Should we be thanking Imogen Heap for her 2016 efforts, now that NFTs are a thing for art? CC-licensed photo by Lee Jordan 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. Fifteen hundred plus one! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

CDC says fully vaccinated people can take fewer precautions • Axios

Marisa Fernandez:

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there’s early evidence that suggests vaccinated people are less likely to have asymptomatic infection and are potentially less likely to transmit the virus to other people. At the time of its publication, the CDC said the guidance would apply to about 10% of Americans.

“If grandparents have been vaccinated, they can visit their daughter and her family, even if they have not been vaccinated … so long as the daughter and her family are not at risk for severe disease,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said at a press conference on Monday.

A fully vaccinated person — someone who’s been vaccinated two weeks after receiving their last dose — should still take standard precautions like masking and social distancing when in public.

Those who are vaccinated are allowed to:
• Visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing.
• Visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing.
• Refrain from quarantine and testing following a known exposure to COVID-19, if asymptomatic.

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The US CDC is clearly a lot happier to let vaccinated people to mix than the UK, where (as our next link shows) things remain much tighter.
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The painful politics of vaccination • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

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It isn’t often I receive an email that makes me smoulder with rage. This one did, which was strange since it was perfectly polite. My correspondent wanted to know why he wasn’t allowed to meet his friends indoors for coffee. They were in their early seventies and vaccinated. Was there really a risk?

Inoffensive enough, you might think. But the question sat in my stomach and burned.

If you want to think clearly about the world, you need to notice your emotional responses to new information. I have become so convinced of this, I made it the central point of the first chapter of my book. So it was time to take my own advice. Why was I so angry?

It may have been a quick bit of mental arithmetic. The vaccines seem to be very good at preventing serious illness — just how good depends on the vaccine, and what exactly we mean by “serious illness”. But let’s assume they reduce the risk of death by a factor of 20.

The other thing that reduces the risk of Covid death by a factor of 20? Being about 20-25 years younger. A vaccinated 70-year-old has roughly the same low risk of death as an unvaccinated 47-year-old. Those numbers may not be exactly right, but for this particular unvaccinated 47-year-old, they were close enough to trigger a severe emotional reaction.

I have not been hanging out with my 47-year-old friends — and that is not because I fear death. It’s to prevent the virus from spreading, and thus protect the people who are most vulnerable. So it has been for all of us, on and off, for a year. And let’s not even talk about our fraying-under-the-strain children, vastly less at risk of Covid-19 complications than any 70-year-old will ever be, no matter how well vaccinated.

That was why I smouldered. We have all been making extraordinary sacrifices to protect vulnerable people, and here was one of these people, suddenly feeling invulnerable (but, actually, no more invulnerable than I), complaining that his freedom had not instantly been restored.

…I did not write an angry response to my correspondent. I simply reminded him that we do not yet have complete confidence that vaccinated people are not infectious. The latest numbers on that question look very encouraging, but we cannot yet be sure that vaccinated people pose no risk to others.

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Smartphone lobby wants conference for 50,000 people in June • Bloomberg

Nate Lanxon:

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The global wireless industry is planning to allow tens of thousands of international visitors to congregate for its flagship Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona in June, more than a year after it was axed due to the pandemic.

The GSMA trade body said everyone present will have to show a negative Covid-19 result to access the Fira Gran Via venue and repeat the test every 72 hours. Rapid testing centers will be made available on site and organizers are considering using hotels for more.

Additional measures being put in place for one of Europe’s most important business gatherings include a new contact tracing mobile app, real-time occupancy monitoring, improved air conditioning at the venue, and an increased number of on-site medical staff.

“We believe that we can have around 45,000 to 50,000 attendees, as of today,” Stephanie Lynch-Habib, the GSMA’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview on Monday, adding that visitor interest is expected to be strong.

“About 80% of our top 100 clients committed to a three-year participation when we canceled last year,” she said.

The show will be a test of whether the pandemic is under control enough to make vast in-person events viable, and safe. MWC Barcelona, which in 2019 attracted 109,000 attendees from 198 countries, was one of the first major European conference casualties when it was axed in February last year.

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Ericsson has already said it will withdraw entirely, citing health and safety concerns. These days, requiring a negative test simply isn’t enough. What’s the betting that in a couple of weeks they’ll have upped the requirement to a double vaccination certificate?
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The enclosure of internet commons • Hey.com

David Heinemeier Hansson, CEO of Hey:

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When we view our growing trouble with the monopolist abuses from app stores through this historical lens, things start to make more sense. Apple and Google are simply acting like the lords that in the early capitalist era decided that what used to be free or at least cheap –– distributing software over the internet –– now suddenly needed to be taxed at 30%. Such that the already grotesque capitalist accumulation they had managed – to the literal tune of trillions! – could continue to grow. Or as Hickel calls it: a fix.

This naturally caused the commoners, app developers, to become squeezed in the process. To either run a third faster, cap the capacity to grown by a third, or turn to other unsavory business models, like loading up their apps with ads and trackers, such that they could sell privacy, attention, and data instead of selling software.

It’s particularly ironic that it should be Apple that has lead both this enclosure movement and the specific pivot to ad-infested software. Given how they were themselves were able to escape Microsoft’s dominance of the 90s due to the rise of the cross-platform internet, and because they pride themselves on caring oh-so-much about privacy in advertisement (and certain aspects of their platform design).

To be fair, the enclosure of the internet commons isn’t entirely down to Apple (and Google). But they are a very large part of the story. Just like Facebook managed to enclose the social networks that had long existed outside of their walls with blogs, newsletters, rss, irc, and other open pastures. Or Google’s other enclosure project that eventually turned internet search from a mission to find the best results on the internet to a for-sale catalogue of ads and Google’s own properties.

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You may be able to guess that he’s not pleased about it all.
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Encode Mighty Things • Noah Liebman

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NASA JPL engineers landed a rover on Mars.

People from around the world decoded the message in the parachute they designed.

I just made this small tribute to their work.

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If you need to design a parachute (or maybe a paperfold?) for something that’s going to be dropped in a remote location while being watched internationally by a drone, here’s the page for you.

Challenge: can you get every piece of the chute to be brown? And can you get every piece to be white?
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Tesla emails admit current ‘full self-driving beta’ will always be a Level 2 system • The Drive

Rob Stumpf:

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Promises of hands-free driving and robotaxis have swirled in the dreams of drivers and investors ever since Tesla first teased the possibility of a consumer-grade autonomous vehicle. Despite this promise, Tesla has yet to release a fully autonomous car for the public to purchase. It does, however, still allow customers to buy the promise of the “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) set of features for their vehicles which currently fit the SAE definition of Level 2 partial autonomy.

So what exactly is Tesla teasing in its newest “FSD Beta” Advanced Driver-Assistance System (ADAS) build? As it turns out, a recently uncovered series of emails between Tesla and the California Department of Motor Vehicles indicates that while the automaker’s ADAS systems are greatly improving, hands-free driving is not coming to a Tesla near you in the immediate future.

Last October, Tesla released an over-the-air update to limited participants which it called “FSD Beta,” something which many understood to be an early release of Tesla’s long-promised hands-off suite. By December, around 200 individuals were granted access to the program, 54 of whom were non-Tesla employees (though this likely changed, as CEO Elon Musk reported that Tesla had nearly 1,000 people participating in the beta by January). Those included in the FSD Beta began driving their vehicles around and recording the vehicle’s performance to post online.

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The videos posted online aren’t too impressive for “self-driving”: “swerving in traffic and stopping mid-turn”. It’s very much the counter to Robert Scoble’s excited post from two weeks ago about “just HOW ADVANCED Tesla is”. Always dilute Scoble’s excitement about stuff by a factor of 10 or so.
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A leading critic of big tech will join the White House • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

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President Biden on Friday named Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, to the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, putting one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech’s power into the administration.

The appointment of Mr. Wu, 48, who is widely supported by progressive Democrats and antimonopoly groups, suggests that the administration plans to take on the size and influence of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, including working with Congress on legislation to strengthen antitrust laws. During his campaign, Mr. Biden said he would be open to breaking up tech companies.

…Mr. Wu has warned about the consequences of too much power in the hands of a few companies and said the nation’s economy resembled the Gilded Age of the late 1800s.

“Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding the appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership,” Mr. Wu wrote in his 2018 book, “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.”

“Most visible in our daily lives is the great power of the tech platforms, especially Google, Facebook and Amazon,” he added.

…His role, with a focus on competition policy, will be a new one in the National Economic Council. Mr. Wu will also focus on competition in labor policy, such as noncompete clauses enforced by companies, and concentration in power in agriculture and the drug industry.

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Biden, together with the House of Representatives, looks very serious about antitrust and tech companies.

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Someone is hacking the hackers • Gizmodo

Lucas Ropek:

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In the latest in a string of “hits” on Russian dark web forums, the prominent crime site Maza appears to have been hacked by someone earlier this week.

This is kind of big news since Maza (previously called “Mazafaka”) has long been a destination for all assortment of criminal activity, including malware distribution, money laundering, carding (i.e., the selling of stolen credit card information), and lots of other bad behavior. The forum is considered “elite” and hard to join, and in the past, it has been a cesspool for some of the world’s most prolific cybercriminals.

Whoever hacked Maza netted thousands of data points about the site’s users, including usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords, a new report from intelligence firm Flashpoint shows. Two warning messages were then scrawled across the forum’s home page: “Your data has been leaked” and “This forum has been hacked.” 

KrebsOnSecurity reports that the intruder subsequently dumped the stolen data on the dark web, spurring fears among criminals that their identities might be exposed (oh, the irony). The validity of the data has been verified by threat intelligence firm Intel 471.

This hack comes shortly after similar attacks on two other Russian cybercrime forums, Verified and Exploit, that occurred earlier this year. It’s been noted that the successive targeting of such high-level forums is somewhat unusual. Criminal hackers have been known to hack each other, but is that what is happening here?

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Answer: nobody knows. Intelligence services? Law enforcement? Other criminal hackers? Hackers for good? It only takes one suitably annoyed or determined person to do it. Then they just have to stay ahead of those trying to take revenge.
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The new Google Pay repeats all the same mistakes of Google Allo • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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The new Google Pay app came out of beta this week, and it marks the first step in a major upheaval in the Google Pay service. Existing Google Pay users are about to go through a transition reminiscent of the recent move from Google Music to YouTube Music: Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service. The fun, confusing wrinkle here is that the new and old services are both called “Google Pay.”

Allow us to explain.

The old Google Pay service that has been around for years is dying. The app will be shut down in the US on April 5, and if you want to continue using New Google Pay, you’ll have to go find and download a totally new app. NFC tap-and-pay functionality won’t really change once you set up the new app, but the New Google Pay app won’t use your Google account for P2P payments anymore. You’ll be required to make a new account. You won’t be able to send any money to your new contacts until they download the new app and make a new account, too. On top of all that, the Google Pay website will be stripped of all payment functionality in the US on April 5, and New Google Pay won’t support doing anything from the web. You won’t be able to transfer money, view payment activity, or see your balance from a browser.

In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has “a fee of 1.5% or $.31 (whichever is higher), when you transfer out money with a debit card.”

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Google really hasn’t got any finesse at doing these switchovers. Amadeo’s conclusion:

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For long-term Google users, the new Google Pay is yet another annoying transition they’ll have to explain to friends and family. This is an occurrence that’s getting more frequent and more annoying in recent years, thanks to similar Google shutdowns of Google Play Music, Cloud Print, Inbox, Works with Nest, the ongoing Hangouts situation, and many others. That’s to say nothing of the crazy history of this payment service, which used to be Google Wallet, then Android Pay, then Google Pay, and now it’s a totally different Google Pay.

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Not your keys, not your Kings Of Leon • Forbes

David Birch on NFTs and business possibilities:

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The opportunities for disruptive business models are real and substantial. Here’s an example, continuing the music theme. A band is going to play a concert. There are 10,000 seats in the venue and 100,000 members of their fan club. So the band randomly distribute the tickets to the members of the fan club who pay $50 each for them (this is all managed through smart contracts). And that’s it. Neither the band, nor the venue, nor anyone else has to do anything more.

The members of the fan club can decide whether to go to the concert, whether to buy some more tickets for friends, whether to give their ticket to charity or whatever. They can put their tickets onto eBay and the market will clear itself. The tickets cannot be counterfeited or copied for the same reason that a Bitcoin cannot be counterfeited or copied: each of these cryptographic assets belongs to only one cryptographic key (“wallet”) at one time, and whoever has control of that key has control of the ticket.

The news that the American rock band Kings of Leon have decided to launch their new album as an NFT (and other forms) does, I think, flag up that there are new business models forming through the combination of fintech and fungibility. As Rolling Stone explained, the band is actually selling three different kinds of tokens: one is a special album package, a second type offers front-row seats for life at the band’s concerts and a third is for exclusive audiovisual art (the smart contracts were developed by a company called YellowHeart). I can see why fans might buy these, but I can also see why speculators might buy them too: I might be tempted to part with some considerable sum of money for a lifetime front row seat for my favourite band, especially if I could simply and safely lend or trade it away at any time.

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Although people were dismissive of Imogen Heap’s attempts to put music on the blockchain in 2016, that’s precisely what seems to be happening. That, and versions of art.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

People are going to be sharing narrow pavements with a lot more fast-moving, heavy delivery robots. Will humans always get right of way? CC-licensed photo by Eric Fischer 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. Fifteen hundred! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s ‘privacy-first web’ is really a Google-first web • OneZero

Will Oremus:

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Google will still track users’ behavior on its own services — and, as you might have noticed, it happens to have rather a lot of services. In general, making it harder for websites to track users across the web will place more emphasis on “first-party data,” which is the data that companies collect while users are on their own sites or apps. Between Android, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Home, etc., it’s hard to think of a company with more first-party data than Google. And as the Platform Law Blog’s Dimitrios Katsifis points out: “By operating Google Search, Google is effectively able to follow users’ browsing activity beyond its properties; it knows what the user is looking for, and has full visibility into the search result the user clicks on.

And then there are the alternative tracking frameworks that Google is developing. My OneZero colleague Owen Williams has a very good, plain-language explainer on those approaches, which revolve around the idea of putting users into groups based on their browsing rather than tying their individual website histories to their identity. Some versions seek to preserve the infamous (yet relatively effective) practice of “retargeting,” in which users are targeted repeatedly with ads for an item they once viewed on a shopping site; other versions would dispense with it.

The possible approach that Google specifically mentioned in its blog post is called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, which the company claims can be 95% as effective as cookies. (Google has a white paper explaining it in detail if you’re into that kind of thing.) FLoC has some supporters but also some vehement detractors: The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Bennett Cyphers called it a terrible idea, arguing that it will replace old privacy flaws with new ones and “exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.”

Merits aside, it’s clear that Google is positioning itself for a more privacy-conscious future in ways that seek to preserve its dominance — likely at the expense of a slew of smaller rivals.

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There’s more on this in the EFF’s writeup. Your profile will vanish into the machine learning morass: your profile might be ever-shifting. Cookies will go, but your privacy won’t come back.
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Why did Jack Dorsey’s Square buy Tidal, Jay-Z’s failed music service? • Vox

Peter Kafka:

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It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with Square + Tidal rollouts in the future: A Square-enabled way for artists to sell T-shirts on tour, or even when they’re not on tour, for instance.

More intriguingly, given Dorsey’s love of All Things Blockchain, and the current mania over NFTs, it won’t be surprising to see Square + Tidal work on their own NFT scheme. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are blockchain-enabled digital pieces of … anything that investors and speculators and collectors are hoovering up at a crazy rate. Even if none of this makes sense to you, you may have heard about people paying real money — a lot of money — for digital ephemera like cartoon cat GIFs or animated trading cards of NBA players dunking or blocking. It’s a thing, for now.

So you can picture the Jay-Zs of the world selling songs, or snippets of songs, or the digital version of a lyric scribbled on a napkin, as NFTs, in deals that let Square and the artist get part of the deal.

If they get it out fast enough — while NFT mania booms — it’s easy to imagine many more headlines like these, except you’ll replace “Grimes” with “Beyonce” or whomever: “Grimes sold $6 million worth of digital art as NFTs”

As long as you’re okay with the purely speculative hype around these kinds of sales and stories — and the understanding that some investors, including people who don’t fully understand what they’re doing, are going to make a lot of money, and some will get burned badly (see: GameStop, and also Cryptokitties, an early NFT gambit/gimmick that was kind of hot in 2018 and then cooled off but may be hot again) — then this all seems … okay? Maybe … good?

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As someone pointed out on Twitter, if your response to NFTs is “this is great, we can make things scarce again rather than being uncountably easy to reproduce and spread” then maybe you need to rethink your worldview. Though you can think that it makes digital art easier to validate. (Bitcoins, strictly speaking, are not NFTs because they are divisible.)
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At least 30,000 US organizations newly hacked via holes in Microsoft’s email software • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments — have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit that’s focused on stealing email from victim organizations, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The espionage group is exploiting four newly-discovered flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server email software, and has seeded hundreds of thousands of victim organizations worldwide with tools that give the attackers total, remote control over affected systems.

On March 2, Microsoft released emergency security updates to plug four security holes in Exchange Server versions 2013 through 2019 that hackers were actively using to siphon email communications from Internet-facing systems running Exchange.

In the three days since then, security experts say the same Chinese cyber espionage group has dramatically stepped up attacks on any vulnerable, unpatched Exchange servers worldwide.

In each incident, the intruders have left behind a “web shell,” an easy-to-use, password-protected hacking tool that can be accessed over the Internet from any browser. The web shell gives the attackers administrative access to the victim’s computer servers.

…Microsoft’s initial advisory about the Exchange flaws credited Reston, Va. based Volexity for reporting the vulnerabilities. Volexity President Steven Adair said the company first saw attackers quietly exploiting the Exchange bugs on Jan. 6, 2021, a day when most of the world was glued to television coverage of the riot at the US Capitol..

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With email, you might as well assume that everything is open and hacked already. It’s become once again the equivalent of writing on a postcard. If you want to send something securely, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram and in a different way Slack can all fill the gap. Seriously, why email?
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What the coronavirus variants mean for the end of the pandemic • The New Yorker

Dhruv Khullar:

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Like all viruses, Sars-CoV-2 will continue to evolve. But [Jason] McLellan [a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin] believes that it has a limited number of moves available. “There’s just not a lot of space for the spike to continue to change in ways that allow it to evade antibodies but still bind to its receptor,” he said. “Substitutions that allow the virus to resist antibodies will probably also decrease its affinity for ace-2”—the receptor that the virus uses to enter cells. Recently, researchers have mapped the universe of useful mutations available to the spike’s receptor-binding area. They’ve found that most of the changes that would weaken the binding ability of our antibodies occur at just a few sites; the E484K substitution seems to be the most important. “The fact that different variants have independently hit on the same mutations suggests we’re already seeing the limits of where the virus can go,” McLellan told me. “It has a finite number of options.”

Over time, Sars-CoV-2 is likely to become less lethal, not more. When people are exposed to a virus, they often develop “cross-reactive” immunity that protects them against future infection, not just for that virus, but also for related strains; with time, the virus also exhausts the mutational possibilities that might allow it to infect cells while eluding the immune system’s memory. “This is what we think happened to viruses that cause the common cold,” McLellan said. “It probably caused a major illness in the past. Then it evolved to a place where it’s less deadly. But, of course, it’s still with us.” It’s possible that a coronavirus that now causes the common cold, OC43, was responsible for the “Russian flu” of 1889, which killed a million people. But OC43, like other coronaviruses, became less dangerous with time. Today, most of us are exposed to OC43 and other endemic coronaviruses as children, and we experience only mild symptoms. For Sars-CoV-2, such a future could be years or decades away.

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Call for a Full and Unrestricted International Forensic Investigation into the Origins of COVID-19

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Based on our analysis, and as confirmed by the global study convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese authorities, there is as yet no evidence demonstrating a fully natural origin of this virus. The zoonosis hypothesis, largely based on patterns of previous zoonosis events, is only one of a number of possible SARS-CoV-2 origins, alongside the research-related accident hypothesis.

Although the “collaborative” process of discovery mandated by the World Health Assembly in May 2020 was meant to enable a full examination of the origins of the pandemic, we believe that structural limitations built into this endeavor make it all but impossible for the WHO-convened mission to realize this aspiration.

In particular, we wish to raise public awareness of the fact that half of the joint team convened under that process is made of Chinese citizens whose scientific independence may be limited, that international members of the joint team had to rely on information the Chinese authorities chose to share with them, and that any joint team report must be approved by both the Chinese and international members of the joint team.

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This is signed by 26 scientists unsatisfied with the WHO’s inquiry into the possibility that the original SARS-Cov-2 virus escaped from one of two labs dealing with dangerous pathogens. Pretty much everyone isn’t happy about the WHO’s investigation, because there wasn’t really one.

My own position is that every other zoonosis that we have ever identified is the result of random contact between humans and animals in the natural world. That means the null hypothesis is that it happened in the natural world, by chance. The “lab leak” hypothesis has to overturn that by showing evidence of a leak. I feel that the people who have been so certain it must be a lab leak are jumping the gun.

A full investigation? I’m all for it. But you’d need to show a lot of steps – specifically, the presence of the virus itself ahead of any identification of any case in the outside world – to confirm it.
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Walker ‘stunned’ to see ship hovering high above sea off Cornwall • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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There are only so many polite words that come to mind when one spots a ship apparently hovering above the ocean during a stroll along the English coastline.

David Morris, who captured the extraordinary sight on camera, declared himself “stunned” when he noticed a giant tanker floating above the water as he looked out to sea from a hamlet near Falmouth in Cornwall.

The effect is an example of an optical illusion known as a superior mirage. Such illusions are reasonably common in the Arctic but can also happen in UK winters when the atmospheric conditions are right, though they are very rare.

The illusion is caused by a meteorological phenomenon called a temperature inversion. Normally, the air temperature drops with increasing altitude, making mountaintops colder than the foothills. But in a temperature inversion, warm air sits on top of a band of colder air, playing havoc with our visual perception. The inversion in Cornwall was caused by chilly air lying over the relatively cold sea with warmer air above.

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In case you haven’t seen it, the picture – truly outstanding, not faked – tells a thousand words about the inversion of light rays by temperature:

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Sidewalk [pavement – Ed.] robots get legal rights as “pedestrians” • Axios

Jennifer Kingson:

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Fears of a dystopian urban world where people dodge heavy, fast-moving droids are colliding with the aims of robot developers large and small — including Amazon and FedEx — to deploy delivery fleets.

“The sidewalk is the new hot debated space that the aerial drones were maybe three or five years ago,” says Greg Lynn, CEO of Piaggio Fast Forward, which makes a suitcase-sized $3,250 robot called gita that follows its owner around.

“There’s also a lot of people trying to deploy robots on bike lanes” where the bots can go faster than on sidewalks, he said.

States like Pennsylvania, Virginia, Idaho, Florida and Wisconsin have passed what are considered to be liberal rules permitting robots to operate on sidewalks — prompting pushback from cities like Pittsburgh that fear mishaps.

In Pennsylvania, robot “pedestrians” can weigh up to 550 pounds and drive up to 12 mph. “Opposition has largely come from pedestrian and accessibility advocates, as well as labor unions like the Teamsters,” says the Pittsburgh City Paper. The laws are a boon to Amazon’s Scout delivery robot and FedEx’s Roxo, which are being tested in urban and suburban settings.

“Backers say the laws will usher in a future where household items show up in a matter of hours, with fewer idling delivery vans blocking traffic and spewing emissions,” says Wired.

Some technology evangelists think these laws are a spectacularly bad idea. The National Association of City Transportation Officials — NACTO — says the robots “should be severely restricted if not banned outright.”

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It’s only going to take a few cases of old folks being bumped by these things and everyone’s going to be all riled up. “Pedestrian and accessibility advocates” indeed.
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Inside the ‘Covid Triangle’: a catastrophe years in the making • Financial Times

Anjli Raval:

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Manish Shah knew it was only a matter of time before he was struck by coronavirus.

When the pandemic first hit the UK, the pharmacy where he works in Dagenham, east London, put in strict protocols on mask-wearing and physical distancing. But as the more aggressive variant of the virus raged through this part of the capital over the winter, more and more sick people turned to Shah for help.

“A lot of minicab and Uber drivers came to see me. They showed classic symptoms of the virus, but they kept saying things like: ‘Just give me something for the sore throat, cough syrup or something,’” he says. “I told them time and again to get a Covid test, but they just did not want to get a test or go to the doctor because they knew they could not afford to isolate.”

The pharmacy’s NHS contract meant that staff had to provide clinical services in partnership with local primary care networks. “We could not refuse anyone, even those not wearing a mask,” says Shah. “This is how I got the virus.”

…While coronavirus has inflicted extraordinary suffering across the country, the corner of east London in which Shah lives and works has been so pummelled that it has become known as the “Covid Triangle”. At one point during the peak of the second wave, the three boroughs that made up this triangle — Barking and Dagenham, Redbridge and Newham — were competing for the highest rate of infections in the whole country. In Barking and Dagenham, one in 16 people was reported to be infected.

Within this area, a high proportion of the workforce are either essential staff who cannot stay at home — like Shah — or those forced out to work by job insecurity. “Others that worked in takeaway restaurants told me: ‘I have to go into work, otherwise they will find someone else and I won’t have a job,’” he says. “These people had to keep going because of their financial circumstances.”

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Not paywalled. Terrific in-depth reporting about how the seeds of this problem were sown long, long ago.
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Saudi Arabia’s plan to rule $700bn hydrogen market • Bloomberg

Verity Ratcliffe:

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the world’s biggest crude exporter doesn’t want to cede the burgeoning hydrogen business to China, Europe or Australia and lose a potentially massive source of income. So it’s building a $5 billion plant powered entirely by sun and wind that will be among the world’s biggest green hydrogen makers when it opens in the planned megacity of Neom in 2025.

The task of turning a patch of desert the size of Belgium into a metropolis powered by renewable energy falls to Peter Terium, the former chief executive officer of RWE AG, Germany’s biggest utility, and clean-energy spinoff Innogy SE. His performance will help determine whether a country dependent on petrodollars can transition into a supplier of non-polluting fuels.

“There’s nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of this dimension or challenge,” Terium said. “I’ve been spending the last two years wrapping my mind around ‘from scratch,’ and now we’re very much in execution mode.”

Hydrogen is morphing from a niche power source — used in zeppelins, rockets and nuclear weapons — into big business, with the European Union alone committing $500 billion to scale up its infrastructure. Huge obstacles remain to the gas becoming a major part of the energy transition, and skeptics point to Saudi Arabia’s weak track record so far capitalizing on what should be a competitive edge in the renewables business, especially solar, where there are many plans but few operational projects.

But countries are jostling for position in a future global market, and hydrogen experts list the kingdom as one to watch.

…Saudi Arabia possesses a competitive advantage in its perpetual sunshine and wind, and vast tracts of unused land. Helios’s costs likely will be among the lowest globally and could reach $1.50 per kilogram by 2030, according to BNEF. That’s cheaper than some hydrogen made from non-renewable sources today.

«

How ironic that the country (and region) which happened to have the best natural resources for the petrochemical era also has the best natural resources for the solar era.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s now a chess engine that fits into 1024 bytes – and is pretty good too. CC-licensed photo by Enrico Strocchi 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. Please, AdGuard, not this one. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

EU set to accuse Apple of distorting competition in music streaming • Financial Times

Javier Espinozaa:

»

The EU is set to bring antitrust charges against Apple for the first time, putting more pressure on the iPhone maker to change the way it runs its App Store.

According to several people familiar with the case, the EU will act on a complaint brought two years ago by the music streaming site Spotify, which said Apple was taking a 30% cut of its subscription fees for featuring it in the App Store and denying it the right to tell its users that other ways of upgrading were available.

Spotify also complained that Apple Music, the Cupertino company’s own music service, was able to undercut it on price because it did not have to pay the same 30% fee.

More recently, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, had its hugely popular game thrown off Apple’s App Store after it started directing players to its own payment system. Epic has also filed a competition complaint against Apple in the EU.

Antitrust challenges around the world are threatening one of Apple’s fastest-growing and most profitable lines of business. Its suite of digital services — which include music and video, cloud storage, games and a growing range of other add-ons — is now Apple’s second-largest source of revenue after the iPhone, bringing in $15.8bn in sales in the three months to December.

«

You have to wonder if the EC (which is likely to find for Spotify) will mandate that Apple doesn’t demand a 30% cut, or if it will demand something more dramatic. Given past form – Microsoft and browsers, Google and shopping – it will be less than Spotify wants.

Also worth noting: the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority is opening an investigation into “Apple’s conduct in relation to the distribution of apps…in the UK, in particular the terms and conditions governing app developers’ access to Apple’s App Store.”

The antitrust wave is growing, though these things usually come ten years too late to make the difference that’s desired.
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YouTube will lift Trump suspension when ‘risk of violence has decreased,’ CEO says • CNET

Richard Nieva:

»

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said Thursday that former President Donald Trump will eventually be allowed to post videos on the platform again, after being suspended for almost two months.

Trump was suspended from YouTube on Jan. 12, days after the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, for breaking the company’s rules on inciting violence. The punishment prohibits Trump from uploading videos and livestreams and disables comments on his videos. Since then, YouTube has extended the suspension twice.

On Thursday, Wojcicki said the suspension won’t be permanent. “I do want to confirm that we will lift the suspension of the channel,” she said during an event hosted by the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC-based think tank. “We will lift the suspension of the Donald Trump channel, when we determine that the risk of violence has decreased.”

She said that moment hasn’t come, citing warnings on Wednesday from the Capitol police of another potential attack on Thursday. Some followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which baselessly contends that Satan-worshipping cannibals and pedophiles aimed to take down Trump, believe the former president would return to the White House on March 4. “It’s pretty clear that that elevated violence risk still remains,” Wojcicki said.

She said YouTube would make that judgement by considering several factors. That includes heeding government warnings, looking at increased law enforcement presence around the country and examining violent rhetoric on the platform.

«

I’d guess that they’d wait until he’s clearly no possible threat, which could be a couple of years at least. The other stuff is just chaff.
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Study: employment rose among those in free money experiment • Associated Press

Adam Beam:

»

After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and reported lower rates of anxiety and depression, according to a study released Wednesday.

The program in the Northern California city of Stockton was the highest-profile experiment in the U.S. of a universal basic income, where everyone gets a guaranteed amount per month for free. Announced by former Mayor Michael Tubbs with great fanfare in 2017, the idea quickly gained momentum once it became a major part of Andrew Yang’s 2020 campaign for president.

Supporters say a guaranteed income can alleviate the stress and anxiety of people living in poverty while giving them the financial security needed to find good jobs and avoid debt. But critics argue free money would eliminate the incentive to work, creating a society dependent on the state.

Tubbs, who at 26 was elected Stockton’s first Black mayor in 2016 after endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, wanted to put those claims to the test. Stockton was an ideal place, given its proximity to Silicon Valley and the eagerness of the state’s tech titans to fund the experiment as they grapple with how to prepare for job losses that could come with automation and artificial intelligence.

«

That’s great – but if it’s about preparing people for a world without jobs, what’s the use of the fact that in this experiment they found jobs? Even so, it’s very like the finding that if you give homeless people homes, everything in their life starts to improve.
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Exclusive: this is the Sonos Roam, coming in April for $169 • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Set to be priced at $169, the new device — it’s called the Sonos Roam — is much smaller than the Sonos Move, which was the company’s first foray into portable speakers. This product has a much closer resemblance to popular, take-anywhere Bluetooth speakers like the UE Boom.

According to a source with direct knowledge of the Roam, it measures 6.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 inches and weighs around a pound. It will come with a USB charging cable, and a wireless charging dock will be sold separately for $49. Like many of the company’s other speakers, the Sonos Roam will be available in either black or white.

The Verge has reached out to Sonos for comment. The new speaker first popped up in a Federal Communications Commission filing. Since then, Sonos has confirmed it will announce a new product on March 9th. Current plans call for the Roam to ship a month later on April 20th.

Like the Move speaker, the Sonos Roam will be able to play audio over both Wi-Fi (when at home on your regular Sonos system) and Bluetooth on the go. On Wi-Fi, the Roam will function like any recent Sonos speaker as part of a multi-room system. It runs on the company’s S2 platform that rolled out last year. There are built-in mics for hands-free voice commands for either Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, and AirPlay 2 is supported as well. Two Roams can be stereo paired when in Wi-Fi mode.

Battery life is expected to be around 10 hours on a full charge, and the Roam is fully waterproof, which will help it compete against the similarly-rugged competition.

«

Far better size and pricing than the Move. These will cost about the same as the One, but I bet they sell better if the sound is any good at all.
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COVID-19: Test and Trace barely used check-in data from pubs and restaurants – with thousands not warned of infection risk • Sky News

Rowland Manthorpe:

»

Data from hundreds of millions of check-ins by people who visited pubs, restaurants and hairdressers before lockdown was barely used by Test and Trace, according to a confidential report obtained by Sky News.

The report admits that the failure of the £22bn service to use the data for alerts or contact tracing meant “thousands of people” were not warned they might be at risk of infection, “potentially leading to the spread of the virus.”

To make matters worse, when coronavirus data from venues was used, public health officials encouraged pubs and restaurants to contact customers directly – a breach of data protection law which could leave businesses facing legal action.

The report says that lack of guidance from Test and Trace for local public health teams on how to use the data left businesses “being asked to, or volunteering, to contact customers and visitors”.

…”It is incredibly frustrating,” said Kate Nicholls, CEO of Hospitality UK. “Our teams worked really hard to capture that data on the understanding that it was going to be used should there be problems.

“To hear that it wasn’t used, and in fact we had further restrictions without really any clear evidence that there was a problem with hospitality, is a major cause for concern.”

