the British government is giving strong backing to ‘Covid passports’ – five weeks after saying they wouldn’t be needed. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer on Flickr.

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

Myanmar’s military shuts down Internet, two months after coup • The Washington Post

Miriam Berger:

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Myanmar’s military government ordered broadband Internet shutdowns Thursday amid ongoing violent suppression of opposition to its ouster of the country’s democratically elected government.

The escalation came as the country marked two months since the army’s toppling of the civilian-led government, which has faced widespread public resistance despite the military’s lethal response: More than 500 civilian protesters have been killed and more than 2,000 arrested since Feb. 1, according to local activists.

The United Nations’ special envoy for Myanmar, Christine Schraner Burgener, on Wednesday warned that “a bloodbath is imminent” if the international community did not act to quell the violence.

Last Saturday marked the bloodiest day since the coup, with troops reportedly killing over 140 protesters in more than 40 locations across the country.

As Myanmar death toll climbs, a soldier’s wife is caught between protesters and military
Reuters reported Thursday that official orders to halt wireless broadband services did not provide any explanation. Myanmar’s military previously shut down mobile Internet access and slowed service.

A lawyer for Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s deposed leader, also Thursday said that the detained opposition leader had been charged the week before in Yangon with breaking the country’s secrets law, the most serious allegation against her yet. The lawyer told Reuters that he had heard about the charges against Suu Kyi and several other members of her National League for Democracy only two days ago.

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It really is a calamity: hundreds dead, and Myanmar has essentially rewound to 2005 or so. This is a pretty good explainer of why: Aung San Suu Kyi could have been in a position to change the constitution so that the military wouldn’t have had any political power.
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Biden’s infrastructure plan would make electricity carbon-free by 2035 • Scientific American

Scott Waldman:

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The backbone of President Biden’s plan to use infrastructure spending to advance climate policy is a clean electricity standard for the power sector that has the potential to be the most aggressive ever enacted by the federal government.

Tucked into his $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal is the aim of “achieving 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035,” according to a fact sheet released yesterday by the White House.

“If we act now, in 50 years people are going to look back and say: ‘This was the moment that America won the future,'” Biden said during a rollout of the proposal in Pittsburgh.

While details are vague about how the “energy efficiency and clean electricity standard” would be enacted, it remains — at minimum — a significant symbolic milestone in the U.S. push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And at best, it could be a transformative measure that loosens U.S. reliance on fossil fuels in less than 15 years. The United States is currently at about 40% clean energy on the grid.
The difference depends on whether the 2035 goal is mandatory, or simply aspirational. Congress will have a big role to play in determining how much power is behind it.

“This really will be the backbone for decarbonizing the power sector,” said Lindsey Walter, deputy director for Third Way’s Climate and Energy Program. Previous iterations of a clean energy standard have set a goal of 100% carbon-free energy by 2050 so Biden is significantly advancing the timeline, she said.

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Involves tax rises, so of course it’s completely opposed by Republicans. The Democrats are looking to find a way to finagle it so they don’t need that.
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It took the Suez Canal crisis to highlight the scale of the polluting shipping sector • Climate Change News

Madeline Rose:

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Today there are around 60,000 ships carrying 11 billion tonnes of cargo every year — around 80% of world trade.

Most of everything we own – clothes, shoes, food, technology – at one points sits on a giant container ship like the Ever Given that rose to fame last week.

Every single one of these ships in operation runs on fossil fuels, but not just your everyday petrol or diesel. Container ships run on the world’s cheapest, dirtiest liquid fossil fuel – known as “heavy fuel oil”. This is the gunky black tar-like substance that comes out the bottom of an oil refinery once all the transparent road fuels like gasoline and diesel have been separated out.

Heavy fuel oil contains up to 500 times as much cancer-causing sulphur dioxide than the legal maximum allowed in road fuels. Sometimes even chemical waste and melted car tires, that companies don’t want to pay to dispose of safely, are just blended into shipping fuel.

…Even after somewhat improved sulphur standards finally came into effect in 2020, decades after equivalent rules for power plants, shipping’s dirty air pollution is still linked to 250,000 deaths and 6.4 million childhood asthma cases every year — just the cost of doing business, apparently.

Meanwhile, shipping continues to emit one billion tons of climate-heating greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. That’s more than all but the top five largest emitting countries in the world, we just never talk about it. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is right — governments typically exclude shipping emissions from their climate action plans, pretending the problem doesn’t exist.

Just like other sectors, shipping is capable of running on renewable energy — there are over 100 pilot projects for zero-emission shipping underway. But consumers and governments have not yet demanded that ships make this energy transition.

The shipping industry is in bed with the fossil fuel industry (40% of the sector’s global cargo consist of coal, oil, and fossil gas) so transitioning ships off fossil fuels will require sustained pressure, action, and outrage.

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The Greta Thunberg tweet is quite something. A very cutting meme for a big problem.
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Social distancing changes things we have seen • Stray Reprints

Ben Greenman:

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NOTE: These are all things I made during quarantine from the coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020. Some are funny but almost all are, once you think about them, sad.

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Reimagined pictures: American Gothic, Creation of Adam, Wish You Were Here (the best, I feel), Meet The Beatles, Abbey Road, Forrest Gump (close second), E.T. and plenty more.
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Scientists just killed the EmDrive • Popular Mechanics

Caroline Delbert:

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The crux of the EmDrive is if you bounce microwaves around inside the tube, they exert more force in one direction than the other, creating a net thrust without the need for any propellant. And when NASA and a team at Xi’an in China tried this, they actually got a small-but-distinct net force.

Now, however, physicists at the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden) are saying those promising results showing thrust were all false positives that are explained by outside forces. The scientists recently presented their findings in three papers at Space Propulsion Conference 2020 +1, with titles like “High-Accuracy Thrust Measurements of the EmDrive and Elimination of False-Positive Effects.” (Read the other two studies here and here.)

Using a new measuring scale and different suspension points of the same engine, the TU Dresden scientists “were able to reproduce apparent thrust forces similar to those measured by the NASA team, but also to make them disappear by means of a point suspension,” researcher Martin Tajmar told the German site GreWi.

The verdict:

»

“When power flows into the EmDrive, the engine warms up. This also causes the fastening elements on the scale to warp, causing the scale to move to a new zero point. We were able to prevent that in an improved structure. Our measurements refute all EmDrive claims by at least 3 orders of magnitude.”

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Damn you scientists with your facts and tests! I guess they’ll have to call the EmDrive something else so they can start hyping it again.
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Survey XII: Digital New Normal 2025 – after the outbreak • Imagining the Internet

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Nearly half of experts worry that changes in the ongoing evolution of digital life tied to the COVID-19 outbreak and societies’ responses to it may make digital life in 2025 mostly worse for most people. Threats they cite include inequality and injustice; security risks and privacy’s fall; automation; misinformation and worsening mental health. Their hopes are for improved social relations and social justice; that tech and government may come to more highly value the needs of people and planet over profit and power; and that smarter and fairer human and technological systems will emerge.

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There’s plenty more, in quite a lot of depth. I read the summary and thought “Sure, but surveys like this are easy to do, and who’s going to hold you to account for them? What did they all forecast for 2020, back in the day?”

Fortunately, the website goes back with predictions from as far back as 2004. So to give you an idea of how seriously to take the predictions from III, below is what the 2020 predictions, made in 2008, said.
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The 2008 Survey • Imagining the Internet

Looking forward to the world in 2020:

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Among the quantitative results from the expert group:

• Some 77% said the mobile computing device (the smartphone) with more significant computing power will be 2020’s primary global Internet-connection platform.
• 64% favored the idea that 2020 user interfaces will offer advanced touch, talk and typing options and some added a fourth “T” – think.
• Nearly four out of five respondents (78%) said the original Internet architecture will not be completely replaced by a next-generation ‘net by 2020.
• Three out of five respondents (60%) disagreed with the idea that legislatures, courts, the technology industry, and media companies will exercise effective intellectual property control by 2020.
• A majority—56%—agreed that in 2020 “few lines (will) divide professional from personal time, and that’s OK.”
• 56% said while Web 2.0 is bringing some people closer, social tolerance will not be heightened by our new connections
• 45% agreed and 44% disagreed with the notion that the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the Internet will heighten individual integrity and forgiveness.
• More than half (55%) agreed that many lives will be touched in 2020 by virtual worlds, mirror worlds, and augmented reality, while 45% disagreed or did not answer the question.

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I’d say those are pretty good, actually (apart perhaps from the “few lines divide professional from personal time”?). The smartphone in December 2008 was a shadow of its current incarnation.
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Boris Johnson gives backing to domestic use of Covid passports • The Guardian

Jessica Elgot:

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Boris Johnson has given firm backing to the use of Covid passports after the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, suggested the measure would be against “British instinct”.

Johnson, who has faced criticism from his own party over the proposed use of Covid certification in small venues such as pubs and restaurants, has noticeably warmed to the idea in recent weeks. Government sources have suggested the certificates could be used by businesses as a way to relax social distancing measures inside venues. An interim report into the measure is due to be published on Monday.

Speaking on a visit to Middlesborough, Johnson said a certificate could be used to prove a person was safe in an number of different ways – not just vaccination. He suggested businesses would welcome the idea.

“When it comes to trying to make sure that we give maximum confidence to business and to customers here in the UK, there are three things: your immunity, whether you’ve had it before, so you’ve got natural antibodies anyway; whether you’ve been vaccinated; and then, of course, whether you’ve had a test. And so those three things working together will, I think, be useful,” he said.

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February 23: “The UK government reassured people on Tuesday they will not face major restrictions if they refuse to have a coronavirus jab with officials considering a recent Covid-19 test result as an alternative to ‘vaccine passports’.”

April 1: Johnson gives firm backing to Covid passports. Five weeks.

Though this does set up the possibility that the “libertarian” end of the Tory party will team up with Labour to defeat the measure in Parliament. A strange situation where the right-wing end of the right-wing party finds common cause with the ostensibly left-wing opposition party.
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Update on campaign targeting security researchers • Google Threat Analysis Group

Adam Weidemann:

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In January, the Threat Analysis Group documented a hacking campaign, which we were able to attribute to a North Korean government-backed entity, targeting security researchers. On March 17th, the same actors behind those attacks set up a new website with associated social media profiles for a fake company called “SecuriElite.”

The new website claims the company is an offensive security company located in Turkey that offers pentests, software security assessments and exploits. Like previous websites we’ve seen set up by this actor, this website has a link to their PGP public key at the bottom of the page. In January, targeted researchers reported that the PGP key hosted on the attacker’s blog acted as the lure to visit the site where a browser exploit was waiting to be triggered.

The attacker’s latest batch of social media profiles continue the trend of posing as fellow security researchers interested in exploitation and offensive security. On LinkedIn, we identified two accounts impersonating recruiters for antivirus and security companies. We have reported all identified social media profiles to the platforms to allow them to take appropriate action. 

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Claims to be a company called “SecuriElite”, an “offensive security company”. Quite the turn of phrase.
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A French route to Europe’s EV future • Bloomberg

Colin McKerracher:

»

The latest vehicle sales data for France tell an interesting story about the future of the auto sector in Europe.

The obvious point is that the pandemic and related lockdowns are still affecting European auto markets in a big way. Overall vehicle sales were down 21% year-on-year in February. The other big story is that sales of electric vehicles continue to rise quickly. The plug-in vehicle share of new sales is now running at around 13%. That’s up from of 11% in 2020 and just 3% in 2019. Sales of plug-in hybrid vehicles rose a remarkable 134% in February.

There are two big factors driving this. The first is Europe’s tightening automotive CO2 regulations. Automakers across Europe pushed a record number of EVs onto the market last year to drive down the average emissions of the vehicles they sold and avoid paying large fines. The EU targets effectively tighten again this year, since automakers are no longer allowed to remove their 5% of worst-performing vehicles from the calculations – a carve-out they negotiated years ago.

The other factor at play is taxes. France recently updated what’s known as the bonus malus vehicle taxation scheme, which punishes buyers of high emitting vehicles and rewards those choosing electric or low emissions options. The updates make the program even more stringent and are a big part of the buoyant EV sales on display in the latest numbers.

The highest taxes for the bonus malus scheme are for vehicles that emit 220g or more of CO2 per km. This can include models like the Land Rover Discovery and BMW X7, depending on configuration. Buyers of these vehicles face an additional tax of a whopping 30,000 euros ($35,300). At the other end of the spectrum, buyers of vehicles emitting 0-20g CO2 per km benefit from a 7,000 euro ($8,240) rebate. All battery electric vehicle models fall in this latter category. That’s quite an incentive.

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Making ICE (internal combustion engines) much more expensive than EVs (electric vehicles) seems like a better path to “banning” them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: apparently managed to get through a day without screwing things up.

A big US Army contract means Microsoft’s Hololens bet is going to pay off handsomely. CC-licensed photo by NASA Johnson 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. Boom! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

You and the algorithm: it takes two to tango • Medium

Nick Clegg is not the Liberal Democrat leader or deputy British Prime Minister, he’s the chief PR for Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook:

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Every piece of content that could potentially feature [in your News Feed] — including the posts you haven’t seen from your friends, the Pages you follow, and Groups you joined — goes through the ranking process. Thousands of signals are assessed for these posts, like who posted it, when, whether it’s a photo, video or link, how popular it is on the platform, or the type of device you are using. From there, the algorithm uses these signals to predict how likely it is to be relevant and meaningful to you: for example, how likely you might be to “like” it or find that viewing it was worth your time. The goal is to make sure you see what you find most meaningful — not to keep you glued to your smartphone for hours on end. You can think about this sort of like a spam filter in your inbox: it helps filter out content you won’t find meaningful or relevant, and prioritizes content you will.

Before we credit “the algorithm” with too much independent judgment, it is of course the case that these systems are designed by people. It is Facebook’s decision makers who ultimately decide what content is acceptable on the platform. Facebook has detailed Community Standards, developed over many years, that prohibit harmful content — and invests heavily in developing ways of identifying it and acting on it quickly.

Of course, whether Facebook draws the line in the right place, or according to the right considerations, is a matter of legitimate public debate. And it is entirely reasonable to argue that private companies shouldn’t be making so many big decisions about what content is acceptable on their own. It would clearly be better if these decisions were made according to frameworks agreed by democratically accountable lawmakers. But in the absence of such laws, there are decisions that need to be made in real time.

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The News Feed is determined by machine learning systems, not people. Engagement is the critical metric, and measured by dwell time. And we have no way to tweak the levers of the algorithm except by Liking content and trying to ban content.

It’s very different from just choosing for yourself what you want to read on, say, Reddit. I find it impossible to read anything Clegg writes without constantly thinking it’s covering something up or skewing something. That’s not so much a hangover from his time in politics (where his big problem was that he wasn’t good enough at lying and scheming) as from how Facebook has been and continues to be. The culture won’t change while the leader doesn’t change.

(Side note: was his post on Medium, not Facebook, because anyone can read Medium?)
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Clubhouse feels like a party. But is it a good one? • The New Yorker

Anna Wiener:

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Over time, I found myself moving quickly from room to room on Clubhouse, restive and unsatisfied, as if at a party that hadn’t yet found its groove—staying home with a book would have been more nurturing, but maybe my friends would show up. For a while, I was content to eavesdrop. There were strangers telling stories, and discussing optimistic science fiction, and practicing second languages, and engaging in wild financial speculation. There were occasional flashes of revelation and inspiration.

It seemed plausible that somewhere on the app people were falling in love, or at least meeting future business partners. It was nice to stumble across friends’ avatars in rooms where I was also a listener—like spotting a familiar face at a lecture, or the bar—and exciting to see the names of people I admired from afar, their avatars flickering with the potential for a serendipitous encounter, a shared stage.

Yet I was always dropping in, swinging by. In so many rooms, I couldn’t remember what had drawn me inside; I knew only that I was just passing through, and wouldn’t stay for long.

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Data withheld from WHO team probing COVID-19 origins in China: Tedros • Reuters

Stephanie Nebehay, John Miller:

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Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who travelled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday.

The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to give “full access” to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019.

In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” as a cause.

One of the team’s investigators has already said China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic began.

“In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data,” Tedros said. “I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing… “I do not believe that this assessment was extensive enough,” he told member states in remarks released by the WHO. “Further data and studies will be needed to reach more robust conclusions.”

The inability of the WHO mission to conclude yet where or how the virus began spreading in people means that tensions will continue over how the pandemic started – and whether China has helped efforts to find out or, as the United States has alleged, hindered them.

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China won’t ever let a closer examination of the lab happen. That’s not because the lab is the cause (the report discusses the various possibilities pretty fairly), but because China hates being the source of the problem.
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Microsoft wins contract to make modified HoloLens for US Army • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

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The Pentagon announced that Microsoft has won a contract to build more than 120,000 custom HoloLens augmented reality headsets for the U.S. Army. The contract could be worth up to $21.88bn over 10 years, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday.

Microsoft shares moved higher after the announcement. The stock was up 1.7% to $235.77 per share at the end of Wednesday’s trading session.

The deal shows Microsoft can generate meaningful revenue from a futuristic product resulting from years of research, beyond core areas such as operating systems and productivity software.

It follows a $480m contract Microsoft received to give the Army prototypes of the Integrated Visual Augmented System, or IVAS, in 2018. The new deal will involve providing production versions.

The standard-issue HoloLens, which costs $3,500, enables people to see holograms overlaid over their actual environments and interact using hand and voice gestures. An IVAS prototype that a CNBC reporter tried out in 2019 displayed a map and a compass and had thermal imaging to reveal people in the dark. The system could also show the aim for a weapon.

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That’s the Hololens R&D all paid for, then. Does this push Apple’s plans for a headset forward, do we think?
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Big breakthrough for ’massless’ energy storage • Chalmers

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Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions. It contains carbon fibre that serves simultaneously as an electrode, conductor, and load-bearing material. Their latest research breakthrough paves the way for essentially ’massless’ energy storage in vehicles and other technology.

​The batteries in today’s electric cars constitute a large part of the vehicles’ weight, without fulfilling any load-bearing function. A structural battery, on the other hand, is one that works as both a power source and as part of the structure – for example, in a car body. This is termed ‘massless’ energy storage, because in essence the battery’s weight vanishes when it becomes part of the load-bearing structure. Calculations show that this type of multifunctional battery could greatly reduce the weight of an electric vehicle.

The development of structural batteries at Chalmers University of Technology has proceeded through many years of research, including previous discoveries involving certain types of carbon fibre. In addition to being stiff and strong, they also have a good ability to store electrical energy chemically. This work was named by Physics World as one of 2018’s ten biggest scientific breakthroughs.

The first attempt to make a structural battery was made as early as 2007, but it has so far proven difficult to manufacture batteries with both good electrical and mechanical properties. 

But now the development has taken a real step forward, with researchers from Chalmers, in collaboration with KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, presenting a structural battery with properties that far exceed anything yet seen, in terms of electrical energy storage, stiffness and strength.

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He downloaded the Trezor app on iOS. It was a scam and stole $1 million in bitcoin • The Washington Post

Reed Albergotti:

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Phillipe Christodoulou wanted to check his bitcoin balance last month, so he searched the App Store on his iPhone for “Trezor,” the maker of a small hardware device he uses to store his cryptocurrency. Up popped the company’s padlock logo set against a bright green background. The app was rated close to five stars. He downloaded it and typed in his credentials.

In less than a second, nearly all of his life savings — 17.1 bitcoin worth $600,000 at the time — was gone. The app was a fake, designed to trick people into thinking it was a legitimate app.

But Christodoulou is angrier at Apple than at the thieves themselves. He says Apple marketed the App Store as a safe and trusted place, where each app is reviewed before it is allowed in the store.

Christodoulou, once a loyal Apple customer, said he no longer admires the company. “They betrayed the trust that I had in them,” he said in an interview. “Apple doesn’t deserve to get away with this.”

…Trezor, based in the Czech Republic and owned by a company called Satoshi Labs, is a well-known maker of hardware wallets. Trezor doesn’t have a mobile app, but crypto thieves created a fake one and put it on Apple’s App Store in January and the Google Play Store in December, according to those companies, tricking some unsuspecting Trezor customers into entering their seed phrases.

Kristyna Mazankova, a spokeswoman for Trezor, said the company has been notifying Apple and Google for years about fake apps posing as a Trezor product to scam its customers. Trezor has never had a mobile app, though the company is working on one. She said the process of reporting the apps is “painful” and that representatives of Apple and Google haven’t been in contact.

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Maybe a placeholder app, Trezor? It’s asking a lot of Apple to police all of these – though there could be a list of names to watch for. (Except if the app updates itself to a different name; that though should trigger a check.)
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The Tories are getting away with corruption on an epic scale – how can Labour make them pay? • New Statesman

Paul Mason:

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While nobody in their right mind thinks Line of Duty is real, its metaphoric truth is: when dealing with the commercialised and fragmented British state, you have to assume that everybody is on the make, everyone is gaming the system, everyone has something to hide, and that behind every investigation there is a cover-up.

Beyond this general feeling of numbness and indifference towards malfeasance in public office, there is also something more specific. For a minority of the electorate, so long as Johnson and his ministers go on delivering a steady diet of prejudice, illiberalism and provocations against “wokeness”, they will be forgiven any mistake. Tens of thousands of elderly people dead because of an unconscionably late lockdown? Christmas cancelled? The fishing industry destroyed? A trade border now drawn in the Irish Sea? None of it matters so long as Johnson, Priti Patel and the rest are prepared to fight the culture war.

But it should matter and the opposition needs to make it matter. Labour’s Rachel Reeves has carved out a strong position by meticulously pursuing evidence and explanations over the Covid cronyism scandals. Translating this into a potent political narrative requires Labour to go further.

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The Labour Party seems stunned by Johnson: while Keir Starmer easily bests him in Parliament, that’s not where the real fight is won. Nor does Labour seem to have any policies discernible from the Tories. Starmer hasn’t been helped by the pandemic. But he hasn’t helped himself.
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Dark web bursting with COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine passports • Ars Technica

Tim De Chant:

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Tired of waiting to get your vaccine appointment? For just $500, you could get a COVID-19 vaccine dose tomorrow (overnight shipping not included). Too rich for your blood? How about a vaccination card for just $150?

Security researchers have seen a spike in listings on dark web marketplaces in recent weeks. The sites are advertising everything from vaccine doses to falsified vaccine certifications and negative test results. Currently, more than 1,200 listings are offering a variety of vaccines, including Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Sputnik, and Sinopharm.

Investigations by researchers at security firm Check Point have been monitoring the sites for COVID-19-related activity since January, and they report a three-fold increase in such activity over the last three months. It’s unclear if the doses are legitimate, and even if they were, there’s no guarantee that the vials have been stored at the correct temperature, potentially rendering them useless. 

Last week, Check Point researchers based in Israel attempted to buy the Sinopharm vaccine from one vendor, said Ekram Ahmed, a spokesperson for the company. “We tried to negotiate and buy the Chinese vaccine through one of the vendors,” he told Ars. The team messaged the vendor, who directed them to continue the negotiations on Telegram. Once there, the vendor provided reassurances that the vaccine doses were legitimate. The researchers sent $500 to a Bitcoin wallet, and while they have received a FedEx shipping label, they have yet to receive the shipment.

Dark web vendors are probably doing better business selling falsified vaccine cards and negative test results. “Lately, we’re seeing more vaccination certificates being offered” than vaccines, Ahmed said. “It’s probably a two-to-one ratio.”

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The fake vaccination certificates is the sort of thing the late, great British SF writer John Brunner predicted – in his case it was AIDS, but same sorta thing.
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Suez Canal: QAnon’s cargo ship conspiracies are getting wild(er) • Vice

David Gilbert:

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Within minutes of the Ever Given ship getting stuck in Egypt’s Suez Canal last week, an incident that created chaos in global supply chains, QAnon supporters were spreading wild conspiracies that the ship was operated by Hillary Clinton and carrying a cargo of child sex slaves.

The claims were based on the fact that the Taiwanese shipping company that operates the ship is called Evergreen, which was Clinton’s secret service name when she was first lady.

The baseless theory was given further credence — in the minds of QAnon followers at least — when it emerged that the ship’s call sign was “H3RC” which is close enough to Clinton’s own initials (HRC) for QAnon followers to make the link.

The theory quickly spread on Telegram and Gab, the platforms QAnon followers have fled to in the wake of a purge by mainstream social networks in recent months.

But the claims also made their way to Twitter and Facebook, where fact-checking group PolitiFact flagged and debunked them.

“There is no evidence that an Evergreen ship stuck in the Suez Canal is linked to a human trafficking operation run by Hillary Clinton. That claim has been pushed by supporters of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory,” Daniel Funke, an expert in online misinformation at PolitiFact, wrote.

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This actually ran last week, while the Ever Given was up the spout, and it’s unintentionally hilarious in what it says about the ARG* that is QAnon.

(* Alternative Reality Game.)

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:Pretty much everyone got in touch by some means or another to point out that the bomb dropped over Nagasaki was not a hydrogen (fusion) bomb but was a fission bomb – the difference from the Hiroshima bomb being that it used plutonium rather than uranium. The first “hydrogen” (H-) bomb – so called because the initial fission blast triggers a fusion process on a small amount of heavy hydrogen, thus unleashing a colossal amount of energy – was tested in 1952.

Sleep tracking is popular, but scientists aren’t so sure there’s any benefit CC-licensed photo by Nicolas Winspeare 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. Wakey wakey! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google Nest Hub, Apple Watch and the pros and cons of sleep tracking • WSJ

Nicole Nguyen:

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there is such a thing as sleep-data overload. The formal medical term is orthosomnia. “Basically, it’s insomnia from sleep-tracking devices,” said Dr. Prather.

Susheel Patil, a clinical doctor with the Johns Hopkins Pulmonary Sleep Medicine Program, had a patient with insomnia symptoms cure his sleeplessness by removing the Fitbit he was wearing every night. “It can be so much data, and we don’t know what to do with it. Unplugging can be more helpful,” Dr. Patil said.

Plus, seemingly “bad” results might not be meaningful. If your tracker says your sleep is fragmented, but you feel fine, it’s nothing to worry about, he added.

Another concern is the devices’ accuracy. “The gold standard is the polysomnogram with an EEG signature, and everything else is an estimate,” said Kelly Baron, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the University of Utah. An electroencephalogram (aka EEG) test, typically conducted in a lab, looks at electrical activity in your brain using nodes attached to your scalp.

I wanted to see how my data might compare with a polysomnogram test, so I sent Dr. Baron one night’s worth of my data captured by different devices. Looking at the sleep-phase data from Whoop and Fitbit, she said, “The staging data doesn’t look much like the stages we would see in a sleep study.” (The Apple Watch and Google’s Nest Hub don’t attempt to discern the different phases, and I hadn’t yet begun testing the Withings Mat, which does display sleep-cycle duration.) Dr. Baron pointed to the app’s record of a long period of REM—aka rapid eye movement—toward the end of sleep, and the small amount of time in deep sleep as unusual, even for a particularly terrible night of sleep.

…The biggest benefit of these trackers generally is that I’m now prioritizing my sleep, instead of merely thinking of it as the bookend to my day. And honestly, you don’t need trackers to do the same, and follow the two key tenets of the sleep experts I talked to:

• Set consistent bed and wake times—even on the weekends
• Get seven to eight hours of sleep every night.

«

I remain to be persuaded that these sleep trackers have any value. They’re just easy to do and aren’t medical devices, so don’t need official clearance. There’s no low-hanging fruit left for wearables. Now we get into the tough part of the game.
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Fridges, microwaves fall prey to global chip shortage • Reuters

Josh Horwitz:

»

A global shortage of chips that has rattled production lines at car companies and squeezed stockpiles at gadget makers is now leaving home appliance makers unable to meet demand, according to the president of Whirlpool Corp in China.

The US-based company, one of the world’s largest white goods firm, saw chip deliveries fall short of its orders by about 10% in March, Jason Ai told Reuters in Shanghai.

“It’s a perfect storm,” he said on the sidelines of the Appliance and World Electronics Expo.

“On the one hand we have to satisfy domestic demand for appliances, on the other hand we’re facing an explosion of export orders. As far as chips go, for those of us in China, it was inevitable.”

The company has struggled to secure enough microcontrollers, simple processors that power over half of its products including microwaves, refrigerators, and washing machines.

While the chip shortage has affected a range of high-end suppliers like Qualcomm Inc, it originated and remains most severe for mature technologies, for example power-management chips used in cars.

«

(Thanks Lloyd Wood for the link.)
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Spotify jumps into social audio, acquires sports-focused live audio app • NBC News

Dylan Byers:

»

Spotify said Tuesday it has acquired the company behind the live audio app Locker Room, giving the music and podcast platform a new foothold in a space that has seen a surge of interest following the rise of the app Clubhouse.

The company, Betty Labs, launched Locker Room in October as a sports-focused platform for live audio conversations. Spotify said it plans to “evolve and expand” the app “into an enhanced live audio experience for a wider range of creators and fans.”

Locker Room will soon expand and rebrand to become more like Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces: a forum for live conversations about music, culture and all manner of topics.

“Creators and fans have been asking for live formats on Spotify, and we’re excited that soon, we’ll make them available to hundreds of millions of listeners and millions of creators on our platform,” Spotify’s chief research and development officer Gustav Söderström said in a statement. 

«

So they’ve.. bought internet radio? Talk about reinventing the wheel.
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Arm v9 promises ray tracing for smartphones and a big performance boost • PC World Australia

Mark Hachman:

»

Arm said Tuesday that ray tracing and variable rate shading will migrate from the PC to Arm-powered smartphones and tablets as part of Armv9, the next-generation CPU architecture that the company expects will power the next decade of Arm devices. Chips based upon the v9 architecture will be released in 2021, providing an estimated 30% improvement in performance over the next two Arm chip generations and the devices that run them.

Arm’s v9 will also add SVE2, new AI-specific instructions that will probably be used for the AI image processing used on smartphones, such as portrait mode. Arm v9 will also include what Arm is calling Realms, a hardware container of sorts specifically designed to protect virtual machines and secure applications. 

As an intellectual-property licensing company, Arm enjoys a unique position in the computing industry. Phones, tablets, and servers never include chips directly made by Arm; instead, companies like Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, and others sign licensing agreements wirh Arm, giving them the freedom to manufacture chips designed by Arm, or tweak them to create their own customized designs. Kevin Jou, the chief technology officer of Mediatek—whose chips typically appear in Chromebooks and low-end smartphones—predicted that his company will have an Arm v9 chip by the end of 2021.

«

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Pfizer, Moderna vaccines 90% effective in study of essential workers • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

»

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines being deployed to fight the coronavirus pandemic are robustly effective in preventing infections in real-life conditions, according to a federal study released Monday that provides reassurance of protection for front-line workers in the United States.

In a study of about 4,000 health-care personnel, police, firefighters and other essential workers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the vaccines reduced the risk of infection by 80% after one shot. Protection increased to 90% following the second dose. The findings are consistent with clinical trial results and studies showing strong effectiveness in Israel and the United Kingdom, and in initial studies of health-care workers at the UT Southwestern Medical Center and in Southern California.

The CDC report is significant, experts said, because it analyzed how well the vaccines worked among a diverse group of front-line working-age adults whose jobs make them more likely to be exposed to the virus and to spread it.

…Among 2,479 fully vaccinated people, just three had confirmed infections. Among 477 people who received one dose, eight infections were reported. By comparison, among 994 people who were not vaccinated, 161 developed infections.

No deaths were reported.

«

It begins to look like we’ll emerge from this, doesn’t it?
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Fission chain reaction may trigger supernovae • APS Physics

Philip Ball:

»

A new proposal suggests that when a white dwarf star explodes as a supernova, the initial trigger may be a stellar version of an atomic bomb. This scenario is different from the textbook explanation, which involves an instability resulting from the star sucking mass from a companion star. The researchers suggesting this scenario say that crystallization of uranium during cooling of the stellar core could lead to runaway nuclear fission. This fission “bomb” could in turn trigger an H-bomb-like (nuclear fusion) explosion of lighter elements to produce the supernova. Several key questions about the process remain to be answered, but experts say the theory is worth exploring.

A white dwarf is a very dense star, with a mass comparable to the Sun’s but a size similar to Earth’s. These objects form from Sun-like stars that have densified under gravity after burning most of their fuel. Some white dwarfs end their lives as type 1a supernovae, which are thought to occur only if the star is part of a binary system because a solo white dwarf should be stable as it cools.

But Charles Horowitz of Indiana University and Matt Caplan of Illinois State University point out that heavy elements including uranium are among the first to solidify as a white dwarf’s interior cools. This cooling and solidification process separates the complex plasma-like mixture into its components—a process called phase separation. Even if the initial amounts of uranium and similar elements are very low, “the first solids will be very strongly enriched” in these elements, Horowitz and Caplan write in their paper.

…Horowitz and Caplan carried out calculations and computer simulations showing that a critical mass of uranium can indeed crystallize from a typical element mixture found in a cooling white dwarf. If the uranium explodes, they say, the resulting heat and pressure in the stellar core could be high enough to trigger nuclear fusion of lighter elements, especially carbon and oxygen, and thus a supernova. (Similarly, today’s thermonuclear fusion bombs are detonated by fission bombs.)

«

So it would be a fusion bomb – aka H-bomb – like the one dropped on Nagasaki. like the US first tested in 1952 and which any self-respecting nuclear power now deploys. (Thanks for the corrections.)
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Kuo: Apple headset to have ultra-short focal length lenses and weigh less than 150 grams • 9to5Mac

Filipe Espósito:

»

Following a recent report mentioning that Apple’s rumored mixed reality headset will feature advanced eye tracking, reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said today in a research note obtained by 9to5Mac that Apple has been working on hybrid ultra-short focal length lens aiming to keep the weight of the headset under 150 grams.

As mentioned by Kuo, current virtual reality headsets typically weigh over 300 grams and have a bulky form factor, which is something Apple wants to solve for its own headset. Apple’s VR device is expected to adopt Fresnel’s hybrid ultra-short focal length lens that have improved field of view, as well as reduced weight and thickness.

The analyst believes that the new Apple-built headset will weigh less than 150 grams, which will be a big advantage when compared to similar devices that currently exist. The device will be equipped with lenses made of plastic instead of glass, which are lighter — but details about the durability of the material are unknown.

«

A lemon weighs about 100g, and a kiwifruit about 50g. So imagine those on your face, if that helps. Alternatively: 17 UK £1 coins, which weigh 8.75g each. Or, in the US, 30 nickels – each weighs 5g.
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Steer through the Suez Canal • CNN Interactive

Sarah-Grace Mankarious and Marco Chacón:

»

Navigating the Suez Canal is a high-stress, complicated feat that requires master piloting skills. To demonstrate, we worked with Master Mariner Andy Winbow and Captain Yash Gupta to produce this simulated passage.

Try your hand at traversing one of the most highly trafficked nautical thoroughfares in the world.

Note: This is a non-scientific simplified interactive experience intended for illustrative purposes only. There are many factors that have not been accounted for, including (but not restricted to): the depth of water; proximity to the banks; interaction with passing ships; the turning circle; availability of tug boats and other weather conditions like visibility. We have also sped up the time it takes to maneuver a ship of this size. Master Mariner Andy Winbow and Captain Yash Gupta have been advisers.

«

Well, that’s your lunchtime sorted.
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Apple developing new Remote for the next-generation Apple TV • 9to5Mac

Filipe Espósito:

»

We’ve been hearing rumors about the next-generation Apple TV for a while now, but we don’t know when the company plans to officially announce it. Now 9to5Mac has learned that Apple is developing a new Remote for Apple TV, which corroborates some previous rumors about Apple updating the Siri Remote.

Details about this new Apple TV Remote are still unknown, but 9to5Mac’s sources have told us that this model is being developed under the code name “B519,” which is quite different from the code name of the current Siri Remote — internally identified as “B439.”

«

All I ask is that you can tell which way up it is if you pick it up with your eyes closed. And that the buttons are sized according to how much you’ll use them. And that you can tell which button is which with your eyes closed. (I wrote about the difference between design built around affordance – the Sky remote – and design built around “here’s a shape, now fit the buttons into it” – the Apple TV remote – a while ago. It’s still true.)
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Intel’s 11th gen Core i9 processor boosts Microsoft Flight Simulator by 20% • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

I built a new gaming PC in September to play new games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. I figured that picking Intel’s Core i9-10900K and Nvidia’s RTX 3090 would make this machine last for years and offer top tier performance in demanding titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator. I was wrong. Microsoft Flight Simulator is a notorious beast of a game and is quickly becoming the new Crysis test for PCs.

It has struggled to run smoothly above 30fps with all settings maxed out at 1440p on my PC, and even AMD’s Intel-beating Ryzen 9 5950X only improved the situation slightly for some.

Intel’s latest 11th Gen processor arrives with a big promise of up to 19% IPC (instructions per cycle) improvements over the existing i9-10900K, and more specifically the lure of 14% more performance at 1080p in Microsoft Flight Simulator with high settings. This piqued my curiosity, so I’ve been testing the i9-11900K over the past few days to see what it can offer for Microsoft Flight Simulator specifically.

It’s less than a year after the i9-10900K release, and I’m already considering upgrading to Intel’s new i9-11900K because I’ve found it boosts Microsoft Flight Simulator by 20%.

«

Though this is still at the 14nm (!!) process. No word on the power consumption, which must therefore still be substantial. Still a long time before we see the fruits of Gelsinger’s new policies, of course.
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Banks face regulators’ scrutiny on handling of Archegos fire sale • Financial Times

Eric Platt, Leo Lewis, Ortenca Aliaj and Stephen Morris:

»

Archegos founder Bill Hwang on Thursday gathered Wall Street lenders Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, as well as Swiss rivals UBS and Credit Suisse and Japan’s Nomura, in a last-ditch effort to unwind billions of dollars of markets bets in an orderly manner.

But on Friday banks started selling large blocks of shares that had underpinned Hwang’s trades, knocking $33bn of value off media groups ViacomCBS and Discovery and Chinese tech stocks, such as Baidu. The sales spurred losses for Nomura and Credit Suisse that are expected to run into billions of dollars.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority have requested information from the banks involved. Finra, Wall Street’s self-regulatory body, has also contacted the banks at the centre of the Archegos trading debacle.

As Archegos’ losses increased last week, several prime brokers that had extended credit to the firm tried to agree to an orderly unwinding of the trades over time, fearing that a fire sale would depress the value of the securities held on behalf of Archegos.

One person said they had hoped to sell Archegos’ book over a period of about 20 days.

«

This is a bit Inside Wall Street, but last Friday a big hedge fund called Archegos went bust. In trying to recover their assets, banks sold shares (as detailed here). What everyone’s wondering is whether this presages a much bigger problem, rather as the implosion of two hedge funds at Bear Stearns in July 2007 was the first inkling of the credit crunch.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Membership of American churches has for the first time fallen below 50%. A harbinger, but of what? CC-licensed photo by Don Sniegowski 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. Less than 4.5 billion. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI’s text-generating system GPT-3 is now spewing out 4.5 billion words a day • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

OpenAI started life as a nonprofit, but for the last few years, it has been trying to make money with GPT-3 as its first salable product. The company has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft which gives the tech giant unique access to the program’s underlying code, but any firm can apply for access to GPT-3’s general API and build services on top of it.

As OpenAI is keen to advertise, hundreds of companies are now doing exactly this. One startup named Viable is using GPT-3 to analyze customer feedback, identifying “themes, emotions, and sentiment from surveys, help desk tickets, live chat logs, reviews, and more”; Fable Studio is using the program to create dialogue for VR experiences; and Algolia is using it to improve its web search products which it, in turn, sells on to other customers.

All this is good news for OpenAI (and Microsoft, whose Azure cloud computing platform powers OpenAI’s tech), but not everyone in startup-land is keen. Many analysts have noted the folly of building a company on technology you don’t actually own. Using GPT-3 to create a startup is ludicrously simple, but it’ll be ludicrously simple for your competitors, too. And though there are ways to differentiate your GPT startup through branding and UI, no firm stands to gain as much as from the use of the technology as OpenAI itself.

Another worry about the rise of text-generating systems relates to issues of output quality. Like many algorithms, text generators have the capacity to absorb and amplify harmful biases. They’re also often astoundingly dumb. In tests of a medical chatbot built using GPT-3, the model responded to a “suicidal” patient by encouraging them to kill themselves. These problems aren’t insurmountable, but they’re certainly worth flagging in a world where algorithms are already creating mistaken arrests, unfair school grades, and biased medical bills.

«

“Astoundingly dumb” isn’t quite the tagline that OpenAI may have been looking for. Probably hoping instead for “astonishingly prolific”. Thing is, the prolific element will continue. Will the dumb part, though?
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Hackers backdoor PHP source code after breaching internal git server • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

A hacker compromised the server used to distribute the PHP programming language and added a backdoor to source code that would have made websites vulnerable to complete takeover, members of the open source project said.

Two updates pushed to the PHP Git server over the weekend added a line that, if run by a PHP-powered website, would have allowed visitors with no authorization to execute code of their choice. The malicious commits gave the code the code-injection capability to visitors who had the word “zerodium” in an HTTP header.

The commits were made to the php-src repo under the account names of two well-known PHP developers, Rasmus Lerdorf and Nikita Popov. “We don’t yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points toward a compromise of the git.php.net server (rather than a compromise of an individual git account),” Popov wrote in a notice published on Sunday night.

In the aftermath of the compromise, Popov said that PHP maintainers have concluded that their standalone Git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk. As a result, they will discontinue the git.php.net server and make GitHub the official source for PHP repositories. Going forward, all PHP source code changes will be made directly to GitHub rather than to git.php.net.

The malicious changes came to public attention no later than Sunday night by developers including Markus Staab, Jake Birchallf, and Michael Voříšek as they scrutinized a commit made on Saturday. The update, which purported to fix a typo, was made under an account that used Lerdorf’s name. Shortly after the first discovery, Voříšek spotted the second malicious commit, which was made under Popov’s account name. It purported to revert the previous typo fix.

«

Close call. And makes one wonder how many similar hacks simply haven’t been noticed. How, after all, would you know?
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People’s expensive NFTs keep vanishing. This is why • Vice

Ben Munster:

»

Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit. 

“It’s like a casino,” he said in an interview. “If it goes up 100 times you resell it, if it doesn’t, well, you don’t tell anyone.”

He never got the chance to find out. A week later, he opened up his digital “wallet,” where the artwork would supposedly be available, and was faced with an ominous banner reading, “This page has gone off grid. We’ve got a 404 error and explored deep and wide, but we can’t find the page you’re looking for.” 

The artwork, which he expected to be on the page, had disappeared entirely. “There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” he said. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.”

«

The internet is for porn, but also for scams. But this is different again: if you thought that an NFT was like a signed copy of a picture, this is what happens if you still have the signature but the picture’s gone.
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The mysterious user editing a global open-source map in China’s favour • Rest of World

Vittoria Elliott and Nilesh Christopher:

»

The user had also made the changes [to OpenStreetMap, about a new Chinese village near Bhutan] under the name NM$L, Chinese slang for the insult “Your mom is dead,” and linked to a Chinese rap music label that shares the same name. An accompanying bio hinted at their motives: “Safeguarding national sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity is the common obligation of all Chinese people, including compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan,” it read. 

“Most people on OpenStreetMap don’t even have anything in their profile,” said Doiron. “It’s not like a social media site.”

As he looked deeper, [Nick] Doiron discovered that NM$L had made several other edits, many of them along China’s border and in contested territories. The account had added changes to the Spratly Islands, an archipelago that an international tribunal ruled in 2016 was not part of China’s possible territorial claims, though it has continued to develop in the area. The account also drew along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) that separates Indian and Chinese territory in the disputed Himalayan border region, which the two countries fought a war over in 1962.

What, Doiron wondered, is going on here? 

Anyone can contribute to OSM, which makes the site democratic and open, but also leaves it vulnerable to the politics and perspectives of its individual contributors. This wasn’t the first time Doiron had heard of a user making edits in a certain country’s favor. “I know there are pro-India accounts that have added things like military checkpoints from the India perspective,” he said.

«

Pretty clear, isn’t it.
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Gallup: US church membership dips below 50% for first time • Axios

Fadel Allassan:

»

47% of Americans said they belong to a church, synagogue or mosque in 2020, down from 50% in 2018, according to a Gallup poll out Monday.

«

Them: it’s fallen below 50%! First time since measurement began in 1937!

Me: church membership was ABOVE FIFTY%?! (In the UK, religious affiliation of any sort – not even church membership – has been below 50% since 2009, and as of 2018 was 52%.)

Obvious question is how this will affect religious impact on American politics.
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Apple releases emergency update for iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watch • ZDNet

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes:

»

The patches are iOS 14.4.2, iPadOS 14.4.2, and watchOS 7.3.3, respectively. 

The vulnerability, discovered by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, affects Apple’s WebKit browser engine, and what makes this an urgent update is the fact that Apple claims the vulnerability is being actively exploited.

Details from Apple are limited, but such vulnerabilities could be used to carry out malicious actions such as directing users to phishing sites. 

Underlining the seriousness of this vulnerability is the fact that Apple has pushed out iOS 12.5.2 for older devices: iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, and iPod touch (6th generation).

The bottom line: This patch is important. Install it now.

«

The last time this happened (August 2016), it was an exploit owned by an Israeli hacking/security company which had sold its use to United Arab Emirates, which was using it to spy on dissidents abroad; the use was discovered by a Canadian university.
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The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra’s camera bump is no moon; it’s a space station • The Verge

No comment on the device; I just like the headline. (On the story when you read it. The page headline, which is what Google sees, is much more boring: “The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra camera bump is huge — for a reason”. Bah.)
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Fear me not! I got my Covid vaccine. Now what? • Econlib

Bryan Caplan:

»

I’m now fully vaccinated.  How should I change my behavior?  How should anyone?

One popular answer is: not at all. Why not?  The top reason I’ve heard is: because even those of us who have been vaccinated can’t be absolutely sure we won’t be infected – or spread infection to others.  Some use the same reasoning to argue that people who have recovered from COVID shouldn’t change their behavior either. As immunologist Alexander Sette puts it:

»

Not taking any precautions—including wearing a face mask, practicing social distancing, or getting vaccinated—after an initial coronavirus infection is comparable to “driving a car where you’re 90% sure the car has brakes.”

«

However, both common sense and economic reasoning say virtually the opposite. If a risk falls by 90% – and there are large gains to accepting the risk – you should not only accept more of the risk; you should probably accept much more risk.

This is obviously what self-interest recommends. And when your risk-taking benefits others, this is what humanitarianism recommends as well. Remember: your social distancing doesn’t just harm your quality of life. Your social distancing also harms the quality of life of everyone who loses the pleasure of your company and the profit of your patronage. (Caveat: since vaccines take two weeks or so to kick in, neither self-interest nor humanitarianism recommend drastically changing your behavior the instant you get vaccinated).

What about the “90% sure the car has brakes” analogy?  It posits a lopsided scenario where you have a 10% chance of killing or seriously injuring others for a trivial total benefit. You shouldn’t die with 100% probability to see a movie; neither should you die with a 10% probability to see a movie. Anyone who has ever driven to a movie, however, has accepted a .00001% chance of dying en route. And accepting such a risk to see a movie is both prudent and considerate.

«

This completely misunderstands the problem. You aren’t going to die in the car without brakes. The person at the pedestrian crossing in front of you is. You aren’t going to die of Covid; the 80-year-old infected by the person you infect is. And that’s before we get to variant strains arising in immunocompromised people infected by overconfident vaccinated people.
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SolarWinds hack got emails of top DHS officials – sources • Associated Press

Alan Suderman:

»

Suspected Russian hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to the Trump administration’s head of the Department of Homeland Security and members of the department’s cybersecurity staff whose jobs included hunting threats from foreign countries, The Associated Press has learned.

The intelligence value of the hacking of then-acting Secretary Chad Wolf and his staff is not publicly known, but the symbolism is stark. Their accounts were accessed as part of what’s known as the SolarWinds intrusion, and it throws into question how the U.S. government can protect individuals, companies and institutions across the country if it can’t protect itself.

The short answer for many security experts and federal officials is that it can’t — at least not without some significant changes.

“The SolarWinds hack was a victory for our foreign adversaries, and a failure for DHS,” said Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, top Republican on the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “We are talking about DHS’s crown jewels.”

The Biden administration has tried to keep a tight lid on the scope of the SolarWinds attack as it weighs retaliatory measures against Russia. But an inquiry by the AP found new details about the breach at DHS and other agencies, including the Energy Department, where hackers accessed top officials’ schedules.

The AP interviewed more than a dozen current and former US government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the confidential nature of the ongoing investigation into the hack.

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In Suez Canal, stuck ship is a warning about excessive globalization • The New York Times

Peter Goodman:

»

The fact that one mishap could sow fresh chaos from Los Angeles to Rotterdam to Shanghai underscored the extent to which modern commerce has come to revolve around truly global supply chains.

In recent decades, management experts and consulting firms have championed so-called just-in-time manufacturing to limit costs and boost profits. Rather than waste money stockpiling extra goods in warehouses, companies can depend on the magic of the internet and the global shipping industry to summon what they need as they need it.

The embrace of this idea has delivered no less than a revolution to major industries — automotive and medical device manufacturing, retailing, pharmaceuticals and more. It has also yielded a bonanza for corporate executives and other shareholders: Money not spent filling warehouses with unneeded auto parts is, at least in part, money that can be given to shareholders in the form of dividends.

Yet, as in everything in life, overdoing a good thing can bring danger.

An excessive reliance on just-in-time manufacturing helps explain how medical staff from Indiana to Italy found themselves attending to Covid-19 patients during the first wave of the pandemic without adequate protective gear like masks and gowns.

Health care systems — many under the control of profit-making companies answerable to shareholders — assumed that they could depend on the web and the global shipping industry to deliver what they needed in real time. That proved a deadly miscalculation.

The same dependence explains how Amazon failed to provide adequate stocks of masks and gloves to its warehouse workers in the United States in the first months of the pandemic.

«

I don’t agree. What’s needed isn’t less globalisation, but more resilience: that you expect things will go wrong and have plans for when, predictably, they do.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s a global toilet paper shortage (and too many wipes). Can add-on bidets solve both problems? CC-licensed photo by Melissa Bube 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 12 links for you. Immune (to your herbicidal batterings). I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Give pause before you raise a glass to the prospect of a vaccine passport • The Guardian

Stephanie Hare:

»

the Conservatives have announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023 for all UK-wide and English elections. There’s no obvious need for it: there was only one conviction for “personation” fraud in the UK in 2019.

Then, again, there would be no need to make photo ID mandatory at elections if people could simply use their “vaccine passport” – because, once we’ve built a system that links our identity to our health data and made this a condition of re-entering pubs, cinemas or concerts, or even our workplace, we could link it to other data too, public or private.

This could be used by more than just pub landlords or election officials. The data on our vaccine passports could be used by the police, just as Singapore’s authorities admitted in January to using contact-tracing data.

All this – effectively, as I say, a stealth national ID card without the necessary debate – when we don’t even know if vaccine passports would help to solve our biggest problem: stopping the spread of the virus. We don’t know how long immunity lasts. We don’t know to what extent vaccines reduce transmission, or by how much, or whether this varies depending on which vaccine we’ve had.

«

She is, in case it’s not obvious, very much against the whole idea.
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I was a cable guy. I saw the worst of America • HuffPost

Lauren Hough:

»

I can’t tell you about a specific day as a cable tech. I can’t tell you my first customer was a cat hoarder. I can tell you the details, sure. That I smeared Vicks on my lip to try to cover the stench of rugs and walls and upholstery soaked in cat piss. That I wore booties, not to protect the carpets from the mud on my boots but to keep the cat piss off my soles. I can tell you the problem with her cable service was that her cats chewed through the wiring. That I had to move a mummified cat behind the television to replace the jumper. That ammonia seeped into the polyester fibers of my itchy blue uniform, clung to the sweat in my hair. That the smell stuck to me through the next job.

But what was the next job? This is the stuff I can’t remember — how a particular day unfolded. Maybe the next job was the Great Falls, Virginia, housewife who answered the door in some black skimpy thing I never really saw because I work very hard at eye contact when faced with out-of-context nudity. She was expecting a man. I’m a 6-foot lesbian. If I showed up at your door in a uniform with my hair cut in what’s known to barbers as the International Lesbian Option No. 2, you might mistake me for a man. Everyone does. She was rare in that she realized I’m a woman. We laughed about it. She found a robe while I replaced her cable box. She asked if I needed to use a bathroom, and I loved her.

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I referred to this on Friday, with the Amazon worker stuff. But I don’t seem to have ever linked to it, which is an amazing oversight. Perhaps because it came out on 30 December 2018.

Give yourself a drink and some time. It’s amazing. Includes former US VP Dick Cheney. What she says to him is marvellous.
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Toilet paper shortage could return due to shipping container crisis • Bloomberg

Fabiana Batista:

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The world really doesn’t need more toilet paper problems. But unfortunately the biggest producer of wood pulp — the raw material for products including bath tissue — is warning that the global crunch in shipping containers could start creating supply snags.

Suzano SA primarily ships its pulp in cargo vessels known as break bulk. With demand surging for ships that carry ribbed steel containers, the squeeze is starting to spill over to break bulk and threatens to delay the company’s shipments, Chief executive officer Walter Schalka said in an interview.

Of course that’s happening at a time when demand for residential toilet paper has gone way up and consumers have taken to stockpiling and panic buying. Schalka is concerned that the shipping problems are going to snowball and only get worse from here. Significant disruptions to the pulp trade could eventually impact supplies of toilet paper if producers don’t have ample inventories.

Sao Paulo-based Suzano is already concerned about the risk of exporting less in March than the company had expected, and being forced to roll over some shipments into April, Schalka said. With competition increasing for cargo vessels, break-bulk ships are berthing at the company’s terminals less often than usual.

“All the South American players which export through break bulk have faced this risk,” he said.

Brazil is the world’s top supplier of pulp, and Suzano accounts for about a third of global supplies of hardwood pulp, the type used to produce toilet papers.

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So this is part one of the problem…
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Pandemic wipes create sewer-clogging fatbergs • Bloomberg

Gerald Porter:

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Even before the pandemic, Americans were already flushing far too many wipes into the sewer system. After a year of staying at home, the pipe-clogging problem has gotten worse.

Just ask Larry Hare, who says he immediately observed the change from his vantage point as the manager at a wastewater reclamation facility in Des Moines, Iowa.  

Sewer backups are up 50%, and he attributes this to the flushing of wipes, which don’t break down in water like toilet paper. “We’ve always had the problem, but it just hasn’t been as big a problem as it is currently,” Hare said.

With consumers cleaning everything from counters to doorknobs in hopes of thwarting the coronavirus, sanitary wipes are more popular than ever. In the 12 months through late January, their sales surged 75%, according to data from Nielsen. But the blockages they create when flushed – dubbed fatbergs – have become a costly headache. The Des Moines Metropolitan Wastewater Reclamation Authority has spent more than $100,000 over the past year and deployed specialized block-clearing trucks about 30 times, according to Hare. Similar problems are plaguing cities and towns across the US, and they’re being forced to spend more and more on fixing the problem. 

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…and another…
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Bidet makers see their moment and scramble to make a splash • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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In the midst of a global pandemic, relatively inexpensive add-on bidets—widespread in many parts of the world but never popular in the US—are experiencing a hyperaccelerated transition through the life cycle of a new direct-to-consumer fad. Suddenly these bidet companies are approaching their “Casper Moment,” when a fad becomes a new consumer-goods category, epitomized by a handful of companies. This draws the attention of competitors as well as consumers—and requires tough choices about how best to take advantage of demand that may prove fleeting.

“We’re having the cultural moment that we spent the past five years preparing for and we’re not going to blow it,” says Mr. Ojalvo, who previously spent nearly a decade at Amazon’s Audible unit.

Launched in relative obscurity, bidet specialists including Tushy and Omigo spent investor cash on customer acquisition through targeted advertising on Instagram, Facebook, Google and Amazon. It’s the classic direct-to-consumer playbook, popularized by Casper, Allbirds and Dollar Shave Club: simple product, sophisticated marketing.

…Spikes in sales of bidets could have long-term implications for the entire toilet-paper industry, says Svetlana Uduslivaia, head of home and tech research at Euromonitor. Research suggests that households that adopt them reduce their toilet-paper consumption by up to 75%, she adds. In Japan, 80% of households with two or more people have bidets, but it took decades for the country to reach that level of adoption.

Market penetration of bidets in the US is in the single digits. Historically, that may be because Americans associated them with bordellos, sexuality and other matters that seemed vaguely scandalous and French. But demand began spiking in early March. On March 8, Chicago-based BioBidet, which was incorporated in 2008, got an unprecedented 4,000 orders for its entry-level SlimEdge bidet attachment on Amazon alone. Almost immediately, BioBidet ordered more than 50,000 more bidets from its suppliers in East Asia, says senior marketing director James Amburgey.

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Problem, solved!
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Fleeceware apps on mobile app stores • Avast

Jakub Vávra:

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Researchers at Avast have discovered a total of 204 fleeceware applications [apps with excessive subscription fees] with over a billion downloads and over $400 million in revenue on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The purpose of these applications is to draw users into a free trial to “test” the app, after which they overcharge them through subscriptions which sometimes run as high as $3,432 per year. These applications generally have no unique functionality and are merely conduits for fleeceware scams. Avast has reported the fleeceware applications to both Apple and Google for review.

The fleeceware applications discovered consist predominantly of musical instrument apps, palm readers, image editors, camera filters, fortune tellers, QR code and PDF readers, and ‘slime simulators’. While the applications generally fulfil their intended purpose, it is unlikely that a user would knowingly want to pay such a significant recurring fee for these applications, especially when there are cheaper or even free alternatives on the market.

It appears that part of the fleeceware strategy is to target younger audiences through playful themes and catchy advertisements on popular social networks with promises of ‘free installation’ or ‘free to download’. By the time parents notice the weekly payments, the fleeceware may have already extracted significant amounts of money.

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This site turns unsolicited dick pics into revenge NFTs • Input

Matthew Wille:

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The rapid proliferation of NFT technology has given way to some very, erm, creative applications. Just about anyone can mint a piece of art — or an AI-created masterpiece — with a little research and some dedication. Zoe Scaman, creative strategist and founder of Bodacious, might just take the cake with her take: using NFT technology to prove a point about men who send unsolicited nudes:

“I’ve figured out a way to stop the Twitter DM bad behaviour. From now on, if you send me an unsolicited dick pic or a shitty message, I’m going to turn it into an NFT, etching it onto the blockchain with your name attached as the artist. You want it gone? You’ll have to pay me.”

Scaman, with a little help from a duo by the name of Very Serious, turned this idea into a real website. NFT the DP was born into the world on March 24, with simple instructions to help even the least tech-savvy amongst us turn dick pics into cash:

Though Scaman didn’t come up with the idea herself — she’s since clarified that the inspiration came from a post in an NFT community Facebook group — she and Very Serious have turned that inspo into an actually helpful website. Cyber-flashers beware.

«

At last a good use for them. (Meanwhile, this is my question about NFTs.)
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How a coronavirus variant tore into an English island – and the world •

Andrew Macaskill and Andrew Marshall:

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The first breakthrough came in early December, when Andrew Rambaut, a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, got a tipoff from a scientist thousands of miles away. The scientist, a Brazilian named Tulio de Oliveira, had noticed an unusual set of mutations on the virus when investigating a spike in cases in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. In doing so, De Oliveira had uncovered the so-called South African variant, which has blunted the effectiveness of some vaccines.

Based on this tip, Rambaut began combing Britain’s genome databases, and B.1.1.7 stood out for two reasons. First, it had quickly accumulated a startling number of mutations, 23 in all. Second, Rambaut noticed that eight of those mutations were on the spike protein, which helps the virus lock on to human cells. This was significant because it potentially affected how transmissible the virus is.

More proof was needed. That’s when Volz, the genetic epidemiologist, got involved, working out how fast B.1.1.7 was spreading.

He said that COG-UK’s surveillance data showed a rapid rise in samples of B.1.1.7. “The scale of that growth was faster than anything I had seen before,” Volz said.  

By Dec. 7, Volz had come up with an estimate by comparing the growth of B.1.1.7 with other variants that the new variant was 70% more transmissible. Even so, Volz was confused – initially – because variants sometimes show fast growth spikes, then fizzle out. But “the more we studied it, the more concerning it became,” he said.

…Tracking a variant by sequencing its entire genome is accurate but slow. But Barrett, the statistical geneticist, made a discovery that speeded up the process.

Standard, gene-based Covid tests don’t sequence an entire genome. They look for three genes, and come back positive if at least two are clearly detected. By December, some laboratories had noticed that an unusual number of positive tests were failing to detect one of those three targeted genes. Barrett was asked to work out why, and soon found the answer: The tests were failing to detect the gene because a variant had mutated it. And that variant was B.1.1.7.

This meant COG-UK’s scientists could now track the new variant through Covid tests with the missing gene.

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Absorbing. All from the little Isle of Sheppey off the Kent coast.
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No, bitcoin is not “the ninth-most-valuable asset in the world” • Financial Times

Jemima Kelly:

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The first problem is that bitcoin is not of course a company — nor even, we would argue, an asset — so working out its “market cap” is a non-starter. As some of you might remember, it was originally designed to be a currency that could be used to buy actual things! And although it fails to meet all the criteria that would make it a currency, it does have one thing in common with it: its price is underpinned by sheer faith. The difference being that with fiat currencies, that faith is effectively placed in the governments of the nation states who issue them, whereas for bitcoin, the faith is placed in . . . the hope that other people will keep having the faith. A faith in faith, if you will.

In the context of companies, the “market cap” can be thought of as loosely representing what someone would have to pay to buy out all the shareholders in order to own the company outright (though in practice the shares have often been over- or undervalued by the market, so shareholders are often offered a premium or a discount).

Companies, of course, have real-world assets with economic value. And there are ways to analyse them to work out whether they are over- or undervalued, such as price-to-earnings ratios, net profit margins, etc.

With bitcoin, the whole value proposition rests on the idea of the network. If you took away the coinholders there would be literally nothing there, and so bitcoin’s value would fall to nil. Trying to value it by talking about a “market cap” therefore makes no sense at all.

…[also, ] real liquidity — the actual available supply of bitcoin — is very low indeed. That’s quite obvious even without knowing the stats above from the price moves — you don’t see smooth ups and downs like you might expect in other markets where the demand is coming from real supply-and-demand dynamics rather than speculation, but sudden lurches upwards and cliff-like drops.

«

FT Alphaville, where this is published (and is free to read) suggests that bitcoin isn’t an asset, but a liability. Wonder how it will be recorded in Tesla’s accounts.
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Are electric cars really better for the environment? • WSJ

Russell Gold,Jessica Kuronen,Elbert Wang:

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For every mile driven, generating the electricity for the Tesla emits 34% of the emissions associated with making and burning the gasoline consumed in the RAV4 engine.

At 20,600 miles, the greenhouse gas emissions from building and driving the two cars are roughly the same, according to the University of Toronto analysis.

Then the Tesla pulls ahead. By the century mark, the lifetime emissions of the RAV4 are 77% more than the Model 3.

Their consumer value remains somewhat similar. The total cost of buying a RAV4, filling it with gasoline, maintaining it and then reselling it at 100,000 miles nets out to $33,500, according to Consumer Reports. For the Model 3? A bit more at $34,800.

By the time we get to 200,000 miles, the lifespan of a typical car, the emissions comparison isn’t even close. Building and operating the RAV4 has generated 78 tons of greenhouse gases. The Model 3 has generated less than half: 36 tons.

The Model 3 also comes out ahead in Consumer Reports’s total cost of ownership, at $49,800 to $51,000.

«

Hitting targets for carbon (non-)emissions effectively requires all US states to mandate EV sales by 2035. That’s going to be a tough one.
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The curious case of Florida’s pandemic response • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson:

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Yes, Florida is seeing falling COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. But so is just about everywhere else. And its overall pandemic performance is just about typical. (Some have questioned the veracity of the state’s public COVID-19 data, but I’m assuming for the purposes of this piece that its numbers are accurate.) Florida ranks 27th in deaths per capita, with higher proportional fatalities than Washington, D.C., California, and 22 other states. That’s not a resounding “vindication,” even if Florida’s economic performance blew everybody else’s out of the water.

As far as I can tell, though, it didn’t. At 4.8%, its unemployment rate is 18th in the country, and not meaningfully different from that of the median states, South Carolina and Virginia, at 5.3%. Real-time data tracking state spending and employment show that Florida is doing, again, no better than average. Compared with January 2020, its consumer spending is down 1%, which is right in line with the national average. Its small-business revenue is down about 30%—again, almost exactly the national average. These statistics may be missing something. But the national narrative of an exceptionally white-hot Florida economy doesn’t match the statistical record of its performance.

Political tug-of-wars over Governor DeSantis’s record and photos of swimsuit parties are currently guiding the debate over coronavirus policies. But guided by statistics, I would have identified a different pandemic hero. Vermont has the second-lowest COVID-19 death rate in the country (just behind Hawaii) and the third-lowest unemployment rate (after South Dakota and Utah). To the extent that winning a pandemic is possible, Vermont really is winning the pandemic.

«

One of the biggest problems with reporting on the pandemic is simply getting what seem to be correct numbers. Don’t forget that Florida fired its Covid data curator, who then launched her own dashboard.
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Ever Given Ever Ywhere • Glitch

Garrett Dash Nelson:

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Why should the Suez Canal have all the fun? From the comfort of home you can get the Ever Given stuck wherever you want it. Drag and zoom the map to move this big old boat somewhere else. Click the rotate button to get it wedged perfectly.

Hit the “to scale” button to make it approximately the right size. Or you can make it whatever size you feel like: get it stuck in a swimming pool or across the entire Atlantic Ocean.

«

It’s the Boaty McCanalFace of our year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Zodiac killer of the 1960s, still unidentified, left cryptic ciphers. Now they’ve been cracked. CC-licensed photo by tommy jonq 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, chief impact officer. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon denies workers pee in bottles. Here are the pee bottles • Vice

Lauren Kaori Gurley:

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Amazon’s PR team is beefing with a Wisconsin congressman about the company’s labor conditions, among them whether its workers pee in bottles. 

On Wednesday evening, Wisconsin representative Mark Pocan called out the tech behemoth for its well-documented labor abuses in a tweet: “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles.” 

In response, @AmazonNews, the company’s official news account countered, “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.” 

But the fact that Amazon delivery drivers pee in bottles and coffee cups in their vans is not invented. It has been well-documented, and is a huge talking point among many delivery drivers. It is one of the most universal concerns voiced by the many Amazon delivery drivers around the country that Motherboard has interviewed. Delivery workers, who drive Amazon emblazoned vans, often deliver up to 300 packages a day on a 10 hour shift. If they take too long, they can be written up and fired. So spending time locating and using a bathroom is not always an option. 

In fact, here’s a photo of an Amazon delivery driver’s pee bottles. Motherboard confirmed the driver’s position and employment.

“We’re pressured to get these routes done before night time and having to find a restroom would mean driving an extra 10 minutes off path to find one,” an Amazon delivery driver told Motherboard. “Ten to fifteen minutes to find a bathroom can add up, meaning 20 to 30 minutes there and back all together.” 

“Obviously we drink a lot of water throughout the day so this is happening a lot through the drive,” they continued.

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This reminds me of the story about Lauren Hough, who had a job installing cable and fixing people’s routers. She measured customers by whether they offered her the use of the toilet.
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The solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-character cipher • Wolfram Blog

Sam Blake:

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The Zodiac Killer (an unidentified American serial killer active during the 1960s and 70s) sent numerous taunting letters to the press in the San Francisco area with regard to a local murder spree. In these letters, the killer took responsibility for the crimes and threatened to commit further murders. He also included three ciphers, each containing one-third of a 408-character cryptogram. The killer claimed that this cryptogram would reveal his identity when deciphered. The killer sent the fourth and final cipher (discussed in this blog post) to the San Francisco Chronicle after the 408-character cryptogram, deciphered in 1969, did not reveal the killer’s identity.

In 2020, Melbourne, Australia, had a 112-day lockdown of the entire city to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The wearing of masks was mandatory and we were limited to one hour a day of outside activity. Otherwise, we were stuck in our homes. This gave me lots of time to look into interesting problems I’d been putting off for years.

I was inspired by a YouTube video by David Oranchak, which looked at the Zodiac Killer’s 340-character cipher (Z340), which is pictured below. This cipher is considered one of the holy grails of cryptography, as at the time the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution were truly a moonshot.

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They really did go to the moon. Much easier to create a cipher than to break it. (The answer isn’t Ted Cruz, disappointingly.)
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Musk: Tesla accepts bitcoin as payment, won’t convert it “to fiat currency” • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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An all-caps warning from Tesla told buyers to be careful of mistakes that could result in lost cryptocurrency. “We will provide to you a digital wallet address (‘Bitcoin Address’) in both alphanumeric and QR code form. This is the payment address location to which you will need to send Bitcoin from your digital wallet… IF YOU INPUT THE BITCOIN ADDRESS INCORRECTLY, YOUR BITCOIN MAY BE IRRETRIEVABLY LOST OR DESTROYED,” Tesla said.

On any refunds of purchases made with bitcoin, Tesla will decide whether to give the customer dollars or bitcoin. This could result in a loss of value for customers because the price of bitcoin changes rapidly.

“If you are entitled to a refund of your payment or to a buyback, we reserve the right to refund to you either the exact Bitcoin Price that you provided to us at the time of purchase or an amount of U.S. Dollars that is equivalent to the U.S. Dollar price of the product that you purchased, at our sole and absolute discretion, taking into consideration operational efficiency,” Tesla said.

«

So, note all the elements of this. First, you’re using a payment method that can screw up irretrievably, and which might be harder to get right than a normal bank transfer.

Second, heads you lose, tails Musk wins: you pay in bitcoin, but if its value goes up then you get a refund for less. If its value goes down, you get that lower value.

All this independent of the environmental waste of hawking bitcoin. But Musk is more interested in memes than the environment, it seems.
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Facebook has been autogenerating pages for white supremacists • Ars Technica

Tim De Chant:

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before Congress today, and he may have a few more uncomfortable questions to answer. Among them, why is Facebook autogenerating pages for white supremacist groups?

Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project found that Facebook created dozens of pages for groups like the “Universal Aryan Brotherhood Movement” when a user did something as simple as listing it as their employer. Some of the autogenerated pages garnered thousands of likes by the time they were discovered by researchers. TTP also discovered four Facebook groups that had been created by users. The researchers shared their findings with Facebook, which removed most of the pages. Yet, two of the autogenerated pages and all four Facebook groups remained active when the group published its findings.

Facebook reportedly banned “white nationalist” content following the 2019 mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque, expanding on an earlier ban of white supremacist content. 

It wasn’t hard for the researchers to find offending pages and groups. They simply searched Facebook for the names of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups identified by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

«

Facebook has been doing this for ages – in my forthcoming book, I point to examples where it was ever so helpfully doing this for Isis and Al-Shabab. What’s more interesting is precisely why this happens, and keeps happening. Yes, I do cover that.

Zuckerberg also told Congress that lies aren’t allowed in ads. Not true.
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Broad Institute launches $300m initiative to fight diseases with artificial intelligence • The Boston Globe

Andy Rosen:

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The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is launching a new, $300 million initiative that applies advanced computer science to some of the hardest problems in medicine — an endeavor it said could uncover new ways to fight cancer, infectious disease, and other illnesses.

The Cambridge research center early Thursday announced the creation of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center, named for the former Google chief executive and his wife, who are major funders of the effort.

The money comes as biological and medical researchers are unlocking information about the human body at a scale that could take lifetimes to analyze and fully understand without the help of sophisticated artificial intelligence software. The institute hopes that by focusing its resources and expertise on developing and improving these programs, it will be able to spot patterns and unlock some of the basic mysteries of the human body.

In an interview, Eric Schmidt said he views the contribution as key to continuing the work of “mapping the language of life,” a hugely complicated proposition that is only conceivable because of the rapidly developing capacity of computer programs to help researchers find patterns in massive sets of data.

…He and Wendy Schmidt both said they believe most people would be astonished by the scope of things that science still cannot explain, such as the tangled web of interactions between the cells in our bodies.

“Life is full of patterns,” said Wendy Schmidt. She said advances in computing can help tease those out in ways that individual scientists’ observations cannot. “Then you get to the frontiers of whole new ways of looking at disease, and aging, and all of the things that plague humans.”

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Wasn’t really aware of Wendy Schmidt before. She and Eric S met because she edited his doctoral thesis at the University of California. (She was doing journalism.)
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The mess at Medium • The Verge

Casey Newton spoke to current and former employees at the Ev Williams-funded project:

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Like most such efforts, Medium’s renewed push into original journalism in 2018 was greeted with optimism by the reporters and editors who were hired to build the project out. One editor recounted to me the joy at being told they could pay freelancers $1 a word — more than they had been able to pay at previous jobs.

The company launched publications including OneZero, for tech; Elemental, for health; and Zora, for Black and brown women. Over the next two years, much of its fresh, insightful journalism would be acclaimed by an industry beleaguered by layoffs. At OneZero, Matt Stroud revealed that the CEO of a tech company backed by SoftBank had once been a neo-Nazi, leading to the CEO’s departure from the company; “The Zora Canon,” a list of the best books written by African American women, earned coverage everywhere from NPR to the New York Public Library.

The push into original reporting was rewarded with strong growth in paid subscriptions, current and former staffers said. But journalism was rarely at the center of the company’s marketing efforts. Employees expressed frustration that the company did so little to promote their work, hampering efforts to grow their publications’ brands — particularly during the crucial early months in which readers were forming impressions of them. Publications often had only skeletal branding or visual design; some “launched” before their editors-in-chief had even been hired. (On the other hand, I’m told, Medium’s public relations team exclusively promoted owned and operated publications, as did its social media accounts.)

With millions of dollars sunk into the effort, Medium’s push into journalism represented a significant investment. But individual publications often got little attention — and what resources they did get began shrinking within months. It was too much, and too little, all at once. “We were set up to fail,” a former employee told me.

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About 700k paid subscribers, generates about $35m in revenue annually, yet has burnt through more than $130m since 2016 with 75 editorial employees. It’s a mystery how. Hard to see things improving from here.
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How much of your stuff belongs to big tech? • The New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert:

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[Michael] Heller and [James] Salzman open their new book, “Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives” (Doubleday), with the brouhaha that became known as “reclinegate.” In January, 2020, on the day that the Trump Administration declared covid-19 a “public health emergency,” a woman named Wendi Williams travelled from New Orleans to Charlotte on American Airlines. She was sitting in the next-to-last row, and some minutes into the flight she pressed the metal button on her armrest and leaned back. The man behind her responded by pounding on her seat. Williams filmed him with her phone and tweeted the video, which went viral. Everybody, it seemed, had an opinion on the matter.

“The proper thing to do is, if you’re going to recline into somebody, you ask if it’s O.K. first,” Ed Bastian, the head of Delta Air Lines, said.

“The only time it’s ever O.K. to punch someone’s seat is if the seat punches you first,” Ellen DeGeneres declared.

According to Heller and Salzman, neither party was exactly right or exactly wrong. When Williams bought her ticket, she’d been led to believe that she was buying access to her seat and to the triangle of space behind it. The man in the last row believed that the triangle properly belonged to him. The airline had left the “rules of ownership” vague so that it could, in effect, sell the same wedge of space twice. The result was an aerial imbroglio.

In “Mine!,” Heller and Salzman examine a wide array of ways that people lay claim to things, both actual (as in treasure) and more abstract (as in ideas). Since ownership is constructed, it’s always up for grabs. Consider perhaps the most basic argument for possession: it’s mine because it’s me. Heller and Salzman recount the story of Levy Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn man who worked to match desperately ill patients with kidney donors. Had the donors given away their organs, Rosenbaum would probably have been considered a hero. As it was, the donors were paid. Under U.S. law, a person is forbidden to sell a kidney, even if it’s her own, and Rosenbaum was convicted of organ trafficking. At his sentencing hearing, in Trenton, several people said that he had saved their lives. Nevertheless, he ended up spending two and a half years in prison.

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Since we’ve had NFTs, and the question of “ownership”, this seemed apposite about ownership rights of physical spaces and virtual objects.
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Dr. Zeynep Tufekci to join Columbia Journalism School’s Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security • Columbia Journalism School

»

Zeynep Tufekci, a leading scholar and writer on the complex relationship between technology and society, will be joining Columbia Journalism School’s faculty as a visiting professor in the fall of 2021 to shape the school’s new Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security. 

Tufekci is currently an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill at the School of Information and Library Science and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, WIRED and Scientific American, among other publications. Professor Tufekci’s book “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest” (Yale University Press, 2017) examined the competing innovations and weaknesses of digital tools in mass social movements.

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What would be really useful – if it’s what is happening – would be for Tufekci to teach people how she thinks. Because she is surely one of the smartest people around, and everyone could benefit from there being more people who can think like her.
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It ‘might take weeks’ to free ship stuck in Suez Canal • NPR

Scott Neuman:

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Eight large tugboats were continuing a struggle to free a giant container ship lodged crossways in the Suez Canal after the vessel ran aground earlier this week, bringing transit through one of the world’s busiest waterways to a halt.

The Suez Canal Authority said in a statement Thursday that it had officially suspended traffic while efforts to dislodge the 1,300-foot Ever Given continued. The salvage operator working to free the ship said it could be weeks before it is refloated — raising the possibility of major new disruptions to global commerce just as supply chains have begun to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Ever Given — one of the largest container vessels in operation and nearly twice as long as the canal is wide — ran aground on Tuesday amid high winds, a dust storm and poor visibility for navigation. It was heading north en route from China to the Netherlands through the canal that links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

The tugs have been concentrating efforts around twice-daily high tides in the canal when they have the best chance of nudging the vessel into deeper water, shipping experts said.

But Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company Boskalis, which is trying to free the ship, compared it to “an enormous beached whale” and said “it might take weeks” to get the vessel off, possibly necessitating “a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tugboats and dredging of sand.”

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So that’s going to be 10% of world trade stuff for a while. They need a shipping midwife.

…I’ll get me coat.
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Do you have a news blindspot? Analyze the news diet of any account on Twitter • Blindspotter

Lots of people playing with this on Twitter. However…

»

Limitations of the tool

Our tool cannot decipher if an interaction with news content is positive or negative.

The results of the tool may be less meaningful for accounts largely run by assistants/staffers.

Our tool only records interactions with news sources that have a bias rating, so smaller local publications may not be included as a “news interaction”

We source our bias ratings from allsides, mediabiasfactcheck and adfontesmedia. You can read more about the methodology behind our bias ratings here.

«

It’s all very dependent on what you classify as “left” and “right” and “centrist”. I get the feeling that the New York Times is classed as “left” and that it’s all very US-centric. Rather different from the view one might get this side of the Atlantic. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Straw hats look innocuous enough – yet in the 1920s, triggered a riot. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer 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. You’ve got random direct messages! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Intel’s revival plan is a bet that chip demand will keep booming after Covid-19 • WSJ

Robert Wall:

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Behind Intel Corp.’s INTC -2.27% multibillion-dollar revival plan is a growing view among tech executives that booming demand for computer chips will continue beyond the pandemic.

Intel on Tuesday committed to a record $19bn to $20bn in capital expenditures this year, or about 45% above the company’s average annual capital expenditures over the past five years.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s leading contract chip maker, in January pledged to spend up to $28bn on plant investments this year, a record for that company and a 47% annual increase.

“Everything is becoming more digital and we are saying Intel is stepping into that gap aggressively to help provide the capacity that’s needed,” Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said Tuesday as he rolled out his turnaround plan for the company. The embrace of more digital tools fueling that demand, he said, was only accelerated by the pandemic.

Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella, joining his Intel counterpart by video at the chipmaker’s strategy rollout, said that “we’re entering a complete new era as computing becomes embedded in our world.”

Mr. Nadella expects spending on technology, currently at about 5% of gross domestic product, will accelerate. “It’s going to double in the next 10 years to 10%,” he said last month.

Even before Intel’s latest investment plan the semiconductor industry was on pace for record capital spending, market research firm IC Insights said. The industry globally was expected to plow a record $129.4bn into things such as new plants and equipment, up around 14% from a year ago.

«

Intel’s advantage is that it’s the only American maker of CPUs out there, and geopolitically it’s important that TSMC isn’t the only big supplier. (I wonder constantly what Apple’s strategic plan is for the Chinese government invading Taiwan.)

The seriousness of Intel’s aim here makes its Justin Long adverts trying to poke fun at Apple’s CPU work seem even more strange, though. As though they didn’t know what Gelsinger was working on.

Ben Thompson was hugely impressed by Gelsinger’s presentation and intent. (Personally, I felt he lacked gravitas: he sounded like a motel manager hoping I’d have a good weekend stay. Steve Jobs really could do that we’re-in-deep-crap stuff much better.)
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Slack to fix error in new direct messaging feature over harassment concerns • Yahoo Finance

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Workplace messaging app Slack Technologies Inc said it was working to fix an error in the direct-messaging feature it introduced earlier on Wednesday, which could have lead to online harassment.

The feature enabled users to send direct messages to anyone inside or outside their company through Slack Connect. Users could send an invite to any partner and start messaging as soon as it is accepted, the company said in a blog post.

After rolling out the feature, Slack received feedback from users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages, Jonathan Prince, vice president of communications and policy at Slack, said in a statement.

“We made a mistake in this initial roll-out,” Prince added.

The company, which is being acquired by Salesforce.com Inc, said it would be removing the ability to customize a message when a user invites someone to Slack Connect direct messages to address the issue.

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Amazing that this got through any sort of QA. People being allowed to message you randomly is annoying in LinkedIn, but on Slack?
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Zuckerberg calls for changes to tech’s Section 230 protections

Dylan Byers:

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will propose this week that Congress make revisions to federal internet regulations that would require platforms to have systems in place for identifying and removing unlawful content.

The proposal, which Zuckerberg will present during his testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday, would raise the bar for social media companies that are currently granted immunity from liability for the content that appears on their platforms. That immunity, granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, has come under fire in recent years from Republicans and Democrats.

While meant to ensure that companies are taking action against unlawful content, the changes could theoretically shore up Facebook’s power, as well as that of other internet giants like Google, by requiring smaller social media companies and startups to develop robust content moderation systems that can be costly.

“Instead of being granted immunity, platforms should be required to demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying unlawful content and removing it,” Zuckerberg will say in his opening remarks, according to written testimony released on the House Committee website Wednesday.

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Another key quote: “Definitions of an adequate system could be proportionate to platform size and set by a third-party.” Basically, make government responsible for telling Facebook (and others) what its moderation policy should be.
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Suez Canal container ship accident is a worst-case scenario for global trade

Rory Hopcraft, Kevin Jones and Kimberly Tan at the University of Plymouth:

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As researchers of maritime security, we often simulate incidents like the Ever Given grounding to understand the probable long and short-term consequences. In fact, the recent event is near identical to something we have been discussing for the last month, as it represents an almost worst-case scenario for the Suez Canal and for knock-on effects on global trade.

The Suez Canal is the gateway for the movement of goods between Europe and Asia, and it was responsible for the transit of over 19,000 ships in 2019, equating to nearly 1.25 billion tonnes of cargo. This is thought to represent around 13% of world trade so any blockage is likely to have a significant impact.

The Suez Canal Authority started expanding the strait in 2014 to raise its daily capacity from 49 vessels at present to 97 by 2023. This gives an indication of how many ships are likely to be affected by the current situation. There are reports that the incident has already halted the passage of ten crude tankers carrying 13 million barrels of oil, and that any ships rerouted will have 15 days added to their voyage.

The severity of the incident is because of the dimensions of the vessels using the canal. The Ever Given is 400 metres long, 59 metres at its widest point and 16 metres deep below the waterline. This makes it one of the largest container ships in the world, capable of carrying over 18,000 containers. Depending on the severity of the grounding, the salvage and re-floating of this type of ship is a complex operation, requiring specialist equipment and potentially a lot of time.

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It’s OK, they’ve got a JCB.
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EVER GIVEN Current position (Container Ship, IMO 9811000) • VesselFinder

Just in case you wanted to know how The Ship That Blocked The Suez Canal is doing just now. After this it’s probably going to want to change its name and move to a different town. Or at least the captain will. There’s a good visual rundown at The Guardian.

Quite how this happened (“strong winds” are blamed) is going to make one hell of a Cautionary Tale for Tim Harford’s.. next? podcast series.
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A somewhat sane take on NFTs and crypto-art, from a practicing artist, who thinks, on balance (ultimately) that it’s a good idea • Dan Catt

Dan Catt used to be a colleague at The Guardian, who worked on the coding side. He saw the possibilities of bitcoin quite early, and made some money from Flickr:

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I’ve now laid out my frame of reference; digital art is real, artists are exploited, institutions are capitalist (we’ll cover this below) and bad. This phrase, which I’ve seen on Twitter, may help…

“NFTs are a solution looking for a problem”.

The problem is, how can we pay artists for digital work in a more direct fashion while exploiting them less than they currently are?

The solution is we use an NFT on a decentralised system as a token of “ownership” of an artwork that you give money to the original artist for. The artist then takes that money and buys food.

Again, all the NFT is, is a token that says “this person, owns that art”, it is not the art. It is bits inside a computer, which different people put a value on.

If you value the NFT as stupid, pointless, worthless bullshit, which you are obviously totally free to do, then that’s what it’s worth to you.

If the artist says, “to me, this NFT is worth $100”, and someone who likes the artwork goes “Okay, it’s worth $100 to me to make a transaction with the artist to transfer ownership of this token from them to me” then you can make a deal.

«

It’s a long read. And he does acknowledge that the enviromental problems are, well, problems.
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NFTs are a dangerous trap • Seth’s Blog

Seth Godin:

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THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here. The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method that’s used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That’s on purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go up, not down.

It’s an ongoing waste that creates little in ongoing value and gets less efficient and more expensive as time goes on. For most technological innovations the opposite is true.

The trap, then, is that creators can get hooked on creating these. Buyers with a sunk cost get hooked on making the prices go up, unable to walk away. And so creators and buyers are then hooked in a cycle, with all of us up paying the lifetime of costs associated with an unregulated system that consumes vast amounts of precious energy for no other purpose than to create some scarce digital tokens.

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Estonia’s free county public transport did not fulfill goals • Eltis

Claus Köllinger:

»

The National Audit Office of Estonia have been investigating the free public transport introduced in Tallinn, including the free bus and tram travel for local registered people. Analysis included studying whether economic feasibility as well as the mobility needs of people had been taken into account when deciding to cut payment by users.

Results on the county model were that free public transport has not reached its goal to reduce car journeys. Whilst public transport use numbers have increased, still more than half of all trips to work are done by car.

“What is positive is that the decline in the share of public transport users has stopped for a couple of years,” stated Auditor General Janar Holm. “Unfortunately, not a significant number of new users have been attracted to public transport despite the fact that over the recent years, the state has allocated more and more funds to cover the costs of county bus transport and has allowed people to travel by bus free of charge in most counties.”

Furthermore, the National Audit Office found that funding for public transport services is unequal between Estonian counties and that state expenditures in funding public transport has risen rapidly. “In a relatively short period of time, the costs of county public transport can be expected to triple,” Auditor General Janar Holm said.

«

You would probably expect that cutting fares to zero would mean everyone would prefer that over paying for fuel for their car. Wrong, evidently. But why, exactly? There’s a terrific Twitter thread analysing this finding, and its implications for London and American cities, by John Bull (a technology and transport journalist), which you can read as a single page.
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Straw Hat Riot • Wikipedia

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By the early 20th century, straw boaters were considered acceptable day attire in North American cities at the height of summer even for businessmen, but there was an unwritten rule that one was not supposed to wear a straw hat past September 15 (which was known as “Felt Hat Day”).

This date was arbitrary; earlier it had been September 1, but it eventually shifted to mid-month. It was socially acceptable for stockbrokers to destroy each other’s hats, due to the fact that they were “companions”, but it was not acceptable for total strangers. If any man was seen wearing a straw hat, he was, at minimum, subjecting himself to ridicule, and it was a tradition for youths to knock straw hats off of wearers’ heads and stomp on them.

This tradition became well established, and newspapers of the day would often warn people of the impending approach of the fifteenth, when men would have to switch to felt or silk hats. Hat bashing was only socially acceptable after September 15, but there were multiple occasions leading up to this date where the police had to intervene and stop teenagers.

«

This article (via Benedict Evans) feels like reading about another planet, or one of those parallel-world things from Star Trek. “It was a tradition for youths to knock straw hats off of wearers’ heads and stomp on them.” I have SO many questions, particularly about how many repetitions over how many years it would take for such a “tradition” to become embedded.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You may not know the best orientation to transport a black rhino – but we do. CC-licensed photo by Des Wass on Flickr.

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

How a personal-photo curator separates the is-this-a-rash selfies from the keepers • The New Yorker

Lauren Collins:

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Elevator operator became a job sometime in the latter half of the eighteenth century, first appearing as its own category on the U.S. Census in 1910. It is the only job since 1950, according to a recent study, to have been fully eliminated by automation. Occupations come and go, their life spans following trend and technology. Town criers, soda jerks, lamplighters, clock winders, pinsetters, and ice cutters give way to air-traffic controllers, genetic counsellors, drone operators, influencers, and social-media managers. The other day, a journalist [Collins refusing to use the word “I” for some obscure American journalism reason – CA] was scrolling through Instagram and spotted an interesting-sounding gig in another user’s bio: personal-photo organizer.

A call to Fort Greene (no operator necessary) confirmed that personal-photo organizing is, indeed, an emerging profession, and that people who spend their days swiping and saving in the name of posterity are also known as family-photo curators. “Photo managers can help organize and curate collections, digitize prints, suggest backup systems, re-house in archival storage, and help you tell your story through photo book design, videos, websites, and countless other ways,” reads the web site of the Photo Managers (formerly the Association of Personal Photo Curators), est. 2009.

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Nice work (well, maybe) if you can get it: $125/hr, and she picks about 40 clients per year. A family of four generates about 5,000 photos per year.
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Caller ID authentication may tame the scourge of spam calls • TidBITS

Glenn Fleishman:

»

This morning, my iPhone rang five times. Because I pay Hiya for reverse Caller ID lookups, each number lit up with a name I didn’t know, along with the originating city and state: three from Florida and two from Connecticut. I didn’t answer any of the calls because I didn’t recognize any of the names. When I checked later, I found they lacked a relatively new indicator that I watch out for: a tell-tale checkmark. While tiny, it’s a harbinger of better things to come, particularly with a looming deadline in June 2021 for major phone carriers and Internet telephony providers.

You may not even notice this checkmark—it’s truly very tiny—but it appears in the Recents list in the Phone app on an iPhone and in call details. On some Android phones, a verified indicator appears on the incoming call screen, and telephone carriers have asked Apple to add it there on iPhones, too. Only in the call detail do you get an explanation from Apple: “Calls with a checkmark have been verified by the carrier.”

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The protocol is called “STIR/SHAKEN” (very James Bond). US carriers seem to be implementing it because spam calls are such a blight there. No indication that UK mobile networks are looking to implement it (yet?).
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How science solved the mystery of feet washing ashore in the Pacific Northwest • National Geographic

Erika Engelhaupt:

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On August 20, 2007, a 12-year-old girl spotted a lone blue-and-white running shoe—a men’s size 12—on a beach of British Columbia’s Jedediah Island. She looked inside, and found a sock. She looked inside the sock, and found a foot.

Six days later on nearby Gabriola Island, a Vancouver couple enjoying a seaside hike came across a black-and-white Reebok. Inside it was another decomposing foot. It, too, was a men’s size 12. The two feet clearly didn’t belong to the same person; not only were the shoes themselves different, but they both contained right feet.

Police were stunned. “Two being found in such a short period of time is quite suspicious,” Garry Cox of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the Vancouver Sun. “Finding one foot is like a million to one odds, but to find two is crazy. I’ve heard of dancers with two left feet, but come on.”

The next year, five more feet appeared on nearby Canadian beaches. The discoveries ratcheted up the public’s fears, and media speculation soared. Was a serial killer on the loose? Did he have something against feet?

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This is gruesome, and utterly fascinating. Blame Charlotte Jee – she pointed to it.
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Infection with common cold might provide some protection against COVID • University of Glasgow

»

The research – published today in Journal of Infectious Diseases and led by scientists at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research (CVR) – found that human rhinovirus (the virus that causes the common cold) triggers an innate immune response that seems to block SARS-CoV-2 replication in cells of the respiratory tract.

In further studies, mathematical simulations by the research team showed that this virus-virus interaction might have a population-wide effect, and that an increasing prevalence of rhinovirus could reduce the number of new COVID-19 cases.

Human rhinoviruses cause the common cold and are the most widespread respiratory viruses found in people. Previous research has shown that interactions between rhinoviruses and other respiratory viruses can affect the type and severity of infections in individuals, and the way in which they infect and circulate around groups of people (patterns of infection).

…In the study, the researchers first infected human respiratory cells with SARS-CoV-2 in the lab, recreating the cellular environment in which infections normally occur. They then studied the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in these cells, both in the presence and absence of rhinovirus.

Professor Pablo Murcia, from the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, explains: “Our research shows that human rhinovirus triggers an innate immune response in human respiratory epithelial cells which blocks the replication of the COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2. This means that the immune response caused by mild, common cold virus infections, could provide some level of transient protection against SARS-CoV-2, potentially blocking transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and reducing the severity of COVID-19.”

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So if we’d only managed all to have colds we’d have been OK? Or, alternatively, we just need a common cold vaccine? (Thanks G for the link.)
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The Technology 202: where is YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki? • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski and Aaron Schaffer:

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YouTube videos are a critical source of online misinformation, yet they often get a pass in broader discussions about the dangers of social media. Even in Congress.  

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has never had to appear alongside other social media executives for a Capitol Hill grilling, and she will not be in attendance on Thursday when Congress questions top tech executives for the first time since the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks. 

Instead, lawmakers have invited Sundar Pichai, the CEO of YouTube’s parent companies Google and Alphabet, to testify alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. All are becoming familiar figures at the Capitol. The hearing will be Zuckerberg’s fourth appearance since July and Dorsey and Pichai’s third during the same time period. 

But YouTube critics say that by inviting Pichai, who has to answer for a broad range of different products and services at Alphabet, lawmakers are not paying enough specific attention to one of the most popular social networks in the world. 

“There have been hearings where you can’t count on one hand the number of questions about YouTube, which is ridiculous given the level of impact,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who researches online speech. 

YouTube has massive influence over Americans’ media consumption. YouTube has the highest reach of any platform among American adults, with 73% of Americans reporting they use the platform in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Facebook is the only social network that comes even close to YouTube’s reach, with 69% of Americans reporting they use it. Meanwhile, only 22% of US adults surveyed use Twitter. Additionally, 23% of Americans say they regularly use YouTube as a news source, which is eight percentage points more than Twitter. 

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Possibly the argument is that Pichai has responsibility for YouTube, so Wojicki doesn’t need to show up. But she really should. Also, the idea of regularly using YouTube as a news source strikes me as weird.
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Digital government during the coronavirus crisis • Institute for Government

Gavin Freeguard, Marcus Shepeard and Oliver Davies:

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Departments need interoperable technology to work well with each other. But at the start of the crisis there was a distinct lack of interoperability between systems used by different organisations across government. This made communicating, sharing and working with colleagues much more difficult than it needed to be. Departments were using a variety of platforms and tools which were blocked by other departments, making collaboration much more difficult. Civil servants have long complained about these problems, but they had been easy to overlook until the crisis forced so many officials to use these tools all at once.

[See the grid of inter-departmental interoperability and non-operability, drawn up by the UK government.]

This mix is a result of there being no mandated suite of tools that all civil servants should use. This is something the centre of government has deliberately avoided, since it would bring its own set of problems that the last decade of digital transformation in government has tried to solve – such as reliance on (and being tied into big contracts with) single, big suppliers. But devolving decisions to departments means little consideration has been given to how officials communicate and collaborate between departments.

During the pandemic, GDS established Project Unblock (of which there is only one mention on GOV.UK) to understand and unblock compatibility issues between departments, starting with video conferencing. Between May and July 2020 many departments ‘unblocked’ access to various video conferencing tools. By July, only a few major departments (including HMRC and the Ministry of Defence) were still blocking some software, and even these had made more tools accessible. Microsoft Teams has been unblocked across all major departments, while Google Meet has gone from being unavailable or restricted in 11 departments to four, and Skype from being blocked in five departments to two. Even where departments have mandated the use of a particular tool internally, they have also authorised the use of other platforms for teams to be able to talk to other departments.

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And you thought you had problems picking a video tool. Imagine trying to run a government when you have two departments struggling to find one they can both use. (Via Benedict Evans’s newsletter.)
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Why airlifting rhinos upside down is critical to conservation • CNN

Rebecca Cairns:

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Namibia is home to a nearly a third of Africa’s black rhinos — one of two rhino species found on the continent.

Starting in 2015, the Cornell team suspended 12 black rhinos – each weighing between 1,770 and 2,720 pounds – upside down from a crane, and placed them in a side-lying position for comparison.

The researchers measured biomarkers for respiration and ventilation, and found that the rhinos had higher blood oxygen levels when upside down.

[Robin] Radcliffe [a senior lecturer in wildlife and conservation medicine], says the upside-down position allows the spine to stretch which helps to open the airways. Additionally, the team found that when lying on their side, rhinos have a larger “dead space” — the amount of air in each breath that does not contribute oxygen to the body.

The difference between the two postures was small, but because the strong anaesthetic used on the rhino causes hypoxemia – low oxygen levels in the blood – even a minor improvement makes a difference to the rhino’s welfare.

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Just in case you need to transport a rhino in the next week or two.
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Facebook guidelines allow users to call for death of public figures • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

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Public figures are defined by Facebook to include people whose claim to fame may be simply a large social media following or infrequent coverage in local newspapers.

They are considered to be permissible targets for certain types of abuse “because we want to allow discussion, which often includes critical commentary of people who are featured in the news”, Facebook explains to its moderators.

It comes as social networks face renewed criticism over abuse on their platforms, including of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and of professional footballers, in particular black stars such as Marcus Rashford.Facebook, which also owns Instagram, has changed its policies in response to the criticism, introducing new rules to cover abuse sent through direct messages and committing to cooperate with law enforcement over hate speech.

In the detailed guidelines seen by the Guardian, running to more than 300 pages and dating from December 2020, Facebook spells out how it differentiates between protections for private and public individuals.

“For public figures, we remove attacks that are severe as well as certain attacks where the public figure is directly tagged in the post or comment. For private individuals, our protection goes further: we remove content that’s meant to degrade or shame, including, for example, claims about someone’s sexual activity,” it says.

Private individuals cannot be targeted with “calls for death” on Facebook but public figures simply cannot be “purposefully exposed” to such calls: it is legitimate, under Facebook’s harassment policies, to call for the death of a minor local celebrity so long as the user does not tag them in to the post, for example.

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This must have made some sort of sense when an increasingly exhausted group of people sat around a table and drew it up. But what the hell is a “minor local celebrity”? How local? How minor? How celebrated?
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Bitcoin is a mouth hungry for fossil fuels • Ketan Joshi

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The Venn circles of Silicon Valley tech folks, libertarians, finance bros and oil and gas bros all seem to meet centrally at whatever the hell Bitcoin is. In world where a lot of people give a shit about protecting our planet, there is a broader effort to plead, through a series of misunderstandings, broken arguments and empty promises, that the act will be cleaned up very soon.

This 2019 piece by Maximillian Fiege, who works for Signum Growth Capital, an advisor to ARK, details clearly (and with pretty good knowledge of the energy industry) why bitcoin miners are driven towards fossil fuel operations. Some bitcoin mining operations camp out where power is cheap, plentiful and far too over-supplied, such as China’s massive hydropower schemes, poorly connected to areas of high demand. Of course, they also camp out in coal-rich regions in China. If zero emissions power is used, it’s a side-effect, not an effort to engage in climate action.

Fiege doesn’t make a secret of the fact that this loophole is being erased, because in a climate constrained world, there is no room for wasted potential. The growth of transmission lines and interconnection between regions is accelerating. That means far less ‘surplus’ from renewables. If zero emissions power is “stranded”, it shouldn’t be, because there is still fossil power in the world, and in a climate emergency, it should be displacing fossil fuels, not just meeting new demand.

Despite the natural gravity of this industry leaning towards carbon intensive fuels, there is an instinct to half-heartedly greenwash the climate damage of Bitcoin. This manifests not just through promises to do better in the future, but some genuinely silly arguments that frame Bitcoin as a grid tool that helps wind and solar do their thing.

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There’s a certain element of climate denialism inherent in bitcoin, once you realise how much power it’s consuming to (as Joshi puts it) spit out random numbers in the hope that one of them wins the lottery this cycle. The knots that people tie themselves in to justify it is very similar to those used by climate denialists.
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Pedestrian traffic fatalities by state: 2020 preliminary data • US GHSA

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An analysis of data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) projects that 2,957 pedestrians were killed on U.S. roads in the first six months of 2020, closely mirroring the number from the year before despite a 16.5% decrease in VMT [vehicle miles travelled] during that time.

The report examines key trends affecting this rise in pedestrian deaths, including increased reckless driving behaviors, the need for safer road crossings and efforts to make pedestrians more visible through better lighting and other strategies, and the continued uptick in sales of sport utility vehicles (SUVs), which cause more pedestrian impacts in the event of a collision.

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Pandemic plus bigger cars plus reckless drivers means more deaths. In the US.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Apple HomePod mini has a sensor to measure ambient temperature and pressure. Why? CC-licensed photo by Jazz Guy on Flickr.

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In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click • SparkToro

Rand Fishkin:

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Here are the headline statistics from the data:

• SimilarWeb analyzed ~5.1 trillion Google searches in 2020
• These searches took place on a panel of more than 100 million mobile and desktop devices from which SimilarWeb collects clickstream data
• Of those 5.1 trillion searches, 33.59% resulted in clicks on organic search results
• 1.59% resulted in clicks on paid search results
• The remaining 64.82% completed a search without a direct, follow-up click to another web property
• Searches resulting in a click are much higher on desktop devices (50.75% organic CTR, 2.78% paid CTR)
• Zero-click searches are much higher on mobile devices (77.22%)

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There’s a lot to chew over in this. Some of the cases where there’s no click must be from Google’s factboxes – where the result is on the page already without any need to click. Mobile is bigger than desktop. And there are more paid clicks, almost certainly because on mobile now the whole of the first page of results comprises ads.

For Fishkin’s audience of website owners, though, this is mostly bad news. Zero-click searches mean people aren’t coming to them from Google. And the paid clicks? It’s the websites doing the advertising who are paying for that. Which of course in the end is you. Whereas organic search is free to them and to you.
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Why the COVID lab-leak theory in Wuhan shouldn’t be dismissed • USA Today

Alison Young is an investigative journalist in Atlanta who has done extensive work looking at laboratory accidents in the US:

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According to documents I obtained recently using the federal Freedom of Information Act, U.S. laboratories reported more than 450 accidents during 2015 through 2019 while experimenting with some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens – those subject to federal regulation because they “pose a severe threat” to health and also have the potential to be turned into bioweapons. These pathogens, which the U.S. government calls “select agents,” include anthrax, Ebola, plague, deadly strains of avian influenza and types of SARS coronaviruses.

The safety breaches reported to the U.S. Federal Select Agent Program – which is jointly run by the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture – ranged from animal bites and needle sticks to failures of safety equipment and mistakes that resulted in infectious particles becoming airborne inside labs.

In nearly all reported cases, regulators deemed the breaches serious enough to put workers at risk of becoming infected, the program’s annual reports to Congress show. As a result, more than 660 U.S. scientists and other lab workers involved in the incidents underwent medical assessment or treatment with preventative medications.

The good news is that almost none of these lab workers got sick, according to the reports, which provide only statistics and no personalized details. But a few – without realizing it – became infected, going about their lives at home and in public for months. Their exposures were identified only because their lab happened to conduct annual blood tests, checking for antibodies to research pathogens, something that federal regulators don’t require. Fortunately, the organisms they were working with were types of bacteria that, while dangerous, don’t spread easily from person to person. 

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The big gap in the “Wuhan lab leak” hypothesis is that there’s no evidence the virus we now identify as SARS-Cov-2 was ever in there. (That’s one of the giant gaps that proponents of the hypothesis never admit.) Provide that, and you’re almost there with the case. (You’d also need to show that it escaped, though that would be almost a foregone conclusion.) China, however, would never allow the sort of investigation that would enable that to be proved or disproved. (And if it’s not found, that still isn’t absolute proof.)
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I captured the Iceland volcano eruption from up close • Petapixel

Iurie Belegurschi:

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It finally happened. Every year we’ve seen it on the news: another volcano in Iceland was going to erupt. The truth is: Iceland has so many volcanoes and there is more than one overdue. But this year we could feel an eruption was getting closer.

Over the last month, we had many earthquakes — over 40,000 tremors, with two quakes as large as magnitude 5.6 — so an eruption was imminent. And a few days ago, the eruption finally happened.

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Amazing photos. That’s all there is to say.
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Apple HomePod mini has secret sensor for smart home thermostats • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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Apple Inc.’s HomePod mini speaker launched last November with new features such as a home intercom system. But one part of the device has remained secret: a sensor that measures temperature and humidity. 

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant never disclosed this component and the device currently lacks consumer-facing features that use it. The company has internally discussed using the sensor to determine a room’s temperature and humidity so internet-connected thermostats can adjust different parts of a home based on current conditions, according to people familiar with the situation. The hardware could also let the HomePod mini automatically trigger other actions, say turning a fan on or off, depending on the temperature.

If Apple eventually enables the sensor, it would bolster a smart-home strategy that has sometimes lacked focus and trailed those of rivals. Amazon.com Inc.’s latest Echo speakers have temperature sensors, while Google’s Nest sells sensors that can be placed around homes and connect to its thermostats to adjust the temperature of each room. 

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“Confirmed by iFixit, which took apart one of the speakers after an inquiry from Bloomberg News.” Gurman getting an insider tip, clearly.

And then there’s this, dumped right at the end of the piece:

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Before the discontinuation of the larger HomePod, the company had been working on an updated version for release in 2022. It has also been developing new speakers with screens and cameras, but such a launch isn’t imminent.

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“New speakers with screens and cameras”. Isn’t that.. an iPad? There is, though, a terrific rant by John Siracusa in the “RIP Homepod” chapter on the recent Accidental Tech Podcast about all the things the HomePod could have done if only Apple had given it more inputs – let’s say, optical, line-in, Bluetooth just for starters. As he points out, Apple could even have got people to buy a third box, not just a ridiculously expensive stereo pair of HomePods, if it had only done it right.
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Transmission of SARS-Cov-2 during border quarantine and air travel, New Zealand (Aotearoa) • Emerging Infectious Diseases journal

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The strategy in New Zealand (Aotearoa) to eliminate coronavirus disease requires that international arrivals undergo managed isolation and quarantine and mandatory testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Combining genomic and epidemiologic data, we investigated the origin of an acute case of coronavirus disease identified in the community after the patient had spent 14 days in managed isolation and quarantine and had 2 negative test results.

By combining genomic sequence analysis and epidemiologic investigations, we identified a multibranched chain of transmission of this virus, including on international and domestic flights, as well as a probable case of aerosol transmission without direct person-to-person contact. These findings show the power of integrating genomic and epidemiologic data to inform outbreak investigations.

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The key thing is that a transmission case in a hotel which they thought happened through people touching surfaces turned out instead to be via aerosols.

There are, as far as I know, no documented cases shown to be due solely to surface contact. Indoor aerosols, on the other hand… yet we’re still told to wash our hands, use sanitiser, and so on. (Thanks Richard for the link.)
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Qantas boss: governments ‘to insist’ on vaccines for flying • BBC News

Jonathan Josephs:

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The boss of Australian airline Qantas has told the BBC that “governments are going to insist” on vaccines for international travellers.

Coronavirus vaccines are seen as crucial to reviving an industry that saw worldwide passenger numbers fall 75.6% last year.

Chief executive Alan Joyce said many governments were talking about vaccination as “a condition of entry”.

Even if they weren’t, he thought the airline should enforce its own policy. “We have a duty of care to our passengers and to our crew, to say that everybody in that aircraft needs to be safe,” Mr Joyce said.

He believes that would justify changing the terms and conditions on which tickets are booked.

And Mr Joyce thinks passengers would be willing to accept the change. “The vast majority of our customers think this is a great idea – 90% of people that we’ve surveyed think it should be a requirement for people to be vaccinated to travel internationally.”

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The idea of “Covid passports” is going to go from “maybe” to “good idea” to “definitely” to “you’re not going anywhere without it”. Rather as yellow fever vaccination certificates used to be.
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Biden nominates Lina Khan, a vocal critic of Big Tech, to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

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President Biden on Monday nominated Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, installing a vocal critic of Big Tech into a key oversight role of the industry.

If her nomination is approved by the Senate, Ms. Khan, 32, would fill one of two empty seats earmarked for Democrats at the F.T.C.

Ms. Khan became recognized for her ideas on antitrust with a Yale Law Journal paper in 2017 called “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” that accused Amazon of abusing its monopoly power and put a critical focus on decades-old legal theories that relied heavily on price increases as the underlying measure of antitrust violations.

She served as a senior adviser to Rohit Chopra when he was F.T.C. commissioner. Most recently, she was a leading counsel member to a 16-month-long investigation of online platforms and competition by the House antitrust subcommittee. As a result, Democratic leaders on the subcommittee called for the breakup of Big Tech and legislation to strengthen enforcement of competition violations across the economy.

“As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” Ms. Khan said in an interview with The New York Times in 2018. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.”

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Khan and Tim Wu (at the National Economic Council) will be pretty formidable. “Big tech” has an interesting few years ahead.
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Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold as an NFT for an oddly specific $2,915,835.47 • The Verge

Kim Lyons:

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After it spent just over two weeks on the market, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has sold his first tweet as an NFT for the weirdly specific figure of $2,915,835.47. The winning bidder was Sina Estavi, who had held the high bid since offering $2.5 million on March 6th. He upped his bid to this number at the last moment (and if anyone can tell us what that figure represents, we’d love to hear your theories).

Dorsey put the tweet up for digital auction as an NFT — non-fungible token — a digital good that lives on the Ethereum blockchain, on March 5th. Bids were handled on a platform called Valuables by Cent that lets people make offers on tweets that are “autographed by their original creators.”

…The bids on Dorsey’s succinct first tweet “just setting up my twttr” from March 21st, 2006, quickly escalated, and Dorsey later said he would end the bidding on the tweet’s 15th anniversary. According to the time stamp on Cent, Estavi made his final, winning bid on Monday afternoon, and according to Reuters, paid using the Ether cryptocurrency in the amount of 1630.5825601 ETH. Estavi, CEO of blockchain company Bridge Oracle, told Reuters he was “thankful.”

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So, more Monopoly money payments. But Dorsey sent about 50 bitcoin, or $2.75m, to the Give Africa fund, which I hope has found a way to convert it into real folding stuff.

Meanwhile you can view the tweet for free here. Supplies are not limited.
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Major coronavirus variant found in pets for first time • AAAS

David Grimm:

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The variants of SARS-CoV-2 that keep emerging aren’t just a human problem. Two reports released this week have found the first evidence that dogs and cats can become infected by B.1.1.7, a recent variant of the pandemic coronavirus that transmits more readily between people and also appears more lethal in them. The finds mark the first time one of the several major variants of concern has been seen outside of humans.

B.1.1.7 was first identified in the United Kingdom and that’s where some of the variant-infected pets were found. The U.K. animals suffered myocarditis—an inflammation of the heart tissue that, in serious cases, can cause heart failure. But the reports offer no proof that the SARS-CoV-2 variant is responsible, nor that it’s more transmissible or dangerous in animals. “It’s an interesting hypothesis, but there’s no evidence that the virus is causing these problems,” says Scott Weese, a veterinarian at the University of Guelph’s Ontario Veterinary College who specializes in emerging infectious diseases.

…Infected pets appear to have symptoms ranging from mild to nonexistent, and infectious disease experts say companion animals are likely playing little, if any, role in spreading the coronavirus to people.

The new variants might change that equation, says Eric Leroy, a virologist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development who specializes in zoonotic diseases. In one of the new studies, he and colleagues analyzed pets admitted to the cardiology unit of the Ralph Veterinary Referral Centre in the outskirts of London. The hospital had noticed a sharp uptick in the number of dogs and cats presenting with myocarditis: From December 2020 to February, the incidence of the condition jumped from 1.4% to 12.8%.

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The blockchain is a dark forest • Something Interesting

KF:

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Trades made on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap are broadcast publicly to the entire network they are built on – anyone can see them. Eventually miners will add broadcast transactions to a block to confirm them – but miners don’t include transactions in the order they receive them, they include transactions in order from most to least profitable. It is totally possible (and even normal) for new transactions to “cut in line” in front of older transactions by offering to pay miners a higher fee.

So anyone on the Ethereum network can see any Uniswap trade, calculate how profitable it would be to front-run it [buy that amount ahead of the original buyer and sell it to them for a profit] and how much they would need to pay miners to be able to, and if there is money to be made execute the trade. In Ethereum trading circles this is sometimes called a “sandwich attack” since you enclose the original trade in between two trades of your own. An attacker can even bundle the transactions together so if they lose the front-running race the purchases just harmlessly fail instead of leaving them owning coins they never wanted.

If this sounds like free money to you, you’re not alone. There has been a boom in this kind of predatory trading, a natural consequence of the surge in popularity of decentralized exchanges themselves. But there is no such thing as risk-free yield and every predator is also prey. In this case the predator’s predator is Nathan Worsley, who built an elegant little trap to catch sandwich traders in the act:

Mr. Worsley wrote a smart contract called “Salmonella” and set up a small, completely artificial market for it on Uniswap. Salmonella looked and acted like an ordinary ERC-20 token in all ways but one: when it detected sandwich-trading it would silently confiscate 90% of the attacker’s payout while mimicking the logs of a successful attack. He then set up some tempting front-runnable transactions in the market as bait and let the sandwich traders walk into the trap. Over the course of the next few days he captured >100 ETH (~$176k at time of writing) before sandwich traders updated their strategies to detect and avoid his poison tokens.

This is one glimpse into what finance might look like in a truly decentralized world.

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Sounds delightful. Can’t wait. (Something Interesting is a Substack, of course, newsletter mostly about crypto stuff, if you want to get that.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sperm whales realised they were being hunted in the 1800s and communicated to avoid death, scientists say. CC-licensed photo by Library Company of Philadelphia 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. Email me callsh. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The New York Times is *so* done with its 77,000-member Facebook cooking group. What happens now? • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

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Why would The New York Times want to abandon its 77,000-member cooking Facebook group? The one whose demise I surely ensured by reporting, upon its launch two years ago, that it was a “happy corner of the internet”? A place where, as one Times social media editor put it at the time, “everyone’s so nice to each other, and so encouraging, it feels like one long episode of ‘The Great British Baking Show,’ 24 hours a day”?

A lot can change in two years. It is very, very hard to meaningfully moderate a big Facebook group, perhaps nearly impossible to moderate one the size of a small city. As it turns out, it’s a full-time job — likely more than one — and one the Times no longer wants to do.

“The interest in this group is about much more than recipes or The New York Times. As it continues to grow and change, it should be run by people who are an engaged and informed part of the community. And so it is time to hand this group over to you, its members,” the editors of NYT Cooking wrote in a Facebook post this week, adding that they are looking for “a group of 10 to 20 volunteers to take over as moderators for this community.

…The 2020 election and the pandemic created division and breaking points within communities (real-life and virtual) everywhere; NYT Cooking was no exception. Politics seeped in constantly, despite a group rule that there “are many places to express your political views; this is not one of them.” When posts supporting presidential candidates were deleted, people started sneaking “vote” messages into their food pictures.

Holidays added another round of conflict. For instance: Someone posts a picture of a Thanksgiving table that is clearly set for a gathering beyond immediate family, or asks for a good recipe for a “big group,” or posts a picture of themselves at a “socially distanced” gathering where nobody is masked and everybody is close together; judgment ensues. This happened repeatedly.

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Social media would be great if it weren’t for the damn users.

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Trump will use ‘his own platform’ to return to social media after Twitter ban • The Guardian

Martin Pengelly:

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Donald Trump will soon use “his own platform” to return to social media, an adviser said on Sunday, months after the former president was banned from Twitter for inciting the US Capitol riot.

Trump has chafed in relative silence at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida since losing his Twitter account and the protections and powers of office. Recently he has released short statements which many have likened to his tweets of old.

Speculation has been rife that Trump might seek to create his own TV network in an attempt to prise viewers from Fox News, which was first to call the crucial state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, to Trump’s considerable anger.

But on Sunday adviser Jason Miller said social media was the immediate target.

“The president’s been off of social media for a while,” he told Fox News Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz, “[but] his press releases, his statements have actually been getting almost more play than he ever did on Twitter before.”

Miller said he had been told by a reporter the statements were “much more elegant” and “more presidential” than Trump’s tweets, but added: “I do think that we’re going to see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months here with his own platform.

“And this is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media, it’s going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does. But it will be his own platform.”

Asked if Trump was going to create the platform himself or with a company, Miller said: “I can’t go much further than what I was able to just share, but I can say that it will be big once he starts.

“There have been a lot of high-power meetings he’s been having at Mar-a-Lago with some teams of folks who have been coming in, and … it’s not just one company that’s approached the president, there have been numerous companies.

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Standard Trump-team bollocks. It’s going to be the biggest and the best – sure, like the infrastructure project, the wall, and the health plan. The reality is that running a social media network is difficult, and costs a lot of money. Where’s Trump going to find that? Is he really going to put that money in, skinflint that he is? Will he charge for it, and will people pay?

I’ll predict that it will have security holes, obvious mistakes, be rushed, get overwhelmed, be discovered to be the host for noxious and vicious and violent content.
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Are your NFTs on the wrong blockchain? • Fortune

David Morris:

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NFT discourse has inherited one of the laziest and most misleading habitual inaccuracies of the cryptocurrency industry. These art claims, we hear all the time, “live on the blockchain.” You can trade them “on the blockchain.” The blockchain, the blockchain, the blockchain.

It’s enough to drive a person to drink (more). Because there is no such thing as “the blockchain.” There are many blockchains, and they are effectively competing for market share in a battle that will have winners and losers. So the blockchain your NFT calls home could be just as important to its value as whether it was created by Rob Gronkowski or the CryptoPunks team.

“You can’t really have that kind of value accrual unless the blockchain underlying it is secure,” according to Sam Kazemian, cofounder and President of Everipedia. The blockchain firm has branched out from its initial Wikipedia-like project to build what Kazemian calls “Adobe for NFTs.” The aim is to help companies and artists easily launch their own NFTs, and Kazemian recently helped the Associated Press get its feet wet, but Everipedia doesn’t run its own blockchain.

The health of a blockchain is fundamental to the unique functionality of the NFTs on it. Just like cryptocurrencies, the real point of NFTs is that they offer a form of digital ‘ownership’ that doesn’t rely on a central authority, and their trading can’t (in principle) be censored. If the NFT is in your digital wallet, you don’t just own it, you possess it – the kind of possession that’s 9/10ths of the law. That’s why these things have any value as a category.

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I’m still left puzzled why you’d pay anything for something that can be reproduced perfectly and infinitely. To which the added element that you might just lose the token that claims to give you ownership of one of them if the company goes bust is just sprinkles on the top.
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The Infinite Drum Machine • Experiments with Google

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Sounds are complex and vary widely. This experiment uses machine learning to organize thousands of everyday sounds. The computer wasn’t given any descriptions or tags – only the audio. Using a technique called t-SNE, the computer placed similar sounds closer together. You can use the map to explore neighborhoods of similar sounds and even make beats using the drum sequencer.

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Fun! Though I couldn’t get it to work on Safari – only Chrome.
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Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information • The Guardian

Philip Hoare:

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Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors [of the study] discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made vital changes to their behaviour. As their culture made fatal first contact with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.

“Sperm whales have a traditional way of reacting to attacks from orca,” notes Hal Whitehead, who spoke to the Guardian from his house overlooking the ocean in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he teaches at Dalhousie University. Before humans, orca were their only predators, against whom sperm whales form defensive circles, their powerful tails held outwards to keep their assailants at bay. But such techniques “just made it easier for the whalers to slaughter them”, says Whitehead.

It was a frighteningly rapid killing, and it accompanied other threats to the ironically named Pacific. From whaling and sealing stations to missionary bases, western culture was imported to an ocean that had remained largely untouched. As Herman Melville, himself a whaler in the Pacific in 1841, would write in Moby-Dick (1851): “The moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc.”

Sperm whales are highly socialised animals, able to communicate over great distances. They associate in clans defined by the dialect pattern of their sonar clicks. Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds. Sperm whales also possess the largest brain on the planet. It is not hard to imagine that they understood what was happening to them.

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Renesas warns of hit to global chip supply after factory fire • Financial Times

Kana Inagaki:

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Renesas Electronics, one of the world’s largest makers of chips for the automotive industry, has warned that a fire at one of its factories could have “a massive impact” on global semiconductor supplies and halt production for at least a month.

The timing of Friday’s fire at the advanced chip facility in Japan could not be worse for carmakers, which were already wrestling with widespread disruption to supply chains caused by the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the US cold snap that led to mass blackouts in Texas. 

“We are concerned that there will be a massive impact on chip supplies,” Hidetoshi Shibata, chief executive of Renesas, said at an online news conference on Sunday. “We will pursue every means possible to minimise the impact.” 

The fire broke out in one of the clean rooms at the company’s plant in Naka city, north of Tokyo, bringing to a halt the production of 300mm wafers and burning about 2% of the facility’s manufacturing equipment.

About two-thirds of the affected production was automotive chips, according to Shibata.

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Dominic Cummings ready to reveal all on Boris Johnson’s lockdown paralysis • The Times

Steven Swinford, Oliver Wright and Chris Smyth on Boris Johnson’s dithering over an October lockdown, when he demanded to hear “other voices” rather than those advocating lockdown to save lives:

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That Sunday, Cummings and Vallance arranged a Zoom meeting for the prime minister with prominent lockdown sceptics including Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford University and Professor Anders Tegnell, a leading epidemiologist from Sweden who masterminded his country’s policy of avoiding a lockdown.

John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a member of Sage, made the case for a circuit breaker. By the end of the meeting the prime minister’s views were unclear. “He wasn’t convinced by the anti-lockdowners but he wasn’t persuaded of the need for a circuit breaker either,” a source said.

On the Tuesday, with case numbers at more than 6,000 a day, Cummings and other advisers had one last attempt. Over the weekend data analysts in Downing Street had drawn up projections for the number of cases, hospital admissions and deaths in four to six weeks.

Cummings opened the meeting by asking the prime minister to imagine it was being held in mid to late October, with the projections a reality and Britain in the grip of a second wave. “Dom was making the case that you’re going to have to lock down at that point, so let’s lock down today and save lives and reduce the need for a harder lockdown later,” one government source said.

Johnson again resisted. “He didn’t believe that lockdowns worked, he thought that the economic damage outweighed the public health benefits. He thought things would get better,” a source said. Another source said that the data at that stage was unclear — schools had just returned and the prime minister wanted to see whether the trend would continue before locking down.

That evening he announced relatively minor restrictions, including banning more than six people from meeting and a 10pm curfew on pubs and restaurants. People were asked to work from home if they could.

It was not until the end of October, by which point case numbers had quadrupled, that Johnson eventually implemented the second lockdown. “Those five days were critical,” one Downing Street insider said. “We could have got ahead of it. Instead we let Captain Hindsight [Sir Keir Starmer] become Captain Foresight when he called for a lockdown.”

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This is the flip side – or the obvious outcome – of having a clown (see previous issue) as PM.
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Cursed Keyboard Image • jwz

Jamie Zawinski:

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Apple KeyChange Keyboard, English version. All versions of this innovative keyboard have keys resized to approximate their frequency of use in the keyboard’s language, allowing for smoother and more accurate typing.

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Hard nope from me, and from him. I can’t imagine that it would really be easier to type on this. Though it’s amusing.
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An incredible move: the Indiana Bell Telephone Building • Amusing Planet

Kaushik Patowary, continuing our occasional thread about moving entire buildings from one place to another wholesale:

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The relocation of the headquarters building of Indiana Bell Telephone Company in Indianapolis remains one of the most fascinating moves in the history of structure relocation.

The headquarters of Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T serving the US state of Indiana, was housed inside an 8-story, 11,000-ton building built in 1907. In 1929, the phone company decided they needed a larger building, but they couldn’t just demolish the old building because it was providing an essential service to the city. The building was also inconveniently located on the site where they wanted the larger structure. In the end it was decided that the old building will be moved to the back of the plot to make room for the new building.

The massive undertaking began on October 1930. Over the next four weeks, the massive steel and brick building was shifted inch by inch 16 meters south, rotated 90 degrees, and then shifted again by 30 meters west. The work was done with such precision that the building continued to operate during the entire duration of the move. All utility cables and pipes serving the building, including thousand of telephone cables, electric cables, gas pipes, sewer and water pipes had to be lengthened and made flexible to provide continuous service during the move. A movable wooden sidewalk allowed employees and the public to enter and leave the building at any time while the move was in progress. The company did not lose a single day of work nor interrupt their service during the entire period.

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There’s also a terrific GIF showing the building moving, and a thread about it on Twitter.
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Musk says Tesla would be shut down if its cars spied in China, elsewhere • Reuters

Reuters Staff:

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Tesla Inc chief executive Elon Musk said on Saturday his company would be shut down if its cars were used to spy, his first comments on news that China’s military has banned Teslas from its facilities.

“There’s a very strong incentive for us to be very confidential with any information,” Musk told a prominent Chinese forum during a virtual discussion. “If Tesla used cars to spy in China or anywhere, we will get shut down.”

Sources told Reuters on Friday that the Chinese military has banned Tesla cars from entering its complexes, citing security concerns over cameras installed on the vehicles.

Those restrictions surfaced as the top Chinese and US diplomats were holding a contentious meeting in Alaska, the first such in-person interaction since US President Joe Biden took office in January.

Musk urged greater mutual trust between the world’s two biggest economies, in his remarks to the China Development Forum, a high-level business gathering is hosted by a foundation under the State Council.

He was holding a discussion panel with Xue Qikun, a Chinese quantum physicist who heads the Southern University of Science and Technology.

In China, the world’s biggest car market and a key battleground for electric vehicles (EVs), Tesla sold 147,445 vehicles last year, 30% of its global total. However, it is facing more competition this year from domestic rivals from Nio Inc to Geely.

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The cars do collect a ton of data and send it back to Tesla – that much emerged when a New York Times columnist complained about its range in 2013. If China really wants to make Musk uncomfortable, it has plenty of lines of inquiry.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified