In 1863 scientists seriously debated whether the Sun was fuelled by this stuff. (Because if not, then what?) CC-licensed photo by sarahluv 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 Not included today: links to two preprints (ie not peer reviewed) about coronavirus mutations: one saying there’s a mutation making it more dangerous, another saying there’s a mutation making it less dangerous. Give it a few days, let’s see how it shakes out.

I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Love Bug virus creator comes clean • Medium

Geoff White:

»

His face has filled over two decades, but some distinctive facial features convinced me it was him, even before he began describing the virus and his part in its creation and spread.

[Onel] De Guzman speaks in broken English, and claims his lawyer told him to pretend not to speak the language in the press conference in 2000. He claims the “Love Bug” was a revamped version of an earlier virus he had created in order to steal passwords. In the era of dial-up Internet, such passwords were needed to get online, and de Guzman says he could not afford access himself.

He claims he initially sent the virus only to Filipino victims with whom he communicated in chatrooms, because he only wanted to steal Internet access passwords that would work in his local area.

However, in spring of 2000 he tweaked the code. He added an auto-spreading feature that would send copies of the virus to victims’ Outlook contacts, using a flaw he says was present in Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system. He also created a title for the email attachment that would have global appeal, tempting people across the world to open it.

“I figured out that many people want a boyfriend, they want each other, they want love, so I called it that,” he said.

De Guzman claims he sent the virus initially to someone in Singapore, and then went out drinking with a friend. The first he knew of the global chaos he had unleashed was when his mother told him police were hunting a hacker in Manila.

His mother hid his computer equipment, but left the diskettes containing de Guzman’s classmates’ names, including Michael Buen. De Guzman insists Buen had nothing to do with the “Love Bug” and that he was its sole creator.

«

Twenty years ago this week. The Independent, where I was, used Apple Macs in the newsroom, so the worm (strictly) had no effect. I got to read the code briefly before IT deleted it off the entire system because it had hosed the advertising department, which used Windows PCs.
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Airbnb to lay off nearly 1,900 people, 25% of company • CNBC

Deirdre Bosa and Salvador Rodriguez:

»

“We are collectively living through the most harrowing crisis of our lifetime, and as it began to unfold, global travel came to a standstill,” Chesky told employees in a note. “Airbnb’s business has been hit hard, with revenue this year forecasted to be less than half of what we earned in 2019.”

Prior to the layoffs, Airbnb had 7,500 employees, Chesky said. Airbnb will halt projects related to hotels, a transportation division and luxury stays, Chesky said.

“Travel in this new world will look different, and we need to evolve Airbnb accordingly,” he said. 

US employees laid off will receive 14 weeks of base pay plus an additional week for every year they worked at Airbnb, Chesky said. Airbnb will also provide 12 months of healthcare for laid off US employees, Chesky said. May 11 will be the last work day for impacted Airbnb employees in the US and Canada, Chesky said. 

“I have a deep feeling of love for all of you,” Chesky said. “Our mission is not merely about travel. When we started Airbnb, our original tagline was, ‘Travel like a human.’ The human part was always more important than the travel part. What we are about is belonging, and at the center of belonging is love.”

«

By American standards, that’s an incredibly generous severance package; kudos to Chesky, whose hand has of course been forced by events beyond his control, and beyond most peoples’ imagining a year ago.

Who knows when AirBnB will be able to restart. When would you trust a complete stranger to come into your house? How is a complete stranger going to trust the house that someone else was in? Anyone who hasn’t had Covid-19 probably won’t.
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The race for coronavirus vaccines: a graphical guide • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

»

More than 90 vaccines are being developed against SARS-CoV-2 by research teams in companies and universities across the world. Researchers are trialling different technologies, some of which haven’t been used in a licensed vaccine before. At least six groups have already begun injecting formulations into volunteers in safety trials; others have started testing in animals. Nature’s graphical guide explains each vaccine design.

«

Terrific graphic (also available as a PDF). Read it and you’ll be able to talk wisely about all the options at, um, those Zoom parties.
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Reviving a 16-year old Mac App • Tumult Company Blog

Jonathan Deutsch:

»

Today we released Whisk 2.0: a lightweight web page editor with a live preview that updates as you type. The name may be new, but the Mac app’s origins are in shareware called HyperEdit that I started while in college over 16 years ago. It is hard to believe I’ve worked on an app old enough to get its driver’s license!

I can’t help but reminisce — touching such an old codebase transported me back in time. 2003 saw the release of Apple’ 3rd iPod, Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, and the initial launch of Safari. The movies and music of that year were forgettable, and thankfully no Matrix sequels came out.

HyperEdit began its life as I sat in a session at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (aka WWDC) that year. Gramps unveiled the ability to embed Safari’s WebKit engine into any application. Apple’s marketing was in overdrive touting its rendering speed, a major competitive advantage over the incumbent Internet Explorer.

I decided to put their claims to the test by firing up the Xcode 1.0 beta on a commandeered white iBook. I placed a text view next to the Safari WebView to see if it could keep up with my typing. Sure enough, it could! My friends sitting next to me came up with all kinds of other stress tests like trying out JavaScript or embedding images and video files. Not only did it handle these performantly, it became immediately clear this form of editing with a live preview was an awesome way to write web pages…

…From a developer perspective, distributing software [now] is significantly harder. In 2003, you could switch the config to Release, hit build, zip the app, and then put on a web server. In 2020, distributing requires learning the intricacies of certificates, code signing, provisioning profiles, hardening, notarization, .dmg creation, gatekeeper, and paying a $99 per year fee. From a mac technology perspective, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say the amount required to learn to distribute software exceeds the amount I needed to know to write the first beta of HyperEdit! I wonder if it would have gotten off the ground if I started today.

«

I played a small part in HyperEdit’s success, writing a piece (as Jonathan notes) in The Independent, where I then worked. It’s great to have Whisk, the revitalised HyperEdit, still going and now 64-bit, and hence compatible with the 10.15 version of what used to be called Mac OS X. But his point about the challenge of releasing software now is quite the reality check.
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Accelerating innovation in Windows 10 to meet customers where they are • Windows Experience Blog

Panos Panay:

»

if one thing is clear it is that Windows plays a critical role in helping people navigate the times we are in. Customers are using Windows PCs to stay productive, connect and learn in this time. In fact, over 4 trillion minutes are being spent on Windows 10 a month, a 75% increase year on year.

«

Panay also notes in the blogpost that the ” 1 billion Windows 10 monthly active devices” target was hit in March. As Benedict Evans points out in his newsletter, a quick calculation suggests people are spending an average of 4,000 minutes per month on each Windows 10 PC or tablet, or 2h15 per day. And that’s up 75%? That’s only 1h15 per day a year ago.

Assume that 500 million (half) of the users are using them 8hr per day 5 days a week, because they’re sitting in front of them at work: they account for 1.2trn minutes per month.

The remaining 2.8trn minutes is divided among the home users, plus the work users in their non-working hours: it’s about 0.8 hours, or a bit under 50 minutes per day.

All very rough, but it’s in a different league from smartphone use, which is measured in multiple hours per day, perhaps simultaneously with a PC.
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Democrats are using AI to counter Trump’s coronavirus disinformation • The Next Web

Thomas Macaulay:

»

An anti-Trump political organization is using AI originally designed to tackle Islamic State propaganda to counter coronavirus disinformation spread by the president.

The system has been repurposed to spot comments from Trump that are about to go viral. It will then identify the most popular counter-narratives, and invite a network of more than 3.4 million influencers “to share these highly visual and emotional narratives from real people in unison and at scale.”

The initiative is being led by Defeat Disinfo, a political action committee (PAC) advised by retired general Stanley McChrystal, who commanded US and NATO forces during the Afghanistan war.

The PAC claims that it won’t use any bots, sock puppets, or false information. Instead, it “will rely on real stories from real people.” However, the group plans to pay influencers to amplify the message — a tactic recently used by Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign.

«

Sounds like a fantastic recipe for properly destroying the signal-to-noise ratio on whatever social network you favour. Mute and block buttons to the fore.
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Experts doubt the sun is actually burning coal • Scientific American

From 1863:

»

“If the sun were composed of coal, it would last at the present rate only 5,000 years. The sun, in all probability, is not a burning, but an incandescent, body. Its light is rather that of a glowing molten metal than that of a burning furnace. But it is impossible that the sun should constantly be giving out heat, without either losing heat or being supplied with new fuel…”

«

Given that the atomic nucleus wasn’t discovered for another 50 years, and the idea of fusion wasn’t proposed until 10 years after that, the estimate that they came up with for the Sun’s lifetime – which is in the longer extract from the article – is impressively good.
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Indycar’s virtual race crashes sparked real-world controversy among drivers • VICE

Rob Zacny:

»

Because sim racing does not have the same physical stakes, any driver may feel free to sabotage a sim event at any time. Which means the only way to have a sim series featuring pro drivers is going to be with rules enforcement that bears on drivers’ real-world careers. Otherwise, the future of competitive sim racing will be closer to that of any kind of celebrity competition or all-star event: something where the game fundamentally doesn’t matter to its participants, and which is only notable for the personalities on display.

But even if that’s all Indycar wanted or needed from their iRacing invitational series, the personalities displayed during the Indianapolis event put a terrible face on a racing series that has spent years clawing its way back out of NASCAR’s and F1’s shadows and regaining the elite status it had in the 1990s. The lasting impression of the Indycar iRacing event is one of resentful second-raters whose sense of fair play extends exactly as far as their chances to win. For those within Indycar, it’s raised uncomfortable questions about how well the drivers really know each other and how much they can be trusted. When they’re back at Indy in the real world, what will Pagenaud’s competitors think when they see him up ahead? What will they expect from Ferrucci when he appears in the rearview mirror? The iRacing event was just a game but sports are always just games. It’s the people who are real.

«

Different for racing than other sports sims – not that there are many other sports sims that can be used. Chess is about the only sport that’s essentially undisturbed, though even that has continual concerns about contestants using computers.
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Billy Mitchell takes his Donkey Kong high-score cheating case to court • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland on the case that evolved out of events depicted in the fabulous film King Of Kong:

»

During Twin Galaxies’ months-long public investigation, Mitchell “had the opportunity to submit evidence in support of his score performances and to engage in the lively public debate about the scores,” Twin Galaxies writes in its motion. “He chose not to do so. Instead of settling his grievance then, he waited until the adjudication process had come to end and brought suit in court to prove the veracity of his Donkey Kong score performances.”

But court proceedings are “not the forum for [Mitchell] to get revenge,” Twin Galaxies argues, claiming that its statements regarding Mitchell were “protected activity” under the First Amendment, and Mitchell’s suit “seeks to chill the expression of free speech.”

To entertain Mitchell’s argument would set a precedent that would let others challenge Twin Galaxies score decisions in court, the site writes. That would lead to an “unnecessary waste of the courts’ precious resources” and also “have the practical effect of discouraging Twin Galaxies and others from debating video game scores in a public forum,” the site argues.

Both sides will have the opportunity to debate these issues on July 6, when a judge is scheduled to hear arguments on Twin Galaxies’ anti-SLAPP motion. Whatever the decision, though, we don’t imagine this will be the last we’ll hear on this matter from Mitchell.

«

If you haven’t seen King Of Kong, you should: it’s a brilliant portrait of video games obsession. If you have seen it, watch it again. Not a lot else going on.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An Amazon vice-president has resigned in solidarity with workers concerned about the risks they faced from Covid-19. CC-licensed photo by Scottish Government 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 8 links for you. Fewer, but chewier. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Bye, Amazon • ongoing by Tim Bray

Tim Bray is pretty much a legend in the tech industry: used to work at Sun Microsystems, had a hand in XML, worked at Google on Android, and now worked – part tense – at Amazon:

»

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

What with big-tech salaries and share vestings, this will probably cost me over a million (pre-tax) dollars, not to mention the best job I’ve ever had, working with awfully good people. So I’m pretty blue…

…An announcement sent to internal mailing lists on Friday April 10th was apparently the flashpoint. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two visible AECJ leaders, were fired on the spot that day. The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

Snap! · At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people. ¶

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

«

It’s an excoriating blogpost, and reminds you too how rare it is for someone to resign so publicly in the tech industry and to side with the low-paid people in the company. That’s what Bray did, and does. It’s easy to forget that your Amazon deliveries don’t arrive via magic drones; real humans are earning pittances doing it, while Jeff Bezos is so rich you can’t grasp it.
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Apple, Google ban use of location tracking in contact tracing apps • Reuters

Stephen Nellis and Paresh Dave:

»

Both companies said privacy and preventing governments from using the system to compile data on citizens was a primary goal. The system uses bluetooth signals from phones to detect encounters and does not use or store GPS location data.

But the developers of official coronavirus-related apps in several U.S. states told Reuters last month it was vital that they be allowed to use GPS location data in conjunction with the new contact tracing system, to track how outbreaks move and identify hotspots.

Apple and Google said they will not allow use of GPS data along with the contact tracing systems. The decision will require public health authorities who want to use GPS location data to rely on unstable workarounds to detect encounters using Bluetooth sensors.

Privacy experts have warned that any cache of location data related to health issues could make businesses and individuals vulnerable to being ostracized if the data is exposed.

Authorities and their app developers could reject the Apple-Google restrictions and instead use a more basic Bluetooth-based system to log with whom users have crossed paths. But the system likely would miss some encounters because iPhones and Android devices turn off Bluetooth connections after some time for battery-saving and other reasons unless users remember to re-activate them.

Apple and Google also said Monday that they will allow only one app per country to use the new contact system, to avoid fragmentation and encourage wider adoption.

«

Apparently this could be a problem for countries such as Norway. The “one per country” idea is a good one, at least.
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Exclusive: ‘wobbly’ NHS tracing app ‘failed’ clinical safety and cyber security tests • Health Service Journal

Jasmine Rapson:

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The government’s coronavirus contact tracing app has so far failed the tests needed to be included in the NHS app library, HSJ understands.

The app is being trialled on the Isle of Wight this week, ahead of a national rollout later this month. Senior NHS sources told HSJ it had thus far failed all of the tests required for inclusion in the app library, including cyber security, performance and clinical safety.

There are also concerns at high levels about how users’ privacy will be protected once they log that they have coronavirus symptoms, and become “traceable”, and how this information will be used.

Senior figures told HSJ that it had been hard to assess the app because the government was “going about it in a kind of a hamfisted way. They haven’t got clear versions, so it’s been impossible to get fixed code base from them for NHS Digital to test. They keep changing it all over the place”. 

HSJ’s source described the app as “a bit wobbly”, but added that it was not a “big disaster” the app will not be included in the official NHS store at this stage, because it is at an early development stage. However, they also expressed concern about whether it will be able to pass in the near future…

…A senior NHS national source told HSJ: “The real problem is the government initially started saying it was a ‘privacy-preserving highly anonymous app’, but it quite clearly isn’t going to be… When you use the app and you’re not [covid-19] positive in the early stages, you’re just exchanging signals between two machines… But the second you say, ‘actually I’m positive’, that has to go back up to the government server, where it starts to track you versus other people.”

A DHSC spokesman stressed there was not a plan for the app to track people’s location, for example with GPS, but to monitor who they have been near to, with Bluetooth.

«

At a guess, the NHSX team started working on a contact tracing app a while back, but then had to tear a lot of that up when Apple and Google announced their joint API. It might be an unhappy hybrid of the former and the latter.
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Coronavirus slows Los Angeles money laundering, bringing seizures • Los Angeles Times

Matthew Ormseth:

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The shuttering of nonessential businesses has made a “tremendous impact” on a money laundering system dubbed the black market peso exchange, he said. In the fashion district in downtown Los Angeles — the exchange’s epicenter — drug trafficking groups from throughout the country use wholesalers to remit profits to Mexico, according to cases filed in federal courts in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Steven Mygrant, a federal prosecutor in Oregon who charged six people with laundering heroin proceeds through Los Angeles businesses, said two primary factors drive the exchange: drug trafficking groups need to convert dollars to pesos, which is expensive to do legitimately, and they need to move money from the United States to Mexico, which is risky to transport in cash.

To accomplish this, Mygrant said, a broker pays pesos for the drug traffickers’ dollars. The traffickers deliver cash to an exporter in Los Angeles, who ships goods — commonly clothing, cosmetics, jewelry or sportswear — to a retailer in Mexico. The retailer sells the goods for pesos and pays the broker.

Developed by Colombian cocaine traffickers, Mexican cartels initially did not embrace the black market peso exchange, Bodner said, finding it easier to simply smuggle bulk cash across the border and launder it in Mexico. That changed about 10 years ago, he said, when the Mexican government tightened financial regulations and restricted the flow of dollars into its banks.

Recently, with storefronts closed and agents seizing millions in cash packaged for transport, it appears drug trafficking groups are resorting to older, riskier ways of repatriating profits, Bodner said.

The coronavirus has also cooled Chinese capital flight, he said, which before the pandemic was the primary driver of international money laundering.

«

As one person remarked on Twitter, the speed with which some shops in those areas reopen will tell you which are the ones being used for money laundering.
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What the coronavirus crisis reveals about American medicine • The New Yorker

Siddhartha Mukherjee:

»

A putative advantage of digital hospital records is to enable on-the-fly searches—not the kind of data project that the N.I.H. [National Institutes of Health] might fund (its grants take weeks to process even on an accelerated schedule) but the kind that might be completed in an hour. Perhaps, I thought, we should be advising covid-19 patients to call us if they suspected clots—if their breathing rate and heart rate increased suddenly, for instance. Perhaps our hospital system’s emergency department should be alerted.

Because clotting is a frequent issue among patients with cancers, I called my colleague Azra Raza, the director of Columbia’s Myelodysplastic Syndrome Center, to ask if we could search through the database of her patients for any who had reported being infected, and, if so, had experienced blood clots. She sighed. “I can’t think of a simple way to do this,” she told me. “And in any case, because of all the concerns around privacy, if you wanted to report the findings you would have to file with the institutional review board.”

“But that would take a month, at least,” I protested. (In recent weeks, many hospitals have accelerated their review process to deal with the pace of the pandemic.)

“It’s the way the system is,” she said. “If you want to report the number of times a patient has cut her nails in the last week, you would need approval. And it’s not easy at all to search the E.M.R. [electronic medical records] for any of this information. You’d have to hire someone specifically to look through it.”

A cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, echoed this frustration on Twitter: “Why are nearly all notes in [the doctors’ notes filing system] Epic . . . basically *useless* to understand what’s happening to patient during hospital course?” Another doctor’s reply: “Because notes are used to bill, determine level of service, and document it rather than their intended purpose, which was to convey our observations, assessment, and plan. Our important work has been co-opted by billing.”

«

Very sobering reading.
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Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful • The Washington Post

Meg Kelly and Sarah Cahlan:

»

In Wuhan, at least two labs study coronaviruses that originate in bats — the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC). Both are close to the seafood market. The WIV is about eight miles away. The WHCDC is right around the corner.

Despite the overlap in research, what the two labs actually do is quite different. The WIV is home to China’s first laboratory to receive the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). In addition, it houses lower-level (BSL-3 and BSL-2) labs. The WHCDC is home only to a BSL-2 lab.
“BSL-2 is what we normally think of when we think of a lab,” explained Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. It is a lab where “somebody is wearing a lab coat and gloves; they’re at a bench.” (BSL-4 is akin to what is seen in movies such as “Contagion.”)…

…So how did this virus end up 1,000 miles from the nearest known relative? There are any number of potential explanations. A wildlife trafficker might have brought an infected bat into the city. Another animal might have picked up the virus from bats years ago, allowing it to transform in just the right way to infect humans. There are thousands of bat viruses that scientists have not sampled and even more coronaviruses that circulate in other species, so there’s no guarantee it actually came from thousands of miles away.

But even if that virus from Shi’s lab is not the source for the virus, her lab is full of bat coronavirus variants. That left us wondering: could this virus have been the accidental product of an experiment gone awry? A 2015 paper cautioned against the “gain of function” experiments with which Shi’s team was involved. In this kind of experiment, the researchers mutate a virus strain to enhance a pathogen’s natural traits. Even though the most dangerous part of that experiment was not conducted at the WIV, the 2018 State Department cables referenced similar research by Shi and her team.

In 2017, Shi and her team published a study revealing that they had found a coronavirus from a bat that could be transmitted directly to humans. After reviewing the study, Rasmussen said via email that just because these viruses could attach to human cells, it “does not show that they are particularly effective at doing so.” Binding is only one part of the process. “It is not the sole determinant of viral fitness (the ability of the virus to replicate robustly in a given host) or pathogenicity (the ability of the virus to cause disease).” Moreover, genomic analysis reveals that none of the virus samples used to conduct these experiments were or could have been transformed to be the new coronavirus that causes covid-19.

«

Trump and those seeking to placate his raging narcissism have confused the WIV and the WHCDC (well, that Chinese writing, it’s hard to tell). “Lab escape” is completely the Trump admin’s version of WMD: a story they desperately want to be true, so they’ll make up any old crap about it. It’s more easily explained by simpler, natural methods; that’s what has happened hundreds or thousands of times before.

I also highly recommend this article from Scientific American, which talks to the woman in charge of the WIV. I have a strong feeling that a lot of the “intelligence dossiers” about the WIV being put together rely very heavily on the Scientific American article, but heftily distorted with a “OMG 94% SIMILAR RNA” slant, which fools people who know nothing about science.
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Apple drops 13-inch MacBook Pro with monstrous 32GB of RAM, non-crap keyboard • Input Mag

Raymond Wong:

»

The new 13-inch MacBook Pros are notable for one major reason: after five years of ignoring the flaws of its ill-fated butterfly keyboards, all of Apple’s MacBooks now have good keyboards again. The kind that has enough key travel, won’t break if dust gets stuck underneath, and sport inverted-T arrow keys.

The other notable thing about the new 13-inch MacBook Pro is that it can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM of fast LPDDR4X RAM. Previously, Apple reserved 32GB for the 15- and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Not anymore!

Back in 2016, Apple senior vice president of marketing Phil Schiller told one disgruntled customer who really wanted 32GB of RAM in a MacBook Pro this: “To put more than 16GB of fast RAM into a notebook design at this time would require a memory system that consumes much more power and wouldn’t be efficient enough for a notebook.” Looks like the time has finally come and it only took four years.

«

The first laptop to get the butterfly keyboard was the MacBook, in March 2015. The last laptop to get the butterfly keyboard was the MacBook Air, at the end of October 2018. The first laptop to get the Magic Keyboard was the 16in MacBook Pro, in November 2019. (The MacBook Air followed in
March 2020.)

On that basis it’s only been about a year that you were obliged to buy a butterfly model, but if you wanted something better than the MacBook Air’s grotty screen (getting Retina was the deal you made for the butterfly keys) then it’s been a long time.

I wonder too how long the iPad Smart Keyboard (not the new Magic Keyboard) will keep its butterfly keys, which are protected under a layer of fabric and I find perfect.
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A security guard is shot and killed after telling customer to put on a face mask • CNN

Alec Snyder and Mirna Alsharif:

»

A security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan, was shot and killed after telling a customer to wear a state-mandated face mask, police said.

Calvin Munerlyn, 43, died at a local hospital after he was shot in the head Friday, said Michigan State Police Lt. David Kaiser.

The shooter and a second suspect remain at large, Kaiser told CNN on Monday.

Witnesses at the store told police that Munerlyn got into a verbal altercation with a woman because she was not wearing a mask, said Genesee County prosecutor David Leyton. Surveillance video confirms the incident, Leyton said. Under an executive order from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, all retail employees and customers have to wear a mask.

Footage also shows that immediately after the altercation, the woman left in an SUV. But about 20 minutes later, the SUV returned.

Two men entered the store and one of them yelled at Munerlyn about disrespecting his wife, Leyton said. The other man then shot the security guard.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This is the correct side to charge your MacBook Pro if you don’t want it to waste CPU cycles and get needlessly hot. CC-licensed photo by scottwearsglasses on Flickr.

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

A selection of 12 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mark Zuckerberg asserts control of Facebook, pushing aside dissenters • WSJ

Deepa Seetharaman and Emily Glazer:

»

In December, Facebook’s top brass gathered at Mark Zuckerberg’s more than 700-acre beachfront estate in Kauai, Hawaii, for an unusual board meeting to discuss how to redirect the company after years of turmoil.

Changes came, but they weren’t what everyone expected, according to people familiar with the gathering.

Within months, Facebook announced the departure of two directors, and added a longtime friend of Mr. Zuckerberg’s to the board. The moves were the culmination of the chief executive’s campaign over the past two years to consolidate decision-making at the company he co-founded 16 years ago. The 35-year-old tycoon also jumped into action steering Facebook into a high-profile campaign in the coronavirus response, while putting himself in the spotlight interviewing prominent health officials and politicians.

The result is a Facebook CEO and chairman more actively and visibly in charge than he has been in years.

It is far from certain that Mr. Zuckerberg’s repositioning of Facebook, and his role at the top, will lead to a lasting turnaround in its reputation following more than three years of controversy over the spread of misinformation, loose oversight of user data and the company’s competitive practices.

The departure of long-serving directors, along with those of several longtime lieutenants over the past two years, means he is navigating this moment without key advisers who might be able to help him spot potential pitfalls.

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This story is long on detail, yet short on overview: nobody of the many who are interviewed seems to have a consistent story to tell about what’s going on, or what was wrong. Is Zuckerberg storing up trouble? He already has total control.
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Coronavirus: David Icke kicked off Facebook • BBC News

Marianne Spring:

»

Facebook has taken down the official page of conspiracy theorist David Icke for publishing “health misinformation that could cause physical harm”.

Mr Icke has made several false claims about coronavirus, such as suggesting 5G mobile phone networks are linked to the spread of the virus. In one video, he suggested a Jewish group was behind the virus.

Following the ban, his Twitter account posted: “Fascist Facebook deletes David Icke – the elite are TERRIFIED.” Facebook said in a statement: “We have removed this Page for repeatedly violating our policies on harmful misinformation”.

On Friday, campaign group the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published an open letter calling on tech companies to ban Mr Icke’s accounts. The letter said Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had amplified “Icke’s racism and misinformation about Covid-19 to millions of people”. It was co-signed by MP Damian Collins, as well as celebrity medics Dr Christian Jessen, Dr Dawn Harper and Dr Pixie McKenna.

The CCDH said videos of Mr Icke making “untrue and conspiracist claims about Covid-19” had been watched more than 30 million times online.

«

Well overdue. If you’re going to have rules about misinformation, just get on and apply them.
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Why am I paying $60 for that bag of rice on Amazon.com? • The Markup

Sara Harrison:

»

limited inventory is not the only reason that the price of pasta (or toilet paper, peanut butter, and rice) is shifting so drastically on Amazon. Experts say the fluctuations on Amazon are often a result of the algorithms sellers use to optimize their sales.

Dynamic pricing (or algorithmic pricing) relies on algorithms that can synthesize lots of information about the marketplace and then change the price of something based on what’s happening hour to hour or even minute to minute. Dynamic pricing is already common for items like plane tickets and hotel rooms. As the supply gets smaller or if there’s more demand—a big conference is going to be in town that weekend, for example—then prices go up. If demand goes down because, say, a pandemic has stopped people from traveling, then prices drop. 

But dynamic pricing isn’t quite that simple on Amazon because of its Buy Box. When shoppers click the “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button, they are selecting a specific vendor. There’s usually an option to consider other vendors, but most users—by some estimates 80 percent—make their purchase through the Buy Box. To determine who “wins” the box, Amazon uses its own algorithm, which it does not reveal to the public but which observers say includes more than price. “The Buy Box depends on fulfillment speed, channel, your reviews and rating, availability within a certain period of time,” Victor Rosenman, CEO of Feedvisor, a company that creates algorithms for Amazon sellers, said in an interview.

…Consumers themselves can use browser extensions like Camelcamelcamel and Keepa to track prices on Amazon and set limits that will alert them when the price falls to an acceptable level. But just like couponing, Wilson says, price-tracking apps favor consumers who have the time and the wherewithal to comparison shop and wait for a good deal—a strategy that’s not very practical when you’re staring at an empty pantry or using up that last roll of toilet paper.

«

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ICANN board withholds consent for a change of control of the Public Interest Registry (PIR) • ICANN

»

Today, the ICANN Board made the decision to reject the proposed change of control and entity conversion request that Public Interest Registry (PIR) submitted to ICANN.

After completing extensive due diligence, the ICANN Board finds that withholding consent of the transfer of PIR from the Internet Society (ISOC) to Ethos Capital is reasonable, and the right thing to do.

ICANN’s role is to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems. We are dedicated to making the right decision, knowing that whatever we decide will be well received by some, and not by others. It is our responsibility to weigh all factors from an ICANN Bylaws and policies perspective, including considering the global public interest. We have done this diligently, ensuring as much transparency as possible and welcoming input from stakeholders throughout.

…After completing its evaluation, the ICANN Board finds that the public interest is better served in withholding consent as a result of various factors that create unacceptable uncertainty over the future of the third largest gTLD registry.

«

The PIR is the .org domain. This is the proposed sale to private equity that had pretty much all of the internet up in arms. Thankfully now revoked. Among the factors were the key one that it was moving from a non-profit to a profit-at-all-costs.
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Worldwide smartphone market suffers its largest year-over-year decline in Q1 2020 • IDC

»

Worldwide smartphone shipments decreased 11.7% year over year in the first quarter of 2020 (1Q20), according to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. In total, companies shipped 275.8 million smartphones during 1Q20. Although the first quarter usually experiences a sequential (quarter over quarter) decline in shipments, with the average sequential decline over the last three years hovering between -15% to -20%, this is the largest annual (year over year) decline ever.

The drop comes as no surprise as 1Q20 marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the peak of the lockdowns in China, which extended to the rest of the world by the end of the quarter. The largest regional decline in 1Q20 was in China, which saw shipments drop 20.3% year over year. Since China constitutes almost a quarter of worldwide shipments, this had a huge impact on the overall market. The global dependency on China for its smartphone supply chain also caused major issues as the quarter progressed. Other regions that contributed to the drastic worldwide decline were the United States and Western Europe, which declined by 16.1% and 18.3% respectively.

«

Here comes the storm.
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Worldwide tablet shipments continue to decline in Q1 2020 • IDC

»

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic furthered the decline of the worldwide tablet market as global shipments fell to 24.6m units, down 18.2% year over year during the first quarter of 2020 (1Q20), according to preliminary data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. Detachables continued to grow and gain market share with year-over-year growth of 56.8%, mainly driven by iOS devices, while slate tablets saw shipments decline 36.4% compared to the first quarter of 2019.

«

As ever, the “other” category is shrinking faster than the rest of the market, indicating the squeeze on small players. Well, tiny players.
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macos – How to find cause of high kernel_task cpu usage? • Ask Different

»

TLDR; If your MacBook Pro runs hot or shows a high % CPU for the kernel task, try charging on the right and not on the left.

High kernel_task CPU Usage is due to high chassis temperature caused by charging. In particular Left Thunderbolt port usage.

Solutions include:
• Move charging from the left to the right side. If you have a second charger then plug it in on the right side. Avoid plugging everything on the right side (see last paragraph below).
• Unplug something from the left side. Either power or another accessory until the battery is full.
• Force fans to max before plugging in. iStatMenus has an easy Sensors -> Fans menu item to do so. This only helps in marginal conditions.
• Move to a cooler room.

«

This is amazing, though absolutely undeniable. Just to repeat, if you’ve got a USB-C MacBook Pro and the fans are spinning like mad, make sure you’re not charging on the left. Plug the charger in to the right. (I guess you could unplug the charger?)

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The inevitable coronavirus censorship crisis is here • Reporting by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi:

»

H.L. Mencken once said that in America, “the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”

We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic [suggesting that America’s internet should have more censorship “like China], is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.

The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.

…There’s a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods in any field. It’s particularly in the nature of insular communities of subject matter experts to coalesce around orthodoxies that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most knowledgeable.

“Experts” get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they’ve all been taught the same incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have a financial or professional interest in denying the truth).

«

It’s worth reading this piece, if only to spot the joins where Taibbi conflates different things and claims they’re the same thing, or else fibs. Here’s a few so you’ll see them: journalists aren’t social media platforms; coronavirus isn’t Saddam’s WMD; pollsters didn’t say it was impossible that Trump could win in 2016. (Thanks Jim for the link.)
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Coronavirus offers a clear view of what causes air pollution • WSJ

Jim Carlton:

»

One of the biggest airborne pollutants to fall off has been nitrogen dioxide, which is a byproduct of fossil-fuel emissions that most scientists believe is contributing to climate change. Satellite data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show NO2 levels in the Northeastern U.S. dropped 30% during March from the previous four-year average for the month.

San Francisco-based Aclima has compiled data that shows the NO2 readings dropping in lockstep as the coronavirus swept first from China in January to Europe in February and the US in March. Scientists said it was the first time they could remember so many cities going clean all at once.

Aclima’s most comprehensive data is for its own backyard, the San Francisco Bay Area, home to about eight million people. The region recorded a 31% decline in NO2 during the 10 weekdays ended April 6 compared with the previous three-year average for the same time. In addition, Aclima found a 39% drop in particulate matter such as from smoke and a 41% plunge in soot created by diesel fumes and other human sources. The company’s scientists say they believe those are the lowest levels since the first half of the last century.