«

It’s becoming clear in retrospect what the major errors in the whole coronavirus response were. Misunderstanding of the mechanism by which it spread; calamitous rushed contracts for nonexistent PPE; useless Track & Trace. (The story is the same in the US.)
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The Kilobyte’s Gambit ♟️💾 1k chess game • Vole WTF

»

• You play as White. Click on a piece, then click where to move.
• Supports castling, en passant & pawn promotion (to queen only).
• It won’t announce victory/defeat, only prevent any further moves.
• The entire ‘brain’ of the chess engine fits into 1024 bytes (only three times the length of this help text), including setting up the board & validating moves.

«

Impressive as hell. How is it we can write this sort of stuff now, yet couldn’t years ago when 1 kilobyte was all the memory we had?
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Biden pushes EV chargers as six utilities plan a unified network • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

»

On Tuesday, [President Joe] Biden held a virtual meeting with CEOs from companies building charging infrastructure. The administration has set a goal to build more than 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations by 2030.

Also on Tuesday, a coalition of six electric utilities announced a new initiative that will help Biden achieve his goal. The companies are planning to build a “seamless network of charging stations” in and around the American South. The group plans to build chargers near major highways in every southern state, stretching as far west as Texas and as far north as Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia.

This is not a joint venture. Each utility will build and run its own charging stations. But the goal is to make them appear to the customer as a unified network.

The initiative is important because the limited number of fast chargers is an impediment to more widespread adoption of electric vehicles. It inherently takes longer to recharge an electric vehicle than to refill the gas tank of a conventional car. The problem is exacerbated if EV owners have to drive out of their way to get to a charging station.

As more chargers get built, EV owners will find it easier to find charging stations that are near useful amenities like grocery stores, restaurants, or playgrounds, allowing them to do something useful or fun while their cars recharge.

«

Fast charging is really what’s needed to make the experience equivalent. But failing that, making the experience agreeable must be the next best thing.
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Watchy: the hackable $50 smartwatch • IEEE Spectrum

Stephen Cass:

»

Watchy is based around an ESP32 microcontroller, a popular alternative to AVR- or Arm-based microcontroller because of its built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities that can be programmed via the Arduino IDE. Surrounding hardware includes a 1.5-inch e-paper display, a real-time clock module, a vibration motor, a three-axis accelerometer, and four control buttons.

Assembling the Watchy takes little time. It comes in just four components: a fully populated printed circuit board, a 200 milliampere-hour lithium polymer battery, the display, and a fabric wristband. Adhesive tape keeps the screen and battery in place.  A microUSB socket charges the battery and provides the link for uploading programs for new watch faces.

Slots on the central PCB are provided to thread a fabric watch strap through, but you may wish to 3D-print a case that allows standard watch straps to be used; if so, I recommend not taping the battery down to make it easier to position in the case.

Once I had everything put together, I followed Sqaurofumi’s instructions to install compiler support for the ESP32 along with the Watchy library and example face code. I soon ran into my first problem—none of the sample code would compile. A little poking around online revealed that the macOS version of the Arduino IDE currently has a compatibility problem with the ESP board. However, I was able grab the latest release candidate for the next version of the ESP library, and all was well.

At least until I tried to upload a face to the Watchy. Despite much fiddling, I could not get a response when I tried storing code in the Watchy’s flash memory. Wondering if this was another macOS problem, I fired up Windows 10 on my iMac, but no joy. Querying the official support forum on GitHub got a suggestion from Squarofumi that I test the connection using the “esptools” Python library by erasing the flash directly, but this also produced a negative result.

«

Decades ago I read an article which said “Linux is only free if your labour has no value” and wondered what it meant. Watchy is only cheap if your labour has no value (and you don’t mind the adhesive tape vibe).
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Covid-19 variant in Brazil overwhelms local hospitals, hits younger patients • WSJ

Samantha Pearson and Ryan Dube:

»

Researchers and doctors are sounding the alarm over a new, more aggressive coronavirus strain from the Amazon area of Brazil, which they believe is responsible for a recent rise in deaths, as well as infections in younger people, in parts of South America.

Brazil’s daily death toll from the disease rose to its highest level yet this week, pushing the country’s total number of Covid-19 fatalities past a quarter of a million. On Tuesday, Brazil reported a record 1,641 Covid fatalities. Neighbor Peru is struggling to curb a second wave of infections.

The new variant, known as P.1, is 1.4 to 2.2 times more contagious than versions of the virus previously found in Brazil, and 25% to 61% more capable of reinfecting people who had been infected by an earlier strain, according to a study released Tuesday.

With mass vaccination a long way off across the region, countries such as Brazil risk becoming a breeding ground for potent versions of the virus that could render current Covid-19 vaccines less effective, public-health specialists warned.

A more prolonged pandemic could also devastate the economies of countries such as Brazil, slowing growth and expanding the country’s already large debt pile as the government extends payouts to the poor, economists said.

“We’re facing a dramatic situation here—the health systems of many states in Brazil are already in collapse and others will be in the next few days,” said Eliseu Waldman, an epidemiologist at the University of São Paulo.

«

One thing that those pushing “herd immunity through wide-scale infection” never appear to have considered is that you’d encourage new variants that would stay ahead of that immunity. P1 emerged in Manaus, where the original Covid strain ran riot earlier last year and a huge proportion of the population was infected.
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Project Azorian: the CIA mission to steal sunken sub K-129 • HistoryExtra

Josh Dean:

»

One morning in November 1969, Curtis Crooke was in a meeting when three unexpected visitors came into the room and said they needed to talk to him.

The 41-year-old Crooke was in charge of all engineering for Global Marine, a deep-ocean drilling company known for innovative shipbuilding, and it was that expertise that the three men, all in dark suits, wanted.

They sat down and the one clearly in charge, John Parangosky, spoke. “We work for the Central Intelligence Agency,” he said. “I assume you know what that is.” Parangosky explained that Global Marine was the only company in the world that could complete a job that interested the CIA. Was it feasible, he wondered, to lift something weighing several thousand tons from the bottom of the ocean, at a depth of 15-20,000ft?

Crooke thought a minute. It sounded like a ridiculous problem, but not necessarily impossible. He said he’d have to get back to them. Once they left, he pulled out his copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships, a reference book to all naval vessels, flipped to the section on Soviet submarines, and smiled. The numbers matched up, more or less.

«

Our “failed CIA plots” theme enters its stunning second day. We might get to the Bay Of Pigs if we go on long enough. (Thanks @paulguinnessy for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Anyway, the CIA wanted to put a plutonium-powered sensor atop this mountain. Instead, it’s probably in a glacier. CC-licensed photo by Anirban Biswas on Flickr.

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

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

Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing • WSJ

Sam Schechner and Keach Hagey:

»

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.

The Alphabet company said Wednesday that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.

The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital-advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.

Google’s heft means that its move is also likely to stoke a backlash from some competitors in the digital ad business, where many companies rely on tracking individuals to target their ads, measure their effectiveness and stop fraud. Google accounted for 52% of last year’s global digital ad spending of $292bn, according to Jounce Media, a digital-ad consultancy.

“If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web,” David Temkin, the Google product manager leading the change, said in a blog post Wednesday.

«

The blogpost is unequivocal:

»

Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.

«

This is jawdropping stuff, and it’s impossible not to wonder: what’s Google’s real plan here? It’s like the tale of the French diplomat who was famous for his subtle, clever dealings; when he died, one rival said “hmm, I wonder what he intended by that?”

Obvious questions: does this mean that all the insistence on tracking (“to serve you relevant ads”) was wasted, and isn’t worth doing? If not, how will Google keep on doing tracking? Or if it wasn’t wasted and they aren’t going to keep on doing the tracking, how will they make the ads pay as well as they used to?

The timing – just ahead of Apple introducing its IDFA ad-tracking-opt-in requirement in iOS 14.5 – is surely not accidental. Google may have been working on this for some time, and realised that 14.5 will put a lot of rivals at a disadvantage, and is getting out ahead of it.
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Consumers deserve a data dividend • Oracle corporate blog

Ken Glueck is executive VP at Oracle:

»

consumers are shamefully under-compensated for the data they generate as they go about their daily life, both virtual and physical. Consumers are told that the trade of their personal data in exchange for “free” services is a fair one. It is not. The marginal cost of any of these services is effectively zero yet the ad revenue generated from consumer data easily exceeds $200bn. On the other side of the market Google’s privacy policy and terms of service guarantees its cost to acquire consumer data is zero. It’s a taking. The only one actually getting something for free is Google.

And that’s not all. The most subtle unfairness of this exchange is that consumers never stop paying, and the amount of data taken from them keeps rising. The data extracted from consumers now wildly exceeds the value of what they receive. What’s worse, Google’s data collection is increasingly untethered from a user’s underlying activity. For instance, on an Android phone, Google collects a range of location and sensor information irrespective of what services or apps the user has active, without their direct action, via processes hidden in the background.

Much of this consumer data is not, or should not, be Google’s to take in the first place. The “consent” for this data collection comes from the “notice” provided by “privacy policies,” which in turn embeds Google’s all-encompassing terms of service. So, not unlike the shrink-wrap licenses of the 1980’s, Google’s click-wrap licenses—or contracts of adhesion—give Google cart blanche to collect whatever user data it desires, whenever it desires. Boiled down to its simplest terms, the consideration consumers receive for their highly valuable stream of data is worth a lot more than what Google is providing.

«

Why, you might wonder, is Oracle (jilted suitor of TikTok) griping about Google? Because it has a long-running lawsuit, presently being considered by the US Supreme Court, accusing Google of breaking the copyright around the APIs for Java. And while it waits for that judgment, it might as well snipe at Google in other ways.

Wildly ironic, considering the link before, that Oracle chose today, of all days, to post this.
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Tom Cruise isn’t on TikTok: it’s a shockingly-realistic deepfake • PetaPixel

Jaron Schneider:

»

A TikToker is using deepfake technology to impersonate Tom Cruise on the social media platform and the results are so realistic that some may mistakingly believe it actually is the famed actor. This latest situation has again raised concerns about the creation and use of deepfakes.

While the account is clearly making folks aware that this isn’t the real Tom Cruise — the username is deeptomcruise, for starters– those not paying attention can easily mistake what they’re seeing for the genuine article. Even without seeing the username, the video isn’t quite perfect (The Verge notes that the lip-syncing is off in places and the voice isn’t quite right).

The most recent video, uploaded four days prior to publication, is the most realistic of the batch and depicts the Cruise impersonater performing a magic trick.

Again, looking closely reveals that something is amiss, but no doubt this video would fool many and it’s clearly close enough to raise the alarm as multiple publications have weighed in on the account that is once again causing some to question the legality of deepfakes.

Overall, the account has more than 10 million views, 1.1 million likes, and over 370,000 followers. On Tuesday afternoon, coverage of the account reached a fever pitch and was trending on Twitter.

According to TikTok’s own terms of service, the Tom Cruise impersonation videos should be a violation:

»

You may not: […]
impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent you or your affiliation with any person or entity, including giving the impression that any content you upload, post, transmit, distribute or otherwise make available emanates from the Services

«

Yet days after the initial story of the account’s viral spread broke, the videos remain on the platform.

«

Seem to have been taken down now. They’re really, really impressive. We’ve come a long way in the three years since the first deepfake videos began appearing on porn sites.
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The dark legacy of the CIA’s bungled plot to have famous climbers plant nuclear-powered sensors in the Himalayas • Defector

Patrick Redford:

»

China’s nuclear test announced the country as the world’s fifth nuclear-armed nation, though unlike France, the USSR, and the United Kingdom, the Chinese nuclear program was a black box for American intelligence. Recently declassified government files show, for example, that the U.S. was shocked to learn that the bomb was fueled by uranium, not plutonium. Military-industrial honchos were left scratching their heads as to how to gather intelligence, until a chance meeting between General Curtis LeMay and mountaineer Barry Bishop at a Washington D.C. cocktail party led to one of the most quixotic, unsuccessful operations in the CIA’s long history of screwups.

Bishop was part of the first American team to summit Mt. Everest the year prior, and according to Pete Takeda’s fascinating 2007 Rock And Ice story, he gushed about the unobstructed views he enjoyed from the world’s (arguably) tallest mountain. Takeda writes that LeMay put the pieces together and, “From this casual exchange emerged an unlikely inspiration: Recruit America’s best high-altitude climbers to place a nuclear powered observation device atop the world’s greatest mountain range.” The hope was that a transceiver could pick up radio communications between Chinese nuclear personnel, remaining functional for years off of the heat from decaying plutonium isotopes. Per Takeda, the CIA’s device was an “oven-sized metal bin with five radiating fins” that weighed 125 pounds and was topped by a six-foot long antenna. If this sounds like a crude product of ’60s nuclear frenzy, consider that NASA’s Perseverance rover is scooting around on Mars thanks to this exact sort of battery.

«

There’s also a writeup over at Rock & Ice (which this piece borrows heavily from, but has the better headline) going into some more detail about what might have happened to the device. A clue: nothing good, especially if you live near a glacier at the bottom of Nanda Devi.
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Long COVID patients say they feel better after getting vaccinated • The Verge

Nicole Wetsman:

»

“I started getting texts and calls from some of my colleagues saying hey, are your patients with long COVID reporting that they’re feeling better after the vaccine?” says [Daniel] Griffin, an infectious diseases clinician and researcher at Columbia University. When he started talking with patients, he saw that they were. “It’s not 100 percent, but it does seem like to be around a third,” he says.

Early reports from Griffin and others hint that people with persistent symptoms may improve after getting vaccinated. Information is still limited, and the data is largely anecdotal — but if the pattern holds, it could help researchers understand more about why symptoms of COVID-19 persist in some people, and offer a path to relief.

Many of Griffin’s patients who improved had significant side effects after their first shot of either the Moderna or Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine. That’s common in people who’ve had COVID-19 before — they already have some level of antibodies, so the first shot acts more like a second booster. Then, his patients with chronic symptoms started to report that their sense of smell was improving or that they weren’t as fatigued. “For some of them it was short lived. But for a chunk, it actually persisted — they went ahead, got their second shot out, and are saying, wow, they really feel like there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Griffin says.

…
There are plausible biological reasons vaccination could help people with long COVID, says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University. Scientists still don’t know for sure why some people have chronic symptoms, but one theory is that the virus or fragments of the virus stick around in their body. They’re not contagious, but the leftovers continue to irritate the immune system. Vaccination could clear those out. “Potentially, those remnants are removed because you’re generating a lot of antibodies,” Iwasaki told The Verge.

«

There are a number of reports to this effect. That’s very encouraging.
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CDC’s draft guidelines for vaccinated Americans call for small steps toward normal life • POLITICO

Erin Banco:

»

The CDC guidance, which could be released as early as Thursday, will include recommendations that Americans limit their social interactions to small gatherings in the home with other fully vaccinated individuals, wear masks in public and adhere to other public-health measures such as social distancing for the foreseeable future.
But the agency’s advice is likely to disappoint many who hoped the increasing pace of inoculations would allow some common restrictions to be relaxed immediately for vaccinated people.

The document will include a series of scenarios for Americans to consider, including where they socialize, with whom they can socialize with and what to consider when making plans. It will also include a section on travel.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical officer, as well as CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky previewed the guidance at a press conference with reporters Monday. Fauci said while the guidelines were still being finalized, “doubly vaccinated” Americans could gather within the home safely.

“I use the example of a daughter coming in from out of town who is doubly vaccinated, and a husband and wife doubly vaccinated, and maybe a next-door neighbor who you know are doubly vaccinated,” Fauci said. “Small gatherings in the home of people, I think you can clearly feel that the risk — the relative risk is so low that you would not have to wear a mask, that you could have a good social gathering within the home.”

«

Hardly thrilling. A whole lot of doubly vaccinated people, and you finally think they might be able to leave their masks off? That doesn’t show that much confidence in the vaccine.
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Colleges that require coronavirus screening tech struggle to say whether it works • The New York Times

Natasha Singer and Kellen Browning:

»

Before the University of Idaho welcomed students back to campus last fall, it made a big bet on new virus-screening technology.

The university spent $90,000 installing temperature-scanning stations, which look like airport metal detectors, in front of its dining and athletic facilities in Moscow, Idaho. When the system clocks a student walking through with an unusually high temperature, the student is asked to leave and go get tested for Covid-19.

But so far the fever scanners, which detect skin temperature, have caught fewer than 10 people out of the 9,000 students living on or near campus. Even then, university administrators could not say whether the technology had been effective because they have not tracked students flagged with fevers to see if they went on to get tested for the virus.

The University of Idaho is one of hundreds of colleges and universities that adopted fever scanners, symptom checkers, wearable heart-rate monitors and other new Covid-screening technologies this school year. Such tools often cost less than a more validated health intervention: frequent virus testing of all students. They also help colleges showcase their pandemic safety efforts.

But the struggle at many colleges to keep the virus at bay has raised questions about the usefulness of the technologies. A New York Times effort has recorded more than 530,000 virus cases on campuses since the start of the pandemic.

«

More Covid theatre: you can have the virus but not have a temperature, and possibly be spreading it. Not linking the positive temperature results to the virus outcome is just mindboggling, though. (Thanks G for the link.)
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The ‘LitterCam’ that’s watching you • BBC News

Justin Rowlatt:

»

CCTV cameras will soon have a new target – litter louts.

AI software can now match footage of motorists throwing rubbish to their car’s number plate and issue an automatic fine of £90.

The first trial of the potentially controversial new system will begin in Maidstone in Kent in a few weeks with other councils expected to follow.

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Can even, they say (and show) detect a cigarette butt being thrown out of a window, which is quite an extreme interpretation of “littering”. Automatic numberplate recognition then records the car details.
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flowchart.fun

»

this app works by typing
new lines create new nodes
indentation creates child nodes
and any text: before a colon+space creates a label
[linking] you can link to nodes using their ID in parentheses
like this: (1)
lines have a default ID of their line-number
but you can also supply a custom ID in brackets
like this: (linking)

«

Your diversion for today. Creates lovely, possibly silly, possibly useful flowcharts (though not decision trees).
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Oakland bans the use of combustion engine-powered leaf blowers and string trimmers • City of Oakland

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Prohibition on Combustion Engine-Powered Leaf Blowers and String Trimmers Ordinance (OMC 8.64)

Combustion engine-powered leaf blowers and string trimmers are those powered by an internal combustion or rotary engine using gasoline, alcohol, or other liquid or gaseous liquid. These devices pose significant health hazards to both equipment operators and Oakland residents, including the discharge of particulate matter, carbon monoxide, unburned fuel, and ozone. They also contribute to climate change by emitting carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and generate significant noise pollution, a paramount concern for Oakland residents.

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So it’s the noise more than the greenhouse gases? Oakland is, officially, a city with about 433,000 residents. That’s probably quite a lot of leaf blowers and strimmers, which (because they use two-stroke engines) will pollute as badly as a large car does.

So this ordinance, passed in January, might seem silly. But it will have real impact.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Fosco Marotto, the CTO of Gab, posted on Hacker News explaining that his “simple” coding error that led to Gab getting comprehensively hacked was in fact a very complicated coding error where he’d been completely aware of the risks of SQLi but had thought that all the data that would be presented to the query would be sanitised (as it’s known). Which goes to show that SQLi, like rust, never sleeps. (Thanks Seth for the link.) 

Rory McIlroy doesn’t like proposals to limit the length of golf clubs to reduce hitting distance. CC-licensed photo by Ed Balaun “supergolfdude” 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. Not fungible. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Price of going net zero about to be driven home for Britons • Financial Times

Peter Foster:

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Hitting the net zero target [set for 2050] will require sweeping changes in two key areas: transport, as the shift to electric cars accelerates, and buildings, where an overhaul is required to the way 30m homes are heated and insulated.

And the shift to low-carbon vehicles and swapping out of gas boilers for electric heat pumps presents the government with a series of delicate political and fiscal choices.

The projected cost is immense: the CCC estimates that annual capital spending largely by the private sector in greening the economy will peak at £50bn a year by 2030. That represents about one-eighth of current annual investment by the public and private sectors.

However, the CCC calculates that from the mid-2040s savings in operating spending — stemming in significant part from how it will be cheaper to run an electric car than a petrol-engine vehicle — will start to exceed the annual investment.

The greening of transport and homes will create winners and losers, and the government has yet to clarify where the cost burden will fall. The Treasury has said it will later this year publish a net zero review, setting out in more detail “how the costs of achieving net zero emissions are distributed”.

For transport, which the CCC estimates will require £11.4bn of average annual investment over the next 30 years, the political pathway is easier than for buildings, according to Josh Buckland, who was an adviser to former business secretary Greg Clark and is now at consultancy firm Flint Global.

“Transport is to some degree a solvable problem,” he said. “Consumers can buy cars through financing deals, and so don’t have to pay up front costs.”

Still, there are political potholes ahead. As the UK car fleet goes electric, the Treasury will need to find a way to recoup the £37bn a year it currently secures from carbon taxes, mostly fuel duty and vehicle excise duty.

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That’s the really, really big question. Though total government spend in 2018/9 was £771bn, which doesn’t make it look that much.
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Rookie coding mistake prior to Gab hack came from site’s CTO • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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Over the weekend, word emerged that a hacker breached far-right social media website Gab and downloaded 70 gigabytes of data by exploiting a garden-variety security flaw known as an SQL injection. A quick review of Gab’s open source code shows that the critical vulnerability—or at least one very much like it—was introduced by the company’s chief technology officer.

The change, which in the parlance of software development is known as a “git commit,” was made sometime in February from the account of Fosco Marotto, a former Facebook software engineer who in November became Gab’s CTO. On Monday, Gab removed the git commit from its website.

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SQLi is a decades-old hacking method, and one that everyone coding for a site allowing input should know to watch for and guard against. This is amateurish.
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MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia™, deep learning technology to animate the faces in still family photos • MyHeritage

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Animate the faces in your family photos with amazing technology. Experience your family history like never before!

Free signup is required. Photos uploaded without completing signup are automatically deleted to protect your privacy.

The remarkable technology for animating photos was licensed by MyHeritage from D-ID, a company specializing in video reenactment using deep learning. MyHeritage integrated this technology to animate the faces in historical photos and create high-quality, realistic video footage. The Deep Nostalgia™ feature uses several drivers prepared by MyHeritage. Each driver is a video consisting of a fixed sequence of movements and gestures. Deep Nostalgia™ can very accurately apply the drivers to a face in your still photo, creating a short video that you can share with your friends and family. The driver guides the movements in the animation so you can see your ancestors smile, blink, and turn their heads. This really brings your photos to life!

The Deep Nostalgia™ feature requires a high-resolution face to apply the animation, but faces in historical photos tend to be small and blurry. That’s why we combined this feature with the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer, which brings blurry and low-resolution photos into focus by increasing their resolution and sharpening the faces that appear in them.

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This must be the smartest recruitment drive ever: you can’t see the effects if you don’t sign up. (I stopped short of completion twice, because I just don’t need another email to unsubscribe from, and I don’t have any really old family photos.) But the effect is very impressive, while also spooky.
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Covid-19 vaccine passports: British public support for travel, gyms, care homes • Bloomberg

Katharine Gemmell:

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Nearly a third of UK adults have had at least one Covid-19 vaccine shot. Now a wide majority of Britons support a controversial next step: so-called vaccine passports that would allow some to return to a more-normal life.

New data provided to Bloomberg by YouGov show that 65% of British people say they would support a document that would theoretically allow vaccinated people to return to workplaces, bars and even travel again before those who haven’t had their shots.

The poll found 76% support requiring proof of vaccination for people entering the UK from abroad as soon as possible, with 16% opposed to the idea. Support was broadly steady across the political spectrum, as well as among people who voted for or against Brexit.

The UK government is reviewing the idea of requiring proof of vaccine for certain activities, which is already becoming standard in Israel, another country leading the vaccination drive. The World Health Organization opposes requiring proof of immunization in part because it’s not clear whether vaccinated people can still spread the infection. And critics say a vaccine-passport system would be discriminatory and create an elite class of people with access to the shot.

In the UK, older people, who are more likely to be vaccinated, also were more in favour of requiring proof of vaccination than younger people, who would theoretically be more restricted if requirements were put in place soon.

For Britons aged 65 and above, 77% support the speedy rollout of vaccination passports within the UK, compared with 47% of those between the ages of 18 and 24.

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Wouldn’t have thought anyone is suggesting this be introduced before every adult has had a shot – by the summer. It feels ineluctable: the demand will trickle down from care home staff to people in private hospitals and restaurants and the dam will break, and it’ll just be accepted, with some moaning from those who have been moaning about the imposition of lockdown, and the imposition of rules about masks.
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The benefits of microdosing might be down to the placebo effect • WIRED UK

Victoria Turk:

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In 2018, volunteers with an interest in microdosing – regularly taking tiny amounts of psychedelic drugs such as LSD – began taking part in an unusual experiment. For four weeks, researchers at Imperial College London asked them to swap some of their drugs with empty capsules – placebos – so that when they took them, they didn’t know if they were microdosing or not. They then completed online surveys and cognitive tasks at regular intervals, aimed at gauging their mental wellbeing and cognitive abilities. The idea: to explore if microdosing produces the benefits to mood and brain function that some people claim.

In a paper published in the journal eLife, the researchers reveal their findings. After the month-long testing period, they found that all psychological outcomes had improved since the start of the experiment for those in the microdosing group, including “in the domains of wellbeing, mindfulness, life satisfaction and paranoia.” However, the same was true for the placebo group – with no significant differences between the two.

“So, in a way, microdosing did increase a lot of these psychological variables,” says Balazs Szigeti, a research associate at Imperial College London Centre of Psychedelic Research and the lead author of the study. “But so did taking placebos for four weeks.”

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Placebos really are the wonder drug. They should try a double-blind trial where *both* arms get placebos, except one side is told placebos have lots of effects and the other is told they do nothing.
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Free-to-use ATMs vanishing at alarming rate, says Which? • Yahoo Finance

Vicky Shaw:

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Free-to-use cash machines are vanishing at an alarming rate, according to Which?

The consumer group said its latest analysis suggests there has been a spike in the number of people forced to pay to withdraw their own money from ATMs.

Some of the most deprived areas, where people are more likely to depend on cash, have seen a significant shift from free-to-use dispensers to machines that generally charge up to £2 per withdrawal in recent years, Which? found.

Which? wants to see a “clear blueprint” on the future of cash. The Government has previously pledged to legislate on the issue.

Which? said that, since 2018, two Birmingham constituencies – Hall Green and Hodge Hill – have experienced 44% and 40% reductions respectively in free-to-use ATMs, and both have seen a 59% increase in pay-to-use machines. Nottingham East has seen 43% of free cash machines closed, but an 11% increase in pay-to-use machines, Which? said. It said all three locations are within the top 10% for deprivation in England.

ATMs are the most commonly-used means of withdrawing cash, with UK Finance figures showing 91% of cash withdrawals took place through cash machines in 2019.

While there are other options, such as cashback and counter withdrawals that may play a greater role in future, ATMs currently remain an important indicator of access levels, Which? said.

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Cash is essential for those locked out of the contactless economy – which is a lot of those in poorer groups. The rise of paid machines is thus a double whammy on them.
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Pay cuts, taxes, child care: what another year of remote work will look like • WSJ

Chip Cutter and Emily Glazer:

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Companies are anticipating another largely remote work year, and new questions about compensation and benefits are weighing on managers.

Discussions about the future of work, such as whether to reduce the salaries of employees who have left high-cost cities, are priority items in board meetings and senior executive sessions across industries, according to chief executives, board members and corporate advisers.

Among the questions companies are trying to resolve: who should shoulder tax costs as employees move to new locations while working remotely? And what is the most effective way to support working parents?

Companies say there is much at stake, from the happiness and productivity of employees to regulatory consequences, if they get these decisions wrong.

Employees’ relocations to new cities, states and countries have companies and workers grappling with tax concerns.

Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees last year that, beginning in January, the company would use its virtual private network, or VPN, that employees use to access company systems to determine where they were working for tax purposes. [The company ultimately decided not to.]

…The prolonged remote spell is putting pressure on companies to give parents more help with child care—while being careful not to rankle workers without dependents.

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I don’t understand this last part. Those with dependents (well, children) have always been at a disadvantage in normal work environments: juggling responsibilities if a child is sick or school is out, or childcare is expensive, or the childcare ends before work does. Those without children honestly have no idea, and no grounds to feel rankled.
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A grizzled, months-old Chrome tab welcomes a fresh-faced new tab to my browser window • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Simon Henriques:

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Yeah, I’ve seen things. Things I wish I could forget. I’ve seen a tab of Twitter get closed, then a new one opened right back up in its place. I’ve seen tabs get opened just to do a quick arithmetic problem in the search bar — then closed before they even got the chance to visit a single website. And don’t get me started on the bloodbaths they call crossword puzzles. Dozens of good, honest tabs opened just to look up some misspelled obscure proper noun, then closed in shame once they’ve helpfully suggested the right word. It’s a dangerous world out here. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll find some kind of peace amidst this chaos we call home.

Here, I’ll introduce you to some of the guys. On the end, that’s Gmail. He’s the only one been around longer’n me, and he’s not going anywhere. Practically invincible. This fella next to me has a page of upstate real estate listings that get refreshed every so often. We call him The Dreamer. And that’s Bank Web Portal. He’s sat idle so long that he’s auto-logged out. That’s a death sentence. As soon as he gets noticed, he’s a goner. Don’t stare, son.

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Wonderful. Reminiscent of John Gruber’s “An Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard“, from June 2007. (Via John Naughton.)
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Golf: McIlroy slams proposed rule changes to reduce hitting distance • Reuters

Reuters Staff:

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Rory McIlroy has criticised golf’s lawmakers for considering changes to equipment that would tame the power of the game’s big hitters, saying the campaign is “a huge waste of time and money”.

The Royal and Ancient (R&A), in conjunction with the United States Golf Association (USGA), has proposed reducing driver shaft length to 46 inches from the current limit of 48.

Another “area of interest” for the R&A and USGA is for the potential use of local rules that would specify the use of clubs and/or balls, resulting in shorter distances.

The proposals are part of the latest updates to the Distance Insights Report published last February that said increased hitting distances changed the challenge of the game and risked making courses obsolete.

“I think the authorities are looking at the game through such a tiny little lens, that what they’re trying to do is change something that pertains to 0.1% of the golfing community,” four-times major champion McIlroy said.

“Ninety-nine% of the people that play this game play for enjoyment. They don’t need to be told what ball or clubs to use.”

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McIlroy must know that the R&A has legislated again and again down the years on what things are and aren’t legal in the game. And other professional sports impose differences on the top levels – baseball players must use wood, not the aluminium bats used in lower leagues. Football pitches vary in size.

The reduction in shaft length from 48in to 46in would in theory reduce head velocity by, what, 4% (smaller radius), and so reduce the energy imparted to the ball by 8% (96% squared = 92%). Doesn’t that make the gap in favour of the big hitters even bigger, proportionally? (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Biden administration is dramatically raising the theoretical price per tonne of carbon emitted. That’s going to have a lot of effects. CC-licensed photo by John Englart 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. And only you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Biden is hiking the cost of carbon. It will change how the US tackles global warming • The Washington Post

Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis:

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The administration plans to boost the figure it will use to assess the damage that greenhouse gas pollution inflicts on society to $51 per ton of carbon dioxide — a rate more than seven times higher than that used by former president Donald Trump’s administration. But the number, known as the “social cost of carbon,” could reach as high as $125 per ton once the administration conducts a more thorough analysis.

In a recent interview, Biden’s national climate adviser, Gina McCarthy, said the administration is setting an initial price to inform its policies “and then work more diligently about what the actual cost might be as we move forward, and get the information that we need to be able to do that.”

The ultimate figure will be incorporated into decisions across the federal government, including what sort of purchases it makes, the kind of pollution controls it imposes on industry and which highways and pipelines are permitted in the years to come. Just as important, the move sends a powerful signal to the private sector and to ordinary Americans that the choices the country makes now could lock in disastrous consequences on both current and future generations — or help to avert the worst impacts.

“A new social cost of carbon can tip the scales for hundreds of policy decisions facing the federal government,” said Tamma Carleton, assistant professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Any policy, project or regulation that lowers emissions will now have a higher dollar value, reflecting the many benefits future Americans enjoy when emissions fall today.”

“Confronting climate change will cost money,” she said. And putting a higher price on global warming’s damages, she added, “highlights the large hidden costs of doing nothing.”

While this is not a new tax that consumers would have to pay, it would make it harder for fossil fuel projects to win government approval by factoring in their long-term costs to society.

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E-mail is making us miserable • The New Yorker

Cal Newport:

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When employees are miserable, they perform worse. They’re also more likely, as the French labor minister warned, to burn out, leading to increased health-care costs and expensive employee turnover. A Harvard Business School professor found that giving a group of management consultants predictable time off from e-mail increased the percentage of them who planned to stay at the firm “for the long term” from forty% to fifty-eight%. E-mail’s power to makes us unhappy also has more philosophical implications. There are two hundred and thirty million knowledge workers in the world, which includes, according to the Federal Reserve, more than a third of the U.S. workforce. If this massive population is being made miserable by a slavish devotion to in-boxes and chat channels, then this adds up to a whole lot of global miserableness! From a utilitarian perspective, this level of suffering cannot be ignored—especially if there is something that we might be able to do to alleviate it.

Given these stakes, it’s all the more surprising that we spend so little time trying to understand the source of this discontent. Many in the business community tend to dismiss the psychological toll from e-mail as an incidental side effect caused by bad in-box habits or a weak constitution. I’ve come to believe, however, that much deeper forces are at play in generating our mismatch with this tool, including some that get at the very core of what drives us as humans.

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Though of course not the daily email in which this link appears. Don’t need to say that.
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Twitter to launch subscription service Super Follows, aims to double revenue by 2023 • WSJ

Sarah E. Needleman:

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Dantley Davis, Twitter’s head of design and research, said that “an audience-funded model where subscribers can directly fund the content that they value most is a durable incentive model that aligns interests of creators and consumers.”

Twitter disclosed the new business models at an online event for analysts, its first in several years, and said they are part of Twitter’s broader goal of reaching at least $7.5 billion in revenue or more by 2023, up from the $3.7 billion it made last year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The company is projecting its daily user base to grow to at least 315 million by the end of 2023, or around 20% annually between now and then.

Shares in Twitter rose 5% in Thursday trading.

Moving into subscriptions could be a way for Twitter to rely less on advertising, which accounted for 86% of the company’s total revenue in 2020. Last month Twitter said it reached a deal to buy newsletter platform Revue Holding BV, tapping into a trend of tech companies providing content creators with tools to make money. The growing space includes other newsletter startups such as Substack Inc. and Rocket Science Group LLC’s Mailchimp.

With tipping, Twitter would join several other social-networking companies that offer users the opportunity to show support for one another or groups of users. Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube, Amazon.com Inc.’s live-streaming service Twitch and chat platform Discord Inc. allow users to purchase digital perks for this purpose.

Though it is working to build other lines of business, Twitter has added and improved tools for advertisers looking to market on the platform. The company has said one way it hopes to grow is by appealing to more small-business advertisers. Most of its advertisers are large companies.

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So! Which Twitter accounts do you follow that you’d actually pay for?
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Some of biggest Android VPN services’ user data hacked • CyberNews

“Cybernews Team”:

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The VPN services whose data has been allegedly exfiltrated by the hacker are SuperVPN, which is considered as one of the most popular (and dangerous) VPNs on Google Play with 100,000,000+ installs on the Play store, as well as GeckoVPN (10,000,000+ installs) and ChatVPN (50,000+ installs).

The forum user is selling deeply sensitive device data and login credentials – email addresses and randomly generated strings used as passwords – of more than 21 million VPN users for an undisclosed sum. 

We reached out to SuperVPN, GeckoVPN, and ChatVPN and asked the providers if they could confirm that the leak was genuine but we have received no responses at the time of writing this report.

The author of the forum post is selling three archives, two of which allegedly contain a variety of data apparently collected by the providers from more than 21,000,000 SuperVPN, GeckoVPN, and ChatVPN users, including:
• Email addresses
• Usernames
• Full names
• Country names
• Randomly generated password strings
• Payment-related data
• Premium member status and its expiration date

The forum post author is also offering potential buyers to sort the data by country. The random password strings might indicate that the VPN user accounts could be linked with their Google Play store accounts where the users downloaded their VPN apps from. 

…Based on the samples we saw from the second archive, it appears to contain user device information, including:
• Device serial numbers
• Phone types and manufacturers
• Device IDs
• Device IMSI numbers

If the data sold by the threat actor is genuine, it appears that the VPN providers in question are logging far more information about their users than stated in their Privacy Policies.

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Remember how podcasts used to be stuffed with ads for VPNs? I still don’t trust them.

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Far-right platform Gab has been hacked—including private data • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project” siphoned that data out of Gab’s backend databases in an effort to expose the platform’s largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump’s election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.

DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab’s public posts and profiles—with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site—but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. “It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content,” Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. “It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6.”

DDoSecrets says it’s not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. WIRED viewed a sample of the data, and it does appear to contain Gab users’ individual and group profiles—their descriptions and privacy settings—public and private posts, and passwords. Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the breach in a brief statement Sunday.

…Among the users whose hashed passwords appeared to be included in the data were those for Donald Trump, Republican congresswoman and QAnon-conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, MyPillow CEO and election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, and disinformation-spouting radio host Alex Jones.

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So this shows that its security is pretty weak, but it’s hard to see that this will make any difference unless they carefully pick who they disclose to: most of the grim behaviour on Gab is right there in the open.
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SmartThings starts saying goodbye to its hardware • Stacey on IoT

Stacey Higginbotham:

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If you own a 2013 SmartThings hub (that’s the original) or a SmartThings Link for the Nvidia Shield TV, your hardware will stop working on June 30 of this year. The device depreciation is part of the announced exodus from manufacturing and supporting its own hardware and the Groovy IDE that Samsung Smartthings announced last summer.

…I get that a lot of y’all are going to be upset over this news, especially because transitioning hubs and routines is a pain. If you’d rather abandon the SmartThings ship entirely then we have a list of alternative hubs you can find, although many of them are tough to find in stock owing to chip shortages and supply delays. I’m going to use this moment to argue for companies to put expiration dates on their products so buyers can evaluate how long they should expect a device to last, especially for something like a hub which can require hours of programming and setting up.

Those who purchased the first version of the hub in 2013 to see it stop working after seven years is annoying, but it doesn’t feel like an affront. It’s still pretty early to determine what the lifetime of a smart home hub should be. Based on the discounting plan, Samsung seems to think three years is sufficient, although that seems pretty limited to me. For a hub device, five years feels like a good minimum, and I might even hope it would last a decade. But I am cheap and hate to reprogram my home automation.

The thing I most like about this news is that Samsung is thinking about the death of these products and planning for recycling.

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If you can in effect hot-swap a new hub for the old, then OK. But not if it involves a ton of reprogramming. That’s going to be the next obstacle for smart homes: what happens when pieces of gear in a complex system reach the end of their lives at different times, until you’re constantly swapping things out and replacements in.
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Biden can’t fix the chip shortage any time soon. Here’s why • The Washington Post

Jeanne Whalen, Reed Albergotti and David J. Lynch:

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Many of the factors contributing to the shortfall are tied to recent events like the pandemic and the cold snap that slapped Texas and sidelined two chip factories in Austin. But the growing presence of chips in devices large and small foreshadows a supply problem not easily resolved by warmer weather or presidential executive orders. New semiconductor factories are among the most complex manufacturing facilities to build, costing billions of dollars and taking years to construct.

That means much of the world’s electronics industry will continue to depend heavily on existing factories, many of them in Taiwan — a reliance that critics say looks increasingly risky as the island’s tensions with China rise. One Taiwanese company, TSMC, produces 70% of the global auto industry’s supply of a key type of chip called a microcontroller, according to research firm IHS Markit.

“You have an entire global electronics supply chain that is dependent on Taiwan, and it’s 100 miles offshore of China,” said Stacy Rasgon, a semiconductor analyst at the financial services firm AllianceBernstein. “Given everything going on with geopolitical tensions, that’s becoming a strategically untenable position.”

That has helped spark bipartisan calls for government subsidies to encourage construction of more chip factories in the United States, which today hosts 12% of global semiconductor manufacturing.

The supply pinch has hit auto manufacturers particularly hard because they use many chips designed years ago that are lower-priority items for semiconductor makers. Those chips yield lower profit margins than the newer, pricier semiconductors that power 5G smartphones and video games, which are also in high demand worldwide and dominate many manufacturing lines.
The global auto industry will produce 1.5 million to 5 million fewer vehicles this year than originally planned because of the supply constraints, according to the consulting firm AlixPartners. Some analysts predict that could raise auto costs for consumers and threaten jobs in a sector that employs hundreds of thousands of Americans.

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TSMC more and more looks like a basket containing too many eggs. Globalisation is great until it puts your critical infrastructure under the purview of a potentially hostile power.
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Clubhouse users spend hours on the app. What’s the appeal? • Los Angeles Times

Sam Dean:

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Many have been drawn by simple curiosity, or the promise of hopping into a room with a favorite celebrity. Some are chasing fame and exposure to the growing crowd. Others are there because it’s their job to figure out what’s going on in the social tech world. For the most part, only the most popular performers are making money on the app, by soliciting tips from fans via payment apps.

And then there are those scammers.

The grifts run the gamut from the most basic — persuading people to pay for invitations to the app, or to join a room or a club — to multi-phase chicanery.

Users claiming to be business experts have run pitch rooms, Harfoush said, where they invite hopeful entrepreneurs to outline their dreams for a new business on stage, and then go register related domain names with the intent of selling them back to the hopefuls at a markup. Fake literary agents promise aspiring authors that they’ll edit their manuscripts and connect them with publishers, for an upfront fee.

Other users claiming to be music producers invite aspiring beatmakers to present their tracks live for critique, and then simply steal the tracks as their own. And motivational speakers are using Clubhouse as a new venue to convince anyone that they can learn how to become a millionaire — if only they pay thousands of dollars for an exclusive executive coaching seminar. Audience plants, fake time limits and other hard-sell tactics abound.

The anti-grift squad makes a point of not naming bad actors in their weekly sessions, in part to avoid another risk that’s emerged as Clubhouse has grown: harassment and retaliation. Users with significant follower bases can coordinate mass blockings and reportings of users who accuse them of wrongdoing (or whom they simply dislike), which can result in temporary suspension. Clubhouse declined to comment for this article.

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Apple Watch is now worn on 100 million wrists • Above Avalon

Neil Cybart:

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More than 100 million people wear an Apple Watch. Based on my estimates, Apple surpassed the important adoption milestone this past December. The Apple Watch has already helped usher in a new paradigm shift in computing, and Apple is still only getting started with what is possible on the wrist. New services designed specifically for Apple Watch (such as Fitness+) are being released. The wrist’s utility continues to be unveiled thanks to new hardware and software features revolving around health monitoring.

It took five-and-a-half years for the Apple Watch installed base to surpass 100 million people. As shown in the figure, the installed base’s growth trajectory has not been constant or steady over the years. Instead, the number of people entering the Apple Watch installed base continues to accelerate. The 30 million new people that began wearing an Apple Watch in 2020 nearly exceeded the number of new Apple Watch wearers in 2015, 2016, and 2017 combined.

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Certainly I notice a growing number of people wearing an Apple Watch who I wouldn’t have expected to where I live in the UK (not in a city). The launch of Fitness+ is fortunately timed: I’ve been trying it out, and realise that it gives you the encouraging feeling that you’re doing the workout with a group, not just with an instructor. And in These Times, that’s a strong positive.

The doubts about the Apple Watch at its launch were reasonable: the fashion missteps (blame Jony Ive) were, quickly enough, erased in favour of exercise and health. I wonder if Tim Cook had some input into that: he’s a lot more into fitness than fashion.
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How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6m • Reuters

Elizabeth Howcroft and Ritvik Carvalho:

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In October 2020, Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spent almost $67,000 on a 10-second video artwork that he could have watched for free online. Last week, he sold it for $6.6 million.

The video by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was authenticated by blockchain, which serves as a digital signature to certify who owns it and that it is the original work.

It’s a new type of digital asset – known as a non-fungible token (NFT) – that has exploded in popularity during the pandemic as enthusiasts and investors scramble to spend enormous sums of money on items that only exist online.

Blockchain technology allows the items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind, unlike traditional online objects which can be endlessly reproduced.

“You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work,” said Rodriguez-Fraile, who said he first bought Beeple’s piece because of his knowledge of the U.S.-based artist’s work.

“The reality here is that this is very, very valuable because of who is behind it.”

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2001 internet: haha! Copyright is dead, everything can be replicated infinitely, your content has no value!

2021 internet: we really like digital things that are unique, how much can we pay?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sanitising hands and surfaces doesn’t make any difference to the spread of Covid. So why do we keep on doing it? CC-licensed photo by Hazel Nicholson 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. Not disinfected. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How public-health messaging over coronavirus, the pandemic and the vaccine backfired • The Atlantic

Zeynep Tufekci:

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Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty. And now, even as vaccines offer brilliant hope, and even though, at least in the United States, we no longer have to deal with the problem of a misinformer in chief, some officials and media outlets are repeating many of the same mistakes in handling the vaccine rollout.

The pandemic has given us an unwelcome societal stress test, revealing the cracks and weaknesses in our institutions and our systems. Some of these are common to many contemporary problems, including political dysfunction and the way our public sphere operates. Others are more particular, though not exclusive, to the current challenge—including a gap between how academic research operates and how the public understands that research, and the ways in which the psychology of coping with the pandemic have distorted our response to it.

Recognizing all these dynamics is important, not only for seeing us through this pandemic—yes, it is going to end—but also to understand how our society functions, and how it fails. We need to start shoring up our defenses, not just against future pandemics but against all the myriad challenges we face—political, environmental, societal, and technological. None of these problems is impossible to remedy, but first we have to acknowledge them and start working to fix them—and we’re running out of time.

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Tufekci, as I keep saying, has an astonishing ability to cut through the noise in any situation. If I were in charge of anything bigger than a skiff, I’d be calling her for advice regularly. I think her background as a sociologist gives her that skill at understanding what is important, and what is just people being thoughtless people.

(Her five fallacies are: risk compensation, rules in place of mechanisms and intuitions, scolding and shaming, harm reduction, and the balance between knowledge and action. But of course you really should read it for yourself.
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First vaccine to fully immunize against malaria builds on pandemic-driven RNA tech • The Academic Times

Monisha Ravisetti:

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Making a vaccine for malaria is challenging because its associated parasite, Plasmodium, contains a protein that inhibits production of memory T-cells, which protect against previously encountered pathogens. If the body can’t generate these cells, a vaccine is ineffective. But scientists recently tried a new approach using an RNA-based platform. 

Their design circumvented the sneaky protein, allowed the body to produce the needed T-cells and completely immunized against malaria. The patent application for their novel vaccine, which hasn’t yet been tested on humans, was published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on Feb. 4.

“It’s probably the highest level of protection that has been seen in a mouse model,” said Richard Bucala, co-inventor of the new vaccine and a physician and professor at Yale School of Medicine.

The team’s breakthrough could save hundreds of thousands of lives, particularly in developing nations.

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OK, but: IN MICE. Many a slip between murine and human. Still: this is the third mRNA vaccine we’ve seen in testing: after Covid, there was multiple sclerosis, and now this. The latter two, of course, in mice only so far.
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What do you miss least about pre-lockdown life? • eRambler

Jez Cope:

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The first thing that leaps to my mind is commuting. At various points in my life I’ve spent between one and three hours a day travelling to and from work and I’ve never more than tolerated it at best. It steals time from your day, and societal norms dictate that it’s your leisure and self-care time that must be sacrificed. Longer commutes allow more time to get into a book or podcast, especially if not driving, but I’d rather have that time at home rather than trying to be comfortable in a train seat designed for some mythical average man shaped nothing like me!

The other thing I don’t miss is the colds and flu! Before the pandemic, British culture encouraged working even when ill, which meant constantly coming into contact with people carrying low-grade viruses. I’m not immunocompromised but some allergies and residue of being asthmatic as a child meant that I would get sick two or three times a year. A pleasant side-effect of the COVID precautions we’re all taking is that I haven’t been sick for over 12 months now, which is amazing!

Finally, I don’t miss having so little control over my environment. One of the things that working from home has made clear is that there are certain unavoidable aspects of working in my shared office that cause me sensory stress, and that are completely unrelated to my work. Working (or trying to work) next to a noisy automatic scanner; trying to find a light level that works for 6 different people doing different tasks; lacking somewhere quiet and still to eat lunch and recover from a morning of meetings or the constant vaguely-distracting bustle of a large shared office.

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I bet a lot of people really don’t want to go back to commuting – for the cost, as much as the time. But equally, I bet there’s a lot who really do want to get away from their home surroundings, and wallow in a totally different milieu.
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E Day • Archiepyedia

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The first known celebration of e Day is believed to have occurred on January 27 1983, thus predating the very first Pi day by over five years. This happened when a group of second-year mathematics undergraduates at the University of Unter Über Schlesswig Holstein decided that they had had enough of calculus and were instead going to get blind drunk on several crates of low-quality, high-strength Weissbier. The resulting rampage through the town is estimated to have caused twenty-four million deutschmarks’ worth of damage. However, the ringleaders avoided any punishment by pointing out the date, 27/1/83, and claiming that they were in fact celebrating the transcendental mathematical constant to five significant figures. Despite strong suspicions that this was a complete coincidence, the university and municipal authorities eventually backed down.

There were no further celebrations of e Day for several years after this, as mathematics departments in universities throughout the world maintained a state of high alert in case of any repetition of the Unter Über Schlesswig Holstein incident. However, when the first Pi Day went off without any apparent problems in 1988, a small celebration of e Day was allowed in 1990 and has continued thereafter.

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You’ve heard of Pi day. Are you sure there isn’t an e day? (Via Jonathan Pinnock)
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Convenience of public phone boxes near end of line • Financial Times

Nic Fildes:

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About half of Britain’s 40,000 public telephone boxes are set to disappear from the streets as BT scraps kiosks that attract more visitors wanting to “spend a penny” than make a 60p phone call.

The telecoms company’s phone booths, including 7,000 traditional red phone boxes, still handle about 33,000 calls a day, despite universal mobile phone ownership. Yet more than half the boxes lose money and about a third do not handle a single phone call in any given month.

Gerry McQuade, head of BT’s wholesale unit which runs the pay phones business, said he has speeded up plans to cull 20,000 phone boxes and focus on profitable locations. “Very few of them make any money as it stands. In aggregate, it costs us more to collect the money than the phone boxes generate,” he said.

BT has already reduced its phone box estate from a peak of 92,000 in 1992 before the advent of mobile phones reduced the relevance of the traditional pay phone. The number of calls made in phone boxes has dropped 80% from its peak and continues to dwindle at a rate of about 20% a year.

Most of the boxes have become a burden for the company, which has to repair smashed panes of glass and clean up the mess when members of the public use the pay phone as a public convenience.

The annual cost of repairing phone boxes hit £7m five years ago and the company still struggles with illegal activity in some locations where phone boxes can be used to organise drug deals.

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Probably also a proxy for landlines overall. I’d love to know how many home movers now don’t attach a phone to their landline (which is generally required for providing broadband).
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Politics Odds: UK 5/1 to rejoin EU by 2026 as Brexit bites • Betfair

Max Liu:

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The UK is 5/1 to rejoin the European Union amid growing concerns that the Brexit trade deal has left the country poorer and less secure.

So far the government has played down claims from businesses and fisherman that the deal has damaged their exports and ignored concerns from the valuable performing arts sector.

But this week a group of Conservatives said the deal had left the UK “less safe and less secure” and called for Boris Johnson to reopen talks with the EU about security co-operation.

Dominic Grieve and David Lidington, a former attorney general and de facto deputy prime minister respectively, lead the calls. They both voted Remain and were vocal critics of the government’s handling of Brexit, so you might conclude that it’s a case of the usual Remainer suspects trying to scupper the outcome.

On the other hand, as the reality of Brexit bites it could be that this is a taste of things to come.

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Wow! Excepppppppppt: if you look at the market predictor, it’s offering 1-10 (a bet of £10 gets you £11) on remaining out. So if you bet £10 on staying out, and £1 on going back in, if we stay out: you lose nothing. If we go back in, you win £6, losing £5 in total. Funny kind of game.
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Dispo, David Dobrik’s photo-sharing app, is taking off • The New York Times

Taylor Lorenz:

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Dispo, a new photo-sharing app that mimics the experience of using a disposable camera, is taking off. People are clamoring for invites to test the beta version. Early adopters are praising its social features. And investors are betting big on its future.

In the app, users frame photographs through a small rectangular viewfinder. There are no editing tools or captions; when the images “develop” — i.e. show up on your phone at 9 a.m. the next day — you get what you get. Multiple people can take photos on the same roll, as might happen with a real disposable camera at a party.

“When I used to go to parties with my friends, they would have disposable cameras all throughout the house, and they’d urge people to take pictures throughout the night,” said David Dobrik, a YouTube star and a founder of the app. “In the morning, they’d collect all the cameras and look back at the footage and be like, ‘What happened last night?’” (He used an expletive for emphasis.)

He and his friends loved the serendipity of scrolling through fleeting and forgotten moments. “It would be like the ending of ‘The Hangover’ every morning,” Mr. Dobrik, 24, said. He started posting his developed photographs on a dedicated Instagram account in June 2019, and quickly racked up millions of followers. Other influencers and celebrities, including Tana Mongeau and Gigi Hadid, soon started their own “disposable” accounts; their fans followed suit.

Sensing a trend, Mr. Dobrik sought to recreate the disposable-camera experience digitally, as an antidote to the obsession with getting the perfect shot. “You never looked at the picture, you never checked the lighting,” he said of using disposables. “You just went on with your day, and in the morning you got to relive it.”

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Delayed gratification: who would have guessed that we were in the mood for it after a year of on-off lockdowns. This does sound a bit like Hipstamatic, which had a similar Polaroid-picture feel, but was thoroughly steamrollered by Instagram because it lacked social features.

Expected future app: something that mimics taking a picture with film, where you have to do some gesture to wind it on.
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Apple fans are obsessed with this TikToker’s awesome iPhone hack • BGR

Yoni Heisler:

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Say, for example, you want to move eight applications from your home screen to the second page of apps on your device. Normally, you’d press down on an app and select the “Edit Home Screen” option from the contextual menu. Once the apps started wiggling, you’d manually drag each application, one by one, from the home screen to the second page of apps. Needless to say, this can quickly get tedious, especially if you’re trying to move apps from the home screen to, say, the fifth page of apps on your iPhone.

This iPhone trick, however, allows you to simultaneously select multiple applications and move them to another page all at once. Here’s how it works.

To get started, long-press on an app icon until the contextual menu appears. From there, select the “Edit Home Screen” selection. Once the applications start wiggling, press down on an application you’d like to move to another page and move it slightly in any direction. You’ll want to make sure that you keep your finger pressed down on the app the entire time. From there, with your finger still on the screen, take your other finger and simply tap every other application you’d like to move to another page. Upon doing so, you’ll see every newly-tapped application be whisked away to the first app icon’s location. It may seem like you’re adding all of the apps into a folder, but that’s not the case.

Once you’ve selected every app you want to move, drag the collection of app icons to the right or left, depending on which page you want to move them to. Upon doing that, all of the selected apps will re-appear on the new page.

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The video makes it look like the simplest, most obvious thing ever. But: though I wasn’t aware of it, it’s been available since iOS 11, in 2017. Touch interfaces hide their complexity through the lack of a menu bar.
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How heat pumps help homeowners fight climate change • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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we expend energy glorifying electric cars. For this year’s Super Bowl, General Motors spent millions on a star-studded ad celebrating its ambitious electric-vehicle plans. It was surprising, but not out of place. Less surprisingly, no heat-pump ads aired during the big game. Even if trust in the grid can be improved, electric heat faces one big problem: Transitioning off natural gas just isn’t as sexy as solar panels or electric cars. Unless you’re a contractor or an HVAC nerd, you probably don’t think much about your heating and cooling systems. They are hidden in attics and basements and utility closets, tucked away on roofs or in side yards. These machines go almost entirely unconsidered unless they break down. Nobody shows off their new water heater when friends come over the way they might show off a Tesla in the garage.

Unlike solar panels, clean upgrades to home appliances also don’t produce social-signaling benefits—the neighbors can’t gawk at your greener home, and you can’t take pride in passersby noticing it. How do you make a heat pump sexy? “I don’t know,” Scott Blunk, Sacramento Municipal Utility District [SMUD]’s strategic business planner of electrification and energy efficiency, admitted. “I think the closest we have is cooking.” He means the blue flame of a stove, the only place in the home where a resident can see and hear and feel natural gas at work. Stove-top cooking is so essential to justifying home gas service, the fossil-fuel industry has poured resources into preserving the appliances’ appeal.

Even SMUD’s executives felt protective of kitchen gas. “You’re never going to get rid of my gas stove,” Blunk recalled them saying. So he bought them portable induction-cooking units (a kind of electric stove that transfers heat directly to cookware) to demonstrate that modern electric cooking heat wasn’t like the old wire coils they might remember from the 1950s.

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And yet heat upmps are amazingly efficient. That plus electric cars, you’re a long way towards the taget.
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Bill Gates explains why he still prefers Android over iPhone during interview on Clubhouse • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Gates has talked about his use of Android in the past, so Sorkin was curious [in an interview with Gates on Clubhouse] if his preference might have changed, given that he was speaking through a service that’s only available on iOS.

In response, the Microsoft founder explained that he still prefers an Android, but that he keeps an iPhone around to try out — and apparently for joining Clubhouse rooms. Gates’ reasoning for using Android is because manufacturers often pre-install Microsoft software:

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I actually use an Android phone. Because I want to keep track of everything, I’ll often play around with iPhones, but the one I carry around happens to be Android. Some of the Android manufacturers pre-install Microsoft software in a way that makes it easy for me. They’re more flexible about how the software connects up with the operating system. So that’s what I ended up getting used to. You know, a lot of my friends have iPhone , so there’s no purity.

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The reasoning here is a bit odd because you can download Microsoft apps from the App Store on iPhone, and even now adjust your default browser and email apps with iOS 14, so it’s not clear what Gates is referring to.

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Wouldn’t expect BillG to be up on the ins and outs of what iOS 14 has brought – he has very much better things to be concerned about – but there’s a wonderful irony in him appearing on (what is presently) an iPhone-only service. How did he get on there, exactly? Did someone loan him a phone? Did he switch his SIM into an iPhone? Inquiring minds need the detail.
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Google says it’s working to get ‘Hey Google’ working on Wear OS again • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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Activating the Google Assistant by saying “Hey Google” has been broken for months, according to a report from 9to5Google. Google tells The Verge it’s now working on a fix, saying that it’s “aware of the issues some users have been encountering” and will help its partners “address these and improve the overall experience.”

There are a good number of users reporting the issue — a post on Google’s Issue Tracker has almost a thousand stars. Reading through the thread, it’s clear that many users with different smartwatch models are all reporting the same issue going back to November 2020. They say the assistant isn’t completely unusable, as users are still able to trigger it with a long button-press, but if the voice-activation feature hasn’t been working for that long, it likely doesn’t help the perception that Google doesn’t care about Wear OS.

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First reported on November 9, 2020; implies that Google staff who use Wear OS don’t use that feature either. I think the phrase “Google doesn’t care about Wear OS” probably rolls it all up; Google’s now much more interested in making Fitbit its thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The pandemic is leading local authorities to remove swings from playgrounds, bizarre though it sounds. CC-licensed photo by Simon 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. Roundabouts next? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why swings are disappearing from UK playgrounds • City Monitor

Emma Haslett:

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“In case nobody’s pointed this out, in terms of equipment, swings are way more popular than anything else,” says Tim Gill, author of Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities. “Always have been, always will be.”

Their popularity could be the very reason swings are disappearing, says Gill. Local authorities are faced with a dilemma: on one hand, successive lockdowns have hit kids’ mental health hard, with a report by the NHS and the UK’s statistics authority indicating one in six children had a probable mental health disorder last year, up from one in nine three years previously – and outdoor play is seen as a way to combat that. On the other, local residents are complaining to councils that parents may be using playgrounds as an excuse for under-the-radar socialising while their kids exercise.

“Members of the public have noticed that kids are still playing in playgrounds and adults are congregating around playgrounds, so they then have complained to local authorities,” says Mark Hardy, head of the Association of Play Industries (API), which represents 85% of the UK’s play sector. One poll on the TV show Loose Women in January showed 75% of the public wanted playgrounds to be closed.

An easy solution for councils may be to remove the most popular piece of equipment on the playground to control the number of people there. Taking away swings cuts a whole group of parents – of kids who aren’t old enough to use anything but a swing – out of the equation. It also cuts down on the number of people lingering, and potentially socialising, around swing sets as they push their kids or wait for one to become available.

“If a council does… feel the need to stop people from coming to a place – reduce the numbers – the quickest and easiest way to do that is to disable the swings,” says Gill. “It’s a device, I guess, for a certain end to be achieved.”

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People standing near each other in the open air: utterly minimal risk of coronavirus transmission. Kids stuck inside with parents: bigger risk of all sorts of other adverse effects. It would be great if busybody non-parents could stay out of some things. (Thanks Citizen Sev for the pointer.)
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Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest in a millennium, say scientists • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

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The Atlantic Ocean circulation that underpins the Gulf Stream, the weather system that brings warm and mild weather to Europe, is at its weakest in more than a millennium, and climate breakdown is the probable cause, according to new data.

Further weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could result in more storms battering the UK, more intense winters and an increase in damaging heatwaves and droughts across Europe.

Scientists predict that the AMOC will weaken further if global heating continues, and could reduce by about 34% to 45% by the end of this century, which could bring us close to a “tipping point” at which the system could become irrevocably unstable. A weakened Gulf Stream would also raise sea levels on the Atlantic coast of the US, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who co-authored the study published on Thursday in Nature Geoscience, told the Guardian that a weakening AMOC would increase the number and severity of storms hitting Britain, and bring more heatwaves to Europe.

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The only sort of climate news we’re going to get from here on it is bad climate news. Yet unlike the rule that usually applies for news – don’t give us the good, give us the doom! – we don’t seem to welcome the bad climate news.
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Exclusive: Google pledges changes to research oversight after internal revolt • Reuters

Jeffrey Dastin, Paresh Dave:

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An internal email, seen by Reuters, offered fresh detail on Google researchers’ concerns, showing exactly how Google’s legal department had modified one of the three AI papers, called “Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models.”

The email, dated Feb. 8, from a co-author of the paper, Nicholas Carlini, went to hundreds of colleagues, seeking to draw their attention to what he called “deeply insidious” edits by company lawyers.

“Let’s be clear here,” the roughly 1,200-word email said. “When we as academics write that we have a ‘concern’ or find something ‘worrying’ and a Google lawyer requires that we change it to sound nicer, this is very much Big Brother stepping in.”

Required edits, according to his email, included “negative-to-neutral” swaps such as changing the word “concerns” to “considerations,” and “dangers” to “risks.” Lawyers also required deleting references to Google technology; the authors’ finding that AI leaked copyrighted content; and the words “breach” and “sensitive,” the email said.

Carlini did not respond to requests for comment. Google in answer to questions about the email disputed its contention that lawyers were trying to control the paper’s tone. The company said it had no issues with the topics investigated by the paper, but it found some legal terms used inaccurately and conducted a thorough edit as a result.

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Quantifying carbon fluxes in the world’s forests • World Resources Institute

Nancy Harris and David Gibbs:

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The world is getting a better understanding of just how important forests are in the global fight against climate change.

New research, published in Nature Climate Change and available on Global Forest Watch, found that the world’s forests sequestered about twice as much carbon dioxide as they emitted between 2001 and 2019. In other words, forests provide a “carbon sink” that absorbs a net 7.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 per year, 1.5 times more carbon than the United States emits annually.

Unlike other sectors, where carbon makes a one-way trip to the atmosphere, forests act as a two-way highway, absorbing CO2 when standing or regrowing and releasing it when cleared or degraded.

Before now, scientists estimated these global “carbon fluxes” from the sum of country-reported data, creating a coarse picture of the role forests play in both carbon emissions and sequestration. With these new data that combine ground measurements with satellite observations, we can now quantify carbon fluxes consistently over any area, from small local forests to countries to entire continents.

Using this more granular information, we found that the world’s forests emitted an average of 8.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year due to deforestation and other disturbances, and absorbed 16 billion metric tonnes of CO2 per year.

…Over the past 20 years, forests across Southeast Asia have collectively become a net source of carbon emissions due to clearing for plantations, uncontrolled fires and drainage of peat soils.

The Amazon River basin, which stretches across nine countries in South America, is still a net carbon sink, but teeters on the edge of becoming a net source if forest loss continues at current rates.

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To prevent climate change getting worse, we need to not just stop carbon being added to the atmosphere (because what’s in there has an amplification effect) but also take it out, as the forests do.

How much? Something like half a trillion tonnes.
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Brexit trade delays getting worse at UK border, survey finds • The Guardian

Lisa O’Carroll:

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Delays importing and exporting goods to and from the EU have worsened since Brexit was introduced at the start of the year and will result in stock shortages and price rises for consumers, according to a report.

A survey of 350 supply chain managers found that two out of three had experienced delays of “at least two to three days” getting goods into the UK, compared with 38% who reported delays in a similar survey in January.

A third of this group said the delays were “significantly longer” than in January, 28% said “slightly longer” and 15% reported delays of a similar length to January. Just 18% of those surveyed by the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) said they experienced no delays or fewer delays.

The situation was only slightly better for exports, with 44% experiencing delays of at least two to three days getting goods into the EU.

The survey comes as one of the UK’s largest chemical producers, BASF, reveals it has experienced “substantial friction” from the new trade barriers caused by withdrawal from the EU.

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O’Carroll is The Guardian’s Brexit correspondent. I think she’s going to be in work for a long time. The UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab suggested we should expect to see benefits of Brexit in about ten years’ time. By which time he’ll be well out of office.
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How social networks got competitive again • Platformer

Casey Newton:

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If I had to put a date on when competition ended among social networks in the United States, I’d choose Aug. 2, 2016. That’s when Instagram introduced its copy of Snapchat stories, blunting the momentum of an upstart challenger and sending a chill through the startup ecosystem.

I don’t think copying features is necessarily anti-competitive — in fact, as I’ll argue below, it’s a sign that the ecosystem is working as intended — but the effect of Facebook’s copying here was dramatic. Snap fell into a long funk, and would-be entrepreneurs and investors got the message: Facebook will seek to acquire or copy any upstart social product, dramatically limiting its odds of breakout success. Investment shrunk accordingly.

The previous year, after the success of Twitter’s Periscope app, Facebook had cloned its live video features, and enthusiasm for both products seemed to broadly peter out. When live group video experienced momentary success under Houseparty, Facebook cloned that too, and Houseparty later sold to Epic Games for an undisclosed sum.

It was in this stagnant environment that many people, myself included, came to believe that it had been a mistake to let Facebook acquire Instagram and WhatsApp.

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But he thinks there’s now serious competition again:

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when it comes to mobile short-form video, Facebook and YouTube face a real challenge [from TikTok].

So where else does Facebook suddenly find itself forced to compete?

For starters, there’s audio. While still available only by invitation, Clubhouse recently hit an estimated 10 million downloads. Celebrities including Tiffany Haddish, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Zuckerberg himself have made appearances on the app, granting it a cultural cachet rare in a social startup that is still less than a year old. Clubhouse raised money last month at a valuation of $1 billion — more than Facebook paid ultimately paid for Instagram.

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Apple Fitness Plus review: two months in, still on easy mode • The Verge

Dieter Bohn, Ashley Carman, Monica Chin, and Becca Farsace have all been giving it a try for the past two months:

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Fitness Plus’ main selling point is it’s easy to jump into — so long as your own oodles of Apple devices. The app requires an Apple Watch to access the classes, and then you’ll need an iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV to stream the workouts. (Critically, there’s no way to stream from a Mac, which makes no sense and required me to stream from my tiny iPhone display.) But because the app connects to the Watch, your rings show up in the corner of the screen throughout a workout. It serves as a reminder of how hard you’ve worked and how far you have to go to meet your goals for the day. Some people might find this motivational. I did.

As for equipment, the app offers a variety of cardio workouts, such as cycling, treadmill classes, and rowing, which require special equipment. But it also offers classes like Time to Walk, which Becca will dive into below, and dance classes that require no equipment at all. Most of the strength classes would like you to use dumbbells (which can be hard to find in stock currently), but you could get away with your bodyweight if necessary.

There’s no way to filter classes by equipment requirements or even area of focus, so expect to spend time in the app reading descriptions and watching previews to discern whether a class is for you. This is a pain and a hurdle that shouldn’t exist. Filters by workout type and equipment should be table stakes for any fitness app.

…If there’s a single message to take away from this review, it’s this: Apple Fitness Plus is great for beginners but may not offer the depth you’re looking for if you’re advanced in any specific sport. It’s accessible to anybody who is able to buy into Apple’s whole ecosystem, though.

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The Arizona Republic considers killing “zombies” as a staple of its digital subscription strategy • Better News

John Adams and Alia Beard Rau:

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The latest flash sale promising everything you’ve ever wanted in local journalism can bring the masses through the front door. But just as quickly as they flood the proverbial lobby, many will exit through the back door as soon as their sweet subscription deal expires.

So, at the end of 2018, The Arizona Republic decided we needed to focus on reducing churn. We were tired of working so hard to gain one subscription only to see two leave. We also wanted to focus on what the newsroom could control, separate from efforts in other departments that address churn issues like credit card expirations and customer service complaints.

When we began analyzing the data, we found an unnerving reality. About 42% of The Republic’s digital-only subscribers were not visiting our site once a month. Yes, re-read that and let it sink in. Forty-two% of the people paying for a digital subscription were not even reading one single article. Introducing: our “zombies.” The un-dead. Paying subscribers, but not a part of our living community.

We also discovered that 50% of our stops each month originated from that same group of disengaged subscribers. And so we started our journey to reduce churn through killing zombies.

Special side note to all the journo nerds out there: No zombies were actually hurt during this exercise in churn reduction. We also know that we didn’t want to “kill” these zombies (yes, technically, they are already dead). We actually wanted to bring them back to life as loyal, engaged subscribers. But we also knew that, “Creating loyalists and bringing zombies back to life” didn’t have the same pizzazz. So, don’t @ us.

«

Surprised that they’re not counting their blessings at getting free money from 42% of subscribers. They might be like the AOL users who were still on dialup in 2010.
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‘Spy pixels in emails have become endemic’ • BBC News

Leo Kelion:

»

The use of “invisible” tracking tech in emails is now “endemic”, according to a messaging service that analysed its traffic at the BBC’s request.

Hey’s review indicated that two-thirds of emails sent to its users’ personal accounts contained a “spy pixel”, even after excluding for spam. Its makers said that many of the largest brands used email pixels, with the exception of the “big tech” firms.

Defenders of the trackers say they are a commonplace marketing tactic. And several of the companies involved noted their use of such tech was mentioned within their wider privacy policies.

Emails pixels can be used to log:
• if and when an email is opened
• how many times it is opened
• what device or devices are involved
• the user’s rough physical location, deduced from their internet protocol (IP) address – in some cases making it possible to see the street the recipient is on

This information can then be used to determine the impact of a specific email campaign, as well as to feed into more detailed customer profiles.

Hey’s co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson says they amount to a “grotesque invasion of privacy”.

«

I did talk about this topic on BBC Radio Berkshire (fame!) last week, when it appeared. This is something that has been going on for absolutely years: PR firms used it to track whether journalists had opened emails; spammers have been using it since the 1990s. In that sense, I felt it was already endemic long before this.

But it’s becoming a topic du jour. John Gruber has been focusing on it, and I think the point he makes in a footnote at the end of his article linked there is the most cogent one:

»

Effectively all email clients are web browsers now, yet don’t have any of the privacy protection features actual browsers do.

«

(Thanks Sam R for the suggestion.)
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Quitting Twitter • Krishna’s words

Krishna Sundarram joined Twitter wayyyyyy back in.. late 2020:

»

Problem 3 – Twitter warps people

Some guy with 14k followers said something. It was something like “only Indian people are rude/assholes in this particular way. Here are some anecdotes proving this”. This is a generalisation about a race of people based on anecdotes, so by definition racist. But since the person was Indian, it’s not. Don’t look at me, I don’t make the rules.

Dunking on other Indian people is a common pastime for Indian people – it makes us feel superior to our compatriots. Of course we wouldn’t do the thing that we’re talking about, we’re better than that. He wasn’t doing anything I haven’t heard a hundred others do.

I commented that there could be sampling bias here. Since we’re more likely to be annoyed/embarassed by the actions of Indian people, we’re more likely to notice and remember it. I relayed an anecdote of my Indian friend being very annoyed by something an Indian did but not even remembering that a white person had done the exact same thing the previous day (making us wait while taking a photo). I thought it was ok to say this. I asked “You ever think this is sampling bias? You notice and get annoyed when Indians do it and embarrass you but don’t if it’s someone else?”

Apparently not. He went on a massive tirade. Not content with responding rudely, he quote tweets me so he can dunk in front of all his followers. Apparently, I’m jingoistic deflector, part of the “elite” that refuses to “accept and introspect” and that I “deny deny deny” legitimate issues with India.

«

So anyway, he’s gone. Another for the long list of “I’m quitting Twitter” blogposts. Which are usually followed in a couple of months by “Hey, I’m back on Twitter!” Said on Twitter, rather than a blogpost, because who has time for blogging?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is the world’s future – one with far fewer people? A new book, Empty Planet, suggests so. CC-licensed photo by Tim Samoff 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. Contains unhidden messages. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

There’s a hidden message in the parachute of NASA’s Mars rover • The Verge

Joey Roulette:

»

The parachute that helped NASA’s Perseverance rover land on Mars last week unfurled to reveal a seemingly random pattern of colors in video clips of the rover’s landing. But there was more to the story: NASA officials later said it contained a hidden message written in binary computer code.

Internet sleuths cracked the message within hours. The red and white pattern spelled out “Dare Mighty Things” in concentric rings. The saying is the Perseverance team’s motto, and it is also emblazoned on the walls of Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the mission team’s Southern California headquarters.

The parachute’s outer ring appears to translate to coordinates for JPL: 34°11’58” N 118°10’31” W.

Allen Chen, the entry, descent, and landing lead for Perseverance, dared the public to figure the message out during a press conference on Monday. “In addition to enabling incredible science, we hope our efforts in our engineering can inspire others,” he said.

“Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose, so we invite you all to give it shot and show your work.”

Adam Steltzner, Perseverance’s chief engineer, confirmed the message late Monday night on Twitter.

«

Maxence Abela and his father (a software engineer at Google – talk about a team with an advantage) were the first to figure this out. (His sister’s cartoon about it is sweet.) No easy task, given that it uses 10-bit coding (not 8-bit) and you have to start in the right place. Very reminiscent of the method used to send messages to Earth by the survivor in The Martian. Now, of course, everyone’s going to be too busy looking for Easter eggs in everything about Perseverance to listen to its discoveries.
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BitcoinPaperWallet ‘back door’ responsible for millions in missing funds, research suggests • Coindesk

Colin Harper:

»

It was just past midnight on Jan. 7, 2020, when “Nick Wendell” (a pseudonym) lost half a million dollars in bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s price was roaring toward $40,000, and Wendell was moving some of his bitcoin to a paper wallet generated by BitcoinPaperWallet.com. These wallets allow you to store your private key on a PDF that can then be printed out or saved as a computer file.

Within a minute of depositing 14.5 BTC, worth over $500,000 at the time (and now worth over $700,000), it was all gone. Someone had swept the funds from Wendell’s wallet and, after playing blockchain hopscotch across multiple addresses, sent them to the Binance exchange.

The situation set Wendell’s world spinning.

“Within one minute I realized what happened and it felt like I was falling but [wouldn’t] hit the ground for several minutes. I remember walking in circles around the kitchen as if I were dizzy,” Wendell told CoinDesk.

Wendell is one of at least half a dozen users who claim to have lost dizzying sums to the paper wallet. A quick Google search reveals posts on Reddit, Bitcointalk and elsewhere that tell several individual accounts of a multi-million dollar collective heist: someone with access to the site appears to be filching user funds through a back door in the code that gives them access to private keys.

In fact, some users of the most popular bitcoin paper wallet generator on Google’s search ranking claim to have collectively lost millions of dollars worth of bitcoin over the past two years, CoinDesk has learned.

«

Because, as some researchers discovered, the private keys it generates get sent to whoever runs the site. That’s sneaky smart. The site’s owner might want to check his own privacy: there are going to be angry people out there.
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The music industry makes more money but has more mouths to feed • Financial Times

Will Page is formerly Spotify’s chief economist, is the author of ‘Tarzan Economics’ due out in April (and, I recall, was one of the few voices inside the music industry talking sense about the internet’s effects in the early 2000s):

»

In 1984, a mere 6,000 music albums were released in the UK. Today, streaming services make available a similar volume — 55,000 new songs — every single day. 

There are not only more songs, but more musicians. Since Spotify launched in 2009, the number of British songwriters has increased by 115% to 140,000 and the ranks of UK recording artists have ballooned 145% to 115,000. Twenty years ago, there were five UK major labels and at most two dozen independent distributors; today Spotify hosts music from 751 suppliers.

Unsurprisingly, there are also more genres to classify all these songs. In 2000, the industry classified all the world’s music into no more than a dozen-and-a-half genres. Today, Spotify’s “everynoise” acoustic map tracks 5,224 genres, including Coptic hymns, Russian romanticism and the new lockdown hit of shanty, of course.

Music was one of the first industries hit by digital disruption. Its fate shows the rest of us the future. When digitisation removes barriers to entry, there is so much more of everything. 

…A UK parliamentary inquiry, which I submitted evidence to, has highlighted this dichotomy. Politicians have been pummelled with angry testimony about the industry. Mercury Prize-nominated Nadine Shah told MPs, “I’m critically acclaimed but I don’t make enough money from streaming and am struggling to pay my rent . . . I am just not being paid fairly for the work.”

…Even as the UK considers whether to update music copyright rules, everyone else should be watching this industry as a living demonstration of what happens when barriers to entry fall. The pie definitely grows, but the number of creators wanting a piece of it grows even faster.

«

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The US Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed • Forbes

David Axe:

»

As conceived in the 1990s, the [F-35] program was supposed to produce thousands of fighters to displace almost all of the existing tactical warplanes in the inventories of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

The Air Force alone wanted nearly 1,800 F-35s to replace aging F-16s and A-10s and constitute the low end of a low-high fighter mix, with 180 twin-engine F-22s making up the high end.

But the Air Force and Lockheed baked failure into the F-35’s very concept. “They tried to make the F-35 do too much,” said Dan Grazier, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.

There’s a small-wing version for land-based operations, a big-wing version for the Navy’s catapult-equipped aircraft carriers and, for the small-deck assault ships the Marines ride in, a vertical-landing model with a downward-blasting lift engine.

The complexity added cost. Rising costs imposed delays. Delays gave developers more time to add yet more complexity to the design. Those additions added more cost. Those costs resulted in more delays. So on and so forth.

Fifteen years after the F-35’s first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets. Now the service is signaling possible cuts to the program.

«

A program to solve all the past problems onto which too many things are added? Sounds like every government project ever. This one just happened to cost multiple billions.
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The world might actually run out of people • WIRED

Megan Molteni:

»

YOU KNOW THE story. Despite technologies, regulations, and policies to make humanity less of a strain on the earth, people just won’t stop reproducing. By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren’t the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations.

But what if they’re wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?

That’s the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. “In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline,” they write. “Once that decline begins, it will never end.”

«

Is this a scary forecast? Or a reassuring one, of a world where people don’t have to fight each other for resources and the planet can, er, heal?
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Funky electronics chain Fry’s is no more • Associated Press

»

Fry’s Electronics, the go-to chain for tech tinkerers looking for an obscure part, is closing for good.

The company, perhaps even more well known for outlandish themes at some of its stores, from Aztec to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” said Wednesday in an online posting that the COVID-19 pandemic had made it impossible to continue.

Fans immediately took to Twitter to post images and memories (good and bad).

The chain was concentrated on the West Coast, but had 31 stores in nine states. It was founded 36 years ago.

Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData, called it “the end of an era, and a sad day” for an army of loyal customers.

The pandemic has done heavy damage to retailers, but Fry’s was already getting hammered by online competition and a battle between heavy-hitters Best Buy and Amazon.com.

«

In the UK, the equivalent was a store chain called Maplin, which had all sorts of fun electronics gizmos and gadgets, and closed in March 2018.
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Texas electric bills were $28 billion higher under deregulation • WSJ

Tom McGinty and Scott Patterson:

»

Nearly 20 years ago, Texas shifted from using full-service regulated utilities to generate power and deliver it to consumers. The state deregulated power generation, creating the system that failed last week. And it required nearly 60% of consumers to buy their electricity from one of many retail power companies, rather than a local utility.

Those deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28bn more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities, according to the Journal’s analysis of data from the federal Energy Information Administration.

…None of this was supposed to happen under deregulation. Backers of competition in the electricity-supply business promised it would lower prices for consumers who could shop around for the best deals, just as they do for cellphone service. The system would be an improvement over monopoly utilities, which have little incentive to innovate and provide better service to customers, supporters of deregulation said.

“If all consumers don’t benefit from this, we will have wasted our time and failed our constituency,” then-state Sen. David Sibley, a key author of the bill to deregulate the market, said when the switch was first unveiled in 1999. “Competition in the electric industry will benefit Texans by reducing monthly rates,” then-Gov. George W. Bush said later that year.

…From 2004 through 2019, the annual rate for electricity from Texas’s traditional utilities was 8% lower, on average, than the nationwide average rate, while the rates of retail providers averaged 13% higher than the nationwide rate, according to the Journal’s analysis.

«

There are 9.6m households in Texas, with an average 2.85 people each: if we take it that that’s 5.8m households (60% of the total) who overpaid $28bn over 16 years, that’s about $300 extra per year per household on a bill of about $2,300.

Once again, wild beliefs that The Market will fix everything are proven to be wrong. And people died because of this deregulation – it wasn’t just pricier bills.
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Google has finally added iOS’s privacy labels to Gmail • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

Google has finally added Apple App Store privacy labels to its Gmail app, almost a month after we ran an article wondering what was taking so long (via MacRumors). The app is the second major Google app to get the labels, after they were added to YouTube when it was updated earlier this month.

According to the privacy label, it doesn’t collect your name, physical address, or phone number (though as an email client, Gmail obviously collects your email address). Location data is also used for analytics and there are some features of the app that will request it as well. If you want to see the full label, there’s a video below [in the original post] that scrolls through.

It is worth noting that Apple’s app privacy labels are meant to show all the things that the app might access, not what information that app will access. For example, an app may only use location data when it needs to show you a map, but the privacy labels don’t make that clear — it’s just a binary used/not used. Also, the information in the labels is submitted by the company itself, and Apple doesn’t make promises about its accuracy.

«

And yet it didn’t give an update for a bug on the Gmail app. Google’s clearly quite embarrassed about this. Or else it has just given up on updating its apps.
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Chess.com finds streaming success • Protocol

Hirsh Chitkara:

»

In 2018, Chess.com acquired [a chess playing, solving, predicting] engine of its own, Komodo, which was once considered the best but has since been narrowly usurped by the open-source Stockfish project. Regardless, investment in engines has been another key to Chess.com’s success. Komodo offers post-game analysis, revealing player blunders and missed mate opportunities. Chess.com’s engineers have also developed dozens of opponent AI personalities for the community: Some are adaptive, meaning they adjust the skill of each move according to how well the opponent plays; others bring chess legends back to life, using old game logs to emulate their skill and style of play. Following the release of “The Queen’s Gambit,” Chess.com worked with Netflix to develop engines that simulated Beth Harmon’s gameplay from different periods in the show.

These factors are foundational to the success of Chess.com, but they haven’t been driving the incredible growth over the last year. That would be streaming.

“The first thing to understand is that this is many years in the making,” Nick Barton, VP of business development at Chess.com, told Protocol. “We’ve had a partnership going with Twitch since 2018 in which the onus was on Chess.com — because of our market position within the playing sphere, the size of our playing platform and the size of our player base — to try to grow what we would call now the middle class of streamers.”

Chess.com has showcased how investing in a streaming community can provide immense returns over time. Building out from a core group of Chess.com-sponsored streamers, chess has taken Twitch by storm. Throughout February, for instance, Chess.com has been hosting the latest iteration of its signature PogChamps tournament featuring Twitch megastars xQc, Rubius and Pokimane as well as rapper Logic and actor Rainn Wilson. Altogether, Twitch users watched 18.3 million hours of chess in January 2021 — nearly as much as they consumed in the entirety of 2019.

«

From this I take it that people are quite bored in lockdowns, and rediscovering their past passions. And that Twitch is very compelling.
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The future of QAnon • Vox

Sean Illing:

»

for the most die-hard QAnon followers, hope springs eternal! The next big prophecy is supposed to unfold on March 4, which had been Inauguration Day before the ratification of the 20th Amendment in 1933 — and the day Trump will gloriously return to power and retake the White House, according to the febrile imaginings of the QAnon movement.

All of which is to say, QAnon is still with us, and may be with us for a while. Conspiracy theories are powerful precisely because they’re so flexible. They never have to cohere; they just have to explain what seems otherwise inexplicable and, above all, offer the believer a sense of direction in a complicated world.

With that in mind, it’s worth asking what might become of the QAnon movement. Assuming March 4 doesn’t go as expected, where do the followers of Q turn next? And what does it mean for our politics moving forward if QAnon shape-shifts into an even more nebulous cult?

To get some answers, I reached out to eight journalists and researchers who’ve covered the conspiracy beat over the past four years or so. Their responses, edited for clarity and length, are below.

There wasn’t a perfect consensus, but a couple of themes emerged. One, the way to think about QAnon is that it’s less a political movement than a religion. Two, that is precisely why QAnon will keep going even as its prophecies fail to materialize. Everyone agreed that QAnon will likely persist as a major factor in American politics.

If these experts are right, and I suspect they are, the problems driving the QAnon movement will probably get worse before they get better, if they get better at all.

«

Nothing that “Q” predicted ever came true; it couldn’t, because it was all rubbish, carefully obfuscated so as not to mean anything except what people read into it. The fact that there aren’t any more “drops” (breadcrumbs of “information”) is the most interesting thing. What happened?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What happened when Waze became part of Google? The classic story of a startup swallowed by a whale – which the founder has now left. CC-licensed photo by Travis Wise 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. Someone’s sitting there. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

UK ministers weigh testing as alternative to vaccine passports • Financial Times

im Pickard, Daniel Thomas, Sarah Neville and Kate Beioley:

»

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’.

Prime minister Boris Johnson has announced he is considering the introduction of some kind of documentation or smartphone app which people would be asked to show in order to demonstrate they are free of the disease.

Despite Johnson expressing concerns over the “philosophical, ethical” issues raised by the introduction of Covid status certification, people may be asked to produce such proof to enter workplaces, stadiums or restaurants when England’s lockdown ends in the summer.

On Tuesday Johnson announced Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove would lead an official review into the contentious issue.

Critics have warned that a “vaccine passport” could be discriminatory against those who cannot be inoculated because of existing health conditions or, for example, pregnancy. Refusal to take the jab is more common among ethnic minorities in the UK — opening up the potential for racial discrimination claims.

For these reasons government officials said on Tuesday it was hard to envisage a scenario where vaccination was the only criteria for being able to go to an event or enter a workplace after the lockdown ends. Instead the government is much more likely to use a combination of testing and vaccine proof.

At the same time however the review will not rule out the possibility that companies could choose to ban people who have not been vaccinated.

«

It’s that last point which is key. The government might not mandate it, but queasy companies (and, unless prevented, insurance companies) will quietly, or not-so-quietly, demand it. Doesn’t matter what you call them: vaccine passports are coming, and will be as essential as yellow fever certificates used to be.

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What you need to know about COVID-19 and hair loss? • Shape

Allie Strickler:

»

The latest post-COVID symptom to emerge among “long haulers”? Hair loss.

A scroll through social media groups such as Survivor Corps on Facebook—where COVID-19 survivors connect to share research and firsthand experiences about the virus—and you’ll find dozens of folks opening up about experiencing hair loss after COVID-19.

“My shedding is getting so bad I’m literally putting it up in a scarf so I don’t have to see the hairs falling all day long. Each time I run my hands through my hair, another handful is gone,” wrote one person in Survivor Corps. “My hair has been falling out way too much and I’m scared to brush it,” said another.

In fact, in a survey of more than 1,500 people in the Survivor Corps Facebook group, 418 respondents (nearly one-third of those surveyed) indicated that they’d experienced hair loss after being diagnosed with the virus. What’s more, a preliminary study published in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology found a “high frequency” of hair loss among male COVID-19 patients in Spain. Similarly, the Cleveland Clinic recently noted “an increasing number of reports” related to COVID-19 and hair loss.

Even Alyssa Milano has experienced hair loss as a COVID-19 side effect. After sharing that she was sick with the virus in April, she posted a video on Twitter in which she’s seen brushing literal clumps of hair out of her head. “Thought I’d show you what COVID-19 does to your hair,” she wrote alongside the video. “Please take this seriously. #WearaDamnMask #LongHauler”

«

The cause is put down to stress, where the body puts the hair follicles into a “resting” phase to focus energy elsewhere; the eventual result is shedding. I noticed that Boris Johnson seems to be losing his hair quite fast, though it’s impossible to say if that’s the stress of the job, or a post-Covid effect. (Thanks Lloyd Wood for the link.)
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Walk a city somewhere in the world and listen to its radio • Netlify

It might be a while before you actually go somewhere, so this will do the job for you. The London one that I got started a video walking through Covent Garden on a rainy night – very beautiful – and playing a song that I hadn’t heard before, but immediately recognised as Royal Blood. Serendipity.

Plenty of other cities, including Bangkok, Delhi, Dubai, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, through to Tokyo. Options to walk, drive, take a train; day or night; with no, some or a lot of street noise.
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Uber has lost in the Supreme Court. Here’s what happens next • WIRED UK

Natasha Bernal:

»

In their judgment on Friday, Supreme Court judges said they made their decision based on five key points. Firstly, Uber sets the fare price and drivers are not permitted to charge more than the fare calculated by the Uber app. Judges determined that therefore, Uber dictates how much drivers are paid for the work they do.

Second, Uber imposes contracts and terms of service and drivers have no say in them. Third, once a driver has logged onto the Uber app, their choice is constrained by Uber by monitoring their acceptance rate and imposing “penalties” if too many trips are declined. Fourth, they found that Uber also exercises “significant control” over the way in which drivers deliver their services, using a passenger ratings system that impacts whether the driver can continue working for Uber.

Finally, they determined that Uber restricts communications between passenger and driver to the minimum necessary to perform the particular trip and takes active steps to prevent drivers from establishing any relationship with a passenger capable of extending beyond an individual ride.

…the floodgates will open for around 1,000 similar claims against Uber. It does not mean that all Uber drivers will automatically be classed as workers, but this is the first step in that direction.

The gig economy company has around 60,000 drivers in the UK. If all of these drivers were to require minimum wage (and back pay in compensation), that would severely impact Uber’s bottom line. Prior to its IPO, the company said that it expected drivers to shoulder the burden as it worked to improve its financial results and cut operational losses, which at the time stood at $3bn. At the time, Uber said it aimed to “reduce driver incentives” and expected driver dissatisfaction to increase as a result. It said that its business would be “adversely affected if drivers were classified as employees instead of independent contractors”.

«

That’s put a proper spoke in the wheels, so to speak. An employment relationship where the worker decides how long they want to work each day: quite the 21st century enabling of change.
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Opinion: the GameStop craze was mostly just crazy • The New York Times

Matthew Zeitlin watched the congressional hearings on that stock, you know, that one we all knew everything about:

»

So did we really learn anything profound? The marketplace of opinions about the meme stock phenomenon has been as volatile as the trading itself: A series of hypotheses about populism, corruption, masculinity, inequality and price bubbles battled for primacy among those of us who watch cable news and consume think pieces.

At the hearing, various members endorsed different theories. “Many Americans feel that the system is stacked against them, and no matter what, Wall Street always wins,” said the Financial Services Committee chairwoman, Maxine Waters, Democrat of California.

The panel’s ranking Republican member, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, suggested that the issue was less that of a game rigged against small-time investors and more the lack of productive assets for them to buy. “We created a world where it’s easier to buy a lottery ticket than it is to invest in the next Google,” he said. “Is it any wonder why the unhealthy dynamics of GameStop happened?”

All in all, some hedge funds got pummeled, but briefly. Some unlucky retail investors got in on the fun too late, taking serious losses. And there were also plenty of life-changing profits taken by people far beyond the usual suspects. That’s a pretty muddied picture.

The most meaningful thing to glean from all of this, according to Josh Brown, the chief executive of Ritholz Asset Management, may be a large incentive change for market behavior going forward: “I don’t think it’s in anyone’s best interest to be that visibly vocally ‘short’ on anything,” he told me. “I think that era has ended where there’s this automatic kneejerk reverence for a $5 billion hedge fund manager with a PowerPoint” pitching other investors on why they should bet against a company.

«

That’s the lesson: there is no lesson. Life is random. Nobody’s driving the clattering train.
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Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long? • Paygo

Noam Bardin is one of the co-founders of the drive-mapping app Waze, acquired by Google in 2013, and left a couple of weeks ago:

»

I took the acquisition as a personal challenge. I believed that I could build out Waze within Google, breaking the myth about what happens to companies after being acquired by large corporations. Looking back, this reminds me of the Western CEO and China. Every Western CEO thinks she or he will be the first to be a successful Western brand in China and many try and launch a service there. The Chinese are used to this Western arrogance and welcome the foreigners. Many quarters and dollars later, the Western CEO leaves with some China experience and the Chinese partner keeps the IP, money, business… You cannot fight the nature of the beast, this is China. Same thing happened to me in China pre acquisition… So, to complete the analogy, I was the naive start-up leader believing that I can build out Waze within Google to its full potential and conquer the beast, regardless of its nature. This irrational belief is critical for a startup leader but challenging in the corporate environment.

So what happened? I had all the independence I could ask for, no? 

It’s the nature of the beast.

…at Corp-Tech, the salaries are so high and the options so valuable that it creates many misalignments. The impact of an individual product on the Corp-Tech stock is minimal so equity is basically free money. Regardless of your performance (individually) or your product performance, you equity grows significantly so nothing you do has real economic impact on your family. The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted, since that drives your equity and salary payments. This breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward. Corp-Tech gives you no risk returns on equity. Since 2008, FAANG stock have only gone up so employees look at the equity is a fixed part of their salary with the only option of increasing. We tried to build an innovative compensation model but quickly ran into the challenge that employees viewed their equity as a given compensation so why sacrifice it for a risk model?

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There are some other points too. I reiterate my point that Google is hitting a dangerous point in its maturity: corporate sclerosis is a real risk.
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‘Mode confusion’ vexes drivers, carmakers • EE Times

Junko Yoshida:

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EE Times: Define “mode confusion.”

Missy Cummings [former US fighter pilot, now a professor at Duke University]: Mode confusion happens when an operator thinks a system with some kind of embedded autonomy or automation is in one mode and actually it’s in another.

EE Times: Put that in the context of the aviation industry?

Cummings: This came to light in the 1990s with a lot of Airbus accidents. There was a lot of fighting between the pilot and the automation. The pilot thought the aircraft was doing one thing. It was actually doing a different thing. Sometimes the design of the system causes it. Sometimes it’s feedback to the pilot. In one case, there was this one tiny button. You can press that button, but the light is very small. It wasn’t just obvious.

EE Times: As a fighter pilot, have you witnessed or personally experienced mode confusion?

Cummings: I saw this firsthand when one of my peers was returning from a live weapons area to the aircraft carrier, and he forgot to save his weapons.

Right before he got back, his commanding officer in the other plane decided that they would do a fun one-v.-one, which is like a dogfight. My friend, I like to call him Spider (not his real call sign), got the jump on the commanding officer and got in position to fire. There’s this really compelling shoot queue. So, the system will scream at you to shoot. But you needed to make sure the letters “SIM” were beneath, to show you were in simulated mode. Right? But he didn’t double-check. He thought, in his mind, he was in simulated mode. And the font [for SIM] was so small.

And when you’re doing a dogfight, it’s really rough. He pulled the trigger, thinking he was in stimulated mode. The missile went off the rail.

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Now read on at the original to find out what happened. (They never showed you THAT sort of thing in Top Gun.) The consequences of “mode confusion” are potentially as bad in cars.
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Does Clubhouse mean bad things for podcasting? • Vulture

Nicholas Quah:

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Let’s call it “live group audio.” Clubhouse is by far the most prominent representation of this archetype for now, but it will soon face intensifying competition. Twitter has Spaces (an effort aided, in part, by its recent acquisition of the team behind Breaker, the social graph-oriented podcast app), Facebook is customarily working on a clone, Mark Cuban is co-founding something called Fireside that carries shades of Twitch, and one imagines there will be a range of more specific, niche-oriented alternatives that will emerge down the line.

In the face of all this, a fair few podcast operators wrote me posing the pertinent question: Does Clubhouse mean bad things for podcasting? And to extend the inquiry: Will this new “live group audio” format affect podcasting in either direction?

Well, the answer is yes, of course, probably. For one thing, on the consumption side, all media formats ultimately compete with each other for minutes of attention in a day, and within the specific frontier of audio, one could make the case for thinking in zero-sum terms: Time spent on Clubhouse or Spaces or whatever is time that could have been spent on, say, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. (It’s also, for that matter, time that could’ve been spent digitally streaming the radio, or listening to music.) But there are also non-zero sum possibilities: time spent on Clubhouse or Spaces could theoretically increase affinity for audio experiences that can be trickled down to elsewhere, which in turn grows, to borrow Edison Research’s terminology, the overall “share of ear.” (Product and M&A possibilities abound for the audio-streaming platforms.) In any case, this isn’t an unprecedented competitive cluster: Think about how Twitch relates to YouTube relates to Netflix relates to cable television. They compete, sure, but they also co-exist.

(For what it’s worth, podcast folk seem pretty mixed on the matter when I asked around. The majority believe it’s a fad; others believe it’ll stick around and will offer strong marketing opportunities. None of them believe Clubhouse to be a meaningful competitor to their interests, though this is to be expected.)

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You could pose it like this: did Twitter and Facebook mean bad things for blogging? Well, a lot more people now generate a lot more content, in total. But a lot of that content is crap. On balance, there might now be more good content than there was before. But it’s harder to find. So: yes. And no.
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Black users turned social app Clubhouse from drab to fun • CNBC

Salvador Rodriguez:

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as the app has grown, people of more diverse backgrounds have begun to join, and the Clubhouse experience has changed dramatically.

In particular, the app has carved out a niche among Black users, who have innovated new ways for using it.

A few months ago you might’ve opened the app to a panel discussion on the future of artificial intelligence or the potential of Bitcoin. Now, you’ll still see the tech talk, but it’ll be alongside debates over the music of rappers DMX and 50 Cent or the latest happening in the NBA. Nowadays, you can find folks shooting their shots in dating rooms, cracking jokes in virtual comedy clubs, talking about the latest celebrity gossip or having musical jam sessions with their friends.

This sudden burst of innovation in Clubhouse exemplifies the role Black people often play in America as culture makers and trend setters, said Aniyia Williams, founder of Black & Brown Founders, an organization that supports Black and Latinx entrepreneurs. 

“That ingenuity is the other side of being oppressed. At the end of the day, that’s the thing that unites Black people,” Williams said. “Being a have-not forces you to think and see the world differently, and it makes Black people naturally creative and creators in ways that they’re not even trying. It’s just the way that they operate.”

Several Black users of the app told CNBC that they began to join in May and July. That was after Clubhouse secured a funding round from the firm Andreessen Horowitz that valued the company at approximately $100m. 

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Why you’ll be hearing a lot less about ‘smart cities’ • City Monitor

Sommer Mathis and Alexandra Kanik:

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A further obstacle to the global movement towards smart cities may be the name itself. Even before the pandemic, it wasn’t a particularly descriptive term. What does it actually mean, which technologies count as “smart”, and why did this sector deserve so much attention? These questions were all present prior to 2020. In 2021, the idea that the goal of every city should be to get smarter feels painfully out of touch.

This isn’t to suggest that no useful or important smart technologies have been deployed over the past decade. Many are clearly here to stay. There’s a great deal of consensus at this point, for example, that intelligent street-lighting systems combined with LED bulbs – which enable cities to brighten or dim street lamps based on usage – are both cost-effective and vastly more sustainable. It’s also clear that no city will be able to meaningfully tackle its emissions goals without the widespread adoption of smart meters and digitised grids.

But as with so many other aspects of life on our planet over the past year, it is starting to feel like the end of an era.

“Part of it is that people are sick of talking about this term, ‘smart cities’,” says Story Bellows, a partner at the urban-change management consultancy Cityfi. “People are more focused now on creating outcomes in their communities, whether that’s using technology, whether that’s reinventing processes – kind of the layering of all of those various approaches to making meaningful change on key indicators, whether it’s on health or equity or whatever it is. I think there are still a lot of potential technology drivers and contributors in that, but creating a business model of smart cities just on its own, especially within some of these really big companies, it’s hard to really operationalise and execute.”

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(Via John Naughton)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: First: yesterday’s illustration was of a Honda logo, not a Hyundai logo. We have put in a request with Flickr that the person who captions all the photos be fired for sloppiness.

Second: three or four (I lost count) of the links today came via Benedict Evans’s weekly newsletter. I’d have shamelessly used them a day earlier but I get the free edition, which comes out 24 hours later.