Why haven’t all the people who lay bricks been replaced with machines, since it looks like a repetitive task they’re suited to? It’s complex. CC-licensed photo by Aquistbe on Flickr.

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A selection of 8 links for you. That’s a wrap. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

More than ever we need to understand the dynamics of social networks, and how they suck people in (and affect even those who don’t use them). Read
Social Warming, my forthcoming book, and find answers – and more.

Apple reveals new efforts to fight child abuse imagery • The Verge

Russell Brandom and Richard Lawler:

»

In a briefing on Thursday afternoon, Apple confirmed previously reported plans to deploy new technology within iOS, macOS, watchOS, and iMessage that will detect potential child abuse imagery, but clarified crucial details from the ongoing project. For devices in the US, new versions of iOS and iPadOS rolling out this fall have “new applications of cryptography to help limit the spread of CSAM [child sexual abuse material] online, while designing for user privacy.”

The project is also detailed in a new “Child Safety” page on Apple’s website. The most invasive and potentially controversial implementation is the system that performs on-device scanning before an image is backed up in iCloud. From the description, scanning does not occur until a file is getting backed up to iCloud, and Apple only receives data about a match if the cryptographic vouchers (uploaded to iCloud along with the image) for a particular account meet a threshold of matching known CSAM.

For years, Apple has used hash systems to scan for child abuse imagery sent over email, in line with similar systems at Gmail and other cloud email providers. The program announced today will apply the same scans to user images stored in iCloud Photos, even if the images are never sent to another user or otherwise shared.

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There’s a ton of explanation in this story (though not in the very overheated FT one) about what Apple is and isn’t doing, and the pains it has taken to get cryptographers to look over its plans to see if they’re robust.

But no, people are Losing. Their. §hit. about it. Apparently Apple is now invading their privacy (by checking for hashes of known CSAM?). What’s overlooked is that Microsoft, Google (2008), Facebook (2011) and Twitter (2013) have been doing this sort of thing to email and cloud storage for ages. Yes, that’s a story I wrote in 2013. Nobody knew about it; everyone thought Apple was the first company to scan for CSAM, because there’s a certain tech bro mentality that only things Apple does are worth noticing.

Apparently though evil governments will break into the database, upload hashes of photos they want to find, and get journalists or dissidents arrested. This is the scenario laid out by at least one noisy cryptographer on Twitter, who apparently hasn’t noticed that authoritarian governments don’t need a pretext to arrest someone – they just do it – and hasn’t figured out that to know what the photo in question is, they’d need to have seen on the target’s phone already. It’s just idiotic.
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Why Facebook’s claims about the Ad Observer are wrong • Mozilla blog

Marshall Erwin is chief security officer at Mozilla (which makes Firefox), and weighs in on Facebook banning researchers collecting data about ads that users were being shown:

»

We decided to recommend Ad Observer because our reviews assured us that it respects user privacy and supports transparency. It collects ads, targeting parameters and metadata associated with the ads. It does not collect personal posts or information about your friends. And it does not compile a user profile on its servers. The extension also allows you to see what data has been collected by visiting the “My Archive” tab. It gives you the choice to opt in to sharing additional demographic information to aid research into how specific groups are being targeted, but even that is off by default.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Ad Observer is open source, so anybody can see the code and  confirm it is designed properly and doing what it purports to do.

Of course, companies like Facebook need to be proactive about third-parties that might be collecting data on their platform and putting their users at risk. Figuring out what third-parties to allow under what circumstances is certainly not an easy task. But in this case, the application of its policy is counterproductive.

…The truth is that major platforms continue to be a safe haven for disinformation and extremism — wreaking havoc on people, our elections and society.

…We need tools like Ad Observer to help us shine a light on the darkest corners of the web. And rather than standing in the way of efforts to hold platforms accountable, we all need to work together to support and improve these tools.

«

Facebook is going to brazen this out, though. It’s restricting access to CrowdTangle, which gave other insights into what sort of content is popular on the network.
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Climate crisis: scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

»

The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

The complexity of the AMOC system and uncertainty over levels of future global heating make it impossible to forecast the date of any collapse for now. It could be within a decade or two, or several centuries away. But the colossal impact it would have means it must never be allowed to happen, the scientists said.

“The signs of destabilisation being visible already is something that I wouldn’t have expected and that I find scary,” said Niklas Boers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who did the research. “It’s something you just can’t [allow to] happen.”

It is not known what level of CO2 would trigger an AMOC collapse, he said. “So the only thing to do is keep emissions as low as possible. The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere”.

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Better get that ticket to New Zealand booked, folks, because I can’t honestly see emissions staying “as low as possible”.
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Electric vehicle sales outpace diesel again • BBC News

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More electric vehicles were registered than diesel cars for the second month in a row in July, according to car industry figures. It is the third time battery electric vehicles have overtaken diesel in the past two years.

…In July, battery electric vehicle registrations again overtook diesel cars, but registrations of petrol vehicles far outstripped both.

Cars can be registered when they are sold, but dealers can also register cars before they go on sale on the forecourt.

People are starting to buy electric vehicles more as the UK tries to move towards a lower carbon future.
The UK plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030, and hybrids by 2035.

That should mean that most cars on the road in 2050 are either electric, use hydrogen fuel cells, or some other non-fossil fuel technology.

In July there was “bumper growth” in the sale of plug-in cars, the SMMT said, with battery electric vehicles taking 9% of sales. Plug-in hybrids reached 8% of sales, and hybrid electric vehicles were at almost 12%.
This is compared with a 7.1% market share for diesel, which saw 8,783 registrations.

«

Sales fell by nearly 30%, though. The new car market is incredibly liable to fluctuation (try taking the view out to “max”, which goes back to the 1960s), but the past two years are below the long-term trend.
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UK considers blocking Nvidia takeover of Arm over security • Bloomberg (via Yahoo)

Kitty Donaldson and Giles Turner:

»

Nvidia, the biggest US chip company by market capitalisation, announced in September a $40bn deal to acquire Arm from Japan’s SoftBank Group, as part of a push to spread its reach in the surging market for semiconductors. SoftBank has been selling assets to raise cash for buybacks and fresh investments in startups.

In April, UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden asked the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to prepare a report on whether the deal could be deemed anti-competitive, along with a summary of any national security concerns raised by third parties.

The assessment, delivered in late July, contains worrying implications for national security and the UK is currently inclined to reject the takeover, a person familiar with government discussions said. The UK is likely to conduct a deeper review into the merger due to national security issues, a separate person said.

No final decision has been taken, and the UK could still approve the deal alongside certain conditions, the people added. Dowden is set to decide on whether the merger needs further examination by the UK’s competition authorities.

«

What would the national security issues be that didn’t arise when Softbank bought it in July 2016? Why is an American company more of a risk than a Japanese one? Looking forward to hearing these answered.
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YouTube’s Neal Mohan on the algorithm, monetization, and the future for creators • The Verge

Transcript for the chief product officer’s interview with The Verge’s editor Nilay Patel:

»

NP: Your connection to the early days of YouTube and how you’d make “My Day at the Zoo” now, I buy it. I have a more cynical version of the story though, and I want you to clarify it for me.

The more cynical version is: Snapchat launched Stories, and then Instagram launched Stories, and then WhatsApp launched Stories, and then YouTube launched Stories, and then LinkedIn launched Stories, and now there’s Stories everywhere.

And then TikTok came out, and TikTok is a cultural phenomenon. And now there’s something that looks exactly like TikTok in Instagram, and there is Shorts, which looks exactly like TikTok in YouTube.

That feels like maybe an unfairly cynical reading, but it’s also definitely the correct timeline. Do you think of Shorts as a direct competitor to TikTok?

NM: I’ll put it in context from my perspective. Thinking about things from a creator standpoint — you’re a video creator or you’re a creator that’s looking to build an audience — personally, I believe that it’s really great that there’s lots of platforms, lots of choices, lots of different ways that you can build an audience. I would argue that all of these platforms, while they might seem similar in many ways, are fundamentally very, very different, but I actually think that’s great for creators because it gives them a diversity of options. That’s what I would say first and foremost.

I would just say that we look at the Shorts product through the lens of “simple, fast, easy, but powerful mobile creation.” Ten years ago, you would have a camera, you’d have a tripod, you’d set it up in your family room or in your backyard or in your bedroom, and you would start vlogging. I really think the world is very different [now]. And, as you know, many parts of the world are leapfrogging that generation completely with the prevalence of mobile phones and the power on those devices. I really do look at what we’re doing with Shorts through that lens, and I think the roadmap that we have will also prove out that we’re thinking about those pieces.

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Translation: yup, TikTok is killing us for attention and we need something to compete.
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Scammers will ban anyone from Instagram for $60 • Vice

Joseph Cox:

»

Scammers are abusing Instagram’s protections against suicide, self-harm, and impersonation to purposefully target and ban Instagram accounts at will, with some people even advertising professionalized ban-as-a-service offerings so anyone can harass or censor others, according to screenshots, interviews, and other material reviewed by Motherboard.

It appears that in some cases, the same scammers who offer ban-as-a-service also offer or are at least connected to services to restore accounts for users who were unfairly banned from Instagram, sometimes for thousands of dollars.

“Me (and my friend’s) currently have the best ban service on-site/in the world,” one advertisement for a ban service on the underground forum OG Users reads. “We have been professionally banning since 2020 and have top-tier experience. We may not have the cheapest prices, but trust me you are getting what you are paying for.”

War, the pseudonymous user offering the ban service, told Motherboard in a Telegram message that banning “is pretty much a full time job lol.” They claimed to have made over five-figures from selling Instagram bans in under a month. War charges $60 per ban, according to their listing.

«

I’m always wary of claims about being able to ban and/or reinstate accounts, because there are tons of scammers around social networks who will claim to be able to do this or that, when in fact they can’t. Cox did show someone who was banned, and the claims to have got them banned by the people quoted. Even so, I’d be cautious of networks of people acting in concert to make it seem like they can do something.
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Where are the robotic bricklayers? • Construction Physics

Brian Potter:

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Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, but a hundred years of limited success suggests there’s some aspect to it that prevents a machine from easily doing it. This makes it an interesting case study, as it helps define exactly where mechanization becomes difficult – what makes laying a brick so different than, say, hammering a nail, such that the latter is almost completely mechanized and the former is almost completely manual?

There seems to be a few factors at work. One is the fact that a brick or block isn’t simply set down on a solid surface, but is set on top of a thin layer of mortar, which is a mixture of water, sand, and cementitious material. Mortar has sort of complex physical properties – it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and it’s viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken. This makes it difficult to apply in a purely mechanical, deterministic way (and also probably makes it difficult for masons to explain what they’re doing – watching them place it you can see lots of complex little motions, and the mortar behaving in sort of strange not-quite-liquid but not-quite-solid ways). And since mortar is a jobsite-mixed material, there will be variation in it’s properties from batch to batch.

Masonry machines have constantly struggled with the mortar aspect of masonry; many of them simply ignored the aspect of the problem. The academic studies of the late 80s and early 90s were often based on using mortarless walls, wall systems that don’t require mortar joints (such as surface bonded masonry), or mortar alternatives that behaved a little more predictably (which is what Hadrian ended up using). In his 1996 paper, Pritschow comes right out and says that trying to solve the problem of handling mortar is too difficult.

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I had honestly been wondering about the robotic bricklayers (I vaguely think it was suggested by the Oxford team who predicted doooooom for middle managers a few years ago). But humans are more flexible, more easily replaced and easier to teach new tasks.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Where should you go after civilisation collapses? A new report has some suggestions that might surprise (but reassure) you. CC-licensed photo by Harry McGregor 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Got too many books? You need another:
Social Warming, my latest book, is out now.

NYU researchers speak out after Facebook disables their accounts • Protocol

Issie Lapowsky:

»

On Tuesday, Facebook suspended the accounts, apps and pages of several New York University researchers who have been using scraping tools to better understand political ads and disinformation on Facebook.

…Mike Clark, Facebook’s product management director, explained the company’s stance in a blog post, saying the company took these actions in fulfillment of its consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission, which requires stricter monitoring of third-party apps. “We made it clear in a series of posts earlier this year,” he wrote, “that we take unauthorized data scraping seriously, and when we find instances of scraping we investigate and take action to protect our platform. While the Ad Observatory project may be well-intentioned, the ongoing and continued violations of protections against scraping cannot be ignored and should be remediated.”

The tool in question is a browser extension called Ad Observer, which Facebook users can download if they want to send information about the Facebook ads they see to the researchers. Ad Observer scrapes the information those users see when they click “Why am I seeing this ad?” — a workaround that’s necessary because Facebook does not share information on who advertisers targeted in its public-facing ad archive. In the blog post, Clark accused the team of using the extension to collect data “about Facebook users who did not install it or consent to the collection.”

It’s an accusation that evokes the worst of the Cambridge Analytica scraping scandal, but one that leaves out key details that Protocol revealed earlier this year in a story about Facebook’s dispute with the NYU researchers and the fraught relationship between platforms and researchers generally. The users who had data collected without their consent aren’t private users: They’re advertisers, whose ads are by definition already public, and whose information Facebook stores itself in an ad archive.

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As someone pointed out, it didn’t seem to act with much alacrity when Clearview AI was scraping that data. And that it has decided that the bad press it might get from shutting this down was preferable to the bad press from what the researchers find out.
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Leaked document says Google fired dozens of employees for data misuse • Vice

Joseph Cox:

»

Google fired dozens of employees between 2018 and 2020 for abusing their access to the company’s tools or data, with some workers potentially facing allegations of accessing Google user or employee data, according to an internal Google document obtained by Motherboard.

The document provides concrete figures on an often delicate part of a tech giant’s operations: investigations into how the company’s own employees leverage their positions to steal, leak, or abuse data they may have access to. Insider abuse is a problem across the tech industry. Motherboard previously uncovered instances at Facebook, Snapchat, and MySpace, with employees in some cases using their access to stalk or otherwise spy on users.

The document says that Google terminated 36 employees in 2020 for security-related issues; 86% of all security-related allegations against employees included mishandling of confidential information, such as the transfer of internal-only information to outside parties.

…A Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement: “The instances referred to mostly relate to inappropriate access to, or misuse of, proprietary and sensitive corporate information or IP.”

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Mostly, OK, and it’s a small number of people being fired, though of course one person could exfiltrate a ton of data. Or target one very important person.
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Why the internet in Cuba has become a US political hot potato • The Guardian

Ed Augustin and Daniel Montero:

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With millions of Cubans now online, the state’s monopoly on mass communication has been deeply eroded. But after social media helped catalyse historic protests on the island last month, the government temporarily shut the internet down.

Full connectivity returned 72 hours later, but the issue has become a hot potato in the US. Hundreds of Cuban-Americans marched against the regime in Washington last week, and politicians are trying to leverage political capital: Florida senator Marco Rubio has called for the US to beam balloon-supplied internet to the island nation, while Joe Biden said his administration is assessing whether it can increase Cuba’s connectivity.

Experts say it’s unclear how internet access could be increased at scale if the host nation is unwilling to cooperate. “I haven’t seen anything other than pie in the sky,” said Larry Press, professor of information systems at California State University.

Past US government attempts to bolster connectivity in Cuba read like a John Le Carré novel.

In 2009, Alan Gross, a subcontractor for the US Agency for International Development, was arrested for distributing satellite equipment. His work was funded thanks to a US law that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the Castro regime. (Gross was later released as part of the restoration of US-Cuban relations during Barack Obama’s second term.)

Attempts to smuggle satellite ground stations disguised as surf boards on to the island were similarly foiled.

«

It’s the internet equivalent of exploding cigars. The US never does anything involving Cuba that doesn’t seem bizarrely clumsy.
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Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades • PNAS

Bollen et al:

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Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced “hockey stick” pattern.

Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions.

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language.

We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars.

This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

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Wow. We’re talking ourselves into collapse? (Thanks Richard B for the link.) And since we’re on the topic…
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These six countries are most likely to survive a climate change-caused societal collapse • Mic

AJ Dellinger:

»

If you have ever considered your zombie apocalypse survival plan, you’ve almost certainly concluded that the best place to be to survive the end-of-the-world event is somewhere isolated, and preferably surrounded by water. As it turns out, science agrees with you — it’s just that the event threatening our survival isn’t a zombie takeover; it’s climate change.

A new Global Sustainability Institute study published in the journal Sustainability did the work of ranking the locations best suited to survive a global societal collapse stemming from climate change-led destruction. The results: Islands and other sparsely populated, remote locations are the best places to post up for the end times — though take that with a grain of salt, because no place will go entirely untouched by the planet’s continued warming and ensuing fallout.

According to researchers, New Zealand, specifically, is the best location to live in as climate change rears its ugly head. It’s an unsurprising choice, as the country checks a lot of boxes for survivalists: It’s a remote island with vast, largely untouched landscapes that, in a survival scenario, amount to untapped resources. And it seems there’s some agreement about New Zealand’s merits when it comes to potential global societal collapse. According to the University of Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Initiative, which similarly ranks countries based on their readiness and capability to adapt to climate change, New Zealand ranks second out of 181 countries, behind only Norway.

«

I know, I know – you’re thinking that New Zealand is a long way away. But don’t worry:

»

“Using the perspective of the Gaia Hypothesis, northern Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, New Zealand and the British Isles (along with mountainous regions at lower latitudes) may remain habitable through the persistence of agriculture and may therefore act as ‘lifeboats’ for populations of humans.”

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Hooray?
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The CDC needs to stop confusing the public • The New York Times

Zeynep Tufekci:

»

On July 21, the White House’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, told CNBC that Delta was “clearly different” than previous variants, with an extraordinary capacity for transmitting from person to person, and that fully vaccinated people might want to consider wearing masks indoors. However, just one day later, the C.D.C.’s director, Rochelle Walensky, asserted again that wearing masks for the vaccinated was an “individual choice,” saying that the vaccinated enjoyed “exceptional levels of protection.” Then on July 25, Dr. Fauci confirmed that bringing back mask mandates was “under active consideration.”

Just two days later, on July 27, Dr. Walensky addressed the issue again, but now with a very different message: Delta was behaving very differently, she said, and the C.D.C. was now recommending even the fully vaccinated wear masks indoors in public places wherever transmission rates were “substantial.”

All this was fairly confusing for the public especially since it was already many weeks after the agency should have reacted. A pandemic requires a forceful, quick, clear and unified response from public health authorities.

In announcing changes in mask recommendations Dr. Walensky notably said that vaccinated people who became infected had viral loads similar to those of unvaccinated people who got sick, and could “forward transmit with the same capacity as an unvaccinated person.”

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The CDC’s messaging has been terrible all through. As Tufekci points out, in 2020 it was excusable because Trump didn’t allow it to be clear. But its messaging since has been all over the place, giving room for misinterpretation. It needs the PR equivalent of defensive driving, expecting that people will be trying to misunderstand it.
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Google: ‘racist comments’ behind Piers Morgan’s Simone Biles ad block • UK Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Google has said it blocked advertising on a Piers Morgan Mail Online column slamming US gymnast Simone Biles for quitting Olympic events over her mental health because of “racist comments” under the article.

Mail Online has criticised Google for taking a day to provide this explanation and for failing to provide any examples, while Morgan claimed the action “represents a disgraceful attack on free speech”.

The original column, headlined “Sorry Simone Biles, but there’s nothing heroic or brave about quitting because you’re not having ‘fun’ – you let down your team-mates, your fans and your country”, received 9,000 comments – many from readers agreeing with Morgan’s point of view.

Google told Mail Online it stopped serving ads because it had found “some issues that are policy violations that you must fix”.

Morgan wrote that he had been told by Google that his column contained “dangerous or derogatory content”. According to Morgan, Google has “restricted demand” on nine of his previous columns by choosing not to buy or sell ads. But this is the first time it has fully disabled its service for enabling ads, in what Morgan described as a “draconian blanket ban”.

A Google spokesperson told Press Gazette it had taken the decision because of user-generated comments under the column.

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That’s quite the distinction. Morgan was utterly outraged at the “woke snowflake Twitterati” who he blamed for… something. But if Google is taking racism in the comments into account, the Mail might have a problem with a lot more of its articles and suddenly need to balance moderation costs against ad revenue more carefully.
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Sky News Australia banned from YouTube for seven days over Covid misinformation • The Guardian

Amanda Meade:

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Sky News Australia has been banned from uploading content to YouTube for seven days after violating its medical misinformation policies by posting numerous videos which denied the existence of Covid-19 or encouraged people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.

The ban was imposed by the digital giant on Thursday afternoon, the day after the Daily Telegraph ended Alan Jones’s regular column amid controversy about his Covid-19 commentary which included calling the New South Wales chief health officer Kerry Chant a village idiot on his Sky News program.

News Corp told Guardian Australia the ending of Jones’s column did not mean the company does not support the “compelling” broadcaster.

YouTube has not disclosed which Sky News program the videos were from but said there were “numerous” offending videos which have now been removed.

The Sky News Australia YouTube channel, which has 1.85m subscribers, has been issued a strike and is temporarily suspended from uploading new videos or livestreams for one week.

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Interesting how patterns emerge in this stuff. Which is more powerful, the video site or the TV station? Which is too powerful, the TV station or the video site?
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Tokyo braces for the hottest Olympics ever • The New York Times

John Branch and Motoko Rich:

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when the Summer Olympics return to Japan’s capital, they will open on July 24 and run until Aug. 9 [which was the 2020 schedule]. It will not take an unusual heat wave to turn them into the hottest Olympics in history, endangering athletes, spectators, workers and volunteers. Yet in awarding the 2020 Summer Games to Tokyo in 2013, the International Olympic Committee barely considered the weather.

So why was it so important to stage them in the thick of summer?

“It’s essentially driven by American television,” said Dick Pound, a longtime member of the Olympic committee and former chairman of its television negotiations committee.

Officially, the Olympic schedule is dictated by the I.O.C. But because nearly three-quarters of I.O.C. revenue comes from broadcast rights, and about half of those rights are paid by the American broadcaster NBC, the American sports calendar tends to have an outsize impact on Olympic scheduling. Baseball and football dominate American television screens in September and October. July and August, on the other hand, are relative voids.

The last time the Summer Olympics were held outside the July-August window was in 2000, when the Sydney Games were staged in late September. They remain the least watched Summer Games in the United States over the past several decades.

Ever since, the Olympic committee has told candidate cities that the Summer Games must be scheduled between July 15 and Aug. 31, barring “exceptional circumstances.”

The committee offers a scattershot of explanations for that tight window, including a desire to align with the calendars of various sports federations and attract the likes of N.B.A. players in their off-season.

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But instead it’s rainy and hot – “like sitting in a giant sauna” as one Tokyo denizen calls it.
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Political inaction is dragging the UK deeper into the climate crisis • Financial Times

Henry Mance:

»

London suffered flash floods twice in the past month. Water poured through Tube stations. Raw sewage gushed through homes. People were rightly alarmed. Did Boris Johnson or his ministers seize the moment? Did they wade through the water, and explain that worse would come unless we acted? Did they bring out charts showing that the trend in extreme weather is even worse than climate scientists forecast? Did they announce new policies to reduce emissions? They did not. If only the floods had carried a few dinghies of asylum seekers — the government might have done something.

What is the roadblock to action? You could start with Johnson, a prime minister whose climate commitment is better than many centre-right leaders but still fair-weather. To his credit, he has set a new legal 2035 target for reducing emissions, which means the UK’s emissions must more than halve within 15 years. This should drive urgency and hard choices, but instead there are too many vague strategies. Johnson has promised there will be no carbon taxes on individuals, such as a meat tax, on his watch — a pledge privately dismissed as fanciful by his own ministers.

Johnson’s ambivalence explains the hesitancy of the Treasury, which wants to know how net zero will be paid for. Economists can come up with neat environmental incentives, but politicians need to buy into them. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, is a fiscal conservative inclined to limit borrowing after the coronavirus splurge.

At least a few Tory MPs want to go even slower. Steve Baker, the backbencher who helped to scupper Theresa May’s Brexit deal, rails against the “cost of net zero”. This ignores the cost of inaction, and so is just the latest variant of climate denialism.

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Climate denialism has more variants than Covid. It’s exhausting.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Got a landing spot for Amazon’s Prime Air drones? It’ll probably go untroubled for quite a long time. CC-licensed photo by Graham Smith 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. Crimp it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Heard about Social Warming, my latest book? Follow the link!

The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream • WIRED UK

Andrew Kersley:

»

Just five years ago, Prime Air’s UK operations were at the centre of a frenzied public relations campaign, with Amazon executives claiming that drones would be delivering packages within a few years. The company offered tours of its secret drone lab to local schools, opened a huge new office in Cambridge and released an array of promotional videos for the flights that received millions of views. UK regulators also fast-tracked approvals for drone testing, which made the country an ideal testbed for drone flights and paved the way for Amazon to gain regulatory approval elsewhere.

But in the intervening years the tours stopped, the promotional videos were unlisted from Amazon’s YouTube channel and, bar occasional promises from executives like Jeff Wilke that delivery drones would become a reality “within months”, the firm’s previously widespread PR campaign disappeared. Meanwhile, despite being one of the first big companies to show interest in drones, Amazon was overtaken by Alphabet-owned Wing and UPS in the race for US regulatory approval. Now, half a decade after first conducting UK test flights, the project’s entire UK data analysis team is being made redundant.

An Amazon spokesperson says it will still have a Prime Air presence in the UK after the cuts, but refuses to disclose what type of work will take place. The spokesperson also refused to confirm, citing security reasons, if any of the test flights that once filled promotional videos will still take place in the UK. The spokesperson adds that the company has found positions in other parts of its business for some affected employees and that it will keep growing its presence in the region. The spokesperson did not confirm how many employees were offered other jobs internally.

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Lots of very juicy details about life in an office where everyone has come to realise that it’s dead, Jim.
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The lost history of the electric car – and what it tells us about the future of transport • The Guardian

Tom Standage, in an extract from his forthcoming book:

»

Pollution, congestion and noise were merely the most obvious manifestations of a deeper dependency. An outbreak of equine influenza in North America in October 1872 incapacitated all horses and mules for several weeks, providing a stark reminder of society’s reliance on animal power. The New York Times noted “the disappearance of trucks, drays, express-wagons and general vehicles” from the streets. “The present epidemic has brought us face to face with the startling fact that the sudden loss of horse labor would totally disorganize our industry and commerce,” noted the Nation. Horses and stables, the newspaper observed, “are wheels in our great social machine, the stoppage of which means injury to all classes and conditions of persons, injury to commerce, to agriculture, to trade, to social life”.

Yet societies on both sides of the Atlantic continued to become steadily more dependent on horses. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of horses in American cities grew fourfold, while the human population merely doubled. By the turn of the century there was one horse for every 10 people in Britain, and one for every four in the US. Providing hay and oats for horses required vast areas of farmland, reducing the space available to grow food for people. Feeding the US’s 20 million horses required one-third of its total crop area, while Britain’s 3.5 million horses had long been reliant on imported fodder.

Horses had become both indispensable and unsustainable. To advocates of a newly emerging technology, the solution seemed obvious: get rid of horses and replace them with self-propelling motor vehicles, known at the time as horseless carriages. Today, we call them cars.

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It’s like a metaphor, innit.
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Intense bear fight caught on camera – 3 different angles • YouTube

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Big brown bears fighting in Kuhmo, Finland. The fight took place near the bear hides operated by Boreal Wildlife Centre.

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I like the way they initially use the tree as a means to not quite engage. Until they do.

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Retracted COVID paper lives on in new citations • MedPage Today

Nicole Lou:

»

Published online on May 1, 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study relied on Surgisphere data to claim an association between renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS) inhibitor therapy and worse outcomes in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with cardiovascular disease.

The journal retracted the paper due to concerns about fraudulent data on June 4, 2020 in a widely publicized move, but the study has continued to rack up citations — totaling at least 652 as of May 31, 2021, reported Todd Lee, MD, MPH, of McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues.

Just 17.6% of verified citations acknowledged or noted that the paper was retracted, according to their research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine. [Most citations were used to support a statement in the article, and 2.6% included the data in a new analysis.]

In May of this year alone – 11 months after the article was retracted – it was referenced 21 times.

“Our findings challenge authors, peer reviewers, journal editors, and academic institutions to do a better job of addressing the broader issues of ongoing citations of retracted scientific studies and protecting the integrity of the medical literature,” Lee’s group urged.

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This feels like more evidence that it almost works better to distrust stuff until it has been replicated.
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The climbing wall architects of the Tokyo Games • The New York Times

Natalie Berry:

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“We’re not paid to be nice to athletes, but if they can’t make progress, we’ve gone wrong,” said Percy Bishton, the chief setter at the Tokyo Olympics. “Nobody wants to watch climbers who can’t get off the floor.”

To gauge the level of the world’s best, setters climb with the best. Athletes often work as commercial setters, and some setters are former competitors.

Bishton falls into a different category: He’s a pig farmer. “There aren’t many Olympic athletes farming pigs,” he said.

His route to Tokyo began as a teenager, when he screwed pieces of rock to the exterior of the house while his parents were away. Bishton followed in the hand- and footholds of many British climbers of his era, eventually taking a position as a climbing instructor. But in the 1990s, indoor climbs were rarely changed, and Bishton became bored of the same routes. He decided to reset a climb. One new route inevitably led to another, and it developed into a job, he said.

There’s little glamour.

“It’s extreme D.I.Y.,” Bishton said. “We’re all eccentric, resilient and tough characters.”

Setters invent new movements and compose complex sequences. Over time, some become easy to decipher. Occasionally, athletes find overlooked solutions. From run-and-jumps to gibbonlike leaps, tiptoe teetering to awkward contortion, moves are added to the setters’ playbook and athletes’ repertoires.

But the physicality of setting is juxtaposed with a cerebral aspect. “There’s an artistic element, and many of us also have an analytical, engineering side,” said Bishton, who is also a woodworker.

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Do read the whole article – Berry has done a fantastic job of explaining the complexity of setting routes – but if you had an image of Bishton as a rotund jolly bloke with a pipe hanging out of his mouth, think again. He’s a very good climber in his own right. (He also declared his retirement from routesetting in 2016. God laughs at your plans.)
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Your Facebook account was hacked. Getting help may take weeks — or $299 • NPR

Shannon Bond on the desperate measures some people take to get their hacked Facebook accounts back, given there’s almost zero customer support on Facebook:

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Brandon Sherman of Nevada City, Calif., followed a tip he found on Reddit to get his hacked account back.

“I ultimately broke down and bought a $300 Oculus Quest 2,” he said. Oculus is a virtual reality company owned by Facebook but with its own customer support system.

Sherman contacted Oculus with his headset’s serial number and heard back right away. He plans to return the unopened device, and while he’s glad the strategy worked, he doesn’t think it’s fair.

“The only way you can get any customer service is if you prove that you’ve actually purchased something from them,” he said.

When McNamara, the Facebook user in Canada, first heard about the Oculus trick, she thought it was a joke. But she said, “Once I started thinking about it, all my memories, I really realized that I wanted to do whatever possible to get it back.”

So she, too, ordered an expensive gadget she never planned to use and returned it as soon as she got back into her Facebook account.

(A warning to anyone thinking about trying this — other Reddit users have said they tried contacting Oculus support but were unable to get their Facebook accounts restored. Also, last week, Facebook said it was temporarily halting sales of the Oculus Quest 2, which retails starting at $299, because its foam lining caused skin irritation for some customers.)

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Don’t mention on Twitter that you’ve had your Facebook account hacked: it attracts a ton of scammers who will promise to get it back, but cannot do anything of the sort. (I wrote about that for Which? Computing magazine.)
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Giving young people a safer, more private experience on Instagram – About Facebook

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Wherever we can, we want to stop young people from hearing from adults they don’t know or don’t want to hear from. We believe private accounts are the best way to prevent this from happening. So starting this week, everyone who is under 16 years old (or under 18 in certain countries) will be defaulted into a private account when they join Instagram. 

Private accounts let people control who sees or responds to their content. If you have a private account, people have to follow you to see your posts, Stories and Reels. People also can’t comment on your content in those places, and they won’t see your content at all in places like Explore or hashtags. 

Historically, we asked young people to choose between a public account or a private account when they signed up for Instagram, but our recent research showed that they appreciate a more private experience. During testing, eight out of ten young people accepted the private default settings during sign-up. 

…Starting in a few weeks, we’ll only allow advertisers to target ads to people under 18 (or older in certain countries) based on their age, gender and location. This means that previously available targeting options, like those based on interests or on their activity on other apps and websites, will no longer be available to advertisers.

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I’d say the latter part will make the bigger difference. Notice too that existing under-16 accounts aren’t being made private, even though that would make no difference for those who already follow them. It’s not as if Instagram has any means of age verification either.
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eBay manager imprisoned for harassment of journalists the CEO wanted to “take down” • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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A former eBay security manager who pleaded guilty for his role in a cyberstalking conspiracy was sentenced to 18 months in prison yesterday.

Philip Cooke, former senior manager of security operations for eBay’s Global Security Team, pleaded guilty in October 2020 to one count of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and one count of conspiracy to commit witness tampering. He was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on each charge, with the two sentences to be served concurrently, according to an order issued in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He was also fined $15,000 and sentenced to supervised release of three years after he gets out of prison.

The Department of Justice alleged that in 2019, Cooke helped plan and attempt to cover up the stalking of Ina and David Steiner of Natick, Massachusetts, who run the news website EcommerceBytes. Cooke was one of seven eBay employees accused of harassment involving sending threatening messages and deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig mask to the couple’s home. Several conspirators allegedly traveled from California to Massachusetts to conduct surveillance on the couple, but Cooke was not among them. Cooke wasn’t included in the initial charges filed in June 2020 but was charged a few weeks later.

eBay executives were angered by EcommerceBytes’ news coverage of eBay. Text messages show that then-Chief Communications Officer Steven Wymer wrote, “We are going to crush this lady,” referring to editor Ina Steiner. In another text, then-CEO Devin Wenig allegedly wrote to Wymer, “Take her down.” Wenig and Wymer were not charged.

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Just closing the circle on this one, which first surfaced just over a year ago. That Wenig and Wymer didn’t get charged feels remarkable, but if they didn’t actually say what to do, well…
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How Facebook’s content moderation failed Palestinians • WIRED Middle East

Bani Sapra:

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From the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement, social media platforms have become a public space for activists to rally global attention to their cause. For Palestinians—whose voices have long been left out of mainstream conversations—Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and now TikTok have provided ways to reclaim their narratives, spreading awareness of their situations, filming confrontations with the Israeli security forces, and documenting violent clampdowns on protests.

However, as Shtaya points out, the platforms themselves aren’t always neutral. Although Instagram posted a mea culpa late on May 6, blaming the removal of stories, highlights, and archives on technical problems occurring around the world, Shtaya points out that the glitches don’t explain all the cases she flagged that day. More importantly, Shtaya says that Palestinians continued to face difficulties posting after Instagram said that it had resolved the problems on May 7.

“Sixty-eight% of the cases that we have received on Instagram were after the platform announced that they solved their technical glitches,” she says. “So their announcement was somehow meaningless for Palestinians.”

«

I saw this in Benedict Evans’s newsletter and thought “well, that’s interesting – I didn’t see this on Wired UK or Wired.com”. Turns out that despite this being a story about Facebook, moderation, and suppression of speech in demonstration, and despite Sapra’s byline appearing on other stories in other Wired sites, this one didn’t get picked up. You could layer the irony on your toast.
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Why is China smashing its tech industry? • Noahpinion

Noah Smith on China’s peculiar attack on a number of its tech companies and even their funding:

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The U.S. has slapped down a few of its corporate giants before — Microsoft, AT&T, Standard Oil — but ultimately it didn’t crush the industries these companies were a part of. We’re unlikely to see major action against all the U.S. internet companies at once, and broad EU action will likely take the form of new rules rather than a sweeping crackdown. China’s attack on its tech companies, in contrast, seems far more comprehensive — it’s not just attacking the biggest internet companies, it’s attacking the entire sector. (Update: An important piece of evidence here is that China also appears to be reducing venture funding. If you want more competition you don’t squash new entrants!) For whatever reason, China is suddenly not a fan of the industry we call “tech”.

This is strange because for years, it was conventional wisdom in the Western media that having a “tech” sector was crucial to innovation and growth etc. In fact, for many years American pundits argued that China’s economy would be held back by the government’s insistence on control of information, because it would make it impossible for China to build a world-class tech sector! Then China did build a world-class tech sector anyway, and now it’s willfully smashing the world-class tech sector it built. So much for U.S.-style “innovation”.

But notice that China isn’t cracking down on all of its technology companies. Huawei, for example, still seems to enjoy the government’s full backing. The government is going hell-bent-for-leather to try to create a world-class domestic semiconductor industry, throwing huge amounts of money at even the most speculative startups. And it’s still spending heavily on A.I. It’s not technology that China is smashing — it’s the consumer-facing internet software companies that Americans tend to label “tech”.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: thanks to Gregory Buthis for the link to the Belarusian heavies v sprinter transcript yesterday.

The Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier on manoeuvres: but if you see it on radar, not a photo, can you be sure it’s there? CC-licensed photo by British High Commission%2C New Delhi 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. Reloading summer. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘I will not be silenced’: women targeted in hack-and-leak attacks speak out about spyware • NBC News

Olivia Solon:

»

Ghada Oueiss, a Lebanese broadcast journalist at Al-Jazeera, was eating dinner at home with her husband last June when she received a message from a colleague telling her to check Twitter. Oueiss opened up the account and was horrified: A private photo taken when she was wearing a bikini in a jacuzzi was being circulated by a network of accounts, accompanied by false claims that the photos were taken at her boss’s house.

Over the next few days she was barraged with thousands of tweets and direct messages attacking her credibility as a journalist, describing her as a prostitute or telling her she was ugly and old. Many of the messages came from accounts that appeared to support Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS, including some verified accounts belonging to government officials.

“I immediately knew that my phone had been hacked,” said Oueiss, who believes she was targeted in an effort to silence her critical reporting on the Saudi regime. “Those photos were not published anywhere. They were only on my phone.”

“I am used to being harassed online. But this was different,” she added. “It was as if someone had entered my home, my bedroom, my bathroom. I felt so unsafe and traumatized.”

Oueiss is one of several high-profile female journalists and activists who have allegedly been targeted and harassed by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East through hack-and-leak attacks using the Pegasus spyware, created by Israeli surveillance technology company NSO Group. The spyware transforms a phone into a surveillance device, activating microphones and cameras and exporting files without a user knowing.

For Oueiss and several other women whose phones were allegedly targeted, a key part of the harassment and intimidation is the use of private photos. While these photos may seem tame by Western standards, they are considered scandalous in conservative societies like Saudi Arabia and were seemingly used to publicly shame these women and smear their reputations.

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Huge methane cloud spotted near gas pipeline that supplies China • Yahoo

Akshat Rathi and Naubet Bisenov:

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A massive methane plume detected last month over Kazakhstan occurred near a major pipeline that supplies natural gas to China.

The cloud was observed roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of the largest Kazakh city of Almaty on July 24, and had an emissions rate of more than 200 tons of methane an hour, according to an estimate from geoanalytics firm Kayrros SAS. That amount of the super-warming greenhouse gas would have roughly the same short-term climate warming impact as the annual emissions of 10,000 cars in the UK.

“This large emission event matches the pattern of methane release observed from gas infrastructure,” said a spokesperson for Kayrros. “A pipeline and compressors are in close proximity, and based on information Kayrros has access to there are no other candidates for the observed release.”

KazTransGas JSC, which operates the Kazakh portion of the Central Asia-China pipeline, said it didn’t have any leaks and the country’s energy ministry didn’t immediately provide a response to queries about the plume.

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All the effort that individuals make, wiped out by this sort of supply mistake. One of my (adult) children told me that on global warming, he decided long ago that it can only be sorted by action on supply; that for individuals to change their demands will simply never add up to enough to effect change.
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How Olympic surfing is trying to ride the machine learning wave • WSJ

Daniela Hernandez:

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South African surfer Bianca Buitendag uses some apps and websites to gauge wind and wave conditions before she competes, but she doesn’t consider surfing a high-tech sport. It’s mostly about trying to gauge the weather. 

“That’s about it,” she said this week. 

Carissa Moore, who on Tuesday faced off with Buitendag for the sport’s first-ever Olympic gold medal, takes a different approach. She loads up on performance analytics, wave pools and science. The American, who beat Buitendag by nearly 6.5 points to win the gold medal on Tuesday, has competed on artificial waves and uses technology such as a wearable ring that tracks her sleep and other vitals to help her coaches fine-tune her training and recovery. 

Their different approaches go to the heart of a long-running tension in surfing: dueling images of the spiritual, naturalist wave rider versus the modern, techie athlete. 

“There’s this illusion that you’re trying to sustain, even if you’re aware of all the stuff that’s gone into [surfing],” said Peter Westwick, a University of Southern California surfing historian. He’s talking about the use of advanced polymer chemistry-enabled products in surfboards and wetsuits and complex weather modeling that helps govern where and how competitions like this Olympic event are held. The tech has roots in military research and development, he said. 

 “It’s now the basis of this billion-dollar industry,” Westwick said.

The latest iteration of that loaded conflict involves software that’s invisible but powerful, like the wind that helps propel the waves the sport relies on. Machine learning algorithms could further shape surfing in years to come, helping to improve wave forecasting, and making inroads into training, injury prevention, and recruitment of top athletes, according to researchers and coaches.       

“We’ve been really trying to figure out ways to get our athletes to perform. There’s so many variables you can’t control, like wind and tides,” said Kevyn Dean, USA Surfing’s medical director. “Taking a deeper dive into analytics and data was our roadmap…We really want to follow the data.” 

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One day we have machine learning being useless (in Covid diagnosis), the next Olympic athletes are relying on it. No wonder nobody can decide what to trust.
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‘That’s how suicide cases end up’: transcript of Belarusian sports officials caught on tape trying to pressure sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya into quitting Tokyo Olympics after she criticized them publicly • Meduza

Transcribed by Olga Korelina and Dmitry Kartsev, translation by Kevin Rothrock:

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Hours after the dramatic events at Tokyo’s airport, the anonymous Telegram channel “Nick and Mike” published an audio recording on YouTube that allegedly captures an exchange between [Krystsina] Tsimanouskaya and two Belarusian sports officials: national team head coach Yuri Moisevich and Belarusian Republican Track and Field Training Center deputy director Artur Shumak. About 19 minutes long, the tape is clearly part of a conversation where the two men drive Tsimanouskaya to tears, trying to persuade her to drop out of the Olympics and leave Tokyo immediately. Meduza presents a translation of this recording (with a few minor redactions).

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I can’t honestly tell you if this is true. But it rings really true, and it’s transcribed from the embedded YouTube video which would be a hell of a piece of acting if that’s the case.

On balance I’m prepared to believe this is real. In which the way that the two heavies use every possible tactic, from sympathy to mild threats to bigger threats to appeals to “reason”, is an insight into how Mafiosi work.
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Jihadists flood pro-Trump social network with propaganda • Politico

Mark Scott and Tina Nguyen:

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Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a Politico review of online activity on the fledgling platform.

The social network — started a month ago by members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle — features reams of jihadi-related material, including graphic videos of beheadings, viral memes that promote violence against the West and even memes of a militant executing Trump in an orange jumpsuit similar to those used in Guantanamo Bay.

The rapid proliferation of such material is placing GETTR in the awkward position of providing a safe haven for jihadi extremists online as it attempts to establish itself as a free speech MAGA-alternative to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

It underscores the challenges facing Trump and his followers in the wake of his ban from the mainstream social media platforms following the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots.

Islamic State “has been very quick to exploit GETTR,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism, who first discovered the jihadi accounts and shared his findings with Politico.

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Censorship for thee, but not for me. Is that how it works?
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Alternative Olympics Medal Table

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What would happen if we re-ranked Olympic medals based on other factors? If we took account of population size, wealth or even search interest, how would the medal table look? Click the buttons below to find out.

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It’s a Google product, and they do seem to be updating it regularly. Of course any reordering tends to enormously favour the smaller countries which have been able to get a medal.
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Theranos patients are the emerging wild card in the trial of Elizabeth Holmes • WSJ

Christopher Weaver and Sara Randazzo:

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After three back-to-back miscarriages, Brittany Gould said she turned to Theranos Inc. to know if her latest pregnancy was on track.

Then, one of the company’s trademark finger-prick tests indicated she was losing another baby, Ms. Gould said. The Mesa, Ariz., medical assistant recalled dreading the moment when she would have to tell her 7-year-old daughter, who was waiting for a sibling.

“Mommy is not having a baby,” Ms. Gould said she told her.

Like those of other patients slated as potential witnesses in the criminal trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes , Ms. Gould’s test was wrong. Prosecutors have accused Ms. Holmes of defrauding patients and investors by falsely claiming her invention could accurately perform lab tests on just a few drops of blood.

The repeatedly delayed trial—postponed once because Ms. Holmes was due to have a baby herself—is expected to be one of the most widely watched corporate-fraud cases in years.

…[But] Prosecutors will be hampered in trying to prove Theranos’s technology wasn’t reliable because they can’t access a company database that tracked millions of test results. A copy of the database given to the government on an encrypted hard drive turned out to be unusable when prosecutors belatedly learned they didn’t have a passcode needed to access it. The company, meanwhile, dismantled the original database around the time Theranos dissolved in 2018.

Prosecutors say they aim to call to testify 11 patients and around the same number of medical providers who recall faulty tests from Theranos. Most of their stories have never been reported.

«

John Carreyrou, who originally uncovered it all, is still listed as a WSJ reporter, but in fact left it in 2019 for “paid speaking events that are banned by the paper”.
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The shadow of the chip shortage is looming over tech’s big quarter • The Verge

Chaim Gertenberg:

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Apple had already warned that part shortages could impact its iPad and Mac businesses at its Q2 earnings to the tune of $3bn to $4bn. CFO Luca Maestri said on last week’s Q3 earnings call that it was able to keep those losses mainly limited to iPads and under $3bn, in what was definitely a win for Apple. But it came at the same time as a warning from CEO Tim Cook that supply constraints could impact the iPhone — the most important and lucrative part of Apple’s product lineup — in the coming quarter, which could be a far more concerning factor for the company.

Microsoft, too, called out a decline in Windows OEM revenue (a drop of 3 percent) as being directly caused by supply chain constraints, even as its cloud revenue continued to soar. And of course, while Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox Series X and Series S consoles continue to sell every unit Microsoft can make, there’s just simply not enough supply to go around yet.

It was a similar story at Samsung, which posted increased revenue and operating profit year over year, carried by massive demand from its semiconductor business (which accounts for over a third of its revenue and more than half its profit). But Samsung was also weighed down by less overall demand and revenue for its mobile phone business, which declined compared to last quarter due to a combination of supply shortages and the seasonal buying cycle.

Other companies, like Tesla, have taken more drastic steps to face the shortage: the company had to develop new firmware for whatever chips it could get its hands on, but CEO Elon Musk was blunt about the fact that semiconductors would be a big concern for the company. “The global chip shortage situation remains quite serious,” he said, highlighting difficulties Tesla experienced getting chips that power essential parts of its cars — specifically the airbags and seatbelt modules.

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Phantom warships are courting chaos in conflict zones • WIRED

Mark Harris:

»

On September 17 last year, the largest ship in the UK’s Royal Navy, the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, steamed majestically towards the Irish Sea. The 283-meter-long fleet flagship was flanked by an escort of destroyers and smaller ships from the UK, Dutch, and Belgian navies. The six vessels moving in close formation would have made an awe-inspiring spectacle—if they had actually been there.

In fact, satellite imagery of their supposed locations shows nothing but deep blue sea, and news reports suggest the warships were actually scattered in distant ports at the time. The Queen Elizabeth and its flotilla were previously unreported victims of a disturbing trend: warships having their positions—and even entire voyages—faked using the automatic identification system, a wireless radio technology designed to prevent collisions at sea.

According to analysis conducted by conservation technology nonprofit SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch, over 100 warships from at least 14 European countries, Russia, and the US appear to have had their locations faked, sometimes for days at a time, since August 2020. Some of these tracks show the warships approaching foreign naval bases or intruding into disputed waters, activities that could escalate tension in hot spots like the Black Sea and the Baltic. Only a few of these fake tracks have previously been reported, and all share characteristics that suggest a common perpetrator.

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The perpetrator is not any of the European countries; instead, it’s one that would like to claim that the European countries have been aggressors. As fast as we come up with schemes to record where things are, people come up with schemes to fake them.
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Twitter social distancing • One Man And His Blog

Adam Tinworth:

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On Saturday night, I deleted Twitter from my phone. This morning, I removed it from my iPad. For the rest of August, if I want to interact with Twitter, I’ll either have to open it on the web, or use my MacBook. August is going to be my month of Twitter social distancing.

A decade ago (I’m approaching my 15th anniversary as a Twitter user) I loved Twitter. It was a great place to maintain low level regular contact with interesting people I knew. Even now, I have some great conversations on there from time to time. But something has changed. My Twitter timeline is more performative, more hostile, more aggressive. The journalism part of it is particularly bad. And I need a break from it.

I’ll dig into some of my thoughts behind the reasons why in a later post — it’s partially drafted, but keeps growing, so I’ll use some of the time saved by not doom-scrolling through my feed to finish writing that. But the key point here is that Twitter has been having a notable deleterious effect on my mood and — occasionally — my self-confidence and even mental health.

«

Wondering when I can start diagnosing people as suffering from the effects of social warming. Increased heat, or the excess rainfall of unwanted tweets, or…
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It’s always a good time to buy a book. How about
Social Warming, my latest book?

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This is Burgess Park BMX park, where some of the newest British Olympians have come from. But how? CC-licensed photo by Matt Brown 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The metaverse has always been a dystopian idea • Vice

Brian Merchant:

»

It’s not just Microsoft and Facebook. A widening swath of Silicon Valley’s investor class, cheerleading pundits, and influential founders have been hyping the so-called metaverse, too. Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, which runs Fortnite, has for years been promoting the metaverse as the fast-arriving future. The venture capitalist Matthew Ball attempted to chart its potential and explain why it is “likely to produce trillions in value.” David Baszucki, the founder of the gaming platform Roblox, sung its praises and underlined its import in a January piece for WIRED.

“The Metaverse is arguably as big a shift in online communication as the telephone or the internet,” he wrote.

“The metaverse is a vision that spans many companies—the whole industry,” as Zuckerberg put it. “You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet.”

We’ve seen this movie before, of course: a host of Silicon Valley companies uniting to embrace a new and nebulous concept, a la the Internet of Things, that sounds both adequately future-y and freshly attractive to big picture-loving investors. This has not stopped those companies from fomenting a new air of inevitability within the industry, or its advocates from trumpeting its imminent arrival. “The metaverse is coming,” one futurist enthused in Forbes in a widely viewed story, “and it’s a very big deal.” In fact, a quick Google search reveals that everyone from WIRED to the Economist to TIME Magazine to InvestorPlace.com to Verizon’s “News Center” has published stories titled “The Metaverse Is Coming,” which helps to offer a snapshot of who has an interest in its arrival.

If it is coming, and if it is a big deal, then surprisingly few have paused to carefully consider the actual source of the metaverse, an undertaking which seems like a good idea, especially because that source is a deeply dystopian novel about a collapsed America that is overrun by violence and poverty. The metaverse was born in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash, where it serves as entertainment and an economic underbelly to a poor, desperate nation that is literally governed by corporate franchises.

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Always unsure whether this is the “old man yells at cloud” situation or the “corporations always make things worse not better” one.
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Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch Covid. None of them helped • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

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The AI community, in particular, rushed to develop software that many believed would allow hospitals to diagnose or triage patients faster, bringing much-needed support to the front lines—in theory.

In the end, many hundreds of predictive tools were developed. None of them made a real difference, and some were potentially harmful.

That’s the damning conclusion of multiple studies published in the last few months. In June, the Turing Institute, the UK’s national center for data science and AI, put out a report summing up discussions at a series of workshops it held in late 2020. The clear consensus was that AI tools had made little, if any, impact in the fight against Covid.

This echoes the results of two major studies that assessed hundreds of predictive tools developed last year. Wynants is lead author of one of them, a review in the British Medical Journal that is still being updated as new tools are released and existing ones tested. She and her colleagues have looked at 232 algorithms for diagnosing patients or predicting how sick those with the disease might get. They found that none of them were fit for clinical use. Just two have been singled out as being promising enough for future testing.

“It’s shocking,” says Wynants. “I went into it with some worries, but this exceeded my fears.”

Wynants’s study is backed up by another large review carried out by Derek Driggs, a machine-learning researcher at the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues, and published in Nature Machine Intelligence. This team zoomed in on deep-learning models for diagnosing Covid and predicting patient risk from medical images, such as chest x-rays and chest computer tomography (CT) scans. They looked at 415 published tools and, like Wynants and her colleagues, concluded that none were fit for clinical use.

«

Oh. Oh dear.
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Why Bored Ape avatars are taking over Twitter • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

By the time Swenson decided that he wanted to buy one, on May 3rd, he paid around $1,700 on OpenSea, an NFT marketplace. His ape has a preppy look—sailor hat, gingham shirt, puffer vest—“similar to how I like to dress,” Swenson said. A few weeks later, he bought another. He had previously traded NBA Top Shots, basketball-game highlight videos in NFT form, but this felt more consequential. “It was fear of missing out,” he told me. “I was watching a lot of people whose opinions I valued on NBA Top Shots change their picture to an ape.” Matt Galligan, the co-founder and CEO of a messaging network for crypto called XMTP, who had managed to buy four Bored Apes during the launch, told me, “It became a status symbol of sorts, kind of like wearing a fancy watch or rare sneakers.”

More than previous NFT avatar projects, Bored Ape Yacht Club created rich and detailed iconography drawn from its founders’ personal tastes.Image courtesy Bored Ape Yacht Club
Bored Ape Yacht Club’s initial batch of NFTs brought in more than $2m. The collection has since seen almost $100m in trading, with the cheapest apes often going for almost $14,000.

«

It’s exhausting to have to point this out, but you can just copy the bloody things. They’re digital. The NFT stuff is a way of wasting money that isn’t really money. But it also makes people feel good that they’re “rich” enough to spend this money on total fripperies. They’re a form of indulgence; almost a papal one, because who knows what they’re really worth, apart perhaps from nothing. It’s an ultimate capitalism: buying things with no value with a currency that has no value.
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This is our chance to pull teenagers out of the smartphone trap • The New York Times

Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge:

»

As students return to school in the coming weeks, there will be close attention to their mental health. Many problems will be attributed to the Covid pandemic, but in fact we need to look back further, to 2012.

That’s when rates of teenage depression, loneliness, self-harm and suicide began to rise sharply. By 2019, just before the pandemic, rates of depression among adolescents had nearly doubled.

When we first started to see these trends in our work as psychologists studying Gen Z (those born after 1996), we were puzzled. The US economy was steadily improving over these years, so economic problems stemming from the 2008 Great Recession were not to blame. It was difficult to think of any other national event from the early 2010s that reverberated through the decade.

We both came to suspect the same culprits: smartphones in general and social media in particular. Jean discovered that 2012 was the first year that a majority of Americans owned a smartphone; by 2015, two-thirds of teens did too. This was also the period when social media use moved from optional to ubiquitous among adolescents.

Jonathan [Haidt] learned, while writing an essay with the technologist Tobias Rose-Stockwell, that the major social media platforms changed profoundly from 2009 to 2012. In 2009, Facebook added the like button, Twitter added the retweet button and, over the next few years, users’ feeds became algorithmicized based on “engagement,” which mostly meant a post’s ability to trigger emotions.

«

“The authors are psychologists who have spent years studying the effect of smartphones and social media on our daily lives and mental health,” the article notes.

Well, this is interesting. When I drafted Social Warming, I wrote an entire chapter – 12,500 words – about what the data seemed to show about smartphones and children. There are plenty of psychologists who disagree (strongly) with Haidt and Twenge. So I looked at data from an international, quadrennial study called PISA which looks at children’s educational attainment and other measures. That seemed to me to show an absolutely clear correlation: the more smartphone penetration in a country, the less happy the children in PISA data. It showed over years, and across countries.

Unfortunately we had to cut the chapter due to pressure of space. Yes, it even happens with books.
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China’s Sputnik moment? • Foreign Affairs

Dan Wang:

»

In the 1960s, integrated circuits were developed when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was willing to pay any price for technology that could send astronauts to the moon and bring them safely back. Today, the U.S. government is putting Huawei in NASA’s position: a cash-rich organization willing to pay for critical components on the basis of performance rather than cost. Smaller Chinese companies that previously never stood a chance of selling to Huawei are now sought after as vendors, and they receive infusions of cash and technical expertise that will accelerate their growth. Private and state-owned chip manufacturers are ramping up their operations. Once siloed industries now collaborate in the service of tech innovation: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for example, has begun coordinating regular sessions that bring together math professors and private companies. China is now undertaking a whole-of-society effort to improve domestic technology, specifically around what Chinese leaders think will drive not only economic growth but also geopolitical power.

Is all of this enough to make Chinese industrial policy work this time around? It is likely that in a decade, China will have made greater technological advancements under the U.S. export-control regime than it would have had the United States not forced China’s leading companies to buy from weak domestic firms. Had the United States implemented necessary but measured reforms—strengthening the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and prosecuting intellectual property theft—and stopped there, Made in China 2025 would have likely played out in the usual way, with inefficient state-owned enterprises and government ministries taking the lead rather than innovative tech firms.

But this time is different.

«

Apparently Dominic Cummings thinks this is a Very Important Article, though I’d have to say that if you’ve been following along here they you’ll pretty much know it all already.
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SolarWinds: top US prosecutors hit by suspected Russian hack • BBC News

»

Nearly 30 top US prosecutors had their office’s email accounts hacked during a major breach last year, the Justice Department says.

The attack on users of the software SolarWinds – which the US has blamed on Russia – was the worst-ever cyber-espionage attack on the US government.

The department says 27 US attorneys had at least one office computer hacked. That has raised fears the hackers may have accessed sensitive information, including the names of informants.

“It’s potentially very serious,” Gil Soffer, a former federal prosecutor, told the BBC. He said prosecutors’ emails contain “very sensitive, very confidential and often very secret information”.

If the hackers got hold of secret informants’ identities, they could use the information to “blow their cover,” he added. The hack, which gave cyber-criminals potential access to 18,000 government and private computer networks, was made public last December.

Those hit by the breach include 80% of Microsoft email accounts used by employees at the four New York’s attorney offices – which handle some of the most prominent prosecutions in the country.

«

Notable inasmuch as hacking for information these days has become a thing that state actors do. Commercial gangs don’t mostly care.
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‘Like a mini Olympic programme’: the rise of Peckham BMX Club • The Guardian

Damien Gayle on the silver medal winner who came from the quite deprived southeast London district:

»

Peckham BMX Club is an anomaly. British Olympians tend to be overwhelmingly suburbanites, with just 35% of the current team from the UK’s largest cities. BMX, a sport that requires costly equipment and space, is more associated with quiet and leafy middle-class districts than deprived urban areas such as Peckham.

And yet Peckham BMX has already contributed seven British Olympic team members: at one point four out of seven in the BMX team came from the club.

“Basically [the club is] like a mini Olympic programme,” says its founder, CK Flash. Just like British Cycling, which develops riders for the road and velodrome, Peckham BMX has its own nutritionist, its own weightlifting coach, alongside about 10 riding coaches. “We talk about diet, we talk about water, we talk about how much sleep you get, how should you stretch,” Flash says.

It has taken nearly two decades to build up to this. Flash started training riders in 2003, breaking off a successful career as a DJ. He started in Brixton, where he first met Tre Whyte, Kye’s older brother, who rose to British national champion and took bronze in the world championships in 2014. After building a stable of riders there, Flash moved to Peckham.

“Eventually the guys from Brixton came to Peckham and then, within three years of training them, they won every title in England, which was regional champions, youth games champions, national champions, European champions, and we got a world champion from it as well in 2012.”

«

Whyte won silver; his female equivalent won gold. Making Olympic champions takes investment.
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A bizarre form of water may exist all over the universe • WIRED

Joshua Sokol:

»

The findings, published this week in Nature, confirm the existence of “superionic ice,” a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one. It was first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago, and although it has never been seen until now, scientists think it might be among the most abundant forms of water in the universe.

Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice—filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune—than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these “ice giant” worlds.

Including the hexagonal arrangement of water molecules found in common ice, known as “ice Ih,” scientists had already discovered a bewildering 18 architectures of ice crystal. After ice I, which comes in two forms, Ih and Ic, the rest are numbered II through XVII in order of their discovery. (Yes, there is an ice IX, but it exists only under contrived conditions, unlike the fictional doomsday substance in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle.)

Superionic ice can now claim the mantle of ice XVIII. It’s a new crystal but with a twist. All the previously known water ices are made of intact water molecules, each with one oxygen atom linked to two hydrogen atoms. But superionic ice, the new measurements confirm, isn’t like that. It exists in a sort of surrealist limbo, part solid, part liquid.

«

Don’t expect to buy it at your supermarket any time soon. It requires millions of atmospheres of pressure at thousands of degrees.
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The 50 best movie memes ever • Film School Rejects

Ciara Wardlow:

»

Memes. You love them. I love them. They are the veritable lifeblood of social media as we know it. They come from everywhere — news stories, stock photos, classical art (here’s looking at you, Joseph Ducreux), and, of course, movies. Now, here at Film School Rejects, movies are kind of our thing, and we live on the internet, the land of memes. So, putting two and two together, I decided it was high time that we publish a definitive list of the best movie-sourced memes out there on the interwebs.

«

You might think: only 50? And as it dates from August 2019, it doesn’t include the Anakin/Padme meme, which is one of the finest around. Which prompts me to observe:

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Facebook’s broken vows • The New Yorker

Jill Lepore reviews “An Ugly Truth”, the new book that (unlike mine) focuses solely on Facebook:

»

“Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” is a statement to be found in Facebook’s Terms of Service; everyone who uses Facebook implicitly consents to this mission. During the years of the company’s ascent, the world has witnessed a loneliness epidemic, the growth of political extremism and political violence, widening political polarization, the rise of authoritarianism, the decline of democracy, a catastrophic crisis in journalism, and an unprecedented rise in propaganda, fake news, and misinformation. By no means is Facebook responsible for these calamities, but evidence implicates the company as a contributor to each of them. In July, President Biden said that misinformation about covid-19 on Facebook “is killing people.”

Collecting data and selling ads does not build community, and it turns out that bringing people closer together, at least in the way Facebook does it, makes it easier for them to hurt one another.

«

Lepore gets plenty of room to review it (it is the New Yorker, after all) and one gets the very strong impression that she doesn’t like Facebook in the least.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Plastic recycling has had some success – but oil companies aren’t helping. CC-licensed photo by lwicks_2000 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. Just me, or is it hot in here? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

As China boomed, it didn’t take climate change into account. Now it must • The New York Times

Steven Lee Myers, Keith Bradsher and Chris Buckley:

»

China has always had floods, but as Kong Feng, then a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, wrote in 2019, the flooding of cities across China in recent years is “a general manifestation of urban problems” in the country.
The vast expansion of roads, subways and railways in cities that swelled almost overnight meant there were fewer places where rain could safely be absorbed — disrupting what scientists call the natural hydrological cycle.

Faith Chan, a professor of geology with the University of Nottingham in Ningbo in eastern China, said the country’s cities — and there are 93 with populations of more than a million — modernized at a time when Chinese leaders made climate resiliency less of a priority than economic growth.

“If they had a chance to build a city again, or to plan one, I think they would agree to make it more balanced,” said Mr. Chan, who is also a visiting fellow at the Water@Leeds Research Institute of the University of Leeds.

As early as 2013, Mr. Xi promised to build an “ecological civilization” in China. “We must maintain harmony between man and nature and pursue sustainable development,” he said in a speech in Geneva in 2013.

The country has nearly quintupled the acreage of green space in its cities over the past two decades. It introduced a pilot program to create “sponge cities,” including Zhengzhou, that better absorb rainfall. Last year, Mr. Xi pledged to speed up reductions in emissions and reach carbon neutrality by 2060. It was a tectonic shift in policy and may prove to be one in practice, as well.

The question is whether it is too late. Even if countries like China and the United States rapidly cut greenhouse gases, the warming from those already emitted is likely to have long-lasting consequences.

«

(Via John Naughton)
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Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

»

The lifestyles of around three average Americans will create enough planet-heating emissions to kill one person, and the emissions from a single coal-fired power plant are likely to result in more than 900 deaths, according to the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions.

The new research builds upon what is known as the “social cost of carbon”, a monetary figure placed upon the damage caused by each ton of carbon dioxide emissions, by assigning an expected death toll from the emissions that cause the climate crisis.

The analysis draws upon several public health studies to conclude that for every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, one person globally will die prematurely from the increased temperature. This additional CO2 is equivalent to the current lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans.

Adding a further 4m metric tons above last year’s level, produced by the average US coal plant, will cost 904 lives worldwide by the end of the century, the research found. On a grander scale, eliminating planet-heating emissions by 2050 would save an expected 74 million lives around the world this century.

«

I guess we should round up the average Americans?
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UK already undergoing disruptive climate change • BBC News

Roger Harrabin:

»

The UK is already undergoing disruptive climate change with increased rainfall, sunshine and temperatures, according to scientists.

The year 2020 was the third warmest, fifth wettest and eighth sunniest on record, scientists said in the latest UK State of the Climate report.

No other year is in the top 10 on all three criteria.

The experts said that, in the space of 30 years, the UK has become 0.9C warmer and 6% wetter.

The report’s lead author Mike Kendon, climate information scientist at the UK Met Office, told BBC News: “A lot of people think climate change is in the future – but this proves the climate is already changing here in the UK.

“As it continues to warm we are going to see more and more extreme weather such as heatwaves and floods.”

«

Cleverly timed, I thought, coming just after London in particular was hit by colossal downpours at the weekend.
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Instagram influencer Hushpuppi’s rise was allegedly fueled by cyber scams • Bloomberg

Evan Ratliff:

»

BEC [business email compromise] attacks started appearing roughly a half-dozen years ago, escalating each year until they surpassed all other forms of internet fraud. The FBI reports there were almost 20,000 such scams against American businesses in 2020 alone, accounting for $1.8bn in losses, though the variety of BEC crimes can make totals hard to pin down. Crane Hassold, the senior director of threat research at the cyberdefense company Agari Data Inc. and a former FBI analyst, likes to define a BEC as “a response-based impersonation attack that’s requesting something of value”—basically, posing as a legitimate business to trick people into giving away their money.

No matter the flavor, a BEC scam generally begins with someone hacking into a corporate email account often using social engineering tactics like phishing. Once inside, the perpetrators don’t steal anything, not at first. Instead they quietly begin forwarding copies of incoming and outgoing email to themselves. Then they wait. “They watch it for a number of weeks or months, looking for details of certain payments that are going out, understanding who their customers are, looking at communication patterns,” Hassold says. When they spot an invoice coming in or out, they “use that intelligence to insert themselves into an actual payment that is supposed to be due.”

From there the scam can work two ways: If the scammers have compromised the email of the intended recipient of the payment, they simply create an invoice identical to the real one, swapping in their own bank account details, and resend it from the recipient’s email (often with apologies for the mix-up). If, on the other hand, they’ve compromised the sender, they might send a follow-up invoice from a “spoofed” email that appears at first glance to match the payee’s, or even create an entire company and website, one letter off from the real one. In either case, [innocent] Phil in accounting sees an email that, without careful scrutiny, matches the ones he receives every day.

«

And then Phil sends the money to that account and it’s lost forever. My bank calls me if I send any substantial amount of money to a new account; my solicitors tell me to call them to get their bank details. People are jumpy about BEC. Even so it carries on.
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Brownsville, we have a problem • Protocol

Anna Kramer:

»

For Cameron County and Brownsville, Musk’s money is a bit like his rockets. The Starship prototype was a gleaming vision for the future of space exploration, but its explosion was devastating to the natural environment. Musk’s determination to build a spaceport and town that will one day launch hundreds of people to Mars has brought with it the promise of jobs, economic revitalization and an influx of wealth to one of the poorest and least-connected places in America. But the investment will also bring wealthy outsiders to a culturally vibrant, family-oriented border town that is proud of its history and the people who’ve lived there for generations, a town full of people skeptical that the money and prestige Musk is offering might be anything more than a poison pill.

SpaceX’s investment likely does mean a change in economic status and power for Brownsville. But the money and vision of the world’s second-richest man could also upend the culture and values that make Brownsville special to its community, a fear that has riven the people of this usually quiet place.

«

A lovely portrait of the (don’t say sleepy don’t say sleepy don’t say sleepy) sleepy (dammit) town near which Elon Musk is trying to build a sort of Starbase. It feels like something out of Interstellar.
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NHS data injection: will it hurt? • PC Pro

James O’Malley on the row about the NHS’s plans to collect and centralise patient data:

»

At the heart of the controversy is a trade-off between privacy for the individual and the potential improvements to healthcare that can be achieved with research based on a dataset as richly detailed as the one held by the NHS.

“The really big moment for me was when we did a data collection for diabetic retinopathy screening,” said [Dave] Roberts [head of primary care information at NHS Digital and one of the architects of the new system]. He describes how by centrally collecting data on diabetes patients and inviting those judged at risk for a screening, early interventions can be made to limit or even reverse deterioration. “We were actually changing people’s lives,” he said.

The GP diabetes data is useful on a broader level too, as it feeds into the National Diabetes and Obesity Audits, which identify more effective and efficient treatments.

Roberts also points to how GP data was critical to research carried out by the NHS’s Learning Disabilities Observatory, and led directly to improved care for those patients when they are treated by NHS services. “We’ve probably not shouted enough about the power of data,” conceded Roberts. “I think this is one opportunity to shout that quite loud.”

In terms of how the data is used in research, Roberts argues that it’s a “myth” that NHS Digital is “selling” the data to outside companies for research. Charges only cover costs, and applications to use the data are both vetted and undergo a “data minimisation” process to strip data down to the bare minimum of what is required.

But [Phil] Booth [the coordinator of MedConfidential, a group that’s campaigning against the new data regime] remains concerned due to the track record of some of the companies and organisations that take the data. His site has a long list of organisations — including some NHS bodies — that have previously been found to be in breach of their obligations.

“When audited, [some companies have] been discovered to be breaking the law, but all of them are still getting data,” he said. “They might have had to delete a particular dataset, but they are all customers, and they’re all still receiving data.”

«

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Fresh warning over rip-off locator forms on Google – BBC News

Chris Fox:

»

Rip-off websites which charge people for free Covid-19 passenger locator forms feature at the top of Google search results, the BBC has found.

Airline Ryanair said passengers should be “extra vigilant” and only download forms from the official website. The passenger locator form is designed to help airlines contact people in the event of a coronavirus outbreak.

Google said it had removed several ads but the BBC found some still topped its search results on Wednesday.

“It’s no surprise that these copycat firms have found yet another route to try and make money out of people for something that is free,” said Guy Anker, deputy editor of consumer website Money Saving Expert. While selling passenger locator forms is not illegal, Mr Anker said the rip-off websites were “devious”.

Google’s policy is to ban ads for unofficial websites selling government documents. But in May, the BBC reported that rip-off ads for travel visas, driving licences and other documents topped Google search results every time it checked during a 12-month investigation.

«

You’d think Google would just get an intern to program this as a search and zap the companies that pop up. Or get the intern to run the program and block every advertiser attempting to ride on this.
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The recycling myth: a plastic waste solution littered with failure

Joe Brock, Valerie Volcovici and John Geddie:

»

In early 2018, residents of Boise, Idaho were told by city officials that a breakthrough technology could transform their hard-to-recycle plastic waste into low-polluting fuel. The program, backed by Dow Inc, one of the world’s biggest plastics producers, was hailed locally as a greener alternative to burying it in the county landfill.

A few months later, residents of Boise and its suburbs began stuffing their yogurt containers, cereal-box liners and other plastic waste into special orange garbage bags, which were then trucked more than 300 miles (483km) away, across the state line to Salt Lake City, Utah.

The destination was a company called Renewlogy. The startup marketed itself as an “advanced recycling” company capable of handling hard-to-recycle plastics such as plastic bags or takeout containers – stuff most traditional recyclers won’t touch. Renewlogy’s technology, company founder Priyanka Bakaya told local media at the time, would heat plastic in a special oxygen-starved chamber, transforming the trash into diesel fuel.

«

However, it didn’t work. But because plastics come from oil, oil companies hate the idea of “polluter pays” charges on plastic.

»

The American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry group whose membership is dominated by plastics makers, says polluter-pays measures would hurt the economy. It’s urging US lawmakers instead to ease regulations on and provide incentives to advanced recycling companies.

«

Which takes us back to the beginning, above, which means nothing improves.
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When will it get too hot for the human body to survive? • Slate

Matthew Lewis:

»

A dry heat feels comfortable because the evaporation happens so fast that you don’t even notice the sweat on your skin. (This is also why dehydration is a huge risk in desert climates—while you feel the dry air is helping you tolerate the heat, you’re also losing water from your body the whole time. “Hydrate or die” is not just a clever slogan; it’s good science.)

Now suppose you’re in the same amount of heat, but in Palm Beach, where the air is incredibly humid. The air is already holding all the water vapor it can hold. So your sweat stays on your skin, and the heat that the sweat is supposed to remove from your body … stays in your body, and accumulates.

Your body has lost its ability to shed heat, and so your core temperature starts creeping up to approach the temperature of the air around you. Let the process go on long enough, and body temperature rises from comfortable 98ºF to deadly 108ºF.

That is why the temperature isn’t enough to know if the human body can survive. You need to know the “wet-bulb temperature.” The term comes from the bulb of a typical mercury thermometer. If you wrap a thermometer bulb with a piece of wet cloth and put it in a hot room, evaporation off the cloth will lower the temperature reading of the thermometer to a point that is cooler than the room; the bulb is functionally “sweating.” But if you increase the humidity of the room enough, the temperature of the water vapor in the air will reach equilibrium with the water on the wet cloth, at which point evaporation no longer results in heat loss. So the bulb is sweating, but the mercury will continue to rise.

«

(Via John Naughton)
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Google bans ‘sugar daddy’ apps from Play Store • Android Police

Ryne Hager:

»

If somehow you aren’t familiar with the term, a “sugar daddy” is more than a caramel candy on a stick. In the more common vernacular, a sugar daddy is a person — usually an older man, but you could have a “sugar mommy” or maybe a gender-neutral “sugar parent?” — that spends or gives money in what is typically a transactional relationship, often for sexual favors.

I don’t judge, different people enjoy different things, and if all parties are consenting with full knowledge, I don’t see how an arrangement like that really harms anyone. But, it seems Google does care, though the company is clear it’s not objecting to the nature of the relationship, merely the fact that they’re often sexual relationships with a perceived compensation basis, and the company has a blanket ban on sexual content — at least partly ignoring the primary impulse for many customers behind more generalized dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, as well as many of the messages that even mainstream dating app users swap.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information behind the ban and the precise logic that targets sugar-dating apps while ignoring other potentially sexualized dating apps. But, in the meantime, starting on September 1st, sugar people of all types will have to either stick to websites or sideload their sugar-dating apps — this is Android, you can still get your apps from wherever, unlike iPhones.

«

I’m guessing that the existing apps won’t stop working? Plus they have a whole month to, what, get downloaded in a hurry by “daddies” and, uh, the other side? It’s a weird move.

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Chromebook growth hits 75% in Q2 2021 worldwide, outperforming other PC market categories • Canalys

»

The latest data from Canalys shows the worldwide PC market (including tablets) posted yet another quarter of annual growth, with shipments up 10% to 121.7m units. Chromebooks continued to outperform the rest of the industry product categories, posting 75% annual growth and a shipment volume of 11.9m units. Tablet shipment growth has begun to stabilize, with an increase in Q2 of just 4% year-on-year to 39.1m units.

Chromebook vendors have doubled down on investments in the product category and most have continued to see strong returns in terms of growth. HP maintained pole position with shipments of 4.3m units and growth of 116% in Q2. Lenovo took second place with 2.6m units shipped increasing shipments by 82% from a year ago. Acer secured a top-three position with growth of 83.0% propelling it above 1.8m units in shipments. Dell and Samsung made up the remainder of the top five, with the former being the only leading vendor to suffer a shipment decline.

«

Creeping up: Chromebooks may be starting to capture that schools-to-university-to-work pipeline. For scale, Apple still sold more iPads than the whole Chromebook market, but that might not stay true for long.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you don’t know who the inspiration for the TV detective Columbo is, you’ll be surprised. CC-licensed photo by RTP 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. Papers, please (again). I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google and Facebook to require workers get vaccinated, a first for big tech – The Washington Post

Heather Kelly and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

Silicon Valley’s tech giants are starting to require vaccines for employees returning to the office and pushing back campus reopening dates as the highly contagious delta variant continues to spread across the United States and around the world.

Google became the first Big Tech company to announce on Wednesday that it will require employees who work in its offices to be fully vaccinated. Facebook later announced a similar policy requiring all in-person workers to get vaccinated before coming into a Facebook office in the U.S.

Google also followed Apple in pushing back its return to office to mid October from early September — moves that could trigger a flurry of copy cats across corporate America.

In a note to employees announcing the changes, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company has seen high vaccination rates for Google employees so far, which is why it is comfortable bringing workers back into the office. Currently, there are some early volunteers who are already working at various Google campuses. Workers will have to start reporting back to the office on Oct. 18.

“I hope these steps will give everyone greater peace of mind as offices reopen,” said Pichai in the message.

Any Google employee who doesn’t wish to get vaccinated but doesn’t have approval to work remote indefinitely will need to contact human resources and discuss their options, the company said.

«

I guess it would be a bit weird for someone at Facebook to claim they don’t want to get vaccinated. Ditto Google. Though ironically it might be their chance to continue remote working.
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Columbo: an origin story • THE COLUMBOPHILE

»

February 20 1968 is a red-letter day in the annals of TV history as the day Prescription: Murder first aired, bringing Lieutenant Columbo, as we mostly know and love him, to the collective consciousness of millions.

But what many casual fans don’t realise is that Columbo, the character, was created by William Link and Richard Levinson nearly a decade earlier and had already graced both the stage and screen long before Peter Falk assumed the beige raincoat and ever-lit cigar.

Levinson and Link were fresh young screen writers on the Hollywood scene when the now infamous Writers Guild strike of 1960 took place. The strike would go on for five months from January to June, leaving the dynamic duo at a loss at how to supplement their incomes.

Fortunately for the world they uncovered a loophole that allowed them to flex their creative muscles. Despite the strike action, it was still permissable for Guild members to write for live television. And so targeting the newly launched Chevy Mystery Show and its weekly one-hour live broadcasts, the two got to work on the script for a murder mystery entitled Enough Rope – the first official script featuring one Lieutenant Columbo.

They based the character squarely on Porfiry Petrovich, the astute but meandering lead investigator in Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment – a book both had studied at college.

«

That last one is quite the pub quiz answer.
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The thermocline of truth • Roblog

Rob Miller:

»

In the ocean, temperature decreases with depth: the deeper you go, the colder it gets. But sometimes, what’s called a thermocline forms: a temperature barrier, a point at which the temperature changes rapidly. Go above the thermocline and the water is warm; pass beneath it, and it’s suddenly cold. This can have huge ramifications for life in the ocean, preventing the passage of oxygen and nutrients past the barrier.

In a 2008 blogpost, legendary IT consultant Bruce F. Webster applied the idea of the thermocline to large-scale IT projects. Why was it, Webster asked, that so many projects seemed to be on-track until just before their launch date, at which point it became suddenly clear that they were miles behind schedule?

Webster observed that, generally speaking, those at the bottom of an organisation have a fairly accurate view of what’s going on. They’re close to the detail; they know whether their area of the project is on-track, and can infer from that the state of the wider project.

Those at the top, though, have no such first-hand knowledge. They rely on the bubbling-up of information from below, in the form of dashboards and status reports. But, Webster noticed, those status reports tend to produce a comically optimistic view of the state of the project. Individual contributors presented a rosy picture of what they were working on to their line managers; middle managers gave good news to their bosses; and senior managers, keen to stay on the promotion track and perhaps hopeful that other parts of the project would fail before theirs, massage the truth yet again.

The result is that there is a thermocline within the organisation: not of temperature, but of truth.

«

Lovely idea. Miller uses it to examine how the Post Office IT scandal (criminalising a lot of innocent people) could have happened.
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Social media manager, the most millennial job, comes of age • WSJ

Krithika Varagur:

»

Some 15 years after Facebook and Twitter opened their platforms to the public, social media is an established, mainstream career field. There are academic programs dedicated to its practice. Workers say it’s sometimes still treated as a job for rookies, both through pay grades and interpersonal dynamics from those who think it’s just not that serious. But that’s changing: Those in the field see more bargaining power and more full-time roles than ever before.

Many social media-specific jobs still offer lower salaries than comparable fields like marketing. The average annual salary for marketing managers is $102,496 and $109,607 for marketing directors on Glassdoor, according to a spokesperson for the jobs website. Meanwhile, the average annual salary is $67,892 for social media directors and $47,908 for social media assistants.

“There’s still this idea that everyone uses social media, so it must be easy,” says 30-year-old Alana Visconti, a brand social account lead at Verizon.

But Ms. Visconti notes that the field has become more professionalized in recent years. When she got her undergraduate degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2015, she says, “It definitely wasn’t seen as a career path.” Today, following work for clients including Hyatt and Puma, she believes she can dedicate her whole career to social media. “What I love about it is that it’s the way to connect most directly with consumers,” she says.

«

People are appalled by this idea. I really hope nobody’s going to spend money on a degree for something you can – possibly should – learn in a bedroom.

(This is completely a side note, but the grammar choices in this and the weightlifting story (below) are mad. The WSJ hyphenates “social-media” as an adjective but not as a thing. What?? [I’ve changed it in the extract here.] The NYT knows that it’s the International Weightlifting Federation. So what does it call the sport? Weight lifting.)
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Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI • Vice

Todd Feathers:

»

On May 31 last year, 25-year-old Safarain Herring was shot in the head and dropped off at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago by a man named Michael Williams. He died two days later. 

Chicago police eventually arrested the 64-year-old Williams and charged him with murder (Williams maintains that Herring was hit in a drive-by shooting). A key piece of evidence in the case is video surveillance footage showing Williams’ car stopped on the 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m.—the time and location where police say they know Herring was shot.

How did they know that’s where the shooting happened? Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place.

Except that’s not entirely true, according to recent court filings. 

That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive—a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams’ public defender. The company’s algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. That weekend had seen widespread protests in Chicago in response to George Floyd’s murder, and some of those protesting lit fireworks.

But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and “reclassified” the sound as a gunshot.

…The case isn’t an anomaly, and the pattern it represents could have huge ramifications for ShotSpotter in Chicago, where the technology generates an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The technology is also currently in use in more than 100 cities.

«

The idea that people just reach in and change what could be crucial trial evidence is amazing. The claim was thrown out against Williams because his lawyer objected that it wasn’t a satisfactory forensic method. But the lack of a “chain of evidence” in the system suggests it never should have been.

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Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka highlight the 24-hour rolling hell of Big Sport • The Guardian

Barney Ronay:

»

Keith Miller famously said that pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse. The point being, when you’ve fought in a world war, pressure isn’t playing Test cricket in the 1950s. Well, Keith, the world has changed. And in the process we seem to have created a particular kind of 24-hour rolling hell for our superstar athletes.

At times this can look like some kind of unregulated social experiment. Be brilliant, constantly. Give us that thing we crave. And yes, you will be judged. You will be diced and dissected to the most minute degree. You will be asked to carry our hopes and fears, to embody our politics, to mean something, and to become even here a kind of commodity. This is unsustainable.

Naomi Osaka has already told us this, if we care to listen. Anyone can lose a tennis match, particularly an Olympic tennis match at the end of a strange, disjointed schedule during a strange, disjointed period in the life of planet Earth. She was gracious in defeat by the world No 42 Marketa Vondrousova.

Asked whether pressure was a part of it, she had the self-possession to avoid giving a definite answer. What words do you really want from me? How many billions of people are hanging, in real time, on the nuances of my answer? What kind of space have we made here? All of these might have been reasonable responses.

Osaka, who knows this world better than anyone because it is her world, eventually said: “Yes and no.” She suggested her recent mental health break hadn’t helped her performance. The question answers itself. Here is a young tennis player who has taken a mental health break, in part to avoid being asked painful questions, who is now answering painful questions about her mental health break.

«

As Ronay points out, there’s no respite now from the kleig light glare of attention.
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Weightlifting, an original Olympic sport, may be dropped • The New York Times

Ognian Georgiev and Ken Belson:

»

The weightlifting federation is not the first sports body to run afoul of the Olympic committee, of course. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is running the boxing tournament at the Tokyo Games while it investigates the International Boxing Association, or AIBA, over a series of failings. And in 2018, the IOC lifted a series of restrictions on the International Biathlon Union only after the organization approved governance reforms and greater transparency, particularly related to drug testing.

The scale of corruption at the IWF [International Weightlifting Federation] is far deeper. In January 2020, the German broadcaster ARD produced a documentary called “Lord of the Lifters” that illustrated how entire nations were sidestepping antidoping controls. Six months later, Richard McLaren, a Canadian antidoping investigator, published a 121-page report that pinned much of the blame for weightlifting’s problems on Tamas Ajan, the federation’s longtime leader, who ran the organization with an iron hand.

Ajan, who resigned as the president of the IWF in April 2020, was accused of accepting bribes to bury positive doping results. Efforts to hide positive tests date to at least the 1980s; McLaren said, for example, that in 2016, Ajan called the president of the Albanian weight lifting federation and demanded $100,000 in a suitcase to cover a fine for lifters who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. If the money was not paid, the Albanians were told, the country’s entire team would not be able to compete at the Rio Games.

In a phone interview, Ajan said that contrary to the allegations in the McLaren report, he had fought to eliminate the use of performance-enhancing drugs and had been attacked by national federations he penalized for excessive doping.

«

Not sure where 600 weightlifters having tested positive for drugs fits into that claim by Ajan. You could read it either way, after all.
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‘Disinfo kills’: protesters demand Facebook act to stop vaccine falsehoods • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

»

Activists descended on Facebook’s Washington headquarters on Wednesday to demand the company take stronger action against vaccine falsehoods spreading on its platform, covering the area in front of Facebook’s office with body bags that read “disinfo kills”.

The day of protest, which comes as Covid cases surge in the US, has been organized by a group of scholars, advocates and activists calling themselves the “Real” Oversight Board. The group is urging Facebook’s shareholders to ban so-called misinformation “superspreaders” – the small number of accounts responsible for the majority of false and misleading content about the Covid-19 vaccines.

“People are making decisions based on the disinformation that’s being spread on Facebook,” said Shireen Mitchell, Member of the Real Facebook Oversight Board and founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women. “If Facebook is not going to take that down, or if all they’re going to do is put out disclaimers, then fundamentally Facebook is participating in these deaths as well.”

In coordination with the protest, the Real Oversight Board has released a new report analyzing the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the company’s most recent financial quarter. The report and protest also come as Facebook prepares to announce its financial earnings for that same quarter.

The report references a March study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) that found a small group of accounts – known as the “dirty dozen” – is responsible for more than 73% of anti-vaccine content across social media platforms, including Facebook.

«

Think this is a first, seeing Facebook being picketed as though it was Philip Morris selling cigarettes or an oil company cutting down rain forest.
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Techdirt is now entirely without any Google ads or tracking code • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

»

last summer, we had to pull all ads off of Techdirt, after we kept running into problems with Google, and its overly aggressive, overly sensitive (if somewhat arbitrary) advertising morality police (such as telling us all our stories about Google were “dangerous or derogatory”).

After announcing that, we had a few different companies approach us with possible alternatives, and earlier this year, we tried to put ads back on the site briefly, with a promise from a provider that they could both serve better quality ads as well as “deal with” Google if it started complaining again. Here’s the unfortunate secret underpinning nearly all of the internet advertising space: there are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies which will purport to put ads on your website. And all of them will promise “quality” ads and better rates.

But the unfortunate reality is that they’re all just backstopped by Google, and the ads are all the same crappy ads in the end. Only the largest websites (or highly, highly specialized ones) can really pull their own weight on advertising. And, tragically, wonky tech/legal/policy blogs don’t cut it (unless we wanted to just start running reviews of every silly tech product out there, and that’s not our thing).

So, we worked with a new partner, with promises of higher quality… and it all turned out to just be the same awful Google ads again, and with it, the same automated emails every damn day from Google threatening to cut us off for our “dangerous and derogatory” content. This time around, we just ignored those threats, because at this point, we’re so damn sick of it that if Google cuts us off, so be it.

«

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Amid Henan floods, China’s authorities focus not on climate change, but on control • Los Angeles Times

Alice Su:

»

Large swaths of Henan north of Zhengzhou are underwater, with more rain forecast in coming days. Many of the flooded villages and smaller towns west of Zhengzhou have no running water, electricity or cellphone reception. A massive rescue effort is underway, including both Chinese military and grass-roots volunteers who have rushed from across the country to help.

At the same time, government propaganda is controlling the narrative. Chinese media have been instructed to report on post-disaster recovery, avoid an “exaggeratedly sorrowful tone” and adhere to official statistics on casualties and damage, according to a leaked censorship directive published in the China Digital Times.

Grief has become a target of control. On Monday, Zhengzhou residents laid dozens of bouquets of flowers at the entrance to the subway line where the 14 had drowned. But authorities soon erected a yellow barrier around the flowers, blocking them from view. Journalists and passersby shared photos of the blocked memorial online, sparking thousands of angry comments.

“They are even afraid of flowers,” one wrote.

Another circle of flowers and candles soon surrounded the yellow barrier. At night, videos shared online showed Zhengzhou residents pulling the barrier down as people applauded.

Another leaked directive instructed government workers to go door-to-door around the tunnel and warn shopkeepers: “Heighten awareness, do not accept foreign media interviews, do not give them any possibilities to twist the truth. If any relevant situation happens, report to the district workers or call the police.”

The Times was unable to verify the directive, but foreign reporters from at least five different media outlets were harassed while reporting near the tunnel in the last few days. One salesperson who spoke with The Times about economic losses was pulled away by two women and later threatened by her supervisor, who told her she would be questioned by police.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Rhythmic gymnastics might look like a bizarre pursuit, but it’s a tough sport – as a former national champion explains. CC-licensed photo by IOC Young Reporters 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. Medalling hard. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook creates exec team to work on ‘metaverse’ • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

»

Facebook will create a product team to work on the “metaverse,” a concept that involves creating digital worlds that multiple people can inhabit at the same time.

The metaverse team will be part of Facebook’s virtual reality group, Reality Labs, executive Andrew Bosworth said in a Facebook post on Monday.

“Today Portal and Oculus can teleport you into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences,” Bosworth wrote. “But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces — so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.”

Vishal Shah, the executive in charge of product at Instagram, is among those joining Facebook’s new metaverse group.

Technology companies and executives have started to increasingly discuss building a “metaverse” as a successor technology to smartphones and the mobile internet. Generally, technologists consider a metaverse a virtual world where large numbers of people can gather to play, work and socialize.

The metaverse is closely related to virtual reality and augmented reality technologies currently being developed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in addition to Facebook. Roblox, a game targeted at children whose parent company is valued at over $44bn, is often considered an example of a metaverse.

«

You want to know what a metaverse would be like? Basically, Facebook or Google or whoever writing the rules about what your life is like, how you can spend your money, where you can go – but not on a screen; in three dimensions. Attractive, isn’t it?
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‘A lesson in loss, humility and absurdity’: how rhythmic gymnastics took over my childhood • The Guardian

Rebecca Liu:

»

Every four years, the same argument plays out. The Olympics reminds the public of the existence of rhythmic gymnastics and the public scoffs at this ridiculous spectacle, with its “ribbon dancing”, its sequins, its extravagant bending and pirouetting. Where artistic gymnastics – the one with the beam and the bars, the one with triple backflips and the constant risk of broken bones – is dignified and athletic, rhythmic gymnastics is frilly and absurd. How is this even a sport? Why is it part of the Olympics? These are the usual criticisms. In return, embattled admirers will point out that rhythmic gymnastics is extremely difficult, actually. There is immense skill involved in those backbends and leaps; besides, have you tried throwing and catching a ball while holding your foot above your head?

When I first caught sight of rhythmic gymnastics, I knew nothing of this. The reasons the sport is mocked – the sequins, the balletic dancing, the kilowatt-bright, beauty-pageant smiles of the gymnasts – were the reasons I found it delightful. I was six, sitting in my kitchen in Auckland, staring at the television. On screen, a gymnast at the 2000 Sydney Olympics tossed a bright red ribbon high into the air before catching it with astonishing ease. She was, to me, the height of womanly sophistication: beautiful, graceful, and covered in glitter. I dragged my mother into the room, pointed to the television and announced that this was the sort of lady I would like to become.

«

Her story of how she became a national champion and then fell out of love with it – and what it means to her even so – is wonderful.
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Facebook users are more anti-vaccine than Fox News viewers, new data shows • The Washington Post

David Lazer and many others:

»

The White House has been sharply critical of how social media has helped circulate misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. President Biden put it bluntly when he said, “They’re killing people.” The day after Biden’s statement, Facebook posted a blog entry asserting that it isn’t responsible for US vaccination rates leveling off. The company emphasized that, in a large survey by Carnegie Mellon, supported by Facebook, 85% of Facebook users reported being vaccinated or wanting to be vaccinated.

It’s hard to say who is right in this heated debate. Survey data can’t prove conclusively whether using Facebook affects vaccine acceptance and resistance. However, the data can indicate whether people who get their news from Facebook have higher or lower vaccination rates than those who don’t. In the Covid States Project survey we conducted, we find a surprisingly strong relationship. If you rely on Facebook to get news and information about the coronavirus, you are substantially less likely than the average American to say you have been vaccinated. In fact, Facebook news consumers are less likely to be vaccinated than people who get their coronavirus information from Fox News.

…Even after accounting for demographic and other differences, we still find that getting coronavirus-related news from Facebook — especially when it’s exclusively from Facebook — is associated with lower vaccination levels and higher levels of vaccine resistance. That relationship is stronger only with Newsmax, which is a much less commonly used source.«

I guess Facebook can at least say that it’s not as bad as Newsmax viewers.
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Ships are starting to bypass South African ports as Transnet tells customers and staff of ‘sabotage’ • Business Insider

»

Ships have started to bypass South African ports, and many more may now do so, after Transnet delcared force majeure at its port operations on Monday.

Container vessels that had been due to call at both Cape Town and Durban had been diverted, shipping agents said, in one case to the Port of Maputo, and in other onwards to its Asian stops, bypassing the continent entirely.

Importers – already struggling with shortages of key goods – will now have longer to wait for containers on those ships. Just how long is not yet clear; a global shipping crisis and shortage of some types of containers already has the industry overall scrambling. Those same troubles have made shipping lines allergic to delays they can not quantify.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, Transnet said its force majeure declaration on Transnet Port Terminals ” is expected to be lifted soon”, but provided no other details on its timeline, or the underlying cause.

“The terminals are berthing vessels as planned and facilitating loading and discharge operations with the shipping lines,” it said. “We will continue to work directly with shipping lines in order to facilitate maximum import evacuation and further exports planned for future vessels. Controls have been developed, in conjunction with the shipping lines and SARS’ Customs division to ensure safe clearance and evacuation of each container.”

Logistics operators say the flow of containers had effectively ground to a halt.

Some of Transnet’s computer systems were shut down on 22 July, in what the company described only as a “disruption”.

«

“Force majeure” is “an unanticipated or uncontrollable event that releases a company from fulfilling contractual obligations”. Short version: they’ve been hit by a ransomware attack. Goods aren’t moving and some companies are struggling.
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How to create simple Mac apps from shell scripts • Mathias Bynens

»

Basically, a Mac application has a .app extension, but it’s not really a file — it’s a package. You can view the application’s contents by navigating to it in the Finder, right-clicking it and then choosing “Show Package Contents”.

The internal folder structure may vary between apps, but you can be sure that every Mac app will have a Contents folder with a MacOS subfolder in it. Inside the MacOS directory, there’s an extension-less file with the exact same name as the app itself. This file can be anything really, but in its simplest form it’s a shell script. As it turns out, this folder/file structure is all it takes to create a functional app!

After this discovery, Thomas Aylott came up with a clever “appify” script that allows you to easily create Mac apps from shell scripts.…

Installing and using appify is pretty straightforward if you’re used to working with UNIX.

«

This post actually dates from 2010, but had it confirmed that it still works on the latest version of macOS.
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Amazon denies report of accepting bitcoin as payment • Reuters

Reuters Staff:

»

Amazon.com on Monday denied a media report saying the e-commerce giant was looking to accept bitcoin payments by the end of the year.

The report from London’s City A.M. newspaper, citing an unnamed “insider”, sent the world’s biggest cryptocurrency up as much as 14.5% before it trimmed gains to last trade 6% higher at $37,684.04.

“Notwithstanding our interest in the space, the speculation that has ensued around our specific plans for cryptocurrencies is not true,” said a spokesperson from Amazon.

“We remain focused on exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on Amazon.”

The company on July 22 posted a job opening for a digital currency and blockchain product lead.

A growing number of companies have started to accept virtual currencies for payment, bringing an asset class shunned by major financial institutions until a few years ago closer to the mainstream.

«

1) Not going to be accepting it by the end of the year
2) Focused on exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on Amazon. So, 2022?

Though you can bet that you’ll get the lousiest exchange rate imaginable on any cryptocoins – it would be like the foreign exchange outlets in airport departure lounges, famous for their eyepopping buy/sell spreads which could only be worse if you were standing on the end of a plank over the sea.
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The HART files: inside the group trying to smuggle anti-vaccine myths into Westminster • Logically

Jordan Wildon, Nick Backovic, and Ernie Piper:

»

Logically obtained the HART chat logs via a tip from someone inside the group. The person behind the leak, who spoke to Logically on the condition of anonymity, said that they had been researching the group after a friend shared links from HART. 

“I tried to convince this friend that that site was not a good source of information,” they said. “I became a bit obsessed with the HART group. I wanted to understand them. I wanted to be able to show people, with evidence, why the HART group should not be taken seriously.”

After discovering that a subdomain on the HART website linked to the group’s Rocket.Chat, a popular Slack alternative, they found that the chat was accessible to anyone who registered an account. Later, realizing that they hadn’t been removed from the group, they began saving the messages, automatically archiving redacted message content every hour and uploading it to the internet.

Among the group’s most active and notable contributors are businessman and political activist Narice Bernard, former Pfizer executive widely cited in antivax circles Dr. Michael Yeadon, pathologist Dr. Clare Craig, export credit specialist and libertarian Baron Bernie de Haldevang, anti-mask activist Jemma Moran, retired pediatrician and UsForThem campaigner Ros Jones, and Anna Rayner, who once described herself as a “homeopath specialising in treatment of Autism and related disorders, Vaccine Damage and heavy metal toxicity.”

«

“Export credit specialist and libertarian” is certainly one of the better portmanteau job titles I’ve ever heard.
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‘Doctor Peyo’: the horse comforting cancer patients in Calais – in pictures • The Guardian

Jeremy Lempin:

»

Peyo and his owner once competed at dressage events. Now they spend their time doing rounds in a French hospital, often staying with sick people until the end.

«

No, I didn’t expect to be looking at a horse comforting cancer patients when I started the day either, but here we are.
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See what cities are the furthest away from other major cities • Furthest City

Does what it says on the tin. For the UK, it’s pretty much New Zealand (been there) and places in Australia (ditto).

New York? Australia. (Perth.)

Los Angeles? Ah, that’s rather different. (Have a guess before you try it.)
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Apple’s controversial Safari redesign is now optional in the latest iPadOS 15 beta • The Verge

Ian Carlos Campbell:

»

Like in macOS Monterey (and every version of Apple’s desktop OS in recent history), tabs will once again live in their own separate row by default, alleviating some of the crowding that made Apple’s initial compact redesign annoying. The tab experience is now also controlled via a toggle in the Settings app, so if you’re committed to Apple’s original vision, you can enable it with a tap. You can see how the new settings option looks in this screenshot shared by Federico Viticci.

On iOS 15, the fourth beta also includes the return of the dedicated Reload button, one-tap access to Safari’s Reader mode, and a Share button, according to 9to5Mac.

These kinds of changes are what beta tests are for, and this all could entirely change again before the fall, but it is somewhat notable that this is the second major tweak Apple’s made to the new Safari. The company’s dealt with criticism over its design changes in the past (like iOS 7’s flat UI) but making tabs “normal” again by default does seem to suggest that on at least one element of the new Safari, Apple knows it got it wrong.

«

Linking to this as a heads-up: Apple came up with a radical (terrible) new design for Safari across mobile and Mac, and the evidence suggests that those who hate it inside Apple are gradually arm-wrestling it back to something tolerable. There’s still a worrying tendency in Apple to break things that aren’t broken in the interest of “different”.

What’s more is that Google experimented with exactly this redesign for Chrome, internally in 2016. They decided it was awful and never rolled it out. Wonder if Apple will learn from that.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Anna Kiesenhofer, who won the women’s road cycling at the Olympics, is Austrian, not Dutch – it was the Dutch team that she got away from.

A recurrent proposal is that the Olympics should abandon dope testing altogether. Could that be done safely – and what would happen? CC-licensed photo by France Olympique 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. Five gold rings, but not Christmas. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘Ted Lasso’ is back, but no longer an underdog • The New York Times

Jeremy Egner interviews the creators and actors in the hit show:

»

Q: What was it about the character, and the concept, that felt as if it could support a longer story?

Jason Sudeikis: The theme and tone of it was just something that was bouncing around in my head. I didn’t want to do the arc of son of a bitch to saint — it had already been crushed by Ricky Gervais as David Brent. So it was like, What about just playing a good guy?

The thing Bill and I talked about in the pitch was this antithesis of the cocktail of a human man who is both ignorant and arrogant, which lo and behold, a Batman-villain version of it became president of the United States right around the same time. What if you played an ignorant guy who was actually curious? When someone used a big word like “vernacular,” he didn’t act like he knew it, but just stops the meeting like, “Question, what does that mean?”

And also the idea of just saying please and thank you — I remember holding doors for people when I first got hired at “Saturday Night Live,” and they would stop, thinking I’m going to hit them in the butt or something. It was always really funny to me, and so it was based on those observations about what was going on with society and discourse, and lack of manners, all rolled into one.

Q: But you also get into darker things Ted’s dealing with, like panic attacks. Why was that important to you?

Sudeikis: We had to work backward, because if you’re going to play this nice guy at a certain age who’s married, then why does he take this job? Well, things must not be great at home. It was always about revealing. I’m going to butcher the Mark Twain quote, but every person’s life is a comedy, a drama and a tragedy. So we had to honour those other two elements, because the comedy part was baked into the premise of the fish-out-of-water, bungling idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing. And the mustache, obviously.

«

“An ignorant guy who’s curious”. A simple recipe for a wonderful series.
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The day the good internet died • The Ringer

Katie Baker loved Google Reader, back in 2011: it made sense of the (internet) world. Then Google killed it:

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It’s the year 2021, and I can’t get enough of the internet. This is an admission of defeat. It’s an acknowledgment of my worst tic, the one where I lie in bed until 3 or 4 a.m. and pull-to-refresh, pull-to-refresh, pull-to-refresh, until Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or my email—or, in my lowest moments, Nextdoor—brings me something, anything new.

Sometimes it’s that blasted “oh hello, are you doomscrolling?” Twitter bot getting retweeted into my feed, or a growth-hacking prompt asking for a time you were so totally you back in the day. Sometimes it’s a blurry photo of a former coworker’s third kid with the caption “tfw you’re the third kid…” or a comment thread in which a friendly neighbor unironically and repeatedly calls the California governor “Gavin Newsuck.” Often it’s sponsored content, and I can never tell which service’s offerings leave me more unsettled: Twitter’s bizarre ads and sponsored posts tend to feature either days-old, extremely specific midgame NBA score updates or The 15 Wacky Photobombs You Have to See To Believe!, whereas on Instagram, the DTC marketing strikes are so hyper-targeted, so surgically precise, that they’re able to routinely home in on exactly the lamp made out of 3D-printed corn that I’ve always wanted in my life.

Such is the duality of the internet these days: It is both worse and better than ever, growing tackier as it strives for bespoke, hosting information so limitless that you can’t find any of it anymore.

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I set my browser to remember 366 days of browsing. Beyond that, it’s either lost or if it matters then it will come back again.
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QR codes are here to stay. So is the tracking they allow • The New York Times

Erin Woo:

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QR codes — essentially a kind of bar code that allows transactions to be touchless — have emerged as a permanent tech fixture from the coronavirus pandemic. Restaurants have adopted them en masse, retailers including CVS and Foot Locker have added them to checkout registers, and marketers have splashed them all over retail packaging, direct mail, billboards and TV advertisements.

But the spread of the codes has also let businesses integrate more tools for tracking, targeting and analytics, raising red flags for privacy experts. That’s because QR codes can store digital information such as when, where and how often a scan occurs. They can also open an app or a website that then tracks people’s personal information or requires them to input it.

As a result, QR codes have allowed some restaurants to build a database of their customers’ order histories and contact information. At retail chains, people may soon be confronted by personalized offers and incentives marketed within QR code payment systems.

“People don’t understand that when you use a QR code, it inserts the entire apparatus of online tracking between you and your meal,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Suddenly your offline activity of sitting down for a meal has become part of the online advertising empire.”

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No way that the adtech industry will want to let this narrow chance at getting more data slip.
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The math PhD who just shocked Olympic cycling • WSJ

Jason Gay on the Dutch women’s road cycling victor Anna Kiesenhofer, who zoomed away at the start of the race and never let up:

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Technology was a factor. In professional races, riders are equipped with earpieces that allow them to communicate with team personnel traveling behind in support cars. Riders listen for updates about the course and potential hazards—but also, importantly, they can be told what riders are up the road, and what sort of effort is needed to catch up. 

Olympic road racing allows no such technology. The riders have no radio contact with cars. They get time gap information from motorbikes on the course, or on occasions when they’re within earshot of team personnel, but this information delivery is spottier than someone in your ear, telling you exactly what’s going on.

This is apparently why the Dutch super team [back in the peloton] did not ramp up a ferocious pursuit of Kiesenhofer in the closing kilometers. After collecting the remains of the original breakaway, they thought the reel-in work was done. 

You may have seen it by now: the Dutch veteran racer van Vleuten, crossing the finish line next to the speedway grandstand, smiling, arms raised, under the impression that she’d won gold. She didn’t know Kiesenhofer had clinched it already. [A colossal, relatively, 75 seconds earlier]

Now there was heartbreak amid the surprise. A gold medal would have been a poetic result for van Vleuten. In 2016, she’d spent the night of the women’s road race in a hospital in Rio de Janeiro after a horrifying crash that occurred as she was leading the race, likely en route to gold.

Now gold eluded her again, in far more surreal fashion. 

Van Vleuten later confessed to “mixed feelings.” She was proud of her beautiful silver medal— the first of her career—but she sounded frustrated by the confusion and the lack of race radios to give clarity about what was going on.

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Always fascinating how one way or another, technology plays a key role in the winners.
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The transhuman Olympics • Applied Divinity Studies

“ADS” (I assume) suggests that we stop dope-testing at the Olympics:

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Freedom from unfair drug-testing is only the beginning. An improved Olympics would require radical overhaul, but could at least begin with the following principles:

1. No drug-testing of any kind. Since it’s not feasible to conduct an anti-doping regime, the process should be abandoned entirely in favor of harm reduction. The billions of dollars we currently spend on an antiquated anti-doping regime could instead be spent on developing safer steroid alternatives, and investigating the safety of existing compounds.

As basic mitigation against really extreme abuses, medals would be awarded on the day of competition, but not officially confirmed until the next 4-year cycle, after verifying that the athlete remains alive and in generally good health.

2. A permanent Olympic village and stadium. The process for selecting cities enables corruption, not to mention “high debt, wasteful infrastructure and onerous maintenance obligations“, as well as mass displacements, human rights violations, forced evictions, and the over-policing of vulnerable communities. Trying to host the cities in unsuitable environments also leads to athletes playing on “burning sand“ and risk of heat stroke alongside “oppressive humidity“. Instead, a permanent Olympic village should be built to host athletes year round. Since performance enhancing drugs will remain illegal in many countries, the village could also serve as a safe-haven where crucial drug categories are decriminalized, ensuring equal treatment for athletes regardless of country of origin…

3. Liberalize Equipment Restrictions. Nike’s Vaporfly lead to a record sub 2-hour marathon time by Eliud Kipchoge in 2019, but has since been banned in Olympic competition. This has a chilling effect on innovation, and hampers the development of improved athletic technology. The LZR Racer was subject to similar regulation, resulting in 93 new world records, before being banned for providing an “unfair advantage” in a newly invented phenomenon dubbed “technological doping“. This goes beyond mere cultural stagnation, it is the active impairment of technological innovation.

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Initially attractive. However: how far *down* in sport would you allow drugs? Only the Olympics? But what about the qualifying competitions? World Championships? National championships? Regional championships? Regional competitions? Amateur competitions? Friendly competitions? As a proposal, it’s superficially attractive, but it unravels as soon as you pull at it. Would participants in Park Run do a line before heading off?

By contrast, I do like the suggestion that a random amateur should be included in each competition, to show TV viewers just how incredibly good the top-flight competitors are. (Via Nathan T.)
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MVT: a forensic tool to look for signs of infection in smartphone devices • Github

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Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) is a collection of utilities to simplify and automate the process of gathering forensic traces helpful to identify a potential compromise of Android and iOS devices.

It has been developed and released by the Amnesty International Security Lab in July 2021 in the context of the Pegasus project along with a technical forensic methodology and forensic evidence.

Warning: MVT is a forensic research tool intended for technologists and investigators. Using it requires understanding the basics of forensic analysis and using command-line tools. This is not intended for end-user self-assessment. If you are concerned with the security of your device please seek expert assistance.

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So, not to actually use (though do let me know if you’re capable of using this), but it’s good to know that this exists. Though I suppose we also need an accompanying file listing people who you can trust to install and run it.

Apple released a point-fix update to iOS on Monday which may be a fix for at least one of the vulnerabilities exploited here.
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Bleach peddler Kerri Rivera appears to have been raided by German police • Vice

Anna Merlan:

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Messages posted to a Telegram group run by Kerri Rivera, a pseudo-medical expert who advocates for the use of a dangerous bleach solution to “cure” autism and other serious illnesses, say she’s being criminally charged as a result of advice she gave to a parent. A person who said they were speaking on Rivera’s behalf posted a message, ostensibly written from her perspective, to her Telegram group on July 21; the message said that her home was raided by police on July 13 and that she is accused of causing bodily harm to a child whose parent she advised on Telegram. It also called the claim that she’d harmed the child “impossible.” 

Rivera is a longtime advocate for the use of chlorine dioxide, a substance that, when mixed with citric acid, forms a powerful and dangerous bleaching agent. She has falsely claimed it can “cure” autism and, more recently, suggested it can treat COVID-19. (Chlorine dioxide is also marketed under the name Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS, most infamously by the Genesis II Church in Florida, run by a man named Mark Grenon. Grenon and three of his sons were recently indicted on charges related to their sale of MMS.)

Journalists and activists monitoring Rivera’s activities believe she moved several years ago to Bremerhaven, Germany. Bremerhaven police declined to comment on the reported raid, writing, “Unfortunately, we are not allowed to give you any information about individual persons for reasons of data protection.”

…Two activists, Fiona O’Leary and Melissa Eaton, both say they reported Rivera to German authorities. Eaton, a US-based activist who’s gone undercover in Facebook groups where parents are discussing giving their kids chlorine dioxide, told Motherboard that she reported Rivera to German police and consumer protection agencies.

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I was in touch with O’Leary and Eaton when I was writing Social Warming: they’re quoted in the chapter about social networks’ response to the pandemic. As they point out, Facebook in particular is lax about “treatments” such as Rivera’s (which harm children). But it seems like Germany’s police might be more interested.
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Covid cases in US may have been undercounted by 60%, study shows • The Guardian

Jessica Glenza:

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The study incorporated data on deaths, the number of tests administered each day and the proportion that come back positive. Importantly, it also incorporated data from studies of people randomly sampled for Covid-19 in Indiana and Ohio.

Random sample surveys provide strong evidence of actual prevalence of a disease because they do not rely on people seeking out tests, which often fail to capture asymptomatic infections.

Based on analysis of that data, researchers found as many as 65 million Americans may have been infected. Official tallies put the number at about 33 million. The University of Washington researchers estimated that 60% of all cases were missed, with only one in every 2.3 cases counted in Indiana and Ohio.

On Monday, the Covid case count maintained by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and commonly referred to by media outlets stood at nearly 34.5 million

Undercounts can “depend on the severity of the pandemic and the amount of testing in that state”, said Nicholas J Irons, a study co-author and postdoctoral student.

“If you have a state with severe pandemic but limited testing, the undercount can be very high and you’re missing the vast majority of infections that are occurring,” he said. “Or, you could have a situation where testing is widespread and the pandemic is not as severe. There, the undercount rate would be lower.”

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The recorded cases in the UK will be an undercount too, particularly from the first wave when there weren’t enough tests. The ONS says we’re up to 92% of adults having antibodies (from the disease or immunisation). Cases would be miles below that, of course.
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What is behind the latest fall in cases of Covid across the UK? • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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Is it because of the school holidays or testing?
There are no new cases without new testing. As Donald Trump declared in May last year: “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” Likewise, substantial changes in testing patterns can feed through into the case numbers. As schools closed in July for the summer holidays, student contact will have fallen off, reducing transmission, but testing will have fallen too, whether infections have declined or not. Given that school pupils have some of the highest rates of Covid in the country, a large shift in how often they test could feed into the decline in recorded cases. Difficulties in accessing testing because of capacity problems would have a similar impact, as would people choosing not to be tested. On this issue at least, an answer should come soon. The Office of National Statistics runs an infection survey that captures case numbers in the community each week. If that shows a decline soon, the trend will be far more convincing.

Could the ‘pingdemic’ be driving down cases?
Hundreds of thousands of people have been sent into isolation by the NHS app in recent weeks. That in itself has curbed, as intended, the spread of the virus. But frustration with being pinged, and widespread media coverage of the “pingdemic” that has raised awareness of the problem, have led some people to delete the app. Young people, who are less likely to be vaccinated and have the highest rates of infection, are deleting it more than others, if polling is reliable. Human behaviour is the toughest variable to predict in all of this.

What about the Euros?
One-off sporting events are not expected to drive vast numbers of new infections. But during the Euro 2020 tournament there was a solid rise in cases across the country among males aged between 15 and 44. That trend has now reversed. The steady increase in infections may have bumped up national case numbers, particularly in July, only for them to fall back the fortnight after the final. Prof Kao said a link to the football was “entirely plausible”.

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Blame it on the Euros? Seems very likely that if you pack a ton of people into pubs and sitting rooms and (to a lesser extent) public transport, you’re going to give Covid a wonderful boost.
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Meet the people who warn the world about new covid variants • MIT Technology Review

Cat Ferguson:

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In April 2020, a handful of prominent virologists in the UK and Australia proposed a system of letters and numbers for naming lineages, or new branches, of the covid family. It had a logic, and a hierarchy, even though the names it generated—like B.1.1.7—were a bit of a mouthful.

One of the authors on the paper was Áine O’Toole, a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Soon she’d become the primary person actually doing that sorting and classifying, eventually combing through hundreds of thousands of sequences by hand.

She says: “Very early on, it was just who was available to curate the sequences. That ended up being my job for a good bit. I guess I never understood quite the scale we were going to get to.”

She quickly set about building software to assign new genomes to the right lineages. Not long after that, another researcher, postdoc Emily Scher, built a machine-learning algorithm to speed things up even more. 

They named the software Pangolin, a tongue-in-cheek reference to a debate about the animal origin of covid. (The whole system is now simply known as Pango.)

The naming system, along with the software to implement it, quickly became a global essential. Although the WHO has recently started using Greek letters for variants that seem especially concerning, like delta, those nicknames are for the public and the media. Delta actually refers to a growing family of variants, which scientists  call by their more precise Pango names: B.1.617.2, AY.1, AY.2, and AY.3.

“When alpha emerged in the UK, Pango made it very easy for us to look for those mutations in our genomes to see if we had that lineage in our country too,” says Jolly. “Ever since then, Pango has been used as the baseline for reporting and surveillance of variants in India.”

Because Pango offers a rational, orderly approach to what would otherwise be chaos, it may forever change the way scientists name viral strains—allowing experts from all over the world to work together with a shared vocabulary. Brito says: “Most likely, this will be a format we’ll use for tracking any other new virus.”

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The complexity is colossal: from 524 sequences in March 2020 to 35,000 by May 2020. Whereas for flu in 2019, the total was just 40,000.
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Despite being seen by his peers as the world’s best climber, Adam Ondra might not even get a medal competing in this year’s Olympic Games – because of its odd format.CC-licensed photo by Mattias Kanhov 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 9 links for you. Delighted that our decision to “let it rip” worked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Have you considered ordering Social Warming, my latest book?

He couldn’t get over his fiancee’s death. So he brought her back as an AI chatbot • SF Chronicle

Jason Fagone:

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Last summer, using a borrowed beta-testing credential, [Jason] Rohrer devised a “chatbot” interface that was driven by GPT-3. He made it available to the public through his website. He called the service Project December. Now, for the first time, anyone could have a naturalistic text chat with an A.I. directed by GPT-3, typing back and forth with it on Rohrer’s site.

Users could select from a range of built-in chatbots, each with a distinct style of texting, or they could design their own bots, giving them whatever personality they chose.

Joshua had waded into Project December by degrees, starting with the built-in chatbots. He engaged with “William,” a bot that tried to impersonate Shakespeare, and “Samantha,” a friendly female companion modeled after the A.I. assistant in the movie “Her.” Joshua found both disappointing; William rambled about a woman with “fiery hair” that was “red as a fire,” and Samantha was too clingy.

But as soon as he built his first custom bot — a simulation of Star Trek’s Spock, whom he considered a hero — a light clicked on: By feeding a few Spock quotes from an old TV episode into the site, Joshua summoned a bot that sounded exactly like Spock, yet spoke in original phrases that weren’t found in any script.

As Joshua continued to experiment, he realized there was no rule preventing him from simulating real people. What would happen, he wondered, if he tried to create a chatbot version of his dead fiancee?

There was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and a half, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. and Canada have died of COVID-19, often suddenly, without closure for their loved ones, leaving a raw landscape of grief. How many survivors would gladly experiment with a technology that lets them pretend, for a moment, that their dead loved one is alive again — and able to text?

That night in September, Joshua hadn’t actually expected it to work. Jessica was so special, so distinct; a chatbot could never replicate her voice, he assumed. Still, he was curious to see what would happen.

And he missed her.

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It’s like “Her”, the film and the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” – which both aired in 2013. Technology is catching up with art: current delay, eight years.
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Tweet Like Me • John Herrick

Herrick has built a website which uses GPT-3 plus your tweets to produce a facsimile of you. Or perhaps a simulacrum? Here’s one it generated for me.

Which is a bit concerning, really. I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything about the Bible or Satan.
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Adam Ondra is the world’s most accomplished climber. He may not win an Olympic medal • The New York Times

Authored by the NY Times’s visual team:

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In speed climbing, athletes race head to head on a wall that has an identical setup in every race (think of it as a vertical 15-meter dash). In lead, athletes have one chance to climb as high as they can in six minutes. In bouldering, they try to get to the top of four routes. They have four minutes for each “problem.”

Speed climbing is an all-out sprint to the top of a 50-foot-wall, and in Japan, it will count a full third toward the gold medal. It’s by far Ondra’s weakest event. One of the problems slowing him down is that he is attacking it as a climber instead of a sprinter.

“This is another discipline — it’s not real climbing,” said Petr Klofac, Ondra’s training coach. “It’s more running and sprinting. You have to run on this thing.” Here is Ondra training on the speed wall.

You might think Ondra looks pretty good at speed climbing. But don’t be fooled: He’s likely to be among the slowest at the Games.

His best time in competition is 7.46 seconds. The record for the fastest time was set in May by Indonesian climber Veddriq Leonardo, at 5.20 seconds. The two climbs, side by side, show what Ondra may face in this event.

Speed climbing will play well on television, which is why it was chosen, but the decision to include it has drawn criticism from athletes because before it was selected for the Games, speed specialists rarely competed in bouldering and lead climbing, just as Ondra never bothered with speed.

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That’s a text extract, but to understand why climbing could be the (new) hit of the Games, you should read/watch the whole thing. The lead climbing will leave you gasping, the bouldering moreso. The climbing events start on August 3. (Via Sophie Warnes.)
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A defunct video hosting site is flooding normal websites with hardcore porn • Vice

Matthew Gault and Jason Koebler:

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Hardcore porn is embedded all over regular-ass websites because a porn company has purchased the domain of a popular, defunct video hosting site. 

As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed. 

Seemingly any vid.me embeds now redirect to the 5 Star Porn HD homepage. The site vid.me also redirects there. For example, if you check out this New York magazine article about former House Majority leader John Boehner’s “creepy kissy face,” you will see photos of Boehner but also images of a man with a gigantic penis fucking a woman. [Not any more – CA]

Archived versions of this page show that there was formerly a vid.me embed on the page; the page’s source code shows the same.

Over at the Huffington Post, an article about Martin Shkreli being banned from Twitter is augmented with videos titled “Getting Into Porsha’s Ass” and “Why Don’t We Tag Team Your GF?”

A pre-Trump-presidency Uproxx article about Trump’s performance at a GOP debate is illustrated with thumbnails for videos titled “Aria Lee Is Back For More” and “Naughty Spy Girls Part 2.”

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That was just before the weekend, but there was clearly a blitz to remove all those vid.me embeds since then, so you’re fairly safe. Shows the risk that we take with third-party embeds, though; explains also the tendency to rely on those which come from the really big companies. And so the big get bigger.
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How hot could Britain get? Prepare for temperatures of 40ºC • The Sunday Times

Ben Spencer:

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Britain could experience its first 40ºC day within ten years as intense heatwaves become more frequent, scientists have warned.

If carbon emissions continue to rise and global warming is not curbed the UK will cross the 40ºC threshold more and more often, modelling suggests. Under the worst projections, by the end of the century this temperature would be reached every three years.

Last week’s heatwave peaked at 32.2ºC at Heathrow on Tuesday, and Northern Ireland recorded its highest ever temperature of 31.4ºC in Armagh on Thursday. By the weekend the hot spell had given way to cooler and unsettled weather.

But Chloe Brimicombe, a heatwave hazards researcher at the University of Reading, said last week’s uncomfortable heat could soon be put in the shade. “Southern England could see its first 40-degree day within the next ten years,” she said. The highest temperature seen in the UK so far was 38.7ºC, recorded in July 2019 in Cambridge. The five hottest days have all taken place since 1990.

So what will a 40ºC day mean for us? “Most of our rail network would not be able to run in those sorts of temperatures,” Brimicombe said. “We would see increased pressure on water resources, productivity would be reduced, and it could affect our livestock and our crops.”

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“End of the century” always feels like a poor offering: it’s 80 years away. People old enough to understand the phrase will in all probability be dead. Give us a 50-year horizon to worry about.
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CNBC launching climate change coverage initiative • Talking Biz News

Chris Roush:

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Matt [Rosoff] pitched this concept [to CNBC management] with a simple premise: Coverage of climate today, is a lot like coverage of technology 30 years ago. It’s mostly covered by niche, trade publications and small teams at a handful of mainstream outlets. Yet, climate, like technology, is getting built into the business plans of nearly every company. It deserves a fuller examination.

This will take CNBC into topics such as new technology being used to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to an increasingly hostile environment, the billions of dollars being poured into clean energy, the changing scope of business planning and practices, the political and regulatory impacts, and personal strategies for preserving wealth and livelihood.

Cat Clifford, who has been covering climate change and entrepreneurship for CNBC Make It, will focus primarily on technologies such as clean energy, battery technology, carbon capture, mitigation, adaptation, and far-future tech, as well as business planning.

Emma Newburger, who has covered climate politics over the last two years for CNBC.com, will focus on policy. From her new home base in Los Angeles, she will tell the stories of the people and businesses most affected by the changing climate of the U.S. West. She will move over from our politics team.

Lora Kolodny will continue to cover Tesla from the technology team, leading our reporting on the most influential business in climate tech to date. She will now also focus her non-Tesla reporting on influential players in renewable energy, sustainable transportation, food and agriculture, and solutions that enable businesses, communities or individuals to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

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Good that one major American (business) TV network is actually going to reorient itself around this. Expect more and more news organisations to do this. Eventually, climate will be on a par with politics as the “most important” desks. Hopefully before it’s too late.
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Is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin the future of space exploration? • Smithsonian Magazine

Charles Fishman:

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“When you look at expendable rockets today, the cost of propellant is only about 1% of the cost of the mission,” [Bezos] says. “The big costs come from throwing that aerospace-grade hardware away. With reusability, in theory, you can see a path to lowering the cost of access to space by a factor of 100.” 

In other words, a launch that today costs $60 million or $100 million would cost just $1 million. “That’s gigantic,” Bezos says. “It would change everything.”

And much as Amazon isn’t choosy about what you can buy—in fact, it wants you to be able to buy anything and everything—Blue Origin is rather agnostic about what people end up doing in space. The company’s goal is to get them there. “Personally, I would love to go to space,” Bezos says. “But it’s not the thing that’s most important to me. I believe that we are sitting on the edge of a golden age of space exploration. Right on the edge. The thing that I would be most proud of, when I’m 80 years old, is if Blue Origin can lower the cost of access to space by such a large amount that there can be a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space—just as we’ve seen over the last 20 years on the internet.”

…Bezos isn’t building a rocket business for profitability in 2020. He’s aiming for market dominance in 2040.

…Aerospace insiders aren’t sceptical of the entrepreneurs’ ability to master complex technology, just of the need for it. Bezos has predicted 50 to 100 launches a year for Blue Origin alone in the not-too-distant future. The sceptics ask: Where will the demand come from?

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I’m with the sceptics. I’ve seen a lot of space launches go (it’s what they do), but even getting to the ISS (which Musk’s rocket managed) is barely useful.
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Government spends hundreds of thousands of pounds on contracts for a digital identity scheme • The i

Poppy Wood:

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DCMS has already spent more than £600,000 on the scheme, according to official contracts.

Oliver Wyman, a US-based management consultancy, was awarded more than £150,000 by DCMS last October to develop a framework for digital identities.

The company has previously suggested they could be used to replace online passwords, office security passes, car rental checks, hotel check-ins and access to government services and digital health records.

But David Davis, former Brexit minister and Conservative MP, told i it was “extraordinary that the Government has spent all this money despite the matter not going to Parliament”.

He said that any digital identity scheme would “open up the public to the loss of information and the possible prevalence of hackers.”

“For centuries, the British people have never had to present our papers to a policeman or official — that’s why we’re a free country. Frankly, it is constitutionally ignorant of the department to go down this route,” he said.

Mr Davis told i the plans were “especially extraordinary in the context of vaccine certificates”.

The Government has faced fierce backlash over plans to make vaccine passports mandatory for entry to nightclubs and other large-scale venues from September, with privacy groups warning it will create a “two-tier society”. 

Mr Davis said: “The argument against vaccine certificates when they were first discussed was that it was the thin end of a wedge into an ID card. Some at the time dismissed that as paranoid — but this demonstrates it was entirely real.”

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Seems rather strange that this hasn’t had any scrutiny at all in Parliament and yet (comparatively) huge sums are being spent on it.
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The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot • BBC News

Charlie Haynes and Flora Carmichael:

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“It started with an email” says Mirko Drotschmann, a German YouTuber and journalist.

Mirko normally ignores offers from brands asking him to advertise their products to his more than 1.5 million subscribers. But the sponsorship offer he received in May this year was unlike any other. An influencer marketing agency called Fazze offered to pay him to promote what it said was leaked information that suggested the death rate among people who had the Pfizer vaccine was almost three times that of the AstraZeneca jab.

The information provided wasn’t true.

It quickly became apparent to Mirko that he was being asked to spread disinformation to undermine public confidence in vaccines in the middle of a pandemic.

“I was shocked,” says Mirko “then I was curious, what’s behind all that?”

In France, science YouTuber Léo Grasset received a similar offer. The agency offered him 2000 euros if he would take part. Fazze said it was acting for a client who wished to remain anonymous. “That’s a huge red flag” says Léo.

Both Léo and Mirko were appalled by the false claims. They pretended to be interested in order to try to find out more and were provided with detailed instructions about what they should say in their videos.

In stilted English, the brief instructed them to “Act like you have the passion and interest in this topic.” It told them not to mention the video had a sponsor – and instead pretend they were spontaneously giving advice out of concern for their viewers.

Social media platforms have rules that ban not disclosing that content is sponsored. In France and Germany it’s also illegal.

Fazze’s brief told influencers to share a story in French newspaper Le Monde about a data leak from the European Medicines Agency. The story was genuine, but didn’t include anything about vaccine deaths. But in this context it would give the false impression that the death rate statistics had come from the leak.

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One Indian influencer did take the bait. Fazze is part of a digital marketing company registered in the UK and, it says here, Russia.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified