of equality at work.
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Possibly there have been enough boosts, but here’s another one for Social Warming, my latest book.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Virtual reality doesn’t photograph well, and doesn’t sell well. So why are we still talking about the ‘rich white kid’ of technology? CC-licensed photo by Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas%2C University of Texas at Austin on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Still hot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The way the Senate melted down over crypto is very revealing • The New York Times

Ezra Klein:

»

Think about it this way: The internet we have allows for the easy transfer of information. We costlessly swap copies of news articles, music files, video games, pornography, GIFs, tweets and much more. The internet is, famously, good at making information nearly free. But for precisely that reason, it is terrible at making information expensive, which it sometimes needs to be. What the internet is missing, in particular, are ways to verify identity, ownership and authenticity — the exact things that make it possible for creators to get paid for their work (for more on this, I highly recommend Steven Johnson’s article “Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble”).

That’s one reason the riches of the web haven’t been more widely shared: You get rich selling access to the internet or by building companies that add convenience and features to the internet. So Facebook got rich by building a proprietary infrastructure for identity, and Spotify created a service in which artists could eke out payment from works that were otherwise just being pirated. The actual creators who make the internet worth visiting are forced to accept the exploitative, ever-changing terms of digital middlemen.

This is the problem that the technology behind crypto solves, at least in theory: If the original internet let you easily copy information, the next internet will let you easily trade ownership of digital goods. Crypto lets you make digital goods scarce, which increases their value; it lets you prove ownership, which allows you to buy and sell them; and it makes digital identities verifiable, as that’s merely information you own.

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Which strengthens my theory that crypto (generally) is seen by Gen Z as the way of getting in on the ground floor of “property” that older generations “don’t get”. Two benefits immediately flow: just like property, its value seems to keep going up (look at bitcoin!); and it creates the tribal effect of the in-group/out-group.
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In new documentary, WHO scientist says Chinese officials pressured investigation to drop lab-leak hypothesis • Washington Post

Adam Taylor, Emily Rauhala and Martin Selsoe Sorensen:

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A discussion of whether to include the lab-leak theory at all lasted until 48 hours before the conclusion of the mission, Ben Embarek told the Danish reporters. In the end, Ben Embarek’s Chinese counterpart eventually agreed to discuss the lab-leak theory in the report “on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.”

Asked in the documentary whether the report’s “extremely unlikely” wording about the lab-leak theory was a Chinese requirement, Ben Embarek said “it was the category we chose to put it in at the end, yes.” But he added that this meant it was not impossible, just not likely.

Ben Embarek said one similar scenario, in which a lab employee inadvertently could have brought the virus to Wuhan after collecting samples in the field, could be considered both a lab-leak theory and a hypothesis of direct infection from a bat, which was described as “likely” in the report.

“A lab employee infected in the field while collecting samples in a bat cave — such a scenario belongs both as a lab-leak hypothesis and as our first hypothesis of direct infection from bat to human. We’ve seen that hypothesis as a likely hypothesis,” Ben Embarek said.

In further comments during the interview that were not included in the documentary but were incorporated in an account by the Danish channel TV2 on its website, Ben Embarek suggested that there could have been “human error” but that the Chinese political system does not allow authorities to acknowledge that.

“It probably means there’s a human error behind such an event, and they’re not very happy to admit that,” Ben Embarek was quoted as saying. “The whole system focuses a lot on being infallible, and everything must be perfect,” he added. “Somebody could also wish to hide something. Who knows?”

«

Who knows indeed, though there’s no doubt China would want to be as controlling as possible. Though the idea that a worker getting infected by collecting samples in a cave would count as a “lab leak” suggests a bit of mission creep on that hypothesis.
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Virtual reality is the rich white kid of technology • WIRED

David Karpf:

»

The technology [of VR and AR] is always about to turn a corner, about to be more than just a gaming device, about to revolutionize fields like architecture, defense, and medicine. The future of work, entertainment, travel, and society is always on the verge of a huge virtual upgrade. VR is a bit like a rich white kid with famous parents: it never stops failing upward, forever graded on a generous curve, always judged based on its “potential” rather than its results.

One reason that VR has been offered such an endless string of second chances (VR’s proverbial lineage, if you will) is that it has played an outsized role in the popular science fiction that our collective image of the future is built around. William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his 1984 book Neuromancer. The term later became synonymous with the World Wide Web, but Gibson’s initial rendering was of a virtual realm that “console cowboys” could enter and exit. Gibson and his cyberpunk peers heavily shaped the culture of 1980s tech—before the dotcom boom, before the tech bros.

When Lanier unveiled his bulky head-mounted display and dataglove in 1987, he was inviting tech hobbyists to be the first inhabitants of the virtual future they had glimpsed in cyberpunk novels. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash and Ernest Cline’s 2011 Ready Player One later were massive science fiction hits whose stories unfolded in a future where VR is a fixture.

When Zuckerberg says that he has been “thinking about some of this stuff since [he] was in middle school and just starting to code,” it isn’t hard to guess what books he was reading at the time. For the Gen X and Millennial tech entrepreneurs who dominate Silicon Valley today, the science fiction stories of their youth have always treated VR as an ambient part of the future technological landscape.

«

I’ve been hearing about (and writing about) VR since 1995, and it hasn’t become any more generally convincing in all that time. Always a niche game thing, never a “grandma wants to try it out” thing.
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You found the link! It’s Social Warming, my latest book.

How private is my VPN? • The Markup

Alfred Ng:

»

while VPNs say they do not log people’s activity—meaning their browsing, who they call, which TV shows they watch—that does not mean they’re not siphoning data from their users and even their prospective customers. 

To get a sense of exactly what sorts of information VPNs are grabbing, The Markup examined the privacy policies of 14 popular VPN companies. We also ran their websites through Blacklight, our tool for detecting third-party trackers. And we searched through our Citizen Browser data for VPN Facebook advertisements to see not only how VPNs are marketing themselves on Facebook but also how they’re making use of that platform’s personal-data-driven advertising machine.

Overall, we found a fair bit of hypocrisy: While the VPNs’ homepages and blog posts highlight their privacy benefits, some of their privacy policies tell a different story.

Surfshark’s homepage, for instance, boasts that it can “protect your privacy with the fastest VPN,” while its privacy policy notes that the company collects user devices’ advertising identifiers for marketing purposes.

“We do collect aggregated data for marketing purposes as it is crucial in making business decisions for customer acquisition and competing in an extremely competitive VPN industry,” Dom Dimas, a spokesperson for the company said.

«

Of the 14 they tested, 10 included trackers. Some of those trackers are feeding back directly to Facebook and Google. But don’t worry, it means the bad guys can’t magically hack into your emails in the café!
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Facebook plans ads revamp in response to privacy concerns • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

“We definitely see that [ads] personalization will evolve very meaningfully over the course of the next five years,” said Mudd, Facebook’s VP of product marketing for ads, in an exclusive interview with The Verge. “And that investing well ahead of that will benefit all of our customers and enable us to help shape that future state of the ads ecosystem.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Facebook to get this right. Apple recently introduced a prompt to iPhones that makes developers ask for permission to track users across other apps for targeting ads. Facebook has said the prompt will likely hurt its revenue growth. Google is planning something similar for Android phones. The European Union is considering a ban on microtargeted ads as part of a sweeping legislative proposal called the Digital Services Act, and the Biden administration recently signaled interest in policing the “surveillance of users” by “dominant Internet platforms.”

Facebook’s new rhetoric about making advertising more privacy-conscious is also, in a sense, admitting defeat. Last year, it mounted a loud PR campaign in objection to Apple’s ad tracking prompt, arguing that Apple was acting anti-competitively and harming small businesses that relied on ads to reach customers. But the campaign ultimately fell flat, and now Facebook is working on some of the same privacy-conscious approaches to data collection that Apple uses.

«

A welcome little bit of analysis thrown in at the end there. So Apple and Facebook and Google are all introducing systems that will process specific elements of your content on your device.
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‘Nowhere is safe’: heat shatters vision of Pacific north-west as climate refuge • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

»

Oregon was supposed to be a tranquil haven for Steven Mana’oakamai Johnson, who moved to the state in 2017 after witnessing his home in Saipan, part of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, menaced by typhoons made increasingly powerful by the warming ocean and atmosphere.

But when the heatwave struck, Johnson, his partner and their dog had to flee their Corvallis apartment, which does not have air conditioning, to stay on the Oregon coast in an attempt to cool down. The surging heat, which followed wildfires that raged nearby last year, has forced Johnson to revise his previous assumptions.

“I always thought this was a comfortable place, that it could even be a host state for climate migrants,” said Johnson, a biologist. “But there has been this big wake-up that things are moving faster than anticipated. It was shocking how hot it got, and how long it took to cool down.”

“In just a few days you’ve seen this big change in how people are thinking about adapting,” he said. “It has changed my view of Oregon. It’s hammered home to me that climate change is inescapable – no matter where you are or when you go there, you have to think about it. Nowhere is safe, nowhere is truly a refuge.”

«

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Hot air • The Critic Magazine

Christopher Snowdon:

»

The government says decarbonising the UK will cost one trillion pounds, but then it also said HS2 would cost £36bn. Since HS2’s budget is now three times higher, the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s estimate of Net Zero costing more than three trillion pounds may be more realistic. And this is in addition to our contribution to $100bn of “climate finance” the rich world has promised to give developing countries every year.

It will not be long before 25 million households are told to rip out their gas boilers and pay £20,000 for a less efficient electric heat pump and insulation. The government will soon stop asking people to eat less meat and take fewer flights and find ways of forcing them. Will the public put up with it?

In France, months of violent protests by the gilets jaunes were caused by the government putting 6p on a litre of diesel. Macron swiftly froze the carbon tax, froze gas and electricity prices and postponed tougher vehicle emission rules. In Britain, the fuel tax protests of September 2000 were the only time Labour lost its lead over the Conservatives in the opinion polls between 1993 and 2005. Gordon Brown responded by cutting and freezing petrol duty. The Conservatives learned the lesson and by 2018 George Osborne was boasting of freezing fuel duty for the sixth year in a row because, he said, the Conservatives were “the party for working people”.

This is reality of ‘climate action’ in a democracy. It’s all fun and games until the public gets involved.

«

Can’t argue with any of that inasmuch as he’s right: we are terrible at taking actions today for the long term. (Oh, except you? How’s your pension looking?) But, equally, it’s not going to be hard to persuade people not to take flights to countries suffering droughts, 50ºC heatwaves, floods or tidal submergence. The question is always what the carrot looks like. Nature’s stick is rather ugly.
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Helping actor Val Kilmer reclaim his voice • Sonantic

»

Last year, we were contacted with an exciting question: Could Sonantic build a custom AI voice model for acclaimed actor Val Kilmer? 

Kilmer, whose Hollywood career has spanned nearly four decades, has starred in scores of films, including blockbusters such as Top Gun, Willow, The Doors, Tombstone, Batman Forever, and Heat. But after undergoing a tracheotomy in 2014 as part of his treatment for throat cancer, Kilmer no longer has a voice that would be easily recognisable to fans. 

The actor has been reflecting on his career recently for the production of his autobiographical documentary, Val. But despite this recent focus on the past, Kilmer never stops moving forward. He and his team knew that building a custom voice model would help him explore new ways to communicate, connect, and create in the future.

From the beginning, our aim was to make a voice model that Val would be proud of. We were eager to give him his voice back, providing a new tool for whatever creative projects are ahead.

«

You can hear the result on YouTube. (It’s also embedded in the linked post.) See, deepfakes can have good uses too.
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Mass mask-wearing notably reduces COVID-19 transmission • medRxiv

A big team from the University of Bristol and elsewhere:

»

Mask-wearing has been a controversial measure to control the COVID-19 pandemic. While masks are known to substantially reduce disease transmission in healthcare settings, studies in community settings report inconsistent results.

Investigating the inconsistency within epidemiological studies, we find that a commonly used proxy, government mask mandates, does not correlate with large increases in mask-wearing in our window of analysis. We thus analyse the effect of mask-wearing on transmission instead, drawing on several datasets covering 92 regions on 6 continents, including the largest survey of individual-level wearing behaviour (n=20 million). Using a hierarchical Bayesian model, we estimate the effect of both mask-wearing and mask-mandates on transmission by linking wearing levels (or mandates) to reported cases in each region, adjusting for mobility and non-pharmaceutical interventions.

We assess the robustness of our results in 123 experiments spanning 22 sensitivity analyses. Across these analyses, we find that an entire population wearing masks in public leads to a median reduction in the reproduction number R of 25.8%, with 95% of the medians between 22.2% and 30.9%. In our window of analysis, the median reduction in R associated with the wearing level observed in each region was 20.4% [2.0%, 23.3%]. We do not find evidence that mandating mask-wearing reduces transmission. Our results suggest that mask-wearing is strongly affected by factors other than mandates.

«

Not yet peer-reviewed, note. But certainly the idea that mask mandates mean people will wear masks, particularly in the US, isn’t that reliable.
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Future Tense: I will defend Microsoft Word to the death • Slate

Torie Bosch:

»

I am deeply committed to Microsoft Word. I see the ascendence of Google Docs—which has been around in various forms since 2006 but has become an unstoppable force over the past several years—as a personal affront. Word is clunky and expensive and all those things, but it’s also wonderful in a lot of ways: The track changes function is superb (even if it takes a little getting used to), it’s customizable, and, frankly, it’s familiar. I know its quirks and its features, I can troubleshoot it, and the mere act of staring at a Word document tells my brain: OK, time to get to work.

I’m not saying Google Docs is completely useless, just mostly so. There are some good use cases—in particular, planning documents. I use it for grocery lists, packing lists, to track expenses. But when it comes to the thing I most need a word processor for—editing articles for Slate—Google Docs utterly fails. It’s the little things: If I delete a bunch of text, then start writing over top of it, Google Docs marks the new words as deleted text. Why? Why would I type in text only for Google Docs to delete it? It often adds a hyperlink to the space before a word, which is hideous. The way it puts all of the changes in bubbles on the side, instead of in-line, takes up far too much space and means that you rarely see the change and the changed text on the same latitude of the page. It’s hard to rapidly accept a bunch of changes—I get stuck doing them one. At. A. Time. Like. A. Sucker.

And, worst of all: the collaboration that allows multiple people to work in a document at once, the very feature most championed by Google Docs partisans. Once a writer sends a Google Doc to me and I start editing, by default, Google lets them know. Then I see their initial pop up in the upper right-hand corner of the document, and I know they are watching me. I can’t edit in front of an audience! I need to move things around, to try different phrases out. But sometimes writers actually start responding to my edits in real time. What the hell! Leave me alone! One person in a document at a time! I want clear iterations, not various versions that bleed into one another.

«

Totally agree (though for me, the app that says “quit email and your Twitter app and knuckle down” is the ever-excellent Scrivener, available for macOS, Windows and iOS.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Goodreads site is being used for bad things (specifically, extortion) against some unlucky authors, in another moderation challenge. CC-licensed photo by Dav Yaginuma on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. It’s a good number. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Facebook failed to stem racist abuse of England’s soccer players • The New York Times

Ryan Mac and Tariq Panja:

»

In May 2019, Facebook asked the organizing bodies of English soccer to its London offices off Regent’s Park. On the agenda: what to do about the growing racist abuse on the social network against Black soccer players.

At the meeting, Facebook gave representatives from four of England’s main soccer organizations — the Football Association, the Premier League, the English Football League and the Professional Footballers’ Association — what they felt was a brushoff, two people with knowledge of the conversation said. Company executives told the group that they had many issues to deal with, including content about terrorism and child sex abuse.

A few months later, Facebook provided soccer representatives with an athlete safety guide, including directions on how players could shield themselves from bigotry using its tools. The message was clear: It was up to the players and the clubs to protect themselves online.

The interactions were the start of what became a more than two-year campaign by English soccer to pressure Facebook and other social media companies to rein in online hate speech against their players.

«

The piece is good inasmuch as it details what happened. Yet Twitter’s blogpost about the racist abuse on its platform after the 2021 Euros event gives a much clearer meta-view:

1: “the UK was – by far – the largest country of origin for the abusive Tweets we removed on the night of the Final and in the days that followed.”
2: “our data suggests that ID verification would have been unlikely to prevent the abuse from happening – as the accounts we suspended themselves were not anonymous. Of the permanently suspended accounts from the Tournament, 99% of account owners were identifiable.”
3: “only 2% of the Tweets we removed following the Final generated more than 1000 Impressions (Impressions are the number of views a Tweet receives before being removed).”

The NYT story treats the abuse as more like weather – raining racist abuse again, it’s such a mystery! – when we really need to understand why the climate is like it is.
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Poly Network recovers over $258m of stolen funds in largest DeFi hack • FX Street

Ekta Mourya:

»

Poly Network expects to recover stolen funds after writing a letter asking the hacker to return the funds. Currently, less than 1% of the funds have been recovered. 

On August 10, a hacker drained the cross-chain protocol Poly Network of hundreds of millions of dollars. Over $600m in several cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, Binance smart chain tokens, and stablecoins were stolen.  

The heist included $273m in Ethereum tokens, $253m in tokens on Binance Smart Chain, and $85m in USD coin (USDC). In the aftermath of the attack, Poly Network reached out to exchanges and miners on its Twitter handle and requested them to blacklist the stolen funds. 

Tether was the swiftest to blacklist the stolen USDT, worth $33m. Binance, OKEx and other exchanges extended support to Poly Network in the hours following the hack. Among exchanges and protocols coming out in support of the cross-chain protocol, SlowMist stood out since the blockchain security firm claimed to have the hacker’s identity (ID) information. 

SlowMist’s initial investigation revealed that the hacker used Hoo, a less popular Chinese cryptocurrency exchange, to gather funds for the attack. From Hoo, the blockchain security firm was able to obtain details of their digital footprint. 

Poly Network then reached out to the hacker through an open letter on Twitter, describing the magnitude of the hack and asking them to establish communication and work together to return the stolen funds. 

The team behind the Poly Network prepared a multi-sig address controlled by a known Poly address and identified three addresses where the attacker could return funds.

«

DeFi = decentralised finance. That is, doing all the transactions with “smart contracts” – essentially, little chunks of code triggered by certain conditions. Problem is, the interaction of all those bits of code can be unpredictable, and lead to hacks through a form of impersonation (in this case). Many other flaws exist; they just haven’t been found yet.
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Goodreads’ problem with extortion scams and review bombing • Time

Megan McCluskey:

»

few months after posting a message on Goodreads about the imminent release of a new book, Indie author Beth Black woke up to an all-caps ransom email from an anonymous server, demanding that she either pay for good reviews or have her books inundated with negative ones: “EITHER YOU TAKE CARE OF OUR NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS WITH YOUR WALLET OR WE’LL RUIN YOUR AUTHOR CAREER,” the email, shared with TIME, read. “PAY US OR DISAPPEAR FROM GOODREADS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.”

Black, who has self-published both a romance novel and a collection of short stories in the past year, didn’t pay the ransom. “I reported it to Goodreads and then a couple hours later, I started noticing the stars dropping on my books as I started getting all these 1-star reviews,” she says. “It was quite threatening.”

Scammers and cyberstalkers are increasingly using the Goodreads platform to extort authors with threats of “review bombing” their work–and they are frequently targeting authors from marginalized communities who have spoken out on topics ranging from controversies within the industry to larger social issues on social media.

Black says she had posted about the upcoming book in a Goodreads community group, and had sent PDF copies to self-proclaimed reviewers. According to Black, the pressure to rack up reviews on Goodreads and Amazon led to her becoming the target of a cyber-extortion attack.

«

We’re so far into the internet, and moderation – dealing with the humans – rather than trying to get machines and technology turns out to be the real problem again and again.
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Samsung Galaxy Watch4: the last chance for Wear OS • Forbes

Barry Collins:

»

The awkward union of Samsung and Google feels like the last throw of the dice for Wear OS. If Samsung can’t make a success of it, who else will? But is there enough in the Samsung Galaxy Watch4 (yes, they’ve dropped the space between ‘Watch’ and ‘4’) to deliver an upswing in Wear OS’s fortunes?

The official press release for the Galaxy Watch4 describes the operating system as “the new Wear OS Powered by Samsung, built jointly with Google”, which tells you something about the backstage politics, if nothing else. Samsung wants you to know it’s not just putting up the hardware.

What evidence is there of Samsung’s involvement in software design? Well, the Galaxy Watch4 is tightening the integration between Samsung smartphone and watch.

For instance, a new feature called One UI Watch automatically installs the Wear OS version of an app on your watch if it’s installed on your Samsung phone, which saves fiddling around with the Google Play Store on the watch.

Other settings, such as do-not-disturb hours and blocked callers, are automatically synced with the watch, so you shouldn’t be woken by the Galaxy Watch4 in the small hours. An Auto Switch feature also lets Samsung earbuds toggle between audio from your Samsung phone and earbuds.

The message here is clear: Samsung is trying to deliver the same joined-up experience you get with an Apple iPhone/Watch/AirPod combo.

Samsung is also making heavy play of its own services, sitting alongside those of Google.

«

If Samsung can’t make this happen, then indeed, that party’s over.
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Ah, so this is where I hid the advert for Social Warming, my latest book.

Why Instagram’s creatives are angry about its move to video • The Guardian

Amelia Tait:

»

In late July, hobbyist photographer and self-proclaimed “sunrise hunter” Sam Binding conducted an experiment. After visiting Somerset Lavender Farm to catch the sun peeking over the purple blossoms, the 40-year-old from Bristol uploaded the results to both Instagram and Twitter. Two days later, he used the apps’ built-in analytics tools to assess the impact of his shots. On Instagram, a total of 5,595 people saw his post – just over half of his 11,000 followers. On Twitter, his post was seen by 5,611 people, despite the fact he has just 333 followers on the site.

This confirmed Binding’s hunch that although most people believe that Instagram is a place to share photos and Twitter is a place to share words, that may no longer be the case. When it launched in 2010, Instagram courted the artistic community, inviting respected designers to be among its initial users and naming its very first filter X-Pro II, after an analogue photo-developing technique. In her 2020 book No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, technology reporter Sarah Frier documents how Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom wanted Instagram to be an outlet for artists (in a high-school essay, Systrom wrote that he liked how photography could “inspire others to look at the world in a new way”).

But Facebook bought Instagram in 2012. Systrom departed as CEO in 2018. And three weeks before Binding uploaded his lavender pics, the new head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, posted a video to his personal social media accounts. “I want to start by saying we’re no longer a photo-sharing app.”

«

And that is being proved over and over. One thing about Instagram that’s crucially different from just about every other social network, I noticed when writing Social Warming, is that it doesn’t have any method for content to go viral. That has its benefits – you don’t get ideologues building up huge follower numbers through the algorithm – but equally when the algorithm demotes you, for reasons you can’t understand, then there’s no recourse. You’re swinging in the dark.
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Taliban members are reportedly running Clubhouse chatrooms • NY Post

Theo Wayt:

»

As the Taliban sweep across Afghanistan, some members of the Islamist terrorist group are apparently making time to log on to Clubhouse, a trendy audio-based social media app. 

Taliban spokespeople are running chatrooms within the app where they discuss religion and their plans for the future of Afghanistan, which is rapidly falling into the extremist group’s control amid the withdrawal of American troops, Agence France-Presse reported. 

“The Taliban called me rude and cut my mic after I spoke the truth about them,” Haanya Saheba Malik, an Afghan Clubhouse user who joined a Taliban room, told AFP. “They openly declared those of us calling for human rights infidels and deserving of death.”

Clubhouse’s terms of service forbid “immoral, racist, or discriminatory” behavior based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or serious disease.” 

But the app — which is backed by A-list investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global Management, as well as celebrity entrepreneur Audrey Gelman — appears to have allowed the group to operate on the platform for at least two weeks.

«

They can have Lashnagard, but not Clubhouse! For a slightly more nuanced version (can you do nuance with the Taliban?) which suggests that Afghans are tuning in to ask what the Taliban intend to bring to the country, here’s the AFP story (hosted on Spacedaily).

Not sure it’s going to help Clubhouse’s valuation to be big in Afghanistan, though.
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Pay cut: Google employees who work from home could lose money • Reuters

Danielle Kaye:

»

Google employees based in the same office before the pandemic could see different changes in pay if they switch to working from home permanently, with long commuters hit harder, according to a company pay calculator seen by Reuters.

It is an experiment taking place across Silicon Valley, which often sets trends for other large employers.

Facebook and Twitter also cut pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller companies including Reddit and Zillow (ZG.O) have shifted to location-agnostic pay models, citing advantages when it comes to hiring, retention and diversity.

Alphabet’s Google stands out in offering employees a calculator that allows them to see the effects of a move. But in practice, some remote employees, especially those who commute from long distances, could experience pay cuts without changing their address.

“Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from,” a Google spokesperson said, adding that pay will differ from city to city and state to state.

«

Nothing is going to be quite the same.
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Wagner: scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed • BBC News

Ilya Barabanov & Nader Ibrahim:

»

A BBC investigation has revealed the scale of operations by a shadowy Russian mercenary group in Libya’s civil war, which includes links to war crimes and the Russian military.

A Samsung tablet left by a fighter for the Wagner group exposes its key role – as well as traceable fighter codenames.

…The tablet was left behind by an unknown Wagner fighter after the group’s fighters retreated from areas south of Tripoli in spring 2020.

Its contents include maps in Russian of the frontline, giving confirmation of Wagner’s significant presence and an unprecedented insight into the group’s operations. There is drone footage and codenames of Wagner fighters, at least one of whom the BBC believes it has identified. The tablet is now in a secure location.

A comprehensive list of weapons and military equipment is included in a 10-page document dated 19 January 2020, given to the BBC by a Libyan intelligence source and probably recovered from a Wagner location.

The document indicates who may be funding and backing the operation. It lists materiel needed for the “completion of military objectives” – including four tanks, hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles and a state-of-the-art radar system.

«

Logical, when you think about it: easier to read than a phone, more portable than a laptop. Though it also shows that things have moved on. When Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbotabad, part of the haul included a PC. But that was 2011.
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The same post-truth politics of Brexit and Covid now threaten Britain’s climate change response • The i

Ian Dunt:

»

Climate change policy has become a key area of opposition for the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Sweden Democrats and Alternative for Germany. 

You can see the same process happening here. In his new slot on GB News this week, Nigel Farage branded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report climate “alarmism” and said he “questioned the obsession with carbon dioxide and its direct link to global warming”. 

This message fits easily into the fake binary opposition established by Brexit, of an out-of-touch metropolitan elite versus the authentic people of the country. The Tory MPs on WhatsApp on Tuesday were busy sharing private polling which showed that 47% of petrol drivers supported the Conservatives, while around 70% of electric car drivers backed Labour.  

It also highlights a psychological tendency on the Conservative backbenches which seeks to deny long-term casual effects and present a simplified fairy story in place of complex real-world dynamics. We saw this during the Brexit debates, when prominent Leavers rubbished the idea that customs borders involved bureaucracy and delays, only to now see them brought disastrously to life in UK exports to Europe and trade between Britain and Northern Ireland.  

We then saw it during the Covid emergency, when many of the same figures railed against lockdowns, only to then watch cases spiral out of control due to the ensuing delay to government action. 

We’re now in danger of the precise same thing happening again. The European Research Group of Tory MPs acted as a vanguard of Brexit missionary zeal during the break from Europe. The Covid Recovery Group did the same against the second lockdown. Now a new group is being formed – presumably entitled something suitably Orwellian like the Environmental Research Group – to challenge the goal of net-zero carbon emissions. 

«

Very likely the complaint will be that China’s “doing nothing” or the US is “doing nothing” or Germany is “doing nothing”, so why should we? There are lots of countries that can be accused of “doing nothing”.
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Vodafone latest UK carrier to reintroduce roaming charges in Europe after Brexit • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

Vodafone has announced it will reintroduce roaming charges in Europe for UK mobile customers from January next year. It’s the latest UK carrier to reintroduce the fees after the country’s departure from the European Union, and it follows a similar U-turn from EE in June. All major carriers in the country previously said they had no plans to introduce roaming fees in Europe after the Brexit vote.

The fees will apply to any Vodafone customers who sign up to or change their contract from August 11th, 2021, with the fees applying from January 6th, 2022. Costs are dependent on the specific plan, but most customers will pay £2 ($2.77) a day to use their UK allowance of calls, texts, and data in Europe, or £1 a day if access is bought in eight- or 15-day bundles.

Roaming charges were abolished in the European Union on June 15th, 2017, but after the UK voted to leave the EU, it had to renegotiate its trade agreements with the bloc. These did not include free mobile roaming, allowing UK carriers to reintroduce fees if they wished.

«

Sunlit uplands. Well, for the mobile carriers, anyway.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Why would a science paper talk about “counterfeit consciousness” rather than “artificial intelligence”? Because it’s trying to hide plagiarism, researchers suggest. CC-licensed photo by deepak pal on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Misinformed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Inside the White House-Facebook rift over vaccine misinformation • The New York Times

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Cecilia Kang:

»

In March, Andy Slavitt, then a top pandemic adviser for President Biden, called Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, and delivered an ominous warning.

For many weeks, Mr. Slavitt and other White House officials had been meeting with Facebook to urge the company to stop the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines. Many Americans who refused to get vaccinated had cited false stories they read on Facebook, including theories that the shots could lead to infertility, stillborn babies and autism. Mr. Slavitt and other officials felt that executives were deflecting blame and resisting requests for information.

“In eight weeks’ time,” Mr. Slavitt told Mr. Clegg, “Facebook will be the No. 1 story of the pandemic.”

Mr. Slavitt’s prediction was not far off. Roughly three months later, with cases from the Delta variant surging, Mr. Biden said Facebook was “killing people” — a comment that put the social network in the center of the public discussion about the virus.

Mr. Biden’s comment, which he later walked back slightly, was the culmination of increasingly combative meetings with the company about the spread of misinformation. Interviews with administration officials, Facebook employees and other people with knowledge of the internal discussions revealed new details about who took part in the talks and the issues that fed the frustrations between the White House and the Silicon Valley titan.

«

A long read. Note this: “When Mr. Patil [for the White House] asked for data on how often misinformation was viewed and spread, the company said it couldn’t provide that kind of data.”

Just like I said. Facebook doesn’t know the extent of the problem.
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A new Plandemic-like misinformation video has earned tens of millions Facebook engagements via streaming platforms • Media Matters for America

Alex Kaplan and Kayla Gogarty:

»

Facebook has claimed it would remove content from its platform that pushes false claims about vaccines, and YouTube prohibits content “about COVID-19 that poses a serious risk of egregious harm” or “contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.” Given the speed at which this latest video has racked up engagements, it appears that neither platform has learned any lessons from allowing conspiracy theory videos like Plandemic and Planet Lockdown to go viral, nor are these policies being consistently enforced to fight medical misinformation. 

The new video features a man named Dan Stock speaking in front of an Indiana city’s school board. Calling himself a “functional family medicine physician,” Stock falsely suggested that coronavirus vaccines were not effective, saying, “Why is a vaccine that is supposedly so effective having a breakout in the middle of the summer when respiratory viral syndromes don’t do that?” He also falsely claimed, “People who have recovered from COVID-19 infection actually get no benefit from vaccination at all,” and inaccurately alleged that masks do not work, saying that “coronavirus and all other respiratory viruses … are spread by aerosol particles, which are small enough to go through every mask.” And rather than vaccines, Stock suggested people use the drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19 — which the FDA has specifically advised against.

According to the tracking tool BuzzSumo, uploads of the video from streaming platforms have earned more than 90 million total Facebook engagements. Most of those come from YouTube — in particular, from three versions of the video that have since been removed for violating the platform’s community guidelines.

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Just so you don’t think that misinformation is all down to Facebook.
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Why is tech illustration stuck on repeat? • Protocol

Hirsh Chitkara:

»

You may not have heard of “corporate memphis,” but you’ve almost certainly seen it. The illustration style can be found in the trendiest direct-to-consumer subway ads, within the app you use to split restaurant tabs or on the 404 page that attempts to counter your frustration with cutesiness. In fact, corporate memphis has become so synonymous with tech marketing that some illustrators simply know it as the “tech aesthetic.”

But corporate memphis has also become a victim of its own success. The once-whimsical, fresh style now feels safe and antiseptic. More conspicuous iterations of it get roasted online, if they get noticed at all; one popular tweet asks, “Why does every website landing page look like this now?” Illustrators are just as often tired of corporate memphis, but tech companies continue to commission it.

So why can’t tech wean itself off of corporate memphis? Part of it has to do with the practical aesthetic considerations that gave rise to the style. But corporate memphis has primarily stuck around because tech executives continue to overlook the value of illustration, according to several of the illustrators interviewed for this story. Illustration work is increasingly awarded to the lowest bidder on gig platforms, using tools designed to standardize output. For the few companies that recognize the value of illustration, however, investing in creative talent has paid considerable dividends — just not in ways that are easily measured.

«

Turns out we should blame a company whose name starts with “F” and ends with “acebook”. But this is a genuinely clever story; it may have been prompted by the tweet linked above, but you still have to go out and find the people doing the work, and discover there’s such a thing as “corporate memphis”. (And then use it six times in the first three paragraphs. Work it, baby.)
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When hope kills: Social media’s false promises to cancer patients • Healthy Debate

Anne Borden King:

»

“You have to die a little to live,” my friend’s husband told me as I began chemo last summer. He’d had Stage 2 cancer, like me, and was preparing me for how difficult the treatments would be. And he was right: In fact, it was hard to get my feet to walk through the hospital doors for my treatments. I knew that this was my best shot but on some visceral level I really wished I didn’t have to do it.

I shared updates about my cancer treatments with my friends on Facebook and it helped to get encouragement. But something else also happened on my timeline: Facebook’s advertising algorithms began targeting me for cancer ads from scammers selling phony treatments. These companies promised that I could cure my cancer “naturally without toxic chemotherapy or surgery” using vitamin IV therapy that allegedly had “the same mechanism as chemotherapy.” A page called Breast Cancer Conqueror offered a host of custom supplements and another clinic in Mexico offered beachside IV cocktails that would defeat cancer with “antioxidant properties.” It all sounded good – too good to be true.

I reported the ads to Facebook in the hope the platform would remove them (it didn’t). I also wrote about it, joining the legion of voices raising the alarm about mis- and disinformation on social media.

A year later, not much has changed on Facebook.

«

I spoke to Borden King in writing Social Warming: the way that Facebook overlooks so much misinformation about stuff that can kill you is incredible.
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Paris Equity Check • Pledged Warming Map

Yann Robiou du Pont:

»

The Pledged Warming Map provides an assessment of global warming when all countries follow the ambition of a given one. This warming assessment assumes a self-interested approach of equity where each country follows the least stringent of three equity concepts (historical responsibility, capacity to pay and equality). This warming assessment reconciles the bottom-up architecture of the Paris Agreement with its top-down warming threshold.

With the Paris Agreement, countries committed to collectively limit global warming to well below 2 °C and pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels. However, there is currently no commonly agreed effort-sharing mechanism to determine the contribution of each country. Measuring the ambition of the climate pledges, the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), requires considerations of effort-sharing driven by equity concepts and countries are requested to provide in their NDC a description of how their contribution is ‘fair and ambitious’ (these are provided under the country graphs).

«

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of good news to be found on this map. Among the most gigantic what-ifs are what if Al Gore had been installed as president in 2000 (given that he was elected, right?) and what if Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, had been president in 2016. We might be in a better place – though a lot would depend on China.
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Pricing vs rules: the EU’s balancing act • Internationale Politik Quarterly

Noah Gordon:

»

Finding the right balance between pricing and rules [on greenhouse emissions] is so difficult because the two policy approaches tend to irritate (or invigorate) different interest groups.

Take road transport, where the EU is planning both new rules and new taxes. The proposal to put a carbon price on transport fuels has come under heavy fire in Brussels. Pascal Canfin, the French MEP from the centrist, liberal Renew Europe group who chairs the European Parliament’s environment committee, has warned that this would be “politically suicidal.” “Do not make the mistake … we saw in France; it gave us the yellow vests.”

As the economic historian Adam Tooze has argued, the Macron administration’s announcement that it would continue to periodically raise the carbon tax on fuels was far from the only cause of the Gilet Jaunes protests—and there are many ways to recycle carbon tax revenue to low-income Europeans. (European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen did say Brussels would establish a social climate fund worth €144 billion to “compensate vulnerable groups” for higher costs.) Yet it is the perception that matters, and there has indeed been an ugly backlash against carbon pricing in places like Australia or the US state of Oregon.

In any case, it is not only the French who have concerns. Polish state secretary for climate Adam Guibourgé-Czetwertynski has said “The commission seems to be making the choice of taxing poorer households,” which he called a mistake. Danish Climate Minister Dan Jorgensen has admitted that it is “difficult for me to just point to a big number of other countries that support [the ETS for transport].” Germany is one of the few supporters, but the proposal has reportedly split the commission.

Interestingly, the skepticism about pricing comes from across the political spectrum, in Brussels and in national capitals alike.

«

I try very hard not to whisper “we’re so screwed” when I read anything like this, but I do increasingly think we’re so screwed.
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‘Tortured phrases’ give away fabricated research papers • Nature

Holly Else:

»

In April 2021, a series of strange phrases in journal articles piqued the interest of a group of computer scientists. The researchers could not understand why researchers would use the terms ‘counterfeit consciousness’, ‘profound neural organization’ and ‘colossal information’ in place of the more widely recognized terms ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘deep neural network’ and ‘big data’.

Further investigation revealed that these strange terms — which they dub “tortured phrases” — are probably the result of automated translation or software that attempts to disguise plagiarism. And they seem to be rife in computer-science papers.

Research-integrity sleuths say that Cabanac and his colleagues have uncovered a new type of fabricated research paper, and that their work, posted in a preprint on arXiv on 12 July1, might expose only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the literature affected.

To get a sense of how many papers are affected, the researchers ran a search for several tortured phrases in journal articles indexed in the citation database Dimensions. They found more than 860 publications that included at least one of the phrases, 31 of which were published in a single journal: Microprocessors and Microsystems.

“It harms science. You cannot trust these papers, so we need to find them and retract them,” says Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, France, who worked on the study.

«

Also frequently seen in blogs that scrape originals and then throw them through thesaurus-style systems. The effects are very, very strange.
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Interview: Apple’s Head of Privacy details child abuse detection and Messages safety features • TechCrunch

Matthew Panzarino interviews Erik Neuenschwander:

»

One of the bigger queries about this system is that Apple has said that it will just refuse action if it is asked by a government or other agency to compromise by adding things that are not CSAM to the database to check for them on-device. There are some examples where Apple has had to comply with local law at the highest levels if it wants to operate there, China being an example. So how do we trust that Apple is going to hew to this rejection of interference If pressured or asked by a government to compromise the system?

Well first, that is launching only for US, iCloud accounts, and so the hypotheticals seem to bring up generic countries or other countries that aren’t the US when they speak in that way, and the therefore it seems to be the case that people agree US law doesn’t offer these kinds of capabilities to our government. 

But even in the case where we’re talking about some attempt to change the system, it has a number of protections built in that make it not very useful for trying to identify individuals holding specifically objectionable images. The hash list is built into the operating system, we have one global operating system and don’t have the ability to target updates to individual users and so hash lists will be shared by all users when the system is enabled. And secondly, the system requires the threshold of images to be exceeded so trying to seek out even a single image from a person’s device or set of people’s devices won’t work because the system simply does not provide any knowledge to Apple for single photos stored in our service. And then, thirdly, the system has built into it a stage of manual review where, if an account is flagged with a collection of illegal CSAM material, an Apple team will review that to make sure that it is a correct match of illegal CSAM material prior to making any referral to any external entity.

«

Neuenschwander might have guessed that things would get a little heated, though I doubt he realised quite how heated. Apple’s giving absolutely no ground on this, though. And he emphasises that if you turn iCloud Photos off, then no scanning at all takes place.
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Google didn’t want sideloading for Fortnite on Android • Android Authority

C Scott Brown:

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According to the [newly released court] documents, Google tried to dissuade Epic from allowing sideloads of Fortnite for Android. First, it offered Epic a “special deal” to bring Fortnite to the Google Play Store. Presumably, this deal would have cut down Google’s 30% commission on app sales, which is the main reason Epic didn’t want Fortnite on the Play Store.

Google also allegedly tried to paint sideloading as an “awful” and “abysmal” experience for users. A Google representative said that its takes “15+ steps” to sideload an app (sideloading is when you install an Android app outside of the Play Store).

Ironically, Google trying to dissuade Epic from allowing sideloads of Fortnite for Android is a huge boon to Epic’s case. Epic is trying to argue in court that the Play Store (and, in a different suit, the Apple App Store) is a de facto monopoly. Epic argues that Google purposefully makes it difficult for publishers to succeed outside the Play Store, even if it is possible to do. As such, Google trying to paint sideloading as a poor experience only bolster’s Epic’s argument.

«

Google wasn’t wrong, though. The sideloading experience also brought malware opportunism, which screwed up people’s phones.
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Why do consumer apps get worse? • ongoing

Tim Bray (who used to work at Google and Amazon):

»

Why does this happen? · It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted.

It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML.

Also, any time you make any change to a popular product, you’ve imposed a retraining cost on its users. Unfortunately, in their evaluations, PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero.
How to fix this? Well, in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers, crippled or broke the product. I’m not going to claim that our UX was generally excellent because it wasn’t; the fact that most users were geeks let us somewhat off the hook.

Why no breakage? Because these were Enterprise products, so the number of customers was orders of magnitude smaller than iAnything, so the PM could go talk to them and bounce improvement ideas off them. Customers are pretty good at spotting UX goofs in the making.

The evidence suggests that for mass-market products used by on the order of 107 people, it’s really difficult to predict which changes will be experienced as stupid, broken, and insulting.

«

(Unrelated: Bray left Amazon on a matter of principle over its firing of whistleblowers last year.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: “ECU” stands for “electronic control unit” not “engine control unit”.

Modern fuel cars have up to 150 engine control units (ECUs) – so they’re now struggling for parts. (EVs need fewer. Just saying.) CC-licensed photo by 3ndymion on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Told you it was warm. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Global warming? But what about Social Warming, my latest book?

Why the latest IPCC report is my climate tipping point • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

»

I no longer feel like the dog in the cartoon, insisting that “this is fine.” This isn’t fine. We have messed up quite badly, for some noble reasons, such as lifting people out of poverty, and some less noble ones, such as enriching the shareholders of fossil-fuel companies. But the same ingenuity that got humanity here, the ingenuity that created the internal-combustion engine and the airplane and the power station and the megafarm, is what can save us.

The impulse to procrastinate is understandable. Anyone who has written a book or cleaned out a garage will know the feeling: Simply by beginning such a project, you have committed yourself to an enormous amount of time and labor, so it’s easier not to start at all. That’s where politicians come in. Individual changes are no substitute for political action. Through subsidies and taxes, governments need to make the greenest option also the easiest one to take. Again, the surprise of the pandemic has been the high levels of compliance with shutdowns and mask mandates, despite isolated instances of rebellion making the news. The coronavirus didn’t cause looting. Society didn’t break down. In the face of existential threats, most of us are cooperative, kind, and resilient. Those qualities are what propelled a bunch of apes through an evolutionary journey that led to humans reaching the moon, splitting the atom, and creating RuPaul’s Drag Race.

The first thing to do is let the fear in, without letting it paralyze us.

«

Though, equally, at the individual level we have effectively no power; it requires those in charge to make decisions that change the game. Back nuclear power. Make coal-powered power stations financially calamitous to their owners. Fund carbon capture/removal technologies at every scale. (Trees are good, but we need something much more dramatic.)
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Latest climate change report just heartfelt farewell letter telling humanity to remember the good times • The Onion

»

Cautioning readers to avoid dwelling on the negative, the latest report published Monday by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was just a heartfelt letter telling humanity to remember the good times.

“Look, regardless of what happens next, it’s been a great 300,000 years for our species,” read the assessment in part, adding that it would be a shame if the prospect of continual cataclysmic storms and unbreathable air overshadowed Homo sapiens’ many high points, such as the development of spoken language, stone tools, and agriculture.

“After studying all the data on ozone levels and the rate of melting permafrost, we found that you shouldn’t harp on that and instead focus on stuff like the Renaissance and the invention of irrigation or ice cream, you know, the halcyon times. Despite what our projections state, humanity will always be alive as long as we keep it in our hearts.”

The report concluded by imploring global citizens to take immediate action by sharing one fond memory from our epoch.

«

Like a stiletto slipped in between the third and fourth rib.
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Apple’s mistake • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

I am not anti-encryption, and am in fact very much against mandated backdoors. Every user should have the capability to lock down their devices and their communications; bad actors surely will. At the same time, it’s fair to argue about defaults and the easiest path for users: I think the iPhone being fundamentally secure and iCloud backups being subject to the law is a reasonable compromise.

Apple’s choices in this case, though, go in the opposite direction: instead of adding CSAM-scanning to iCloud Photos in the cloud that they own and operate, Apple is compromising the phone that you and I own-and-operate, without any of us having a say in the matter. Yes, you can turn off iCloud Photos to disable Apple’s scanning, but that is a policy decision; the capability to reach into a user’s phone now exists, and there is nothing an iPhone user can do to get rid of it.

A far better solution to the “Flickr problem” I started with [that Apple is underrepresented in reports of people holding or sending child sex abuse material] is to recognize that the proper point of comparison is not the iPhone and Facebook, but rather Facebook and iCloud.

One’s device ought be one’s property, with all of the expectations of ownership and privacy that entails; cloud services, meanwhile, are the property of their owners as well, with all of the expectations of societal responsibility and law-abiding which that entails. It’s truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up on its particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying the fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device is truly yours.

«

I disagree, but he makes the best case possible. The reality is that the phone and the backup are effectively inseparable – the phone is the vessel for the backup – unless you limit yourself to local iTunes backups (in which case you’re not using iCloud Photo Library, which case the scanning doesn’t affect you).
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Expanded protections for children: Frequently Asked Questions • Apple

»

Can the CSAM detection system in iCloud Photos be used to detect things other than CSAM?

Our process is designed to prevent that from happening. CSAM detection for iCloud Photos is built so that the system only works with CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and other child safety organizations. This set of image hashes is based on images acquired and validated to be CSAM by child safety organizations. There is no automated reporting to law enforcement, and Apple conducts human review before making a report to NCMEC. As a result, the system is only designed to report photos that are known CSAM in iCloud Photos. In most countries, including the United States, simply possessing these images is a crime and Apple is obligated to report any instances we learn of to the appropriate authorities.

Could governments force Apple to add non-CSAM images to the hash list?

Apple will refuse any such demands. Apple’s CSAM detection capability is built solely to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos that have been identified by experts at NCMEC and other child safety groups. We have faced demands to build and deploy government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users before, and have steadfastly refused those demands. We will continue to refuse them in the future. Let us be clear, this technology is limited to detecting CSAM stored in iCloud and we will not accede to any government’s request to expand it. Furthermore, Apple conducts human review before making a report to NCMEC. In a case where the system flags photos that do not match known CSAM images, the account would not be disabled and no report would be filed to NCMEC.

Can non-CSAM images be “injected” into the system to flag accounts for things other than CSAM?

Our process is designed to prevent that from happening. The set of image hashes used for matching are from known, existing images of CSAM that have been acquired and validated by child safety organizations. Apple does not add to the set of known CSAM image hashes.

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Emphasis added in the second answer. (I think it might be a reference to the FBI/San Bernadino kerfuffle.) Apple clearly sees this as a bit of an antenna-gate, but not quite big enough to actually brief humans about it.

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#DEFCON: Hacking RFID attendance systems with a Time Turner • Infosecurity Magazine

Sean Michael Kerner :

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If a computer science student has a scheduling conflict and wants to attend two different classes that occur at the same time, what should that student do?

In a session at the DEF CON 29 conference on August 7, Ph.D. student Vivek Nair outlined a scenario where a hack of the attendance system could, in fact, enable him, or anyone else, to be in two places at the same time. Nair explained that many schools use an RFID-based attendance system known as an iClicker to track whether or not a student is present. The system includes a base station for each classroom or lecture hall, and then each student is required to carry a device, which can also be used to answer multiple-choice questions.

Nair noted that in the popular Harry Potter fiction series there is a magical device known as a Time Turner, which is used to help enable a student to be in two classes at the same time, via time travel.

“Without the luxury of magic, what is the next best thing?” Nair asked. “It is, of course, hacking.”

«

Well, hacking is after all a sort of magic.
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How software is eating the car • IEEE Spectrum

Robert Charette:

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“Once, software was a part of the car. Now, software determines the value of a car,” notes Manfred Broy, emeritus professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich and a leading expert on software in automobiles. “The success of a car depends on its software much more than the mechanical side.” Nearly all vehicle innovations by auto manufacturers, or original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) as they are called by industry insiders, are now tied to software, he says.

Ten years ago, only premium cars contained 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of a car, executing 100 million lines of code or more. Today, high-end cars like the BMW 7-series with advanced technology like advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) may contain 150 ECUs or more, while pick-up trucks like Ford’s F-150 top 150 million lines of code. Even low-end vehicles are quickly approaching 100 ECUs and 100 million of lines of code as more features that were once considered luxury options, such as adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking, are becoming standard.

Additional safety features that have been mandated since 2010 like electronic stability control,backup cameras, and automatic emergency calling (eCall) in the EU, as well as more stringent emission standards that ICE vehicles can only meet using yet more innovative electronics and software, have further driven ECU and software proliferation.

Consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited estimates that as of 2017, some 40% of the cost of a new car can be attributed to semiconductor-based electronic systems, a cost doubling since 2007.

«

150 ECUs is a lot of ECUs, isn’t it. Apparently EVs use about one-third as many as internal combustion engines – providing another incentive, you’d think, for carmakers to shift.
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Doximity, social network for doctors, full of antivax disinformation • CNBC

Ari Levy:

»

Doximity, which has long described itself as LinkedIn for doctors, held its stock market debut in June and rocketed up to a $10 billion market cap. In its IPO prospectus, the company said it had 1.8 million members, including 80% of physicians across the U.S. They use the site to connect with one another, share research, stay informed on industry trends and securely communicate with patients.

Malarik, who worked in psychiatry for over two decades, said it’s baffling to peruse Doximity’s site and find the type of misinformation that he expects to see on Facebook and YouTube, where conspiracy theories run rampant.

Malarik read directly from several comments posted by people with the initials M.D. or D.O., which indicates doctor of osteopathic medicine, after their names. There’s no anonymity on the site, so everyone is identified. In the posts, they refer to the vaccines as experimental, unproven or deadly and occasionally write “Fauxi” when talking about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical advisor.

Some commenters say that antibodies from contracting Covid are more effective than the messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines, which instruct human cells to make specific proteins that produce an immune response to the disease.

«

So little knowledge, so much internet.
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Bad blood: a cautionary tale of the start-up that promised too much • The Sunday Times Magazine

Sara McCorquodale:

»

TLT had developed a futuristic Apple Watch-style device that claimed to measure “beat to beat” blood pressure in real time. It didn’t need to know your gender, your weight or your medical history. It just strapped on and gave you an instant, accurate flow of Fitbit-like data to an app on your phone. Two years of setbacks, delays and bust-ups with Sandeep and Nita Shah, the company’s founders, did not change the fact that this was the holy grail of healthcare.

The market size was enormous and the potential impact profound. Hypertension — the bane of 1.13 billion people globally — would lose its chilling nickname, “the silent killer” and it was all thanks to the Shahs’ revolutionary, closely guarded algorithm. Many companies with astronomical budgets had tried to measure blood pressure non-invasively in real time and failed. The idea that a couple from Hertfordshire had managed to crack it with a clever algorithm made their story all the more compelling and Pearce was not the only one to be convinced. The government had endorsed the company, putting Sandeep in front of potential investors at the British Business Embassy, and the device had won awards for innovation. Since Pearce had joined the company there had been meetings with tech giants, including Apple in London and Palo Alto.

…The Department for International Trade — then known as UK Trade and Investment — invited Sandeep to present TLT at the British Business Embassy as part of the celebrations around the London Olympics. During his talk, Sandeep claimed that the Sapphire was a “cuffless system” that could take a blood pressure reading anywhere on the body and that it would enter the market within the next 12 months. Watching from Minneapolis, Borgos was rolling his eyes. “There’s no way the sensor we had could have morphed into that,” he says. “I spent some time investigating non-invasive blood pressure, but it always involves the artery because that’s the pressure you’re measuring.”

«

The UK’s own little Theranos – though with a sadder ending: Sandeep Shah was found dead at his home last September.
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Google considered buying ‘some or all’ of Epic during Fortnite clash, court documents say • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

Google considered buying Epic Games as the companies sparred over Epic’s Fortnite Android app, according to newly unsealed court filings. Last night, Google lifted some of its redactions in Epic’s antitrust complaint against Google, which Epic amended and refiled last month. The complaint still omits many details about Google’s dealings with specific companies, but the new details reflect internal Google communications about competition on the Android platform.

Epic claims Google was threatened by its plans to sidestep Google’s official Play Store commission by distributing Fortnite through other channels, and in an unredacted segment, it quotes an internal Google document calling Epic’s plans a “contagion” threatening Google. Here’s Epic’s description of the situation:

Google has gone so far as to share its monopoly profits with business partners to secure their agreement to fence out competition, has developed a series of internal projects to address the “contagion” it perceived from efforts by Epic and others to offer consumers and developers competitive alternatives, and has even contemplated buying some or all of Epic to squelch this threat.

The internal messages discussing that possibility remain secret, and the complaint doesn’t indicate that Google ever reached out to Epic with these plans. It also doesn’t give a timeframe for the discussion — although it presumably happened after Epic started its plans to launch Fortnite on Android in 2018. In a tweet after this article’s publication, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said the plan “was unbeknownst to us at the time.”

«

Buying Epic could have been a good move in its own right, though. If Google could have kept up sufficient interest in the company, and if Epic had been able to retain its cohesion.
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Divergent Association Task

»

The Divergent Association Task measures verbal creativity in under 4 minutes.

It involves thinking of unrelated ideas. People who are more creative tend to think of ideas with greater “distances” between them.

We recommend that you take the test before you learn more about it. You can also read our open-access manuscript in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

«

And here’s where you take the test.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The slog of identifying items in Google’s captchas is an insight into the awful inner world of an AI. Grim, isn’t it? CC-licensed photo by Seth Stoll on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. That warm, huh? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple’s new ‘child safety’ initiatives, and the slippery slope • Daring Fireball

John Gruber:

»

For obvious reasons, this feature is not optional. If you use iCloud Photo Library, the images in your library will go through this fingerprinting. (This includes the images already in your iCloud Photo Library, not just newly-uploaded images after the feature ships later this year.) To opt out of this fingerprint matching, you’ll need to disable iCloud Photo Library.

A big source of confusion seems to be what fingerprinting entails. Fingerprinting is not content analysis. It’s not determining what is in a photo. It’s just a way of assigning unique identifiers — essentially long numbers — to photos, in a way that will generate the same fingerprint identifier if the same image is cropped, resized, or even changed from color to grayscale. It’s not a way of determining whether two photos (the user’s local photo, and an image in the CSAM [child sexual abuse material] database from NCMEC) are of the same subject — it’s a way of determining whether they are two versions of the same image. If I take a photo of, say, my car, and you take a photo of my car, the images should not produce the same fingerprint even though they’re photos of the same car in the same location. And, in the same way that real-world fingerprints can’t be backwards engineered to determine what the person they belong to looks like, these fingerprints cannot be backwards engineered to determine anything at all about the subject matter of the photographs.

The Messages features for children in iCloud family accounts is doing content analysis to try to identify sexually explicit photos, but is not checking image fingerprint hashes against the database of CSAM fingerprints.

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Three days on, loads of people are still commenting on this without having read the proposals in detail. There’s a fair discussion on Lobsters. As one correspondent noted, “I suspect a key driving aspect is about violating people’s psychological expectations of property.”

But it’s scanning images *only if* they’re going to be uploaded to iCloud Photo Library. It’s like the difference between being frisked for illegal drugs (say) when you step outside your front door onto the garden path to the road, and being frisked for those drugs when you step through the gate onto the pavement. You’re going to the same place, and the purpose of the frisking is the same. And all the cloud services do the same frisking.

In fact, you don’t know if the cloud services are “frisking” for things other than the known CSAM. Apple at least is being clear about just using the NCMEC database.

More to the point, I’m increasingly sure that Apple delayed its implementation of iCloud backup encryption (which the FBI objected to) in 2018 so it could do this instead.

After this, though, it can roll out encrypted backups while being sure it isn’t harbouring CSAM. That could actually be a benefit to people in countries with repressive regimes which demand access to iCloud backups: Apple might not be able to grant that.
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In internal memo, Apple addresses concerns around new Photo scanning features, doubles down on the need to protect children • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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In an internal memo distributed to the teams that worked on this project and obtained by 9to5Mac, Apple acknowledges the “misunderstandings” around the new features, but doubles down on its belief that these features are part of an “important mission” for keeping children safe.

Apple has faced a significant amount of pushback for these features, including from notable sources such as Edward Snowden and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The criticism centers primarily on Apple’s plans to scan iCloud Photos to check against a database of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) for matches and the potential implications of such a feature.

The memo, which was distributed late last night and obtained by 9to5Mac, was written by Sebastien Marineau-Mes, a software VP at Apple. Marineau-Mes says that Apple will continue to “explain and detail the features” included in this suite of Expanded Protections for Children.

Marineau-Mes writes that while Apple has seen “many positive responses” to these new features, it is aware that “some people have misunderstandings” about how the features will work, and “more than a few are worried about the implications.” Nonetheless, Marineau-Mes doubles down on Apple’s belief that these are necessary features to “protect children” while also maintaining Apple’s “deep commitment to user privacy.”

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Note that the memo says they’ve been working on this for “years” – some people (on Twitter) have been responding as though Apple built it in a week and never considered the possibility of government influence or interference, and how to counteract that. The NCMEC (US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) also praises it.
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When Amazon customers leave negative reviews, some sellers hunt them down • WSJ

Nicole Nguyen:

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In March, New Yorker Katherine Scott picked out an oil spray bottle for cooking, based on nearly 1,000 glowing Amazon reviews of the product, which had a 4.5-star rating average. When the $10 sprayer arrived, she found the item didn’t work as advertised: Instead of a mist, it produced a stream of oil, she said. “It was like a Super Soaker gun instead of a spray-paint can, which defeats the purpose of the product,” she said. She left a negative review.

A week later, Ms. Scott received an email from someone claiming to be from the customer-service team of the oil sprayer’s brand, Auxtun—correspondence which I have reviewed.

“We are willing to refund in full,” the representative wrote. “We hope you can reconsider deleting comments at your convenience okay?” The message concluded, “When we do not receive a response, we will assume that you did not see it, and will continue to send emails.”

The seller shouldn’t have had her email address. Sellers who fulfill orders themselves do receive customer names and mailing addresses. But for orders that Amazon itself fulfills, customer data is supposed to be shielded from sellers and brands.

Sellers are permitted to communicate with buyers through Amazon’s built-in messaging platform, which hides the customer’s email address. Amazon’s terms of service also prohibit sellers from requesting that a customer remove a negative review or post a positive one.

“We do not share customer email addresses with third-party sellers,” an Amazon spokesman told me.

Meanwhile, brands, which can be distinct from sellers, may reach out to unsatisfied customers through Amazon’s messaging service, but they also aren’t allowed to ask customers to remove negative reviews.

Ms. Scott asked for a refund but didn’t want to delete her review. Another representative reached out the next day and declined to issue her refund. “A bad review is a fatal blow to us,” read the email. “Could you help me delete the review? If you can, I want to refund $20 to you to express my gratitude.” (This was twice what Ms. Scott paid.) A few hours later, she received another plea from the same email address.

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The principal question – how they got the email address – really isn’t satisfactorily answered. Doesn’t seem to be an Amazon leak. But we are starting to think that reviews really aren’t a good metric for anything, aren’t we.
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China’s Huawei reports 38% revenue drop as US sanctions bite • WSJ

Dan Strumpf:

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China’s Huawei Technologies reported a 38% fall in quarterly revenue Friday, as the damage U.S. sanctions have done to its sales of smartphones and telecommunications equipment worsened.

The drop marks the third straight decline in quarterly revenue for Huawei, the world’s largest maker of telecom equipment and formerly one of the world’s biggest smartphone sellers, and the declines have accelerated since the end of 2020.

Huawei’s smartphone sales, once a top revenue driver for the company, have fallen dramatically since the Trump administration imposed restrictions last year blocking the company from buying most advanced semiconductors. Revenue from telecommunications equipment sales have also dropped, although less dramatically, amid a U.S. campaign pressuring allied countries to drop the Chinese company as a supplier of 5G equipment.

Second-quarter revenue fell to 168.2bn yuan, about $26bn, from 271.8bn yuan in the same quarter a year ago, according to calculations based on figures disclosed by the Shenzhen-based company Friday. The decline marked a sharp acceleration from the 16.5% revenue drop in the first quarter and an 11.2% drop in the fourth quarter of 2020.

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Hard to see that anything is going to pull Huawei out of this dive unless the US abruptly rescinds the Trump sanctions. Biden shows no sign of doing that. Possibly it’s being used as a bargaining chip, but there doesn’t seem to be any bargaining underway. Don’t forget, by the way, that a Huawei executive is still fighting extradition from Canada to the US, and China has a Canadian executive in jail, effectively in reprisal.
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Why stores send you so many emails • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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Email is one of the few ways companies can reach their customers directly. In fact, people overwhelmingly say that the way they want to hear from brands is by email, Chad S. White, the head of research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, told me. That’s why the mailbox software started suppressing messages—to protect people from companies’ temptation to send too many emails. In response, email marketers obsess over “deliverability,” or how the content and frequency of their emails might help those messages actually hit your inbox in the first place. But that process has created new and weird feedback loops, in which some companies and certain messages might be able to reach your inbox more readily than before, while others get junked—condemned to spam, deleted, or the like—before you see them.

As a result, your personal inbox gradually has become less like a mailbox and more like a wormhole into every business relationship you maintain: your bank; your utility provider; your supermarket; your favorite boutiques, restaurants, housewares providers, and all the rest. It’s your own digital commercial district: Opening up email is akin to visiting a little mall in your browser or on your phone, where every shop is right next to every other. A few years ago, Gmail made that metaphor concrete by introducing the promotions folder, recasting spam as marketing. When you’re in the mood to shop, just drop into promotions and see what’s on offer (or search for a favorite brand to see the latest wares).

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Letter to Facebook • Federal Trade Commission

Acting Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection Samuel Levine writes:

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Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:

I write concerning Facebook’s recent insinuation that its actions against an academic research project conducted by NYU’s Ad Observatory were required by the company’s consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. As the company has since acknowledged, this is inaccurate. The FTC is committed to protecting the privacy of people, and efforts to shield targeted advertising practices from scrutiny run counter to that mission.

While I appreciate that Facebook has now corrected the record, I am disappointed by how your company has conducted itself in this matter. Only last week, Facebook’s General Counsel, Jennifer Newstead, committed the company to “timely, transparent communication to BCP staff about significant developments.” Yet the FTC received no notice that Facebook would be publicly invoking our consent decree to justify terminating academic research earlier this week.

Had you honored your commitment to contact us in advance, we would have pointed out that the consent decree does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest. Indeed, the FTC supports efforts to shed light on opaque business practices, especially around surveillance-based advertising.

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I’d say that’s pretty unambiguous.
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Why CAPTCHA pictures are so unbearably depressing • Medium

Clive Thompson:

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I hate doing Google’s CAPTCHAs.

Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. I also don’t like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems.

But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason:
The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing.

…Each cube here [in a Captcha picture] is a tone poem in melancholia. Looking at these leaden vistas of America makes you, slightly but noticeably, feel worse than you did before.

Why are these photos so depressing? What is it about their composition that is so enervating? I’ve been musing on this for a few months now, and had some terrific exchanges about it with Todd Pruzan and Emily Gordon, two friends of mine, on Twitter.

I think I’ve figured it out, and so now I present — The Six Reasons CAPTCHA Pictures Make You Feel Like Crap.

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They’re compelling, and surprising, reasons. They also feel very true. Obviously, don’t read it if you don’t want to feel like crap, because there are a few of those Captcha captures in the article.
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The economics of OnlyFans • xsrus.com

Thomas Hollands scraped OnlyFans for some revenue data:

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The revenue of content creators follows a classic power law distribution. The top accounts make something like $100,000 a month (these aren’t in my sample). The median account makes $180 a month.

The top 1% of accounts make 33% of all the money. The top 10% of accounts make 73% of all the money. This isn’t the 80:20 rule; it’s the 80:14 rule.

The standard way to measure inequality of an economy is with a Gini Index. An index of 0 implies a communist utopia, a value of 1 implies a single greedy capitalist owns all the wealth. The Gini index of OnlyFans is 0.83. The most unequal society in the world, South Africa, has a Gini index of 0.68. OnlyFans is less equal than an ex-apartheid state.

OnlyFans is so unequal because chancers make accounts with zero fans, while big Instagram stars take their following with them. A large proportion of accounts have no fans at all, and the lion’s share of fans are shared by the top accounts.

Being an independent explicit online content creator is by many accounts exhausting. Your “fans” are not merely fans, they’re paying customers. To keep that sweet money flowing into their bank accounts, content creators often have to work harder and harder to satisfy their patrons.

Most accounts take home less than $145 per month (after commission). The modal revenue is $0.00, and the next most common is $4.99.

Creators put hours into each post, and on top of that, they interact one-on-one, with fans who can message them at any time. To break even on an OnlyFans account, creators need to earn more per month than the cost of hours spent engaging. The median take-home revenue is $136 per month. If you value a creator’s time at a $15 minimum wage, the median creator needs to be spending less than 9 hours per month on her OnlyFans to break even. This is less than 20 minutes a day.

Fans expect regular, prompt engagement, and many creators compare OnlyFans to running a business. It seems unlikely that you could satisfy all your fans demands in less time than it takes to make and eat breakfast.

Relative to effort, it looks like most accounts lose money.

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The internet is fractal: it’s always a power law.
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August 8-14, 1921 • Reading the Roaring (19)20s

“Tate” is summarising the FT and WSJ from 100 years ago, once a week in the period leading up to the crash of 1929. (That takes a certain confidence in the continued existence of Substack, Tate and indeed the civilised world):

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Executive Summary:

Writers at the FT ponder how to spend their day while equity and commodity markets vacillate listlessly. Random ideas captures the very moment of boredom. Even the Financial Times has temporarily shrunk: 6 pages per day this week down from the classic 12 pages. Summer has arrived.

August 11, 1921 – Financial Times
Wrangling over German reparations continues. Over the past year, it has become clear to Britain and France that Germany cannot pay in full. Instead of default, talks open on August 10, 1921 regarding three core issues: German payments to British and French soldiers currently occupying German regions, in kind (steel, coal, timber) transfers in lieu of German gold marks, and assumption of war debt of smaller European countries.

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Might build to a great crescendo, or might reveal that nobody knows anything when they’re in the midst of it.
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How to lose body fat without it ruining your life • Vice

Casey Johnston:

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A study published in April 2018 indicated that body composition—that is, the ratio of muscle mass to body fat—played a crucial role in how long subjects lived, and was a better indicator than the tyrannical body-mass index (which is just a weight and height ratio). Muscle mass also helps maintain our metabolism, and stave off diabetes and osteoporosis. People who work to maintain or build the muscle they have by strength training and making sure to eat their protein are protecting their overall health. 

Furthermore, if they are trying to lose body fat, taking care of their muscles means their metabolisms won’t suffer as much from modestly restricting their calories. Without taking care of lean muscle mass, aggressive dieting loses body fat and muscle, and then the inevitable rebound is gained back as body fat. Therefore, chronic or yo-yo dieting without muscle care becomes, effectively, just trading off more and more muscle for body fat. That makes it harder to lose body fat in subsequent attempts, and each time more and more muscle, and its associated benefits, are lost. This sounds scary, I imagine, but hopefully reveals what a scam diet programs are; aside from their extremely regressive “be smaller and smaller forever!” goals, they are essentially designed to create an increasingly desperate failure situation. Fuck them and fuck that.

So given all this, where should you start? While a lot of people I think would say dieting, and dieting certainly seems like the “easiest” way, for the reasons I’ve laid out here, it’s a fool’s errand.

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A doctor (off-duty) recently said to me that it’s important to maintain muscle mass, which is lost at about 1% per year past the age of 40, because that’s what burns calories. Otherwise you’ll inevitably put on weight from eating what has always seemed like a “normal” amount, and the avoirdupois won’t be muscle.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Last week’s article about articles becoming more depressive might just be a factor of a changing corpus in Google Books, according to this Twitter thread (off Twitter, on a single page). So hey, maybe things are looking up! (Thanks Seth for the link.)