«

Terrible headline – we know what causes air pollution – and as the article notes, this is only short-term. Climate change is about cumulative addition of greenhouse gases; you need to take some out, not just stop adding them, to have beneficial effects.
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Blackout risk as low demand for power brings plea to switch off wind farms • The Times

Emily Gosden:

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Britain could be at risk of blackouts as extremely low energy demand threatens to leave the electricity grid overwhelmed by surplus power.

National Grid asked the regulator yesterday for emergency powers to switch off solar and wind farms to prevent the grid from being swamped on the May 8 bank holiday, when demand is expected to be especially low.

In its urgent request to Ofgem, it warned of “a significant risk of disruption to security of supply” if the “last resort” powers to order plant disconnections were not granted.

National Grid has to keep supply and demand balanced to ensure stable voltage and frequency on the network. When there is an imbalance the network can become unstable, leading to blackouts such as that on August 9 last year when a million homes were cut off.

The lockdown has led to a huge fall in demand for power as factories and businesses shut down. National Grid said in its request to Ofgem: “The societal changes required by the need to achieve social distancing have led to demand for electricity falling by up to 20% compared to predicted values.”

«

Emphasising the need for storage – but wow, that’s a dramatic fall in demand.
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In conversation with the murder hornet • ¡Hola Papi!

John Paul Brammer:

»

Her apartment decor immediately dispels any notion that this will be the interview I was expecting. A porcelain mint green tea set sits on a shelf alongside a copy of Severance by Ling Ma and Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. For a moment, the Murder Hornet seems unaware I have joined the Zoom call. She fiddles with her antennae, a conceit to keeping up appearances, yet another surprise in an interview in which we’ve yet to exchange a word.

“Hello!” I greet her over the faulty internet connection. Her eyes, not too unlike Spiderman’s mask with their teardrop shape and inscrutable motives, meet mine. “Hi there!” she says cheerfully.

I haven’t prepared any questions. I suppose I expected the Murder Hornet to live up to her name and lead our conversation with some degree of homicidal bravado. What I have instead is just a bug, a pair of wings, an immigrant, an entity. Where to start?

«

For those who haven’t been keeping up, the US faces an invasion of murderous hornets (though the murder is apparently mostly focussed on bees, but anyway). And this is a wonderful parody of those bloody celebrity interviews.
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Me on COVID-19 contact tracing apps • Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier:

»

Assume you take the app out grocery shopping with you and it subsequently alerts you of a contact. What should you do? It’s not accurate enough for you to quarantine yourself for two weeks. And without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing, you can’t confirm the app’s diagnosis. So the alert is useless.

Similarly, assume you take the app out grocery shopping and it doesn’t alert you of any contact. Are you in the clear? No, you’re not. You actually have no idea if you’ve been infected.

The end result is an app that doesn’t work. People will post their bad experiences on social media, and people will read those posts and realize that the app is not to be trusted. That loss of trust is even worse than having no app at all.

It has nothing to do with privacy concerns. The idea that contact tracing can be done with an app, and not human health professionals, is just plain dumb.

«

But, but, but. The idea is that you do get cheap and fast testing. OK, might not be accurate, might not be ubiquitous; but you can make up for the accuracy by testing twice. You can also read more than you perhaps ever wanted to know about the Apple-Google API at NSHipster.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A machine learning system wrote this caption. So I guess that makes it copyright-free? (Source: Imgflip.)

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 13 links for you. Save some for the weekend, then. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon • NBC News

Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins:

»

In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website’s message board.

Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q,” the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, and it would eventually make its way from those message boards to national media stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump.

Now, the people behind that effort are at the center of a fractious debate among conspiracy enthusiasts, some of whom believe the three people who first popularized the Qanon theory are promoting it in order to make a living. Others suggest that these original followers actually wrote Q’s mysterious posts…

…Part of the Qanon appeal lies in its game-like quality. Followers wait for clues left by “Q” on the message board. When the clues appear, believers dissect the riddle-like posts alongside Trump’s speeches and tweets and news articles in an effort to validate the main narrative that Trump is winning a war against evil.

«

Started on 4chan, expanded to YouTube, then Reddit (they were “able to tap into a larger audience of conspiracy theorists”), then Facebook (“where it found a new, older audience”) and then the fabulously toxic 8chan, and then Discord.

One of those involved was identified because he logged in to the wrong account. It’s impossible to live that sort of internet double life forever. The eternal downfall of scams.
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How coronavirus broke America’s healthcare system • Financial Times

Leslie Hook and Hannah Kuchler:

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The US government funds more than half of healthcare spending — but it does not run the hospital system. Instead, it supplies public insurance in the form of Medicare, for seniors, and Medicaid, for the poorest, paying through a fragmented network of healthcare providers. To get by, hospitals must also have enough money coming in from commercial insurers or beg for extra subsidies.

Many are on the brink. More than a hundred have closed in the past decade, and a report last month from consultancy BCG estimated that 20% were at “near-term risk of insolvency” before the pandemic. They now think the figure is between 30-40%.

The high number of uninsured people in the US compounds the challenges of responding to coronavirus. At least 27 million Americans lack any health insurance, and that figure is set to rise as millions more lose their jobs. Without insurance, patients risk getting saddled with high bills from emergency room visits that they cannot pay, forcing bad debt on to the hospitals.

Even though the US spends trillions of dollars on healthcare, much of that is wasted. The funding gets used up by bureaucrats that have to code and bill every action a doctor takes, by doctors and hospital administrators paid far more than their European counterparts and by the soaring cost of drugs. A study last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association found at least $760bn was wasted in unnecessary health spending — more than the US spends on primary and secondary education.

Poorer hospitals that cater to low-income urban communities, or rural areas where population is declining, are dependent on government insurance. They say the payments from Medicaid do not cover their costs as the price of staff, equipment and drugs rises.

«

A lot of those commenting in the story say they don’t know if this will be what the US healthcare system finally needs so that it will get fixed, or if it’s just going to continue getting worse and worse. I’d like to be optimistic, but US healthcare has so many inbuilt biases towards awfulness – and most of them are making the people with power rich.
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TikTok tops 2 billion downloads, India accounts for over 600m: Sensor Tower • NDTV

Tasneem Akolawala:

»

TikTok, a popular short-video app, has achieved 2 billion downloads via Google Play Store and App Store. According to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the first quarter of 2020 has been the best so far for TikTok, as it managed to accumulate 315 million installs. While businesses continue to suffer and adjust to the new norms of work from home, TikTok has witnessed never-before-seen downloads, engagement, and revenue. This massive growth was accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis as it has drawn more people to their mobile devices and use social media as one of the means to connect with people.

The social giant has amassed 2 billion downloads, just five months after it surpassed 1.5 billion downloads. This means it has added 500 million new downloads in this short period. Sensor Tower notes that India has been the biggest driver for TikTok installs, and out of the 2 billion downloads – 611 million are from this country. This amounts to 30.3% of the total downloads. China comes in second, with 9.7% (196.6 million) of total downloads, and the US comes in third with 165 million downloads – an 8.2% share.

«

That number for India is absolutely bonkers. Though they’re not spending any money on it (that’s being done by China, the US and UK.) I’d love to know how the activity per country breaks down.
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Zoom admits it doesn’t have 300 million users, corrects misleading claims • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

The Verge noticed the company had quietly edited a blog post making the claim earlier this month. Zoom originally stated it had “more than 300 million daily users” and that “more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time.” Zoom later deleted these references from the original blog post, and now claims “300 million daily Zoom meeting participants.”

The difference between a daily active user (DAU) and “meeting participant” is significant. Daily meeting participants can be counted multiple times: if you have five Zoom meetings in a day then you’re counted five times. A DAU is counted once per day, and is commonly used by companies to measure service usage. Only counting meeting participants is an easy, somewhat misleading, way to make your platform usage seem larger than it is.

«

Upshot: we don’t actually know how many daily users Zoom has.
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When data viz goes psychotic • FT Alphaville

Jemima Kelly:

»

What in heaven’s name is that, we hear you ask? Well it’s a whirl-chart (totally a thing) showing the “Rates of change in affected countries”, of course, which we stumbled across via Emma Wager on Twitter.

The chart appears to have been drawn by Danny Dorling, who is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, no less!

It was posted on his website under the headline “Three charts that show where the coronavirus death rate is heading”, so one would kind of hope to have a sense of where the coronavirus death rate is heading after staring at it for a while. We didn’t experience this.

«

But don’t worry, he explains it! Well, as far as it’s explicable.

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Jukebox • Open AI

»

We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.

«

The country music sample is very impressive; there are also more samples, and the one in the style of Prince is quite near. It’s pretty close to average. But you know it’s going to get better too.
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This Meme Does Not Exist • Imgflip

»

AI Memes by Imgflip, uncensored

Click a meme to generate a new caption

«

The Verge has played with it longer than I did. You can imagine that someone with a pro account and feeding a few well-chosen words in could create something which would eventually provoke quite the reaction.
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US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot legally be an inventor • The Verge

Jon Porter:

»

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has ruled that artificial intelligence systems cannot be credited as an inventor in a patent, the agency announced earlier this week. The decision came in response to two patents — one for a food container and the other for a flashing light — that were created by an AI system called DABUS.

Among the USPTO’s arguments is the fact that US patent law repeatedly refers to inventors using humanlike terms such as “whoever” and pronouns like “himself” and “herself.” The group behind the applications had argued that the law’s references to an inventor as an “individual” could be applied to a machine, but the USPTO said this interpretation was too broad. “Under current law, only natural persons may be named as an inventor in a patent application,” the agency concluded.

The patents were submitted last year by the Artificial Inventor Project. Along with the patents submitted to the USPTO, the team also submitted documents to the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). The IPO and EPO have already ruled that DABUS, which was created by AI researcher Stephen Thaler, cannot be listed as an inventor based on similar legal interpretations. The USPTO asked the public for opinions on the topic last November.

«

So my interpretation of this is that you can claim to have invented something that an AI has devised. Such as music? Or memes?
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Wealth, shown to scale • Matt Korostoff

Jeff Bezos’s wealth is $139bn. Yes, but what does that look like compared to the cost of cancer treatment for everyone in the US for a year, or how much you’ll probably earn in your life, or the annual pay of an Amazon warehouse worker. It’s stunning.
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Aviation’s crisis just became permanent • WSJ

Jon Sindreu:

»

Some in the industry have warned since the start of this crisis that it could take more than two years to get capacity back to 2019 levels, due to a combination of health restrictions, fear of flying and corporate culture embracing videoconferences. This week’s announcements offer confirmation that there is no turning back.

Order cancellations have only been modest so far, because they are expensive for airlines. But the watershed moment for production rates is likely still months away. Consensus forecasts compiled by data provider FactSet show that the combined revenues of Boeing and Airbus aren’t expected to top the 2018 level—before the 737 MAX crisis hammered the US manufacturer—until 2023. Sales that year would still be 7% lower than what analysts expected for 2020 a few months ago.

That is a lost five years for the aerospace industry, and estimates might still have to catch up with the news.

For engine manufacturers and companies that make money repairing aircraft, history suggests that the trough will be even deeper. General Electric said Wednesday that it would need to cut $2bn in costs after reporting a whopping 40% drop in profits for its aviation division.

While governments have stepped in to bail out some troubled airlines, some are likely to disappear. Virgin Australia has already filed for administration, and its founder and part-owner Richard Branson has so far failed to secure aid for his other carrier, UK-based Virgin Atlantic. In the US, airlines are required to retain their workforce through September as part of the aid package provided by Washington, but they are already offering voluntary exit schemes. They will surely start dismissing workers as soon as they are allowed to.

Other industries still have hope of returning to some level of normalcy within the foreseeable future. Aviation, though, will be smaller and less profitable for years to come.

«

See also this discussion at The Conversation between three academics about where aviation is going.
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Helium supplies at risk from plunging oil prices – which is bad news for our coronavirus effort

Jon Gluyas is a professor of geoenergy at Durham University:

»

On April 1, scientists at the University of Arizona College of Medicine reported on the invention of a new breathing device that has potential to help patients suffering with lung damage to recover from COVID-19 using a mix of oxygen and helium gases called heliox.

Heliox has about the same viscosity as normal air but lower density, and the way it flows requires much less energy for the lungs to take in the oxygen it carries than is the case for air. The gas is non-toxic and non-reactive so is already beginning to be used to help people with asthma and a range of other conditions in which patients have breathing difficulties.

About 22% of all helium produced already goes to medical uses, and breathing mixtures account for 2%-3%. Should the application of heliox become widespread, then demand would grow dramatically.

But helium is already in short supply globally. And, since 87% of helium supplies comes directly from petroleum production the oil decline could put significant further strain on the market.

«

I feel like this wins some sort of Overspill trifecta: oil, helium and coronavirus all wrapped up with a neat little bow.
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The ‘old dogs’ who build Apple products — The Information

Wayne Ma:

»

While plenty of ambitious engineers and industrial designers want to be the next Jony Ive—Apple’s former chief design officer, who famously shaped its iconic products—few want to be the next [Mike] Janicek [now 61, who has done hardware work for Apple, on and off, since 1984]. He’s one of a vanishing breed of engineers with expertise in the less glamorous aspects of manufacturing such as surface finishing, metalworking and machine tooling.

“This is an industrywide problem, not just for Apple. There aren’t that many really experienced manufacturing engineers in the US,” Janicek said in a series of interviews with The Information conducted by phone from Taiwan, where he now consults for a large Fortune 500 company. “Kids don’t grow up working on cars or fixing stuff anymore. Instead, if they need an answer, they’ll look it up on Google.”

Apple’s need for deep manufacturing knowledge—and its reliance on older experts like Janicek—highlights one of the challenges that face any effort to bring manufacturing back to the US. The gradual disappearance of this know-how is a decades-long trend that has become more pronounced as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have sought to emulate Apple’s success by hiring from a shrinking pool of American engineers with such backgrounds. 

There’s now an added urgency to seek out and hire American manufacturing experts. In recent years, political pressure on companies like Apple to bring factory jobs home has increased. The economic downturn from the coronavirus could highlight the issue even more. But America’s shortage of manufacturing skills—the result of decades of outsourcing production overseas, starting in the 1980s—is a barrier that Cook has mentioned over the years.

“In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure you could fill the room,” Cook said at a conference in China in 2017. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”

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“It’s time to build”, eh? Though you also need the space to put the factories.
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Smartphone production to drop by 16.5% YoY in 2Q20, setting historical record in YoY decline • TrendForce

»

Global smartphone production for 1Q20 fell by 10% YoY to around 280 million units, the lowest in five years, due to pandemic-induced disruptions across the supply chain, such as delayed work resumption and labor/material shortages, which caused low factory capacity utilization rates. Turning to 2Q20, there are now improvements to both the supply chain and the work resumption statuses of manufacturing and assembly lines, but the pandemic is now making its effects felt on the demand side of the smartphone market by tanking major economies worldwide. Global production for 2Q20 is now estimated to register another YoY drop of 16.5% to 287 million units, the largest decline on record for a given quarter. TrendForce forecasts total yearly production volume of 1.24 billion units, an 11.3% decrease YoY.

«

Samsung was under pressure anyway from Chinese companies in southeast Asia and India; Trendforce reckons its production will fall nearly 11% next quarter. Unclear for Huawei and Apple. Quite how the demand side is going to work out is anyone’s guess.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There won’t be queues like this for the next iPhone, of course; and they’ll probably be a month later than usual CC-licensed photo by Ian Betteridge 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. Now that’s what I call lockdown. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Poll finds a problem for Apple-Google coronavirus app: mistrust of tech firms • The Washington Post

Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell and Alauna Safarpour:

»

Nearly 3 in 5 Americans say they are either unable or unwilling to use the infection-alert system under development by Google and Apple, suggesting that it will be difficult to persuade enough people to use the app to make it effective against the coronavirus pandemic, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll finds.

The two tech giants are working with public health authorities and university researchers to produce a set of tools that apps could use to notify users who had come in close contact with a person who tested positive for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The initiative has been portrayed as a way to enhance traditional forms of contact tracing to find potential new infections and help make resumption of economic and social activities safer in the months ahead.

But the effort faces several major barriers, including that approximately 1 in 6 Americans do not have smartphones, which would be necessary for running any apps produced by the initiative. Rates of smartphone ownership are much lower among seniors, who are particularly vulnerable to the ravages of Covid-19, with just over half of those aged 65 or older saying that they have a smartphone (53%). Rates are even lower for those 75 and older, according to the Post-U. Md. poll.

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I think it’s going to dawn eventually on people that reopening locked-down countries will rely very heavily on having good contact tracing; which means smartphones; which means apps, and they’ll have to use the Apple-Google API, because not doing so will be the kiss of, well, death. (Perhaps, in time, it can record if you’ve already had it, or been vaccinated.)

Quite possibly the elderly will be told to get a cheap one and keep it powered simply for the tracing.
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Inside Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s two months of magical thinking • Vanity Fair

Gabriel Sherman:

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[Health and Human Services secretary Alex] Azar was briefed on a new and dangerous coronavirus sweeping the Chinese city of Wuhan by CDC director Robert Redfield on January 3—but he struggled to communicate this knowledge to the president. At the time of the outbreak, Trump had soured on Azar, whom he blamed for his weak health care polling numbers. “Trump thought Azar was a disaster. He is definitely on the gangplank,” a person close to Trump told me. Azar wasn’t able to speak to Trump about the virus for two weeks, even though Trump called him during this period to scream that the White House’s ban on e-cigarettes, a response to a health crisis that he believed could help him politically, had become a drag on his poll numbers. “I never should have done this fucking vaping thing!” Trump told Azar on January 17, a person familiar with the call told me.

When Azar finally told Trump about the outbreak on the phone at Mar-a-Lago, on the night of Saturday, January 18, Trump cut him off and launched into another e-cigarette rant. “Trump jumped his shit about vaping,” a person briefed on the phone call told me…

[Embodiment of Dunning-Kruger’s Law, Jared] Kushner blamed [Azar] for the criticism Trump received about the delays in testing, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved. Kushner had no medical experience, but that didn’t seem to matter. “’To be honest, when I got involved, I was a little intimidated. But I know how to make this government run now’,” Kushner said, according to a source. “The arrogance was on full display.”

Kushner advocated for the iconoclastic public-private approach he had used for his Mideast peace plan. He reached out to business leaders like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, according to a source. With bravado only partly grounded in reality, he promised Trump that Google was rolling out a testing website. He also made a point of bypassing normal channels, phoning Wall Street executives and asking for advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said. A former West Wing official said Kushner’s involvement wrought chaos: business leaders wanting to contribute masks or ventilators didn’t know who in government to call. According to two sources, Kushner told Trump about experimental treatments he’d learned of from executives in Silicon Valley. “Jared is bringing conspiracy theories to Trump about potential treatments,” a Republican briefed on the conversations told me. (A person close to Kushner said he brought COVID testing ideas to Trump.)

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It’s a terrifying piece: Kushner’s idiot-in-charge confidence combined with Trump’s idiot-in-charge stupidity and lack of focus. It’s also hilarious for the “sources close to” denials, obviously from Kushner himself.
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Yes: the American people should see Trump’s coronavirus briefings in their entirety • NY Mag

Olivia Nuzzi:

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to watch Trump speak, uninterrupted by TV hosts and pundits, is to understand that he does not have a message, that the stray sentences he formulates which do articulate a belief of some kind are anomalies, and he is likely to muddy their meaning in the next breath, or bury it with a series of half-formed thoughts and throwaway verbal crutches — many people are saying, some people would say, if you can believe it, and so on. And when we extract his words in clips or quotes in news articles, when we divorce them from their rambling context to place them in the context of the real world, and his real record, we are also helping him articulate a semi-coherent worldview and ideology when there usually isn’t one. We are aiding and abetting him in the creation of a message, and giving the voting public the option to abstain from sitting through his endless yapping to discern his meaning for themselves.

A viewer, hearing the president in full, would likely struggle to notice or take seriously that stray sentence which articulates a belief, sandwiched between a dozen other thoughts spewing from his mouth at rapid speed and inhuman cadence. Even when we place the belief in context, when we explain that he’s often expressed the opposite sentiment, or that his actions contradict his words, we’re not revealing Trump to those inclined to believe him over the fake news media.

For a Republican voter who has been able to stomach the Trump presidency because of tax reform, or the reconfiguration of the courts, but who ignores his tweets and opts out of attending his rallies, I imagine it’s much easier to tolerate the president’s words when they are distilled into proper sentences and coherent thoughts by the media. I imagine it would be less tolerable to have to hear it straight from the rambling horse’s mouth. When you listen to what he says, and how he says it, you are confronted by his insanity in a way that is more powerful, and harder to ignore, than hearing a cable-news analyst or reporter explain to you why you shouldn’t take him seriously, why it would be stupid to do so, when he’s lied or been wrong about X, Y, or Z so many times before.

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Apple delays mass production of 2020 flagship iPhones • WSJ

Yoko Kubota:

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Apple is forging ahead with plans to release four new iPhone models later this year, people familiar with its plans say. The phones, some with 5G connectivity, will vary in price and come in three sizes—5.4 inches, two measuring 6.1 inches, and one at 6.7 inches, all featuring organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, screens, the people said.

Apple’s annual product refresh fuels the majority of iPhone sales for an entire year, making new phones the linchpin of a business segment that accounts for more than half of the company’s total revenue.

Investor anticipation for this year’s 5G release helped send Apple shares to record highs before the pandemic hit, as analysts predicted the devices would lift a mature product line that last year failed to ship more than 200 million units for the first time since 2015.

Apple declined to comment.

Apple usually unveils new iPhone models in mid-September and begins selling them before the end of the month. To do so, it usually ramps up mass-production in the early summer, building up inventory around August.

This year, while Apple would still be building some of the new phones in the July-to-September period, the mass-production ramp-up will slide back by about a month, the people said.

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The phones “will vary in price”. Quelle surprise. So essentially it’s pushing things back a month. As the story points out, the original iPhone X was delayed until November.
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Apple making it easier to unlock Face ID iPhones if you have a mask on • CNBC

Todd Haselton:

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Right now, if you’re wearing a mask, you need to lift your mask to unlock an iPhone with Face ID. Otherwise, there’s a small but annoying delay between when the phone realizes it can’t see your face and when it presents the screen to enter in a passcode. You can just turn off Face ID, but then you don’t get the convenience when you’re at home and not wearing a mask.

In the new iOS 13.5 beta 3 code, which was released to developers for testing on Wednesday, Apple simplifies the unlock process for folks wearing masks by bringing the passcode field to the main screen. All you need to do is swipe up if you’re wearing a mask, and you’ll skip the Face ID display and enter in a code instead.

That means you’ll be able to get to unlock your phone easier while doing things like mobile payments at a checkout counter instead of fumbling with your mask or waiting for a passcode screen to pop up. Since this is still a beta, it may be a few more weeks until a final version launches with the feature enabled.

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Bet Apple will try to hurry it up. Face ID turns out to have been a great idea which was launched with unlucky timing. (Still, at least it wasn’t AirBnB.) How soon will we have iris recognition?
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Facebook poaches social media regulator Tony Close from Ofcom • The Times

Matthew Moore:

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A senior official at the watchdog preparing to regulate social media companies has been poached by Facebook to help it respond to the curbs.

Tony Close, Ofcom’s director of content standards, has been heavily involved with drawing up rules to rein in the tech giants and protect the public.

Ministers said in February that they were minded to appoint Ofcom as the country’s first internet watchdog. It is already responsible for TV and radio.

The government is preparing to announce a timetable for legislation but Mr Close will not oversee the regime after accepting an offer to become Facebook’s director of content regulation.

He is expected to be responsible for ensuring the US company does not fall foul of the regulatory system, and for pushing back against any restrictions that it deems unworkable.

A former senior Ofcom official said that colleagues were shocked. “He was obviously privy to all their thinking about online harms,” the source said. “Facebook wants regulation that isn’t going to adversely affect their profits too much, so it’s in their interest to recruit people with inside knowledge.”

The Conservative MP Damian Collins, the former chairman of the culture select committee, said: “We don’t want to see a revolving door between regulators and companies they are seeking to regulate . . . parliament must insist on a proper regulator with teeth who can set standards for the platforms and hold them to account.”

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Perhaps Parliament could pass a law about this sort of thing, Mr Collins. In fact, it has had years to pass such a law; the revolving door has been outraging people in different sectors for ages.
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World’s largest solar energy project will also be its cheapest • Greentech Media

John Parnell:

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Abu Dhabi has set a global record-low solar price as authorities confirmed the winning bid in a 2-gigawatt tender. Upon its expected completion in mid-2022, it is slated to be the largest single-site solar energy project in the world.

The Al Dhafra project had five bidders, with the lowest offer coming in at 1.35 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour.

The state-run Abu Dhabi Power Corporation (ADPower) confirmed to Greentech Media that the leading consortium consists of French energy giant EDF and the projects division of Chinese solar manufacturer Jinko Solar.

ADPower will now negotiate a 30-year power-purchase agreement with EDF/Jinko. If an agreement cannot be reached, ADPower, part of the Emirates Water and Electricity Company, can negotiate with the second-best bidder.

…There are numerous factors behind the ever-lower prices for solar in the Middle East, including great solar resources, large and flat sites, cheap-to-zero land costs, massive scale, and the cheap finance that comes with a 30-year PPA [public-private agreement] with a petrostate as the offtaker.

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Twitter launches a COVID-19 data set of tweets for approved developers and researchers • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Twitter is making it possible for developers and researchers to study the public conversation around COVID-19 in real time with an update to its API platform. The company is introducing a new COVID-19 stream endpoint to those participating in Twitter Developer Labs — a program that offers access to new API endpoints and other features ahead of their public release. The new COVID-19 endpoint will allow approved developers to access COVID-19 and coronavirus-related tweets across languages, resulting in a data set that will include tens of millions of tweets daily, Twitter says.

The data can be used to research a range of topics related to the coronavirus pandemic, including things like the spread of the disease, the spread of misinformation, crisis management within communities and more.

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I like how there’s an implicit assumption that there will be misinformation and that it will spread; that Twitter is a nice little Petri dish for observing its foibles, and its users’ foibles.
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The scale of the problem • Jayson Lusk

Lusk is quickly becoming our go-to on the question of American meat processing:

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Keep in mind, there are 77.6 million pigs in this country. Iowa alone has 23.6 million pigs, or about 7.6 pigs for every man, woman, and child in that state.

Here is where the scale of the problem really kicks in. We have a national pork processing capacity of about 500,000 head per day. Latest data suggests that because of plant closures and slowdowns, we are processing about 40% fewer pigs, which means an extra 500,000*0.4 = 200,000 pigs that are left on the farm. Every. Single. Day. Do that for 5 days, and that’s 1 million “excess” pigs left on the farm.

Why not send the the hogs to smaller local packers? Well, assuming those packers even had room, how big are they? Some of the small-ish packers of any scale process 200 hogs a day. But, the largest plants now shut down can process 20,000 hogs a day. That means, 1 of those small plants would have to run 20,000/200 = 100 extra days to make up for just 1 day of lost production from the large plant. Or, stated differently, we’d need 100 brand new small packing plants to make up for the loss of one large plant.

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And you can’t just tell the pigs not to exist, because they were effectively set in train 300 days ago. There’s a graph of how rapidly storage is filling up too from the US Dept of Agriculture. (Thanks Paul G for the pointer.)
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Tax havens: there’s a chance now to apply conditions to bail outs • The Conversation

Atul K. Shah is a professor of accounting and finance at the City University of London:

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the reality is that it has become normal for multinationals to even shift their profits from one EU country to other EU countries which have lower corporate tax rates. One study finds that France, for example, loses 22% of its corporate revenue to tax havens – 18% of this goes to other EU countries. In 2017 it lost US$13bn, of which more than US$11bn went mostly to Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and Ireland.

Another recent study by the Tax Justice Network think tank found that Italy and Spain – both badly hit by coronavirus – lost significant tax revenues (US$1.5bn and US$1bn, respectively) to the Netherlands in 2017. Yet most of the recent announcements by countries to not give state aid to tax avoiders only use the EU’s official list.

A better solution to this problem would be to introduce country-by-country reporting. This would allow investors and government to accurately tell where a company trades, where it parks its profits, and where and what taxes it actually pays. Considering accounting has international standards and most big corporations are audited by one of the Big Four auditing firms, this should be relatively easy to implement…

…Now that we are in a profound economic crisis, with a number of multinationals reliant on state aid, we have a unique opportunity to change business as usual. Corporations are in trouble and seeking state aid so governments can now call the shots, and make sure that money is not given away without conditions. Such conditions can include not having a subsidiary in a tax haven, transparency about profits earned in each country, and greater openness and commitment to paying fair taxes in the countries where revenues are earned.

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I think that given “These Difficult Times”, governments all over will decide that tax havens are a blight. Perhaps if they declared that companies are free to use them but will be taxed henceforth on revenues, rather than profits, there might be a shift.
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HTC’s crypto mining phone takes 500 years to recoup cost of device • Decrypt

Andrew Hayward:

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“Midas Labs empowers Exodus 1s users to mine at least $0.0038 of [the cryptocurrency] XMR per day on average, while the electricity cost is less than 50% of that,” [Midas Labs founder Jri] Lee told The Block. The company suggests that someone could mine about $0.06 of XMR per day on a laptop, but spend an average of $0.156 on energy to do so.

Running the DeMiner app, the HTC Exodus phones will automatically stop mining when in heavy use or unplugged from a charger, ensuring that the phone still remains a functional, reliable phone throughout the day.

Still, it’s peanuts. Even if you mined every single day, that $0.0038 estimate would only yield $1.39 of XMR in a full year

For context, the most recent edition of the Exodus 1—the Binance Edition (which has native support for Binance’s decentralized exchange, and is the only version in stock on HTC’s website)—costs around $700. Assuming the price of Monero remains constant, it would take half a millennium of mining to get your money back. And that doesn’t even factor in electricity costs.

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I’m going to guess that half a millennium of mining might rack up some electricity costs. At this point I have no idea why HTC carries on. It’s a zombie.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This year’s CES in Las Vegas delivered on this promise: there was a chance to catch the disease millions of others would later get. CC-licensed photo by John Biehler 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. How’s the pulse oximeter doing? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple iPhone contact tracing: how it came together • CNBC

Christina Farr:

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In mid-March, with Covid-19 spreading to almost every country in the world, a small team at Apple started brainstorming how they could help. They knew that smartphones would be key to the global coronavirus response, particularly as countries started relaxing their shelter-in-place orders. To prepare for that, governments and private companies were building so-called “contact tracing” apps to monitor citizens’ movements and determine whether they might have come into contact with someone infected with the virus.

Within a few weeks, the Apple project – code-named “Bubble” – had dozens of employees working on it with executive-level support from two sponsors: Craig Federighi, a senior vice president of software engineering, and Jeff Williams, the company’s chief operating officer and de-facto head of healthcare. By the end of the month, Google had officially come on board, and about a week later, the companies’ two CEOs Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai met virtually to give their final vote of approval to the project.

That speed of development was highly unusual for Apple, a company obsessed with making its products perfect before releasing them to the world. Project Bubble also required that Apple join forces with its historic rival, Google, to co-develop technology that could be used by health authorities in countries around the world.

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The team that Apple had includes some incredible names, such as Bud Tribble, who was on the original Macintosh team in the 1980s, and also the co-inventor of the Signal messaging app. What I can’t understand is why any country thinks it’s going to devise a better app system than Apple coordinating with Google – which the UK’s NHS seems to think it will. The Open Rights Group pointed out that it probably won’t, but if it really believes that it should publish how its app will work.
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A Covid-infected attendee emerges from CES, a massive tech conference in January • APM Reports

Angela Caputo, Sasha Aslanian, and Will Craft:

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When a doctor phoned Michael Webber on Monday with the results of his antibody test for the coronavirus, her first word was filled with irony: “Congratulations.” He had tested positive, meaning that the 49-year-old who divides his time between Texas and France had been infected with the virus and recovered.

While millions of people worldwide will likely have antibody tests that return positive results, Webber’s outcome offers new insight into how the virus may have begun to spread. He was among more than 170,000 people who attended the Consumer Electronics Show between Jan. 7 and 10 in Las Vegas, a four-day event that attracted technology professionals from around the world.

Speculation has been whipping around social media for months that the virus might have incubated during CES and was sprayed worldwide when attendees traveled home. However, Webber’s disclosure of his test result to APM Reports is the first indication that the virus was likely circulating at the conference.

Webber’s revelation comes at the same time that public health officials in Northern California, including Silicon Valley, reported three newly confirmed coronavirus deaths. One of those deaths was in early February, which signals that the virus was probably spreading in the United States weeks earlier than previously thought…

…A little more than 100 people attended from Wuhan, home to the first recorded outbreak in late 2019, according to conference organizers.

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The conference business is going to take a long, long time to recover. Probably as long as it takes to develop a vaccine. Which in turn means a lot of airline and hotel business won’t come back.

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As Chinese propaganda on Covid-19 grows, US social media must act • The Washington Post

Vanessa Molter, Renee DiResta and Alex Stamos:

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in the midst of the messaging war over the coronavirus, several Chinese state media launched a new Facebook ad offensive. Talking points include emphasizing the Chinese government’s alleged transparency in its pandemic response and promoting the idea that Beijing’s sharing of covid-19 information was helping the world battle the pandemic. Chinese state media have also covered coronavirus-related protests in the United States, while avoiding mention of police clashes in China on their English-language social media presence.

Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google (which owns YouTube) already search for and disable networks of fake accounts run by foreign government-aligned organizations. While such efforts can deal a significant blow to the kinds of activity we saw from Russia in 2016, China’s behavior has demonstrated that the disinformation game is broader than fake social media accounts. US platforms should take steps to avoid being complicit in Beijing’s state-driven propaganda.

First, these platforms should not allow paid political advertisements from media outlets registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Twitter has banned all state media ads after Chinese state media ads against the Hong Kong protesters on Twitter caused a backlash. Facebook and YouTube still allow, and financially benefit from, Chinese state media ads on their platforms, even though these outlets are registered under FARA. This means the US government must continue to be aggressive about rooting out state media and mandating foreign agents register.

Second, platforms should disable the capability for official blue-checked diplomatic or state media accounts to block other accounts…

…Finally, tech platforms should consider banning state media and government-representative accounts run by countries that block their own citizens from accessing these platforms. Such a move could be costly in financial terms: While many U.S. tech platforms are blocked from being visible to Chinese citizens, Chinese companies can still buy advertisements for global consumers. Up to 10% of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from China.

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Molter and DiResta work at the Stanford Internet Observatory; Stamos used to be Facebook’s chief security officer.
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Sharp knives, high friction and tomatoes • Tribonet

Evan Zabawski:

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The easiest and safest way to slice a tomato is to use a sharp knife. The counterintuitive reason a sharp knife slices more easily through a tomato is that it has higher friction, albeit only on the knife’s edge.

Slicing is actually stretching the tomato and, like most materials, a tomato is weaker when stretched than when compressed. Stretching the tomato skin creates a tearing force that opens a crack in the skin, thus beginning the slice.

A dull knife edge is relatively round and smooth, which glides smoothly across the skin as the knife is drawn across the tomato. Sometimes it can slide so smoothly near the edge of the previous slice that the knife slips off the tomato—hopefully away from the hand holding the tomato.

A sharp knife edge has a more jagged and peaked edge that generates much more friction as it is dragged across the tomato. A sharp edge is producing a shear force that reaches the same local critical stress using much less downward force, which enables greater control of the knife as it moves downward.

Once the crack has formed, the natural stress focused at the advancing crack is generally sufficient to propagate the cut at a much lower nominal stress, reducing the required force to slice the rest of the way through the tomato.

Other foods, like cheese, exhibit a nonlinear relationship between applied stress and the resulting deformation, meaning they can stiffen when deformed sufficiently. This nonlinear feedback leads to a frictionally locked situation when using a dull knife, where the knife progresses easily at first but then slows as both the cheese stiffens and the knife blade itself experiences the friction of the surrounding cheese.

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So now you know the difference between tomatoes and cheese. I’d never thought that sharpened knife edges were rough or jagged; I thought they were supremely fine, down to atomic thickness.
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More meat market madness • Jayson Lusk

Lusk is a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University:

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Plant closures and slow-downs from COVID-19 have reached such levels that it will be impossible for consumers not to notice effects on meat prices or availability in the coming weeks. If the full page ad in the New York Times wasn’t enough to convince you, below is some updated data on animal processing numbers and wholesale beef and pork prices.

Estimated daily hog and cattle slaughter are both down almost 50% compared to this time last year

Less meat being produced means less meat available for grocery stores to buy. As a result grocery stores and consumers are bidding up the price of the available supplies. Wholesale beef prices have skyrocketed, and have reached a level (at least in nominal terms) we haven’t seen in at least a decade. Wholesale pork prices have also increased significantly from the dip a few weeks ago, but as of today, they remain below where they were in 2019.

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Trump has said he’ll order the meat plants to remain open as “critical infrastructure”. But if the workers get ill, the plants can’t function – and anyway, there’s less meat for them to process. Prices are going to go up and/or there will be shortages.
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Telecoms paranoia, 5G vs Covid-19 (and phones turning into human heads) • The Royal Factor

David Eckhoff recalls his time working in customer services in BT back in the 1980s:

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Regulars included ‘dreamers’, who insisted their phones rang all through the night. With these we put a check on their lines to test for incoming calls and always found that their phones never rang at night. Most took this well and once their brains knew it was a dream they could sleep through. Some resented the ‘invasion of privacy’ but were unable to explain what privacy we had invaded.

It was at this time that telecoms paranoia was joined by accusations of health issues. Cordless phones had been launched and despite them being massive and ceasing to work ever again after thunderstorms they were very popular. But not so popular with some neighbours.

“My daughter’s had psoriasis ever since next door got a cordless phone,” I was told by one person. This was new territory then, and I wasn’t sure what to say other than that sounds ridiculous, which I wasn’t allowed to say. So I said I’d contact our laboratories and see what they had to say.

“That sounds ridiculous,” said the boffins.

In the meantime I got a call from the neighbour, who said her neighbour had told her I had ‘forbidden’ her to use her cordless phone. I assured her that I hadn’t and contacted the original caller to say that not only did she or I not have the right to tell anyone not to use a perfectly legal device, it was scientific opinion that a cordless phone was not the cause of her daughter’s psoriasis. I suggested she got some proper medical opinion from her GP and discussed with her what my friends with this condition did, and this did not include distancing themselves from cordless phones.

After some other roles I moved into PR, working with journalists. This went so well that I left my job and set up my own PR agency. Here I took on the PR for a business which had developed ‘mini-masts’, amongst other technology. These were devices that could be attached to lampposts and telegraph poles to boost the mobile signal in areas where this was a problem.

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But now he had two problems, as he was to discover. And they were going to breed.
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New device turns almost any screen into a touchless touchscreen • Android Authority

Dave LeClair:

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A group of former Samsung engineers is putting their heads together to create a new device called Glamos. It uses LIDAR technology to turn just about any screen into a fully interactive touchscreen.

Well, it functions as a touchscreen of sorts, but you don’t actually have to touch anything to interact with it. Instead, Glamos detects motion and sends a signal to the device telling it what to do.

This creates a situation where a user can control a laptop, smart TV, smartphone, or tablet without actually needing to put their hands on anything but the air within a 180-degree area. For devices with a touchscreen already installed, this will let users interact with them from a distance, which could prove useful for situations where their hands are dirty or they’re doing a presentation from the other side of the room. An example cited by the creators is using a tablet to manage a recipe. Instead of washing their hands to change pages, the user can swipe the air, keeping their tablet clean.

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Already well-funded – £100 for a single one. But apart from the recipe/tablet situation, when would it be any better than using a physical remote, especially since you could in theory activate it by mistake? Isn’t this just Samsung’s “Air Gesture” stuff, which always seemed more of a gimmick than a feature?
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Why don’t some coronavirus patients sense their alarmingly low oxygen levels? • Science

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel:

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In serious cases of COVID-19, patients struggle to breathe with damaged lungs, but early in the disease, low saturation isn’t always coupled with obvious respiratory difficulties. Carbon dioxide levels can be normal and breathing deeply is comfortable—“the lung is inflating so they feel OK,” says Elnara Marcia Negri, a pulmonologist at Hospital Sírio-Libanês in São Paulo. But oxygen saturation, measured by a device clipped to a finger and in many cases confirmed with blood tests, can be in the 70s, 60s, or 50s. Or even lower. Although mountain climbers can have similar readings, here the slide downward, some doctors believe, is potentially “ominous,” says Nicholas Caputo, an emergency physician at New York City Health + Hospitals/Lincoln.

Hypotheses about what causes it are emerging. Many doctors now recognize clotting as a major feature of severe COVID-19. Negri thinks subtle clotting might begin early in the lungs, perhaps thanks to an inflammatory reaction in their fine web of blood vessels, which could set off a cascade of proteins that prompts blood to clot and prevents it from getting properly oxygenated.

Negri developed this idea after treating a woman whose breathing troubles coincided with circulatory problems in her toes. Negri’s team gave the woman heparin, a common blood thinner, and not only her toes but her breathing recovered

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Probably all going to pile into heparin now, aren’t we?
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We still don’t know how the coronavirus is killing us • NY Mag

David Wallace-Wells:

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strokes, several doctors who spoke to the Post theorized, could explain the high number of patients dying at home — four times the usual rate in New York, many or most of them, perhaps, dying quite suddenly. According to the Brigham and Women’s guidelines, only 53% of COVID-19 patients have died from respiratory failure alone.

It’s not unheard of, of course, for a disease to express itself in complicated or hard-to-parse ways, attacking or undermining the functioning of a variety of organs. And it’s common, as researchers and doctors scramble to map the shape of a new disease, for their understanding to evolve quite quickly. But the degree to which doctors and scientists are, still, feeling their way, as though blindfolded, toward a true picture of the disease cautions against any sense that things have stabilized, given that our knowledge of the disease hasn’t even stabilized.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is not just a public-health crisis but a scientific one as well. And that as deep as it may feel we are into the coronavirus, with tens of thousands dead and literally billions in precautionary lockdown, we are still in the very early stages, when each new finding seems as likely to cloud or complicate our understanding of the coronavirus as it is to clarify it. Instead, confidence gives way to uncertainty.

In the space of a few months, we’ve gone from thinking there was no “asymptomatic transmission” to believing it accounts for perhaps half or more of all cases, from thinking the young were invulnerable to thinking they were just somewhat less vulnerable, from believing masks were unnecessary to requiring their use at all times outside the house, from panicking about ventilator shortages to deploying pregnancy massage pillows instead. Six months since patient zero, we still have no drugs proven to even help treat the disease. Almost certainly, we are past the “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals” stage of this pandemic. But how far past?

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Trump’s daily intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat • The Washington Post

Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima:

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US intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former US officials.

The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.

For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.

But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.

The advisories being relayed by US spy agencies were part of a broader collection of worrisome signals that came during a period now regarded by many public health officials and other experts as a squandered opportunity to contain the outbreak.

As of Monday, more than 55,000 people in the United States had died of covid-19.

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As someone observed, if they really wanted Trump to pay attention, they should have bought an advert on Fox News’s morning show. (As the US Postal Service did this week.) Or guested on it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Making it harder to forward messages on WhatsApp has cut viral content spread by 70%, the company says CC-licensed photo by Tuija Aalto 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

NHS rejects Apple-Google coronavirus app plan • BBC News

Leo Kelion:

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The UK’s coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance.

The NHS says it has a way to make the software work “sufficiently well” on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen. That limitation has posed problems for similar apps in other countries.

Experts from GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre have aided the effort. NCSC indicated that its involvement has been limited to an advisory role.

“Engineers have met several core challenges for the app to meet public health needs and support detection of contact events sufficiently well, including when the app is in the background, without excessively affecting battery life,” said a spokeswoman for NHSX, the health service’s digital innovation unit…

…NHSX believes a centralised system will give it more insight into Covid-19’s spread, and therefore how to evolve the app accordingly.

“One of the advantages is that it’s easier to audit the system and adapt it more quickly as scientific evidence accumulates,” Prof Christophe Fraser, one of the epidemiologists advising NHSX, told the BBC. “The principal aim is to give notifications to people who are most at risk of having got infected, and not to people who are much lower risk. It’s probably easier to do that with a centralised system.”

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Sure would like to know what this “sufficiently well” solution is. Always using Bluetooth and always using location? Might struggle on iOS.
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The very real threat from Trump’s first deepfake • The Atlantic

David Frum:

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at 8:25:50 pm ET, the president retweeted an account he had never retweeted before. The account had posted a video of former Vice President Joe Biden, crudely and obviously manipulated to show him twitching his eyebrows and lolling his tongue. The caption read: “Sloppy Joe is trending. I wonder if it’s because of this. You can tell it’s a deep fake because Jill Biden isn’t covering for him.”

Whatever the intentions of the original tweeter—it purports to be the account of a left-wing activist supportive of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders—the Trump retweet looks like an experimental test of the rules of social media. Since earlier this year, Twitter has banned images that have been “significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated,” especially if they are likely to cause serious harm in some way.

Because the account retweeted by Trump explicitly labels its video a “deep fake,” it arguably does not violate Twitter’s anti-deception policy. As of 8:30 this morning, the video remained live on Twitter and present on pro-Trump Facebook accounts.

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Still live on Monday evening. Many people will ignore the words, because that’s how visual content works: it overwhelms any focus on words. The tweet has over 12,000 retweets and 33,000 Likes (don’t ask me why people like a tweet like that).

Twitter does need to reconsider. Faked videos like this are intended to deceive, and the dressing around them won’t stop them doing that.
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Exclusive: she’s been falsely accused of starting the pandemic. Her life has been turned upside down • CNN

Donie O’Sullivan:

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Perhaps the most prominent cheerleader of the idea that [American soldier Maatje] Benassi had a role in the imaginary plot to infect the world is George Webb, a prolific 59-year-old American misinformation peddler. Webb has for years regularly streamed hours of diatribe live on YouTube, where he has amassed more than 27 million views and almost 100,000 followers.

In 2017, CNN revealed how Webb was part of a trio of conspiracy theorists that pushed a false rumor about a cargo ship with a “dirty bomb” that was set to arrive at the Port of Charleston in South Carolina. The bomb never materialized, but the claims did lead to parts of the port – one of the biggest in America – being shut down for a time as a safety precaution.

Until recently, Webb said, his YouTube videos included advertisements – meaning the platform, which is owned by Google, was making money from Webb’s misinformation, as was Webb himself.
Webb even claimed that the Italian DJ Benny Benassi, whose 2002 song “Satisfaction” became a worldwide sensation, had the coronavirus and that he, along with Maatje and Matt Benassi, were part of a Benassi plot connected to the virus. (Benny told CNN Business he has never met Maatje and Matt, and they said that as far as they know, they are not related. Benny pointed out that Benassi is a very common last name in Italy.)

Benny Benassi told CNN Business he has not been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Like artists around the world, he cancelled his concerts because of social distancing and travel restrictions. (Webb previously claimed the DJ is Dutch. He is not.)

In a phone interview with CNN Business on Thursday, which he livestreamed to his followers on YouTube, Webb offered no substantive evidence to support his claims about the Benassis and said he considered himself an “investigative reporter,” not a conspiracy theorist.

He also said that YouTube recently stopped running ads on his videos after he began talking about the coronavirus.

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China and Russia don’t really need to try when there are dolts like this to do the job for them.
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WhatsApp’s new limit cuts virality of ‘highly forwarded’ messages by 70% • TechCrunch

Manish Singh:

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The Facebook -owned service said on Monday that spread of “highly forwarded” messages sent on WhatsApp had dropped by 70% globally in weeks after introducing a new restriction earlier this month.

In one of the biggest changes to its core feature, WhatsApp said earlier this month that users on its platform can now send along frequently forwarded messages they receive to only one person or a group at a time, down from five. The restriction was rolled out globally to WhatsApp’s 2 billion users on April 7.

“We recently introduced a limit to sharing ‘highly forwarded messages’ to just one chat. Since putting into place this new limit, globally there has been a 70% reduction in the number of highly forwarded messages sent on WhatsApp,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement…

…The cut down on forwards should help WhatsApp assuage the scrutiny it is receiving in many countries, including India, its biggest market.

New Delhi asked WhatsApp and other messaging and social media firms last month to do more to control the viral hoaxes circulating on their platforms about coronavirus infection. This is the latest of several similar advisories India has sent to social media firms operating in the country.

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That’s almost surely going to be a substantial reduction in misinformation, because that’s what tends to go viral, by a factor of about 2 to 1. (That’s a study of Twitter, but WhatsApp will be similar.)

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What is the iPad to you? Let me count the ways in a Magic Keyboard review • Birchtree

Matt Birchler:

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I can use the iPad as a drawing tablet, plop it into a keyboard case to make it more of a laptop, connect it to a monitor to use it like a desktop, and I can wirelessly connect a mouse and keyboard to make it work exactly like a desktop. When I’m tired of that, I can unplug it and start using it like a tablet again.

And not only does the hardware allow for me to change the physical context of the device, the software comes along for the ride as well. Apps work differently depending on if you have a keyboard attached, if you have a mouse/trackpad available, or if you’re using an Apple Pencil…

…Ok, now I’ve got myself a MacBook Pro and it’s plugged into an external monitor so I can work at my desk on a big screen and I can take it anywehere else because it’s portable. Better, for sure, but what if I want to read a book? What if I want to draw? What if I want to hold it in portrait orientation? What if I want to use it as a digital board game? The MacBook Pro can’t do any of that, while the iPad is never more than 2 seconds away from adapting to those use cases.

Now you think you have me cornered. “Get a Surface then,” you reply, thinking you’ve got me. And in fairness, this is a close as you’ve gotten so far, but this isn’t the product for me. It doesn’t run the apps I want, the apps it does run are old-school in comparison to iPadOS, and the touch experience is way, way worse than the iPad. But if you like Windows, then yeah, the Surface line is pretty comparable to this quick context switching, although I really feel that the touch stuff still feels hacked into Windows.

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It’s actually not so much about the keyboard, because it’s really about how the iPad is mutable into different contexts. Though OK, he does mention the keyboard.

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Esports and the dangers of serving at the pleasure of a king • Matthew Ball

Ball is a VC who focuses on interactive media:

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even under the most globally controlled league models, the administrating body has far from total control over the sport. A spectator or fan can play soccer or golf without FIFA or the PGA, just as they can set up their own leagues and teams, or broadcast their private games and events.

Esports is different. While we see leagues across each of the aforementioned models, all competitive play is ultimately (and essentially end-to-end) dependent on the game’s publisher. Most simply, independent leagues, events and tournaments, whether for- or non-profit, do not have the right to operate (let alone broadcast to at-home audiences). They can only do so as allowed (explicitly or tacitly) by a publisher. All it takes is a publisher’s copyright claim, cease-and-desist order, or policy change to shut them down. This is true even if the games are played online via location connections, too. And certainly, in the case of remote, online play, all gameplay is ultimately administered (“refereed”, if you will) by the publisher’s online services. This means the publishers are effectively co-running the tournament or league – even if they don’t know it.

At a broader level, it’s also important to emphasize that matches can only be played with the rules, options, gameplay, physics, items, and characters that the publisher offers. If your favorite “hero” is removed, you can’t use them. If you loved a limited time event that’s no longer offered, too bad. If a rule, item, or map changed, you’ve no choice but to adapt…

…The video games upon which each league is based generate billions of dollars in value in the sale of content, digital items, and subscriptions. The customers here are everyday players and there are millions of them. This monetization model and customer group is every publisher’s core business. In comparison, esports drives tens of millions in low-margin revenue, based on a few dozen players and, at least today, tens of thousands of viewers (almost all of which are always players). The problem is teams depend almost exclusively on this latter and much smaller bucket of revenues and players.

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It’s essentially the opposite structure from how professional sports work, where all the money is up at the top. Ball goes into the many ways that this distorts what’s possible: it’s a lot.
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Chip design with deep reinforcement learning • Google AI Blog

Anna Goldie, senior software engineer, and Azalia Mirhoseini, senior research scientist, Google Research, Brain Team :

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today’s chips take years to design, resulting in the need to speculate about how to optimize the next generation of chips for the machine learning (ML) models of 2-5 years from now. Dramatically shortening the chip design cycle would allow hardware to adapt to the rapidly advancing field of ML. What if ML itself could provide the means to shorten the chip design cycle, creating a more integrated relationship between hardware and ML, with each fueling advances in the other?

In “Chip Placement with Deep Reinforcement Learning”, we pose chip placement as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, where we train an agent (i.e, an RL policy) to optimize the quality of chip placements. Unlike prior methods, our approach has the ability to learn from past experience and improve over time. In particular, as we train over a greater number of chip blocks, our method becomes better at rapidly generating optimized placements for previously unseen chip blocks. Whereas existing baselines require human experts in the loop and take several weeks to generate, our method can generate placements in under six hours that outperform or match their manually designed counterparts.

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How soon before humans are out of the equation?
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How long does a film take to recoup? • Stephen Follows

This time he’s asking about payback. Not the film, the process:

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Each film will have a slightly different recoupment pattern.  For example

• Slow burns – An independent film can take time to get noticed and to gain worldwide income.  For example, The King’s Speech was unusual in that it took a couple of years to hit its peak as it was released internationally and eventually went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.
• Up-front deals – A distribution deal could include a Minimum Guarantee (MG) which is deducted from future income.  This can result in no income for a number of years while that MG is repaid.  Most films never repay their MG but those that do will see a small trickle of income after that period.  For example, 28 Days Later saw a large income in years 1 and 2, then nothing for a further five years, after which time money started coming in again.

Below are four examples from the BFI dataset.  In each case, we’re only seeing the BFI’s share of income so sadly we cannot use them to calculate the total income each film received.  That said, with the BFI earning over nine times its original investment on The King’s Speech, we’re able to conclude that the other investors must be pretty happy right now!

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You’re probably wondering. 28 Days Later (made in 2002) had a budget of £5m. In the UK it took £6.1m at the box office, and in the US was a surprise hit: took $45m. But of course the shape of the payment doesn’t reflect that.

Yes, remember when going to watch a film involved travelling further than your front room?
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Augmented reality hits economic reality in the case of Magic Leap • VentureBeat

Milan Račič of robotics and AI company Gideon Brothers:

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Magic Leap just announced its intention to focus on the enterprise market, after years of branding itself as a consumer device company. The corporate press release blamed COVID-19 for the required pivot, and nearly 1,000 employee have been laid off; almost half its workforce.

However, this shift toward the enterprise market is not driven by the COVID-19 crisis. It is a case of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and remote reality (RR) hitting up against economic reality (ER).

Only a minority of (regular) people are willing to pay a lot of money for experiences that can’t populate their Instagram feed. Given a price tag of $2,300-$3,000 for its Magic Leap One goggles, market success would have required a whole lot of social cache to be viable long-term.

By the end of 2019, the company reportedly sold just 6,000 of a planned 100,000 units. Coolness does have a price, but when it comes to augmented reality goggles, the market is telling us that it is far lower than $2,000-$3,000.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Magic Leap and everything they accomplished. They managed to raise $2.6bn from market monster investors like Google and Alibaba. They succeeded in developing interesting technology with giant distribution partners, like AT&T. Yet, the reality is that only 6,000 units sold. Reality is what matters.

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I predicted this move in August 2018, when I tweeted: “I forecast that in 18 months Magic Leap will pivot away from consumers (ie games) to target business and industrial use. Those prices [$2,295 for a headset] are crazy for individuals.” They lasted two months extra. As Račič points out, it’s nothing to do with coronavirus.

It wasn’t the hardest prediction to make. One slightly feels that Račič’s admiration for Magic Leap is about its ability to extract huge piles of cash from venture capitalists more than its success, such as it is, with technology.
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A new doctor faces the coronavirus in Queens • The New Yorker

Rivka Galchen:

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When [Dr Hashem] Zikry came on shift on the evening of March 21st, one of the covid patients signed out to his team seemed not as sick as some of the others he’d seen. “He walked by the desk during sign-out,” Zikry told me. “He walked by again fifteen minutes later. Asked us where the bathroom was. He was walking—that’s a great sign. Talking—that’s a great sign. These are very reassuring things to a physician. I wrote down, ‘Ambulatory, Conversant.’ ” A short time later, a hospital police officer approached Zikry to say that a man had collapsed in the bathroom. When Zikry reached him, the man had no pulse. He began chest compressions. “Nothing like this had ever happened to me,” Zikry said. “I had seen him walking minutes before.” The man was taken on a stretcher to the critical-care area, where resuscitation equipment was on hand. Despite the efforts of Zikry and others, the patient died about fifteen minutes later. Zikry recalled turning back toward the rest of the E.R. He said, “We look back on this sea of, like, three hundred people that expected us to treat them immediately, to figure out what was wrong with them.” This was around 3:15 a.m…

…“I’m truly exhausted,” Zikry told me that day, at the end of another overnight shift. “I’m starting to see patients I’ve already seen, now in worse condition. A patient who four days ago had an oxygen saturation of a hundred% and an O.K. chest X-ray, then two days later their saturation is low nineties and it’s not a great chest X-ray—well, they come in now with a saturation in the high eighties and with horrendous chest X-rays, and we need to admit them to the hospital.” Zikry knows that medical language can obscure as well as explain: “The term used for what you see on the X-rays is ‘ground-glass opacities.’ I have no idea what actual ground glass looks like. I can tell you that on the X-ray it looks like a snowed-out background, or like when I go out in the rain—I wear glasses—and I can’t really see, because of the water on my glasses. There are these patchy opacities. That’s what the chest X-rays look like.”

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The way this disease progresses remains really peculiar.
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Coronavirus means the era of big government is…back • WSJ

Gerald F. Seib and John McCormick:

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Much of today’s new government activism will recede over time along with the virus. Yet conversations with a broad cross-section of political figures suggest there is little reason to expect a return to what had been the status quo on federal spending, or the prevailing attitude toward the proper role of government.

“The era of Ronald Reagan, that said basically the government is the enemy, is over,” said Rahm Emanuel, a moderate Democrat who served as mayor of Chicago, a member of Congress and President Obama’s first White House chief of staff.

An echo came from the other side of the political spectrum. “The era of Robert Taft, limited-government conservatism?” said Steve Bannon, President Trump’s onetime political guru, referring to the Ohio senator who fought the expansion of government programs and federal borrowing. “It’s not relevant. It’s just not relevant.”

…Today, both parties and a vast majority of voters have come together behind a broad and aggressive response at both the federal and state level, and have accepted a sea of new red ink at a time the federal budget deficit already was heading toward a trillion dollars annually…

…In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, voters of both political parties said by a 2-to-1 margin that they approved of the expansion of government’s role in the economy to meet the crisis.

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That approval, which is equal for both Republicans and Democrats, contrasts strongly with 2009, when only 26% of Republicans approved the government’s TARP action, against 78% of Democrats.

It’s a new era.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The story of the man who died after ingesting fish tank cleaner pills looks much darker after details emerged about his marriage. CC-licensed photo by Joegoauk Goa 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. It’s probably.. Monday? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Germany flips to Apple-Google approach on smartphone contact tracing • Reuters

Douglas Busvine and Andreas Rinke:

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Chancellery Minister Helge Braun and Health Minister Jens Spahn said in a joint statement that Berlin would adopt a “decentralised” approach to digital contact tracing, thus abandoning a home-grown alternative that would have given health authorities central control over tracing data.

In Europe, most countries have chosen short-range Bluetooth “handshakes” between mobile devices as the best way of registering a potential contact, even though it does not provide location data.

But they have disagreed about whether to log such contacts on individual devices or on a central server – which would be more directly useful to existing contact tracing teams that work phones and knock on doors to warn those who may be at risk.

Under the decentralised approach, users could opt to share their phone number or details of their symptoms – making it easier for health authorities to get in touch and give advice on the best course of action in the event they are found to be at risk.

This consent would be given in the app, however, and not be part of the system’s central architecture.

Germany as recently as Friday backed a centralised standard called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), which would have needed Apple in particular to change the settings on its iPhones.

When Apple refused to budge there was no alternative but to change course, said a senior government source.

In their joint statement, Braun and Spahn said Germany would now adopt a “strongly decentralised” approach.

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Contrast with, for example, Vietnam where the contact tracing app broadcasts a fixed ID per person and has lots of holes. Apple and Google are aiming to keep governments from building up monolithic databases, and it’s surprising that Germany, of all countries, wouldn’t see why that’s a good idea.
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Coronavirus: only 9% of Britons want life to return to ‘normal’ once lockdown is over • Sky News

Lucia Binding:

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Only 9% of Britons want life to return to “normal” after the coronavirus outbreak is over, a survey suggests.

People have noticed significant changes during the lockdown, including cleaner air, more wildlife and stronger communities.

More than half (54%) of 4,343 people who took part in the YouGov poll hope they will make some changes in their own lives and for the country as a whole to learn from the crisis.

And 42% of participants said they value food and other essentials more since the pandemic, with 38% cooking from scratch more.

The survey found that 61% of people are spending less money and 51% noticed cleaner air outdoors, while 27% think there is more wildlife.

Two-fifths said there is a stronger sense of community in their area since the outbreak began and 39% say they are catching up with friends and family more.

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“Stop the world, I want to get off” was a 1961 play, but became a phrase. Now the world has stopped for many people, and they’ve realised that they wanted it to turn slightly differently. The trouble is, when it restarts, you won’t get much choice about what part of “normal” does and doesn’t come back.
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The fight with Huawei means America can’t shape tech rules • The Economist

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…for the past year technology companies with operations in America have been frozen out of some standard-setting as an accidental consequence of the American government’s attack on the Chinese tech giant, Huawei.

This started with the addition of Huawei to the entity list in May 2019. That made it illegal for any company to export products to Huawei that had been made in America. Tech-company lawyers looked at the regulations and decided that the law prohibited interaction with Huawei during the course of standard-setting, too. They worried that, in the course of discussion, American-made technologies would in effect be transferred to Huawei, placing their employer in breach of the rules.

That legal decision created a problem. Huawei plays a big role in setting standards on artificial intelligence, 5g and other connectivity technologies, so avoiding interactions with the firm while simultaneously getting involved in the rigorous nerdery of standard-setting was impossible. As a result, some companies with American operations have removed themselves from the standard-setting processes in which they used to join. In areas where Huawei is active, this has left America voiceless in setting the tech rules of the future.

The effect has been particularly acute at standards bodies that convene outside America, where the organisers are less inclined to make arrangements to accommodate firms that are subject to export-control rules. At those meetings, in some instances, Huawei and other Chinese companies have had a voice where American companies have not.

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Perverse, unintended consequences.
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Who is the “we” in “We are causing climate change\u201d? • Slate

Genevieve Guenther, writing in 2018:

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Instead of thinking of climate change as something we are doing, always remember that there are millions, possibly billions, of people on this planet who would rather preserve civilization than destroy it with climate change, who would rather have the fossil-fuel economy end than continue. Those people are not all mobilized, by any means, but they are there. Most people are good.

But remember, too, that there are others, some of them running the world, who seem to be willing to destroy civilization and let millions of people die in order that the fossil-fuel economy to continue now. We know who those people are. We are not those people.

Remember as well that there are degrees of complicity. Without structural changes paid for collectively, most of us have no alternative but to use fossil fuels to some degree. As individuals, we must do the very best we can. But constrained choices are not akin to the unthinking complicity of the 10% who produce 50% of global emissions every year by taking multiple long-haul flights for pleasure travel, heating their homes instead of putting on a sweater, and driving swollen SUVs that they replace every few years. Nor are constrained choices akin to the deep and shameful complicity of the many in the print and television news media who refuse to mention climate change even in the stories about climate change effects they’re already reporting.

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A poem made up of the first lines of emails I’ve received while quarantining • The Washington Post

Jessica Salfia:

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In these uncertain times
as we navigate the new normal,
are you willing to share your ideas and solutions?
As you know, many people are struggling.
I know you are up against it:
the digital landscape.
We share your concerns.
As you know, many people are struggling.

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There’s more. It’s lovely. Also the first poem here since its inception.
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Man who died ingesting fish tank cleaner remembered as intelligent, levelheaded engineer • Washington Free Beacon

Alana Goodman:

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friends of 68-year-old Gary Lenius, the Arizona man who passed away last month from drinking a fish tank cleaner that contained an ingredient, chloroquine phosphate, that Trump had touted as a potential coronavirus cure, say they are still struggling to understand what drove an engineer with an extensive science background to do something so wildly out of character.

These people describe Lenius as intelligent and levelheaded, not prone to the sort of reckless and impulsive behavior he reportedly engaged in on the day he died. This account is based on interviews with three people who knew Lenius well and paints a picture of a troubled marriage characterized by Wanda Lenius’s explosive anger.

“What bothers me about this is that Gary was a very intelligent man, a retired [mechanical] engineer who designed systems for John Deere in Waterloo, Iowa, and I really can’t see the scenario where Gary would say, ‘Yes, please, I would love to drink some of that Koi fish tank cleaner,'” one of his close friends told the Washington Free Beacon. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Lenius passed away on March 22 after he and his wife, Wanda Lenius, drank sodas that she had mixed with a fish tank cleaner not intended for human consumption, Wanda Lenius told the Free Beacon…

…Those who knew the couple said they sensed tension in the marriage. “Wanda would constantly berate Gary in public,” said a source who asked that all identifying information be withheld. “Everyone was embarrassed for him, but he outwardly did not seem to care much.”

“In our opinion, their marriage was seen outwardly to be as one-sided as a marriage possibly could be: Gary worshiped Wanda,” this person said, adding that his wife “would routinely call him a ‘doofus'” and humiliate him in public.

Lenius’s friend recalled Wanda Lenius destroying her husband’s aircraft model collection after he returned home late for a meal. “These planes take many dozens and sometimes hundreds of hours to complete,” said the friend. “Gary did not get angry, he simply junked the planes that were not repairable and fixed the rest. That is the Gary I knew, he would never get upset, he just accepted what happened and carried on.”

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The story clearly isn’t “dumb man thought this would make him safe”. I wonder if we’ll hear more on a true crime podcast in a year or so. (Thanks Jim for the link.)
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Congress can’t rebuild US infrastructure until America rebuilds Congress • Vox

Ezra Klein, responding to Marc Andreessen’s “Time To Build” blogpost:

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It’s become a running joke in Washington that every week is “infrastructure week.” But we’re not rebuilding American infrastructure.

The question, then, is why don’t we build? What’s stopping us?

Here’s my answer: the institutions through which Americans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s term, “vetocracies,” in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the federal government. It’s true in state and local governments. It’s even true in the private sector.

I’m not against soliciting more ideas of what to build. But what we need is sustained funding, focus, and organizing to make building in America possible again. And that requires patiently engaging with the kinds of institutions that frustrate builders.

That the US government has become a dysfunctional vetocracy is obvious. Hell, I wrote a whole book about it. But in short: America’s system of checks and balances requires unusual and even extraordinary levels of consensus to pass legislation. First, you need the agreement of the House, the Senate, the White House, and, increasingly, the Supreme Court.

More granularly, congressional power is diffused across committees. The Senate has built in a supermajority requirement, known as the filibuster, which effectively raises the threshold for passage from 51 votes to 60 votes.

This raises the question: If the problem is embedded in the structure of the US government, how did the US ever do anything big? The short answer is that for most of our political history, two unusual conditions held. First, the parties were ideologically mixed, which made compromise easier. Second, one party was usually electorally dominant, which gave the party in the minority a reason to compromise: If you can’t win, you may as well deal.

Both those conditions have dissolved.

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America’s political system has become sclerotic, and unless something dramatic happens – a colossal Senate takeover by the Democratic Party in November? – it might never be able to fix itself.
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Internet speech will never go back to normal • The Atlantic

Jack Goldsmith is a Harvard Law School professor and Andrew Keane Woods is professor of law at the University of Arizona College of Law:

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the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values…

…America’s private surveillance system goes far beyond apps, cameras, and microphones. Behind the scenes, and unbeknownst to most Americans, data brokers have developed algorithmic scores for each one of us—scores that rate us on reliability, propensity to repay loans, and likelihood to commit a crime. Uber bans passengers with low ratings from drivers. Some bars and restaurants now run background checks on their patrons to see whether they’re likely to pay their tab or cause trouble. Facebook has patented a mechanism for determining a person’s creditworthiness by evaluating their social network.

These and similar developments are the private functional equivalent of China’s social-credit ratings, which critics in the West so fervently decry. The U.S. government, too, makes important decisions based on privately collected pools of data. The Department of Homeland Security now requires visa applicants to submit their social-media accounts for review. And courts regularly rely on algorithms to determine a defendant’s flight risk, recidivism risk, and more.

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The comparison with China is unwise, though you can see why they do it. But “China was largely right and the US was largely wrong” is a big mistake. China prevented people talking about the novel coronavirus. People died as a result.
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Switching from MacBook to Chromebook: is Chrome OS good enough? • Android Police

Manuel Vonau:

»

I could break down the verdict into this sentence: Chrome OS is a great browser, but it isn’t a great OS. My experience reminds me of the one I had on the iPad (pre-iOS 13, I should note). A lot of things are great for a specific set of purposes, but once I leave that comfort zone, I start running into issues that make me want to return to a proper desktop OS. On my Chromebook, the situation got better once I stopped trying to run Android and Linux apps and stuck with capable web apps as much as possible instead. However, I still miss my familiar, friction-free image editing software on the machine, and I’d love to see proper third-party cloud storage support.

I still think my Chromebook can have a valid spot in my workflow, just like my iPad used to be great for reading tons of texts during university. I must admit that it took long until the Chromebook grew on me, though — I can’t say that about the iPad, which has always been fun and enjoyable to interact with, despite its limitations. That’s my personal situation, though. I recognize that there are many people who need more than a browser or tablet to get their job done, and I know there’s a big fraction who would be perfectly fine with a Chromebook since they just need something to check mails, shop Amazon, and surf the news on a familiar laptop form factor.

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‘Nobody told us about the coronavirus pandemic’ • BBC News

Jessica Sherwood:

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In 2017, Elena Manighetti and Ryan Osborne decided to take the plunge many dream of – they quit their jobs, bought a boat and decided to travel around the world.

They asked their families to keep in touch, but with one rule: no bad news.

The couple, who lived in Manchester, were travelling across the Atlantic ocean from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean last month when, unbeknownst to them, a new and deadly coronavirus was spreading across the world.

After 25 days at sea, and with little communication with the outside world, the couple planned to dock on a small island in mid-March.

But upon getting phone signal while still off-shore, they discovered the island’s borders were closed and found out the world had been suffering from a global pandemic they’d heard nothing about.

“In February we’d heard there was a virus in China, but with the limited information we had we figured by the time we got to the Caribbean in 25 days it would all be over,” Elena says.

“When we arrived we realised it wasn’t over and the whole world had been infected,” adds Ryan.

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I guess that’s one scenario that zombie apocalypse movies forgot about. I really didn’t think there would be anyone who hadn’t heard.
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Dominic Cummings and SAGE: advisory group’s veil of secrecy has to be lifted • The Conversation

Chris Tyler, on The Guardian’s story that Dominic Cummings, the PM’s political adviser, sat in on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE):

»

Political decisions should be informed by the science; the science should not be informed by the politics. This scenario raises the central question of this story: the independence of SAGE. The Guardian called it a “supposedly independent body” and the government in its statement about Cummings described SAGE as providing “independent scientific advice to the government”.

Interestingly, the notion of SAGE being independent appears nowhere in its 64 pages of guidelines. Even though everyone “knows” that SAGE should be independent, the government’s official guidelines do not recognise this “fact”. As a first step, the 2012 SAGE guidelines should now be updated to outline the role of SAGE – which should include “independence” – and instructions as to when and if it is appropriate for political advisers to be present and, if so, what role they should play.

In order for us to ascertain the role played by Cummings or any other future political adviser, the minutes of SAGE meetings must be made public. The government clearly believes that the advice provided to it by SAGE should be private, but that runs counter to its own guidance on how science advisory committees should work, which calls for “openness and transparency”.

The problem with not being open and transparent is that it is impossible for parliament, the media and researchers to scrutinise what is going on. What is the advice the government is being given? Is government really following that advice? Who is giving it?

«

When Cummings was ill with Covid-19, for about two weeks, the government’s response to the media had a much calmer tone. Now he’s back it’s angrier, more Trump-ish in its out-of-hand dismissals of well-sourced stories when then turn out to be correct, and important.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Can you can breed these? You too could be in charge of Trump’s pandemic task force! Competence no object! CC-licensed photo by Michael Mandiberg 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Coronavirus: YouTube bans ‘medically unsubstantiated’ content • BBC News

»

YouTube has banned any coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts World Health Organization (WHO) advice.

The Google-owned service says it will remove anything it deems “medically unsubstantiated”.
Chief executive Susan Wojcicki said the media giant wanted to stamp out “misinformation on the platform”.

The move follows YouTube banning conspiracy theories falsely linking Covid-19 to 5G networks.

Mrs Wojcicki made the remarks on Wednesday during her first interview since the global coronavirus lockdown began.

“So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy,” she told CNN.

“Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”

Mrs Wojcicki added YouTube had seen a 75% increase in demand for news from “authoritative” sources.

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So is it also going to remove content that goes against WHO advice on vaccination? How does YouTube justify leaving some rubbish on, but taking other stuff out? Yes, coronavirus is a deadly infectious disease; but so is measles; will all the nonsense around that be removed too? I can’t understand how YouTube can defend doing the one but not the other. Dead is dead, whichever disease kills you.
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Want to find a misinformed public? Facebook’s already done it • The Markup

Aaron Sankin:

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Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post pledging to combat misinformation about COVID-19 circulating on Facebook.

“We’ve taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading,” Zuckerberg wrote.

But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience.” According to Facebook’s ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people.

This week, The Markup paid to advertise a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience, and the ad was approved by Facebook. 

Using the same tool, The Markup boosted a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience on Instagram, the Facebook-owned platform that is incredibly popular with Americans under 30. The ad was approved in minutes.

We reached out to Facebook asking about the targeting category on Monday morning. After asking for multiple extensions to formulate a response, company spokesperson Devon Kearns emailed The Markup on Wednesday evening to say that Facebook had eliminated the pseudoscience interest category. 

…we do have an idea what at least one ad targeting the group looks like, since an ad for a hat that would supposedly protect my head from cellphone radiation appeared on my Facebook feed on Thursday, April 16.

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But the plot thickens: when he got in touch with the advertiser, he found that Facebook had expanded the ad into the pseudoscience group. As the story also points out, this is part of a longrunning series of examples where Facebook lets you target people on categories that are, to say the least, surprising.
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Will American shale oil go bust? • The Conversation

Jorge Guira is an associate professor of law and finance at the University of Reading:

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Oil companies are restructuring hastily – assessing the value of reserves, and asking creditors for debt waivers. The US government has helped by extending companies’ ability to offset losses against future tax liabilities, which can make them more attractive to buyers.

Nonetheless, some companies sitting on the priciest oil will get liquidated. In other cases, big creditor banks could take over businesses, or demand mergers and acquisitions, including consolidations.

The biggest uncertainty is how long until the oil price rebounds? With the economy only likely to reopen gradually, demand will stay low for some time while supply remains too high. The futures markets expect WTI to bounce back to the high US$20s by the end of the year, but don’t foresee a return to even US$40 oil until December 2024.

How much US shale oil is worth saving in these straitened circumstances is key. Some estimate as many as 70% of firms will go out of business overall, with some never coming back until oil stabilises above US$50. Others may be taken over by companies prepared to wait for higher prices. As oil historian Daniel Yergin says, “Rocks don’t go bankrupt”. US shale is in a sort of death pageant, and will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future.

«

One thing that might save the shale oil companies – temporarily – is that the US Federal Reserve is diving in and buying all sorts of bonds, including the junk bonds that keep them staggering on. But it’s only delaying the inevitable.
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Zoom grows to 300 million users despite security backlash • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Zoom has now revealed that it has surpassed 300 million daily Zoom meeting participants. That’s up 50% from the 200 million the company reported earlier this month, and a huge jump from the 10 million back in December.

Zoom does say the figures are daily meeting participants, which could mean if you have five Zoom meetings in a day then you’re counted five times. However, Zoom also states in the same blog post that it has “more than 300 million daily users” and that “more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time.”

Either way, more people are using Zoom despite the security and privacy concerns that have been raised recently. Zoom has implemented a 90-day feature freeze, and the company is releasing Zoom 5.0 this week to address some of the concerns. Zoom 5.0 includes passwords by default, improved encryption, and a new security icon to control meetings.

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Does anyone remember Skype?
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This tool automatically transcribes your Zoom meetings as they happen • The Verge

Jon Porter:

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Automated transcription service Otter.ai now integrates directly into Zoom calls to transcribe meetings on the fly. During a meeting, anyone on the call can click the “Otter.ai Live Transcript” button within their Zoom window to open up the Live Video Meeting Notes on Otter.ai’s site, and participants can then annotate them on the fly. Otter.ai quietly announced the new feature in a blog post earlier this month.

Otter.ai has had the ability to transcribe recordings of past Zoom meetings for a little while now. The live transcription feature should make the process quicker, and make highlighting and editing important sections easier while they’re still fresh in your mind.

In order to use the new feature you’ll need to be subscribed to Zoom’s Pro tier or higher, and you’ll also need an Otter for Teams subscription. Otter.ai’s Teams subscription normally costs $20 per use per month, but the service is currently offering two months for free if you use the code COVID19OTTER. You can find instructions on how to set the live transcription feature up on Otter.ai’s website.

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That’s a smart bit of piggybacking.
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Apple aims to sell Macs with its own ARM-based chips starting in 2021 • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

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The first Mac processors will have eight high-performance cores, codenamed Firestorm, and at least four energy-efficient cores, known internally as Icestorm. Apple is exploring Mac processors with more than 12 cores for further in the future, the people said.

In some Macs, Apple’s designs will double or quadruple the number of cores that Intel provides. The current entry-level MacBook Air has two cores, for example.

Like Qualcomm Inc. and the rest of the mobile semiconductor industry, Apple designs its smartphone chips with technology from Arm Inc., owned by SoftBank Group Corp. These components often use less energy than Intel’s offerings. But it in recent years, Arm customers have tried to make processors that are also more powerful.

The transition to in-house Apple processor designs would likely begin with a new laptop because the company’s first custom Mac chips won’t be able to rival the performance Intel provides for high-end MacBook Pros, iMacs and the Mac Pro desktop computer.

The switch away from Intel is complex, requiring close collaboration between Apple’s software, hardware and component-sourcing teams. Given work-from-home orders and disruptions in the company’s Asia-based supply chain, the shift could be delayed, the people said.

Like with the iPhone, Apple’s Mac processors will include several components, including the main processor, known as a Central Processing Unit or CPU, and the GPU, the graphics chip. Apple’s lower-end computers currently use Intel for graphics, while it has partnered with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. for the graphics cards in its professional-focused offerings.

The Kalamata project has been going for several years. In 2018, Apple developed a Mac chip based on the iPad Pro’s A12X processor for internal testing. That gave the company’s engineers confidence they could begin replacing Intel in Macs as early as 2020, Bloomberg News reported.

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Won’t be much of a hit to Intel – 5% of its CPU business? – though the prestige hit is substantial. Now all the questions begin about how Apple gets old Intel-based software to run. (Over to you, JLG..)
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iPhone SE review: an iPhone for people who don’t like new iPhones • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

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Unlike the starting-at-$699 iPhone 11 models, the SE is the only remaining iPhone with the once-beloved home button and a small (well, smaller) 4.7in screen. Yet it still has the performance and some of the camera tricks of those higher-end phones.

To test the SE over the past week, I went deep into my Museum of Ancient iPhones—and deep into my email inbox—to focus on the hundreds of questions that owners of older iPhones have written to me with since my iPhone 11 review last year.

No matter which phone you’re coming from, you’ll find the SE to be one of Apple’s best values in years, especially as we all try to tighten our belts in the coronavirus world. It’s even nice for talking to people, now that we’re doing that again. Just one problem: when we finally can stop sheltering in place, we’re going to want better battery life.

«

As Stern explained when she was on John Gruber’s podcast recently, her email inbox is stuffed with messages from people who don’t want to use Face ID on phones; they like Touch ID, they understand Touch ID, and they’re damn well sticking with it.

And as always, the video accompanying the article is fantastic. I can’t imagine how long it must take to dream up and execute. Stern’s videos are pretty much the only reason for smartphone reviews.
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Making cryptocurrency part of the solution to human trafficking • Chainalysis blog

»

In 2019, we tracked just under $930,000 worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum payments to addresses associated with CSAM providers. That represents a 32% increase over 2018, which in turn saw a 212% increase over 2017. We attribute most of these yearly increases to rising adoption of cryptocurrency rather than increased demand for CSAM, and it’s important to keep in mind these transactions represent a miniscule fraction of all cryptocurrency activity. Even so, this should be a concerning trend for the cryptocurrency industry, from both a moral and reputational standpoint. 

Most individual cryptocurrency payments to CSAM providers fall between $10 and $50, though a significant percentage of these sites’ total revenue comes from much larger payments. We know from law enforcement that payments between $10 and $50 would likely indicate either a one-time purchase of CSAM or, if seen on a recurring basis, possibly a subscription to a consistent CSAM provider. 

For example, this Chainalysis Reactor screenshot shows some recent transactions to an address the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has identified as belonging to a CSAM provider. A clear pattern emerges: Nearly all transfers the service receives are for 0.0021 Bitcoin, worth roughly $15 as of April 2020.

We can discern more patterns by isolating cryptocurrency payments to CSAM sites made from exchanges serving users in a single region. Above, for instance, we see that most payments for CSAM users in South Korea occur during nighttime hours, when most individuals are at home.

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Certainly the exchanges could do a lot more to look out for and alert authorities to transactions of suspicious sizes to particular sites. But of course they have a financial incentive not to.
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‘Sadness’ and disbelief from a world missing American leadership • The New York Times

Katrinn Benhold:

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The United States has an election in November. That, and the aftermath of the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, might also affect the course of history.

The Great Depression gave rise to America’s New Deal. Maybe the coronavirus will lead the United States to embrace a stronger public safety net and develop a national consensus for more accessible health care, [political scientist and senior adviser at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne, Domique] Moïsi suggested.

“Europe’s social democratic systems are not only more human, they leave us better prepared and fit to deal with a crisis like this than the more brutal capitalistic system in the United States,” Mr. Moïsi said.
The current crisis, some fear, could act like an accelerator of history, speeding up a decline in influence of both the United States and Europe.

“Sometime in 2021 we come out of this crisis and we will be in 2030,” said Mr. Moïsi. “There will be more Asia in the world and less West.”

[Timothy] Garton Ash said that the United States should take an urgent warning from a long line of empires that rose and fell.

“To a historian it’s nothing new, that’s what happens,” said Mr. Garton Ash. “It’s a very familiar story in world history that after a certain amount of time a power declines.”

“You accumulate problems, and because you’re such a strong player, you can carry these dysfunctionalities for a long time,” he said. “Until something happens and you can’t anymore.”

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Coronavirus vaccine doctor says he was fired over doubts on hydroxychloroquine • The New York Times

Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman:

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Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed this week as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, and removed as the deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response. He was given a narrower job at the National Institutes of Health.

In a scorching statement, Dr. Bright, who received a Ph.D. in immunology and molecular pathogenesis from Emory University, assailed the leadership at the health department, saying he was pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections” and repeatedly described by the president as a potential “game changer” in the fight against the virus.

“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,” he said in his statement. “I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”

…While Dr. Bright followed careful procedures, [Trump admin officials] said, he was a polarizing figure within the Department of Health and Human Services, where concerns had circulated about a management style that was described as confrontational.

Those officials said that there had been discussions about removing Dr. Bright for many months, and that they came to a head after emails were leaked to Reuters last week detailing internal discussions about chloroquines.

A senior administration official said that Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, told the coronavirus task force members in their meeting on Wednesday about Dr. Bright’s departure from BARDA, describing it as a promotion to the vice president. Officials left the meeting and learned of Dr. Bright’s public statement.

…A person familiar with Dr. Bright’s account said that Dr. Bright was pressured to rush access to the drug after the president and Larry Ellison, the chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle, had a conversation about chloroquines. Dr. Bright was then directed to put in place a nationwide expanded access program to make the drugs available on a broad basis without specific controls in place, according to the person familiar with his account.

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Today in hilarious quotes from Trump “officials”: someone’s management style being described as “confrontational”. And now we turn to Alex Azar (who describes someone being fired as “a promotion”).
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Special report: former labradoodle breeder was tapped to lead US pandemic task force • Reuters

Aram Roston and Marisa Taylor:

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On January 21, the day the first U.S. case of coronavirus was reported, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services appeared on Fox News to report the latest on the disease as it ravaged China. Alex Azar, a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the U.S. government was prepared.

“We developed a diagnostic test at the CDC, so we can confirm if somebody has this,” Azar said. “We will be spreading that diagnostic around the country so that we are able to do rapid testing on site.”

While coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was “potentially serious,” Azar assured viewers in America, it “was one for which we have a playbook.”

Azar’s initial comments misfired on two fronts. Like many U.S. officials, from President Donald Trump on down, he underestimated the pandemic’s severity. He also overestimated his agency’s preparedness.

As is now widely known, two agencies Azar oversaw as HHS secretary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, wouldn’t come up with viable tests for five and half weeks, even as other countries and the World Health Organization had already prepared their own.

Shortly after his televised comments, Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”

Azar’s optimistic public pronouncement and choice of an inexperienced manager are emblematic of his agency’s oft-troubled response to the crisis. His HHS is a behemoth department, overseeing almost every federal public health agency in the country, with a $1.3 trillion budget that exceeds the gross national product of most countries.

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Incompetence, overconfidence and cronyism: the Trump administration in three words. Of course Azar is a Trump pick; of course his past in the pharmaceutical industry indicates that Trump was never truthful in saying, when trying to get elected, that he’d rein in the pharma sector. That hasn’t happened. Still, no labradoodles have died of Covid-19. (Current joke: “Trump wanted someone who was good with labs, and Azar delivered.”)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A billboard: contributing, just a tiny bit, to making you less happy, new research says CC-licensed photo by Zara Gonzalez Hoang 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. Got your pulse oximeter yet? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

University of Warwick study: advertising makes us unhappy • Harvard Business Review

»

HBR: What prompted you to investigate this?

Professor Andrew Oswald: Colleagues and I have been studying human happiness for 30 years now, and recently my focus turned to national happiness. What are the characteristics of a happy country? What are the forces that mold one? What explains the ups and downs? I’d never looked at advertising before, but I met a researcher who was collecting data on it for a different reason, and it seemed to me that we should combine forces. Like a lot of people in Western society, I can’t help noticing the increasing amount of ads we’re bombarded with. For me, it was natural to wonder whether it might create dissatisfaction in our culture: How is your happiness and mine shaped by what we see, hear, and read? I think it’s rather intuitive that lots of ads would make us less happy. In a sense they’re trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more on goods and services to ease that feeling. I appreciate, of course, that the world’s corporate advertisers and marketing firms won’t like hearing me say that.

Yeah, I don’t think they’d agree that that is the goal of advertising.

Their line is that advertising is trying to expose the public to new and exciting things to buy, and their task is to simply provide information, and in that way they raise human well-being. But the alternative argument, which goes back to Thorstein Veblen and others, is that exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate. This study supports the negative view, not the positive one…

…It’s worth wondering whether Western society has done the right thing by allowing large levels of advertising, almost unregulated, as though it were inevitable. Given these patterns, it seems like something we might want to think about. But we haven’t got any political punch line in this paper. We don’t recommend any policy.

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And yes, they did check to make sure it wasn’t just an “ice cream causes murder” type of correlation.
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Why are labels changing song titles after a release? TikTok • Rolling Stone

Elias Leight:

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As the burgeoning world of voice-search starts to have more influence on listening habits, making sure songs fit search terms in this way will only become more important, says Hazel Savage, CEO and cofounder of AI-based start-up Musiio. “Especially what we see with younger generations is they’re more and more comfortable with voice search,” Savage notes. In that space, “it’s all about how much data can you attach to each song,” she continues. “The more you have, the more powerful your search terms are gonna be.”
Astralwerks’ Andrews says “we’ve seen a lot more people using Alexa and voice search since they’re stuck at home.” And when the label attached the “(i love you baby)” to “ily,” “voice search results for the song tripled overnight.” 

The “ily” title change is already impacting the way Astralwerks looks at its catalog. “There’s a song of ours called ‘Sex’ by Eden that has over one million creations on TikTok; it’s one of the top ten trending tracks globally right now,” Andrews explains. “But the phrase people are using on the platform is, ‘catching feelings,’ nothing to do with sex at all. So the title of that one is going to change to ‘Sex (Catching Feelings)’ to optimize how people are absorbing the song. It’s going to be interesting to see that affect more and more people now.” 

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Really would like to know how much voice search on Alexa/Google Home/Siri has risen now that so many people are at home.
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Upgrade our 8-track government • WSJ

Andy Kessler:

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I’ll admit to using this line all the time: “The Howard Stern Show” asked Ringo Starr, “What did you do with the money?” “What money?” “The money your mother gave you for singing lessons.”

Earlier this month, Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary told Tucker Carlson about a much-needed Covid-19 antibody test developed in January that was under review by the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Makary noted, “And we lost precious time when one of the original scientists submitted an application and was told that he had to submit it also by paper mail with a CD-ROM with the files burned on it.” CD-ROM? They might as well have asked for applications on a deck of IBM punch cards with audio on 8-track tapes. The FDA budget is around $5.8 billion. What did you do with the money?

Last week, New Jersey put out a call for Cobol programmers to update its unemployment-benefits software, which runs on mainframes installed 40 years ago. Cobol was invented in 1959. New Jersey has a $39 billion budget. What did you do with the money?

I grew up in New Jersey (Exit 14), but this ineptitude is everywhere. A 2018 study revealed that only 42% of all state and local government computer systems were implemented after Oct. 25, 2001. The rest are “old or broken,” including two-thirds of those used for child support and half of those used for unemployment or vehicle registration.

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And there’s also this Bloomberg article by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, in synchrony:

»

Behind the ideological squabbling, the main problem with Western government is simple: It is out of date. If you want a symbol of this, look no further than U.S. school calendar, which was designed for an agrarian economy where children needed long summer holidays to bring in the harvest. Think of all the changes that America’s private sector has been through over the past century: vertical integration followed by contracting out; steep hierarchies followed by delayering; skyscraper headquarters followed by suburban campuses followed by a return to the city. Think of all the companies that have been created and destroyed in a never-ending whirlwind of creative destruction. Now think of Washington. The Department of Agriculture remains a giant despite the fact that agriculture accounts for only 2% of GDP.

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The Silicon Valley view would be “government’s never faced disruption”.
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Jeffrey Sachs on the catastrophic American response to the coronavirus • The New Yorker

Isaac Chotiner interviewed Sachs, but this extract is all Sachs, who is an economist who advised the Soviets on how to shift to a market economy, and the Bush administrations on the size of funding needed for wide-scale vaccination programs in developing countries:

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Basically, American politics has become deeply corrupt over decades, and it became so corrupt that normal governance already collapsed many years ago. And people with resources and knowledge know it, but they haven’t cared, because things have more or less gone on O.K., and the stock market has been booming, and even though in almost any private conversation Trump is viewed as a complete dolt and a complete incompetent, that was more or less laughed off as manageable because he wasn’t doing too much damage, either.

That’s the real situation. Nobody here has viewed government as actually very functional for a long time, and not because it couldn’t be. It has been increasingly designed to fail. Specifically, it’s been designed to respond to powerful lobbies that want deregulation or tax cuts or some special privileges rather than to function in a normal way. And powerful people shrug their shoulders at that, because for the élites that’s been O.K., but it obviously hasn’t really been O.K. for a long time. We’ve had rising death rates. We’ve had the deaths of despair. We’ve had the failure to come to grips with climate change. We’ve had widening inequalities and massive suffering. But it hasn’t mattered in such a visible way…

…The rich countries got the wave of the epidemic first, mainly because of the high extent of travel between China and Europe, and between China and the United States, and Europe and the United States. And the epidemic went out of control in this country basically because Trump did nothing and called upon the federal system almost not at all between early January and mid-March. And epidemics grow at exponential rates. The poorer countries by and large did not receive the intense seeding of the epidemic as early, because they have fewer flights, they have fewer visitors and tourists. So in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the number of cases was lower. That’s why we’re seeing, at least for the moment, some greater measure of control.

These countries do not have test equipment. They do not have personal protective equipment. They do not have ventilators, and so on. And what I am recommending is that the International Monetary Fund provide emergency financing at essentially zero conditionality, other than that it be used responsibly. And that the World Health Organization work with governments that have the potential to supply additional equipment—that’s China, Korea, Japan, and a few others—and use the emergency financing and the availability of this urgently needed equipment to get it to these countries in need.

Where does the United States stand in this? Well, the United States has done the unimaginable, and that is to try to cut the functioning of the W.H.O. in the middle of the pandemic. So I’m not looking for American heroism. I’m looking for the United States not to be among the most destructive forces on the planet right now.

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In the coronavirus era, the force is still with Jack Dorsey • Vanity Fair

Nick Bilton:

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each day Dorsey wakes up in his multimillion-dollar glass mansion with postcard views of the Golden Gate Bridge, checks to see what the sleep-tracking ring on his finger says, then lowers himself into an ice bath before meditating in a warm tent sauna. This is followed by a seven-minute workout and then drinking his breakfast, which he calls “salt juice,” a concoction of water, salt, and lemon, which is the only thing he will “eat” until the evening, when he enjoys his single real meal of the day. His day wraps up in a slightly more extreme version of the way it began, with a ritual of 15 minutes in his barrel sauna, followed by three minutes in his ice bath, which he does back and forth three times for an hour. He then meditates again. People close to Dorsey caution, though, that his health routine “changes frequently, so what he’s doing now likely doesn’t align with what he talked about months ago.”

…While Dorsey managed to stave off a coup by [hedge fund] Elliott for now, Cohn is going to be sitting on the board of Twitter, leading an executive search that could recommend to replace Dorsey (though it will be left up to the board to decide if it wanted to follow through with those recommendations). And Dorsey is going to have to reach some pretty high metrics, including growing Twitter’s monetizable daily active users (people who use the platform daily and can be served ads) by 20% in order to remain CEO of both companies. As a result of the pandemic and the vertiginous fall in the stock markets, two weeks later, Silver Lake’s $1 billion investment had fallen by a third, as had Elliott’s. Which the bankers won’t be too happy about.

But, in an uncanny twist, given the virus now decimating the global economy, Dorsey might have just received a stay of execution. Any stock declines will be attributed to coronavirus eviscerating the markets as a whole. According to someone familiar with the company’s internal projections, the amount of time people spend on the site is expected to rise this quarter. While people around the globe are on lockdown in their homes, the one place millions are turning to for a constant flow of information is social media, especially Twitter.

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Browser boss: we’re blocking ad trackers because governments didn’t deal with them • Forbes

Barry Collins:

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The CEO of Vivaldi says his company’s new desktop and mobile browsers block ads for the first time because governments have failed to curb online advertising’s worst excesses.

Vivaldi 3 includes an integrated tracker blocker, powered by privacy-conscious search engine DuckDuckGo, as well as an adblocker. A built-in adblocker is also part of the first stable release of Vivaldi for Android devices.

Vivaldi CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, said the company had shied away from integrating adblockers in previous versions, but that the browser’s users had increasingly demanded greater protection that wasn’t being provided by lawmakers.

“The focus on Vivaldi 3 is privacy,” said von Tetzchner. “We’ve always been the browser that isn’t collecting data on you, but people have been asking: ‘what about tracker blocking?’”

Von Tetzchner said Vivaldi had hesitated to build such features into the browser previously, because it was concerned about “the internet being free and open”.

“I’ve been hoping for the governments to deal with that and stop the tracking, because I don’t think it’s really good for anyone.”

The issue came to a head with the release of the company’s mobile browser, where users found the browsing experience was being hampered by aggressive advertising. “Our thinking on the desktop side had been we’ll leave the adblocking to extensions,” von Tetzchner explained. “That was not an option on the mobile side. We saw the comments on the betas – this is what people wanted,” so the company decided to add the feature to both desktop and mobile.

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Not mentioned: Vivaldi’s share on the desktop and mobile. It’s below 0.1%. Still, having an adblocker will definitely get everyone to downl.. ah, forget it.
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Texas: how the home of US oil and gas fell in love with solar power • Financial Times

Gregory Meyer:

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A solar farm the size of a small city will open in the Texas shale heartland this month, adding more competition to a US oil and gas industry that is already flat on its back. 

The blue rows of panels at the Oberon photovoltaic project will generate 150 megawatts of power when they plug into the grid south of Notrees, an appropriately named town in the Permian Basin. Oberon’s developers want to eventually expand the project to 1,380MW — enough to serve 230,000 homes. 

A boom in solar projects is under way across Texas, the US oil and gas capital. The state will build a quarter of the record new industrial-scale solar capacity being installed across the US this year, according to the Energy Information Administration, part of the department of energy. 

Much of that solar investment is taking place in the Permian Basin, the centre of a US shale oil industry that is now reeling from the impact of the coronavirus crisis and the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The solar projects are a threat to fossil fuels. Renewables have helped to force the closures of coal-fired power plants. They are now challenging the primacy of natural gas in the US electricity generation mix as the price of solar equipment keeps on falling. The Republican legislature has declined to rein in rapid increases in wind and solar despite its historic friendliness to the oil and gas industry. 

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This was written back at the start of the month – before the price of Texas oil collapsed below “on its back”. There’s never a problem pumping solar.
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Weekly pro esports schedule: Soccer, Nascar, NFL and more • Gearbrain

Alistair Charlton:

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Watching competitive video games played online is nothing new. But with the coronavirus pandemic pressing the pause button on almost all global sport, the entire industry has stepped up a gear.

Thrust into an all-new spotlight, esports now features many real-world sporting professionals, is broadcast live on television to record audiences, and is called by pro commentators.

Sports including soccer, basketball, football and various forms of motorsport have all headed online to keep fans entertained during lockdown.

Updated weekly, this article will feature highlights of upcoming esports events for you to watch online and on television. While we can’t promise to include every single esports event — there are hundreds — we will try to highlight events where real-world professionals are taking part.

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Neat idea. The professionals need something to keep them… sharp.
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China bat expert says her Wuhan lab wasn’t source of new coronavirus • WSJ

James Areddy:

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Dr. Shi Zhengli [the 55-year-old principal investigator at the Wuhan Institute of Virology] and the Chinese government say there is no evidence the virus came from laboratories in Wuhan. Scientists generally believe the pathogen crossed the species barrier into humans directly from bats or via another animal. Wild animals were sold in the Wuhan market.

As questions about the origin of the coronavirus grew, Dr. Shi pushed back aggressively. In a social-media post republished in Wuhan’s main Communist Party newspaper in February, she said she could “guarantee on my life” that the virus hadn’t originated in her labs. She went on to “advise those who believe and spread malicious media rumors to close their stinky mouths.”

Dr. Shi didn’t respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal. Her boss, Yuan Zhiming, a senior official at the Wuhan facility, told Chinese state television this month that while it is understandable that people might raise questions about the labs, “there’s no way this virus came from us.”

For Dr. Shi’s defenders, the pandemic is a tragic coincidence for a scientist who has devoted her life to tracking threats to human health. “All the elements of the conspiracy are there if you want to believe it,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based environmental health nonprofit, who has collaborated with Dr. Shi for several years. But, he said: “It’s not true.”

Jonna Mazet, a pandemic specialist at the University of California, Davis, who has worked with Dr. Shi for a decade, said the Chinese scientist is cataloging all the coronaviruses she has studied over the years, and told her that “she didn’t have this virus in the lab before people were sick with it.”

Added Dr. Mazet: “She’s been under incredible strain and stress over this whole thing.”

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What proponents of the “escaped from the lab” hypothesis can’t answer is why so many of the early cases are linked to the market, which is quite some distance away.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified