The demand for electricity for AI means Microsoft is signing a deal that will reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. CC-licensed photo by Ted Van Pelt 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. Fizzing with energy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The Russian bot army that conquered online poker

Kit Chellel on how Russians realised they could make a serious amount of money by “solving” poker:

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Deeplay’s bots could help club operators attract new members by making sure there were always active tables to join. The company also offered game analysis and, ironically, anti-bot security, to keep interlopers away.

Some former Deeplay employees told me that once its bots were operating at poker club tables, they could make money at the expense of real users. Others said the skill level could be adjusted down, allowing humans to win just enough so they stayed at tables longer, spending more money. Deeplay would get a fee for providing this technology or take a share of the increased revenue. It’s unclear whether any of Deeplay’s clients knew they were in business with an offshoot of perhaps the largest cheating operation in the history of poker.

I couldn’t find a single poker club or traditional website that openly admitted to running internal bots or having a relationship with Deeplay. “It’s a complicated question,” one gambling executive responded when I asked whether liquidity bots were ethical. “I know of other platforms that use bots.” I asked the top five poker websites the same thing. They all either denied any connection to the practice, declined to comment or didn’t respond. Messages sent to official channels at Deeplay went unreturned.

The average poker enthusiast today can’t really know whether their online opponent is a person or a machine. Game security isn’t infallible, even on the big platforms. “This is an arms race against some very motivated individuals,” PokerStars said in a 2023 blog post. At a recent tournament with a $12.5m prize pool, run by Winning Poker Network, a unit of Americas Cardroom, the second-place player was disqualified midevent on suspicion of botting. “I believe there is no clean game online,” Vitaly Lunkin, a Russian professional, told me.

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It’s a long read, and Bloomberg wants you to register for free to read it. Unfortunately the Javascript on my browser broke and I just got the text.
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Qualcomm approached Intel about a takeover in recent days • WSJ

Lauren Thomas, Laura Cooper and Asa Fitch:

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Chip giant Qualcomm made a takeover approach to rival Intel in recent days, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be one of the largest and most consequential deals in recent years.

A deal for Intel, which has a market value of roughly $90bn, would come as the chip maker has been suffering through one of the most significant crises in its five-decade history.

A deal is far from certain, the people cautioned. Even if Intel is receptive, a deal of that size is all but certain to attract antitrust scrutiny, though it is also possible it could be seen as an opportunity to strengthen the US’s competitive edge in chips. To get the deal done, Qualcomm could intend to sell assets or parts of Intel to other buyers.

Intel—once the world’s most valuable chip company—had seen its shares drop roughly 60% so far this year before The Wall Street Journal reported on the approach. As recently as 2020, the company had a market value above $290bn. The stock closed up over 3% Friday after the Journal’s report.

…Both Intel and Qualcomm have become US national champions of sorts as chip-making gets increasingly politicized. Intel is in line to get up to $8.5bn of potential grants for factories in the US as chief executive Pat Gelsinger tries to build up a business making chips on contract for outsiders.

Qualcomm, led by chief executive Cristiano Amon, had engaged with Intel to potentially make its chips in Intel’s factories. But Qualcomm halted the effort amid technical missteps, the Journal reported last year.

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That last bit goes against the idea that Qualcomm would want to buy it, doesn’t it? Maybe Qualcomm would want some bits, but not the whole mess. Feels like Intel let this out to pep up its share price and make itself look attractive – or just harder to acquire.
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Israel’s pager attacks have changed the world • The New York Times

Bruce Schneier:

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The bottom line: our supply chains are vulnerable, which means that we are vulnerable. Anyone — any country, any group, any individual — that interacts with a high-tech supply chain can potentially subvert the equipment passing through it. It could be subverted to eavesdrop. It could be subverted to degrade or fail on command. And, although it’s harder, it can be subverted to kill.

Personal devices connected to the internet — and countries in which they are in high use, such as the United States — are especially at risk. In 2007, the Idaho National Laboratory demonstrated that a cyberattack could cause a high-voltage generator to explode. In 2010, a computer virus believed to have been developed jointly by the United States and Israel destroyed centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear facility. A 2017 dump of C.I.A. documents included statements about the possibility of remotely hacking cars, which WikiLeaks asserted can be used to carry out “nearly undetectable assassinations.” This isn’t just theoretical: in 2015, a Wired reporter allowed hackers to remotely take over his car while he was driving it. They disabled the engine while he was on a highway.

The world has already begun to adjust to this threat. Many countries are increasingly wary of buying communications equipment from countries they don’t trust. The United States and others are banning large routers from the Chinese company Huawei because we fear that they could be used for eavesdropping and — even worse — disabled remotely in a time of escalating hostilities. In 2019 there was a minor panic over Chinese-made subway cars that could possibly have been modified to eavesdrop on their riders.

…It’s not obvious how to defend against these and similar attacks. Our high-tech supply chains are complex and international. It didn’t raise any red flags to Hezbollah that the group’s pagers came from a Hungary-based company that sourced them from Taiwan, because that sort of thing is perfectly normal. Most of the electronics Americans buy come from overseas, including our iPhones, whose parts come from dozens of countries before being pieced together primarily in China.

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How Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” took over the internet • Vox

Aja Romano:

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It’s the stories that draw people in: A bride feeling upstaged on her wedding day; the woman whose husband insists on bringing his sister with them on their honeymoon; an airline passenger who wonders if she should have given up her first-class seat for a stranger’s child.

These are all tales of questionable behavior from r/AmItheAsshole. AITA, as it’s known for short, is hosted by Reddit, the one-stop clearinghouse for internet drama, comeuppances, and popcorn gallery judgments on the behavior of strangers. The mothership has been on a hot streak, tripling its traffic over the last year, when Google tweaked its search algorithm to prioritize content made by and for real people. Since then, Reddit has risen to over 340 million weekly unique users. Starting from around that same period, AITA has ascended rapidly from niche forum to mainstream forum to omnipresent cultural juggernaut.

The AmITheAsshole subreddit, as Reddit’s topic-based forums are known, boasts 20 million members ready to decide who’s right in a given situation and who’s wrong, if a hair more evocatively. It’s seen numerous spin-offs; not just advice subreddits and confessional subreddits that get at the same yen for revelation and judgment, but subreddits devoted to filtering and curating all those other advice and confessional subs, so that readers can find only the best (or worst) stories. But AmITheAsshole’s cultural dominance doesn’t end there.

This Reddit sprawl has spilled over outside of the platform itself, spawning a whole internet ecosystem dedicated to reading and sharing content from advice subreddits.

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Microsoft signs deal to revive Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to help power data centers • GeekWire

Lisa Stiffler:

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As tech companies scramble to secure new sources of energy, Microsoft on Friday announced a 20-year deal to restart a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island — a facility made infamous by a partial meltdown in 1979.

The deal is a power purchase agreement (PPA) between Microsoft and the clean energy company Constellation to bring a 835-megawatt nuclear reactor back online. The plant was mothballed in 2019 due to economic issues, according to the energy company.

In a LinkedIn post, Constellation CEO Joseph Dominguez called the arrangement, “a win for Pennsylvania’s economy, a big step for Microsoft in its efforts to help decarbonize the grid, and a key milestone as we advance the clean energy transition.”

He also noted that the reactor being restarted, called TMI Unit 1, “was among the safest and most reliable power generators in the U.S.” The partial meltdown impacted TMI-2. The facility is getting a new name in the deal, Crane Clean Energy Center, and is expected to become operational by 2028.

Power demand is rising as Microsoft ramps up construction of new, power-hungry data centers in order to support the increased use of artificial intelligence and generative AI.

At the same time, the Redmond, Wash.-based company has ambitious carbon reduction targets that are becoming more difficult to meet.

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It was all set for decommissioning and/or closure back in 2019. This is quite the reverse.
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Elon Musk’s X backs down in Brazil • The New York Times

Jack Nicas and Ana Ionova:

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Elon Musk suddenly appears to be giving up.

After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.

The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.

Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.

Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.

The abrupt about-face from Mr. Musk in Brazil appeared to be a defeat for the outspoken businessman and his self-designed image as a warrior for free speech.

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Or, just possibly, someone pointed out to him that Brazil actually provided millions of users, and desperately needed advertising revenue, and that they’d migrated to other social networks and might not come back, and that he’d backed down in other countries.
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Silent solar • The Crucial Years

Bill McKibben:

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[In] Pakistan… power prices in the wake of Putin’s Ukraine invasion have soared so dramatically that sales of electricity have gone down 10% in the last two years. That should cripple a country—”yet somehow it’s economy grew by two% anyway,” [Aseem Ashar and Nathan Warren reported]. Again, that should have been impossible: if there’s a truism, especially in the developing world, it’s that growth in energy use is tied to growth in economies.

So what was happening? Basically, Pakistanis were buying huge quantities of very cheap Chinese solar panels and putting them up themselves. Pakistan, they reported, “has become the third-largest importer of Chinese solar modules, acquiring a staggering 13GW in the first half of this year alone.” This is particularly astonishing because the country’s entire official electricity generating capacity is only 46 GW.

In other words: In just six months, Pakistan imported solar capacity equivalent to 30% of its total electricity generation capacity – an absolutely staggering amount.

Energy analyst Dave Jones has gone to great lengths to track this spread on Google maps, finding building after building across the country with big new solar arrays on the roof. For middle-class Pakistanis, they can pay off the investment in a few years selling back power to the grid; in poor areas, things like tube wells for irrigation are now increasingly run on solar.

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Once again, it’s easy to underestimate how cheap solar has become, and how many countries have plentiful sunshine.
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iPad Pro iPadOS 18 warning: Apple pulls update as tablets are bricked • Forbes

David Phelan:

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The latest iPad Pro with the M4 chip is a triumph of software and hardware, so users may have been champing at the bit to upgrade to the latest iPadOS 18 software when it launched on Monday, Sept. 16. However, some users have claimed that their iPad have become useless, and Apple has now removed the option to update to it.

Since the software has some cool upgrades, like a customizable home screen, improved handwriting with the Apple Pencil, live audio transcription and the long-awaited arrival of the Calculator app, you can see why people would hurry to install it.

The iPadOS 18 software has now been withdrawn, as pointed out by MacRumors, so it’s no longer available to be downloaded or installed.

Well, you can download it for other iPads—I’ve just done it on an iPad Air—but Apple is apparently holding it back for its latest, most premium iPad.

You can understand why: some users on Reddit have reported that when installed, the iPad Pro simply stopped working.

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I have one of these new devices, and had wondered why iPadOS 18 wasn’t available on it. This explains. (Hope you didn’t upgrade too hastily. Personally I’m not sure what v18 really has that’s worth upgrading for.)
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‘Remorseless, ruthless, racist’: my battle to expose Mohamed Al Fayed • The Guardian

Henry Porter was from 1995 leading the investigation by Vanity Fair magazine into allegations of sexual assault on his employees by Mohamed al-Fayed, at that time the owner of Harrods:

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Our concern was that if we settled, the evidence about his abuse and surveillance would never be available to [Princess Diana, then beginning a relationship with al-Fayed’s song Dodi]. So it was vital that she understood that all Fayed’s properties were wired for audio and video, and that she could never be sure of having a private conversation on his premises, let alone being able to undress without being watched. Through intermediaries, we made our fears known. Diana’s friend Rosa Monckton and her husband Dominic Lawson also repeatedly warned Diana. I have no idea whether she paid attention.

By the end of July 1997, no agreement was reached. The holidays were upon us and things were closing down, but on 4 August we learned that George Carman, the celebrated QC of the time who was acting for Fayed, had blanched when reading our re-re-amended defence, which included the evidence of security head Bob Loftus and Fayed’s former secretary. The judge delayed the trial by a year – to autumn 1998 – and commented that even without the latest 800 pages of evidence: “you would win this case if you proved only 75% of what you already have.” He described the new allegations as “very serious, including conspiracy to commit several serious offences. It is a matter of public interest.”

That had been my line in a four-page memo to my bosses in New York when I listed the main findings of our investigation, some involving serious criminality. But the crucial point, which I made less well, was that we owed so much to the seven women who had agreed to testify, arguably a bigger step then than the one taken by the women who appeared in the BBC’s documentary, although that, too, required extraordinary courage. In his prime, Fayed was a remorseless enemy to anyone who crossed him, and our witnesses had good reason to be fearful.

Everything was swept away by the death of Diana and Dodi in Paris on 31 August 1997. Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, decided to shut down the case immediately out of respect for the grieving father. Both sides absorbed their own costs, no damages were paid, and we agreed to place all evidence in locked storage. It seemed the right and humane decision in the immediate aftermath of the shocking deaths. But it wasn’t, because of the countless women who have suffered since our case was settled, including many who were raped by a man who appeared unaffected by grief or regret.

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What a bizarre thing: Diana’s death – the fault of al-Fayed’s driver, who was over the limit – also killed the legal case that would have destroyed his reputation, and saved scores of women from his abuse. Fate is a fickle, indifferent thing.
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Do black babies have better survival rates with black doctors than white doctors? • Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche

Steve Stewart-Williams:

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According to a famous study, Black newborns have higher survival rates when they’re attended by Black doctors than White doctors. A re-analysis of the data, however, shows that the effect disappears when you account for the fact that Black doctors more often see normal weight Black newborns, whereas White doctors more often see low birth weight Black newborns – newborns that have much poorer odds of survival.

The re-analysis was reported in a new paper by George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s [part of] the paper’s significance statement:

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An influential study suggests that Black newborns experience much lower mortality when attended by Black physicians after birth. Using the same data, we replicate those findings and estimate alternative models that include controls for very low birth weights, a key determinant of neonatal mortality not included in the original analysis.

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Subtle point, but also this is why it’s useful to have the data available so it can be reexamined for subtle points that might be missed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new social network is just AI chatbots, all the time. A vision of heaven, or hell? CC-licensed photo by James Royal-Lawson 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time: all hail the algorithm.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A new era in sabotage: turning ordinary devices into grenades, on a mass scale • The New York Times

David Sanger:

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the presumed Israeli sabotage of hundreds or thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies and other wireless devices used by Hezbollah has taken the murky art of electronic sabotage to new and frightening heights. This time the targeted devices were kept in trouser pockets, on belts, in the kitchen. Ordinary communication devices were turned into miniature grenades.

And while the target was Hezbollah fighters, the victims were anyone standing around, including children. Lebanese authorities say 11 people died and more than 2,700 were injured in Tuesday’s attack. On Wednesday, at least 20 more people were killed and 450 injured in a second round of attacks with exploding walkie-talkies.

There is reason to fear where this attack on Hezbollah fighters might go next. The history of such sabotage is that once a new threshold is crossed, it becomes available to everyone.

Of course, there is nothing new about sabotaging phones or planting bombs: terrorists and spy agencies have done that for decades. What made this different was the mass scale, the implantation of explosives on so many devices at once. Such subterfuge is difficult to pull off, because it requires getting deep into the supply chain. And that, in a way, is the best reason for people not to be afraid of their internet-connected refrigerators and computers.

But our sense of vulnerability about how everyday implements connected to the internet can become deadly weapons may be just beginning.

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There’s a suggestion that the pagers and walkie-talkies were routed through Iran – after all, it’s hard to get a licence to export to Hezbolla – which will increase the group’s uncertainty about what can be trusted.

At The Atlantic, Eliot Cohen points out:

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Hezbollah members will now be unlikely to trust any form of electronics: car keys, cellphones, computers, television sets. Myth and legend, no doubt reinforced by an information-warfare campaign, will magnify Israel’s success in getting inside black boxes no matter how big or how small. An army skittish about any kind of electronics is one that is paralyzed—an individual leader, like Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar, can communicate without a phone, but an entire organization cannot.

The Iranians, already reeling from the assassination of the political head of Hamas in a Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse on the day of the inauguration of the new president, now have much to wonder about as well. How, they must ask themselves, did the Israelis penetrate the supply chain? How did they get access to the pagers? How did they know that this batch was going to Hezbollah? How did they manage to foil whatever security precautions had been taken?

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The ground war is inevitable, Cohen says:

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Both Iran and Hezbollah have to know that Israel now believes itself to be fighting an existential fight, with a different set of rules.

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AI-generated code is causing outages and security issues in businesses • Tech Republic

Fiona Jackson:

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Bilkent University researchers found that the latest versions of ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Amazon CodeWhisperer generated correct code just 65.2%, 46.3%, and 31.1% of the time, respectively.

Part of the problem is that AI is notoriously bad at maths because it struggles to understand logic. Plus, programmers are not known for being great at writing prompts because “AI doesn’t do things consistently or work like code,” according to Wharton AI professor Ethan Mollick.

In late 2023, more than half of organisations said they encountered security issues with poor AI-generated code “sometimes” or “frequently,” as per a survey by Snyk. But the issue could worsen, as 90% of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants by 2028, according to Gartner.

Tariq Shaukat, CEO of Sonar and a former president at Bumble and Google Cloud, is “hearing more and more about it” already. He told TechRepublic in an interview, “Companies are deploying AI-code generation tools more frequently, and the generated code is being put into production, causing outages and/or security issues.

“In general, this is due to insufficient reviews, either because the company has not implemented robust code quality and code-review practices, or because developers are scrutinising AI-written code less than they would scrutinise their own code.

“When asked about buggy AI, a common refrain is ‘it is not my code,’ meaning they feel less accountable because they didn’t write it.”

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No actual evidence is provided of these outages – we’re told the CEO of a company is “hearing more and more” about them – and I’d also like to know how good your average Joe or Jane programmer is at generating “correct” code. (The linked paper doesn’t specify that – big miss! – though it did introduce me to the concept of a “code smell” which I’d somehow never come across before.)
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Google employees’ attempts to hide messages from investigators might backfire • The Verge

Lauren Feiner on how Google’s peculiar approach to retaining documents on legal request might not help it in its adtech trial, because the judge could “draw an adverse inference” about why that happened:

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Brad Bender, another Google ad tech executive who testified earlier in the week, described conversations with colleagues over chat as more akin to “bumping into the hall and saying ‘hey we should chat.’” The DOJ also questioned former Google executive Rahul Srinivasan about emails he marked privileged and confidential, asking what legal advice he was seeking in those emails. He said he didn’t remember.

Google employees were well aware of how their written words could be used against the company, the DOJ argued, pointing to the company’s “Communicate with Care” legal training for employees. In one 2019 email, Srinivasan copied a lawyer on an email to colleagues about an ad tech feature and reminded the group to be careful with their language. “We should be particularly careful when framing something as a ‘circumvention,’” he wrote. “We should assume that every document (and email) we generate will likely be seen by regulators.” The email was labeled “PRIVILEGED and CONFIDENTIAL.”

While the many documents shown by the DOJ demonstrate that Google often discussed business decisions in writing, at other times, they seemed to intentionally leave the documentation sparse. “Keeping the notes limited due to sensitivity of the subject,” a 2021 Google document says. “Separate privileged emails will be sent to folks to follow up on explicit [action items].”

“We take seriously our obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents,” Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels said in a statement.

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The judge in a previous trial didn’t think Google took those obligations seriously enough. Remains to be seen what this one will think.
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Norway: electric cars outnumber petrol for first time in ‘historic milestone’ • AFP via The Guardian

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Electric cars now outnumber petrol cars in Norway for the first time, an industry organisation has said, a world first that puts the country on track towards taking fossil fuel vehicles off the road.

Of the 2.8m private cars registered in the Nordic country, 754,303 are all-electric, against 753,905 that run on petrol, the Norwegian road federation (OFV) said in a statement.

Diesel models remain the most numerous at just under 1m, but their sales are falling rapidly.

“This is historic. A milestone few saw coming 10 years ago,” said OFV director Øyvind Solberg Thorsen.

“The electrification of the fleet of passenger cars is going quickly, and Norway is thereby rapidly moving towards becoming the first country in the world with a passenger car fleet dominated by electric cars.”

Norway, paradoxically a major oil and gas producer, has set a target for all new cars being sold to be zero emission vehicles – mostly EVs since the share of hydrogen cars is so small – by 2025, 10 years ahead of the EU’s goal.

In August, all-electric vehicles made up a record 94.3% of new car registrations in Norway, boosted by sales of the Tesla Model Y.

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There’s a nice read from back in March about how Norway got there, apparently involving Morten from A-ha before he was Morten from A-ha.
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“Dead Internet theory” comes to life with new AI-powered social media app • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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For the past few years, a conspiracy theory called “Dead Internet theory” has picked up speed as large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT increasingly generate text and even social media interactions found online. The theory says that most social Internet activity today is artificial and designed to manipulate humans for engagement.

On Monday, software developer Michael Sayman launched a new AI-populated social network app called SocialAI that feels like it’s bringing that conspiracy theory to life, allowing users to interact solely with AI chatbots instead of other humans. It’s available on the iPhone app store, but so far, it’s picking up pointed criticism.

After its creator announced SocialAI as “a private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make,” computer security specialist Ian Coldwater quipped on X, “This sounds like actual hell.” Software developer and frequent AI pundit Colin Fraser expressed a similar sentiment: “I don’t mean this like in a mean way or as a dunk or whatever but this actually sounds like Hell. Like capital H Hell.”

SocialAI’s 28-year-old creator, Michael Sayman, previously served as a product lead at Google, and he also bounced between Facebook, Roblox, and Twitter over the years. In an announcement post on X, Sayman wrote about how he had dreamed of creating the service for years, but the tech was not yet ready. He sees it as a tool that can help lonely or rejected people.

“SocialAI is designed to help people feel heard, and to give them a space for reflection, support, and feedback that acts like a close-knit community,” wrote Sayman. “It’s a response to all those times I’ve felt isolated, or like I needed a sounding board but didn’t have one. I know this app won’t solve all of life’s problems, but I hope it can be a small tool for others to reflect, to grow, and to feel seen.”

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No. Nonononononono. This is Black Mirror stuff. You could almost, if you looked sidewise enough, think it might be something that those at end of life or with dementia might use, but even so it feels like denying humans the thing they most need: human companionship.
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Solar power continues to surge in 2024 • Ember

Euan Graham and Nicolas Fulghum:

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Ember’s analysis of the latest data on monthly capacity installations shows that the world is on track to reach 593 GW of solar installations by the end of this year. This would once again surpass most industry forecasts, and comes after 2023 showed record growth in solar installations of 86% compared to 2022. Countries need to plan ahead to make the most of the high levels of solar capacity being built today and ensure the continued build-out of capacity in the coming years.

Ember estimates that at the current rate of additions, the world will install 593 GW of solar panels this year. That’s 29% more than was installed last year, maintaining strong growth even after an estimated 87% surge in 2023. In 2024, an estimated 292 GW of solar capacity was installed by the end of July.

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Half of that will be in China, but countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are also jumping on this very fast-moving bandwagon. And most countries are accelerating their installs. (Pakistan because its grid company is heavily indebted to.. China.)

Now we just need the battery capacity to gather pace.
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Elon Musk’s X finds way around Brazil ban and goes live again for many users • The New York Times

Jack Nicas:

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In his continuing fight with the Brazilian authorities, score one for Elon Musk — at least briefly.

On Wednesday, his social network, X, suddenly went live again for many across Brazil after three weeks of being blocked under orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court. The reason? X made a technical change to how it routes its internet traffic, enabling the site to evade the digital roadblocks set up in recent weeks by Brazilian internet providers.

But by Wednesday night, the president of Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, said his agency believed it would soon be able to restore the block.

The new twist showed how Mr. Musk appears far from backing down in Brazil, making the dispute a significant test of strength between national sovereignty and the borderless power of internet companies. Brazil’s Supreme Court blocked X because the company defied orders to remove certain accounts and then closed its offices in the country to avoid consequences.

…“You can’t just block Cloudflare because you would block half of the internet,” said Basílio Perez, president of Abrint, the trade group for Brazilian internet providers. He said Cloudflare supported more than 24 million websites, including those of the Brazilian government and banks.

But hours later, Anatel’s president, Carlos Baigorri, said in an interview that Cloudflare had agreed to isolate internet traffic from X, enabling Brazilian internet providers to easily target and block that traffic.

“Cloudflare has been extremely cooperative,” he said. “It really shows the diverse reactions from two companies, Cloudflare and X.”

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Unclear if this really was Musk trying to find a way around the Brazilian block or – as claimed in this BBC version of the story – just an “inadvertent mistake”.
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The wordfreq dataset will not be updated any more · GitHub

Robyn Speer:

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The wordfreq data is a snapshot of language that could be found in various online sources up through 2021. There are several reasons why it will not be updated anymore.

1: Generative AI has polluted the data

I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans.

The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies.

…As one example, Philip Shapira reports that ChatGPT (OpenAI’s popular brand of generative language model circa 2024) is obsessed with the word “delve” in a way that people never have been, and caused its overall frequency to increase by an order of magnitude.

2: Information that used to be free became expensive

wordfreq is not just concerned with formal printed words. It collected more conversational language usage from two sources in particular: Twitter and Reddit.

The Twitter data was always built on sand. Even when Twitter allowed free access to a portion of their “firehose”, the terms of use did not allow me to distribute that data outside of the company where I collected it (Luminoso). wordfreq has the frequencies that were built with that data as input, but the collected data didn’t belong to me and I don’t have it anymore.

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(Thanks wendyg for the link.)
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Marree Man: The enduring mystery of a giant outback figure (2018) • BBC News

Frances Mao:

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This week [end of June 2018] marks 20 years since a helicopter pilot flying over central Australia spotted the outline of a giant man drawn into the earth.

The 4.2km (2.5 miles) tall figure, on a remote plateau in South Australia, is often thought to depict an Aboriginal hunter. Dubbed Marree Man after a nearby town, it is one of the world’s largest designs to be etched into the ground.

But mystery surrounds who created it – and why.

Earlier this week, Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith offered a A$5,000 (£2,800; $3,700) reward for any information about the artwork’s origins. “How has it been kept secret for 20 years?” he said on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Monday, external.

Marree Man has been a subject of fascination since its discovery in the desert about 700km north of Adelaide. It has gained popularity on tourism flights because it is too large to be viewed from the ground.

With an outline measuring a total of 28km, Marree Man had an initial depth of about 35cm (14 inches), according to local media reports. Locals believe it portrays an Aboriginal man carrying a woomera – a throwing stick – in his left hand.

Marree publican Phil Turner says he is convinced that its creator, or creators, were “professionals” who possibly used GPS technology.

«

I came across this because someone on Twitter did a thread about how they spotted it out of an airplane window the other day and were very proud of tracking it down via Google Earth and old Landsat photos. (Overkill, really.)

Plenty of ideas about who might have made it; clearly they used earthmoving equipment, and satellite photos show it was created between 27 May and 12 June 1998. It’s 28km of tracks: to do that accurately in two weeks you need big plant and accurate GPS – which in those days wasn’t guaranteed to civilian users.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The chances of AI designing a bioweapon are between zero and none because it takes real work by humans in a laboratory. CC-licensed photo by DisconnecTomas 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Not weaponised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Israel detonates Hezbollah walkie-talkies a day after pager attack • Axios

Barak Ravid:

»

Israel on Wednesday blew up thousands of two-way personal radios used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon in a second wave of an intelligence operation that started on Tuesday with the explosions of pager devices, two sources with knowledge of the operation told Axios. More than a dozen people were killed and hundreds of others were wounded.

The second wave of clandestine attacks is another serious security breach in Hezbollah’s ranks and increases pressure on the militant Lebanese group.

Lebanon’s health ministry said 14 people were killed and 450 wounded in the attacks on Wednesday. The walkie-talkies were booby-trapped in advance by Israeli intelligence services and then delivered to Hezbollah as part of the militia’s emergency communications system, which was supposed to be used during a war with Israel, the sources said.

The attack further damages Hezbollah’s military command and control system.

«

Lots of detail has come out in the intervening 24 hours. A Taiwanese company licensed the manufacture of the pagers in Europe to a Hungarian company, but in fact a Bulgarian company made them, and they sat on some docks for three months.

The walkie-talkies had ICOM branding, but the company says it hasn’t made that model for 20 years. So they’re knockoffs, or fakes, and contained more explosive than pagers.

There’s no denying this is terrorism – civilians and children were injured, some with life-altering injuries. The only question is whether it’s justified. Will Hezbollah roll over? Or will the rocket attacks intensify? Making everyday technology into a weapon changes everything.
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Massive China-state IoT botnet went undetected for four years—until now • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

The FBI has dismantled a massive network of compromised devices that Chinese state-sponsored hackers have used for four years to mount attacks on government agencies, telecoms, defence contractors, and other targets in the US and Taiwan.

The botnet was made up primarily of small office and home office routers, surveillance cameras, network-attached storage, and other internet-connected devices located all over the world. Over the past four years, US officials said, 260,000 such devices have cycled through the sophisticated network, which is organized in three tiers that allow the botnet to operate with efficiency and precision. At its peak in June 2023 Raptor Train, as the botnet is named, consisted of more than 60,000 commandeered devices, according to researchers from Black Lotus Labs, making it the largest China state botnet discovered to date.

Raptor Train is the second China state-operated botnet US authorities have taken down this year. In January, law enforcement officials covertly issued commands to disinfect Internet of Things devices that hackers backed by the Chinese government had taken over without the device owners’ knowledge. The Chinese hackers, part of a group tracked as Volt Typhoon, used the botnet for more than a year as a platform to deliver exploits that burrowed deep into the networks of targets of interest.

«

Half of it was in the US; a quarter in Europe. (Only 3% in the UK. Hurrah.)
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Exclusive: Google offered to sell part of ad tech business, not enough for EU publishers, sources say • Reuters via MSN

Foo Yun Chee and Jody Godoy:

»

Alphabet’s Google took a major step this year to end an EU antitrust investigation with an offer to sell its advertising marketplace AdX but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.

Google’s lucrative ad tech business attracted EU regulatory scrutiny last year following a complaint from the European Publishers Council.

The European Commission subsequently charged Google with favouring its own advertising services, opening its fourth case against the world’s most-popular search engine.

Google has never before offered to sell an asset in an antitrust case, according to three lawyers involved in antitrust cases who did not have permission to speak publicly.

The company is on trial in the US, fighting claims by antitrust authorities who seek to make Google sell its Ad Manager product, which contains AdX and Google’s publisher ad server, known as DFP.

Publishers rejected Google’s proposal because they want it to divest more than just AdX to address conflicts of interest due to its presence in almost all levels of the ad tech supply chain, the people said. They said the EU antitrust enforcer was aware of the offer.

“As we have said before, the European Commission’s case about our third-party display advertising products rests on flawed interpretations of the ad-tech sector, which is fiercely competitive and rapidly evolving. We remain committed to this business,” a Google spokesperson said.

«

Doesn’t sound like you were committed to the business if you offered to sell it, to be honest. Google is fighting this case in multiple locations: EU, UK, US. Not going well in any of them.
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Google gets win from European court as €1.5bn fine overturned • FT via Ars Technica

Javier Espinoza:

»

Google has won an appeal against a €1.5bn competition fine from the European Commission in a victory for the Big Tech group as it comes under growing scrutiny from Brussels regulators.

The EU’s General Court said on Wednesday that while it accepted “most of the commission’s assessments” that the company had used its dominant position to block rival online advertisers, it annulled the hefty fine levied against Google in the case.

When launching the action against Google in 2019, Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief, said that the search giant had imposed anti-competitive restrictions on third-party websites for a decade between 2006 and 2016. She justified the €1.5bn fine by arguing that it reflected the “serious and sustained nature” of the infringement.

However, the Luxembourg-based General Court found that the commission, the EU’s executive arm, had failed “to take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had found to be unfair.”

The commission, which is likely to appeal, said it took “note” of the judgment and “will carefully study the judgment and reflect on possible next steps.”

«

Pretty hard to keep track of who’s paying and who’s repaying with all these nine-digit fines.
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iPhone 16 Pro Camera Review: Kenya — Travel Photographer • Austin Mann

The photographer has been testing the new camera (which has a phone attached):

»

Last week at the Apple keynote event, the iPhone camera features that stood out the most to me were the new Camera Control button, upgraded 48-megapixel Ultra Wide sensor, improved audio recording features (wind reduction and Audio Mix), and Photographic Styles.

When I finally landed in Nairobi (after more than 15 hours of flight delays), these were the features I was most excited to put to the test.

Over the past week we’ve traveled over a thousand kilometers across Kenya, capturing more than 10,000 photos and logging over 3TB of ProRes footage with the new iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max cameras. Along the way, we’ve gained valuable insights into these camera systems and their features.

As iPhone cameras have improved over the years, finding their boundaries has become more challenging, but Kenya’s vast and diverse landscape has provided the ideal setting to really push these devices to their limits.

My question today is the same as it’s always been: how will this new tech make our pictures and videos better?

«

This set of pictures definitely gave me an absolutely irresistible urge to.. go on safari in Kenya.
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Against prophecy among the machines

Anselm Levskaya:

»

The backers of California’s SB1047 routinely cite AI-enabled bioweapons as a threat justifying the radical regulatory regime that places a locus of liability on general computational models, rather than on particular dangerous applications or criminal acts.

For six years I’ve worked on scaling generative AI models at a leading industrial lab – I’ve worked on some of the largest language models ever trained. But before that I was an experimental lab-scientist for two decades working in synthetic biology, optogenetics, and immuno-oncology.

As a biologist I feel compelled to comment on this risk-scenario, speaking solely on my own behalf as a resident of California, and as someone who generally admires my state senator Scott Wiener, the primary sponsor of the bill. The claims being made about biological risks do not reflect scientific reality.

Language models won’t create bioterrorists any more readily than celebrity cookbooks have created Michelin star chefs.

Those of us who have made a living in the practical, experimental arts of the world know: it is not easy to explain to someone how a line cook tests the elasticity of a steak to measure doneness, how a machinist listens to the sound of a cutting bit for signs of a good feed rate, or how a biologist reads the fluorescent smears in a gel to see that a polymerase chain reaction’s annealing temperature was low. These tacit skills are acquired by hand, via repetition, under apprenticeship.

The preparedness and safety studies written by various AI labs on the subject of biological risks all try to assay the ability of users to elicit dangerous experimental recipes from language models. None publish the protocols or results in the sufficient detail necessary for an independent review, but it is clear that none of them actually assay the ability of any of these study participants to translate their dangerous chats into actual bench practice.

Having trained many people in experimental biology, I can tell you that it is a long and cruel apprenticeship requiring the disabuse of enthusiasts’ ideas that manipulating the machines of life is straightforward. One can watch their sanity fray as they slowly learn to stitch DNA constructs together through the arcane and interminable mixing of clear and precious droplets of fluid. One can watch their bright eyes dim as they deal with failed DNA assemblies, failed cell transfections, fritzing instruments, and their own faltering punctiliousness. One can only try to cheer their fatalism as they learn that even the smallest of ambitions will demand the sacrifice of their youth to the lonely nights of a laboratory.

«

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AI started as a dream to save humanity. Then Big Tech took over • Bloomberg

Parmy Olson, with an extract from her new book “Supremacy”:

»

Generative AI promises to make people more productive and bring more useful information to our fingertips through tools like ChatGPT. But every innovation has a price to pay. Businesses and governments are adjusting to a new reality where the distinction between real and “AI-generated” is a crapshoot. Companies are throwing money at AI software to help displace their employees and boost profit margins. And devices that can conduct new levels of personal surveillance are cropping up.

We got here after the visions of two innovators [Demis Hassabis and, separately, Sam Altman] who tried to build AI for good were eventually ground down by the forces of monopoly. Their story is one of idealism but also one of naivety and ego — and of how it can be virtually impossible to keep an ethical code in the bubbles of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Altman and Hassabis tied themselves into knots over the stewardship of AI, knowing that the world needed to manage the technology responsibly if we were to stop it from causing irreversible harm. But they couldn’t forge AI with godlike power without the resources of the world’s largest tech firms. With the goal of enhancing human life, they would end up empowering those companies, leaving humanity’s welfare and future caught in a battle for corporate supremacy.

After selling DeepMind to Google in 2014, Hassabis and his co-founders tried for years to spin out and restructure themselves as a nonprofit-style organization. They wanted to protect their increasingly powerful AI systems from being under the sole control of a tech monolith, and they worked on creating a board of independent luminaries that included former heads of state like Barack Obama to oversee its use. They even designed a new legal charter that would prioritize human well-being and the environment. Google appeared to go along with the plan at first and promised its entity billions of dollars, but its executives were stringing the founders along.

«

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Lionsgate, studio behind ‘John Wick,’ signs deal with AI startup Runway • WSJ

Jessica Toonkel:

»

The entertainment company behind “The Hunger Games” and “Twilight” plans to start using generative artificial intelligence in the creation of its new movies and TV shows, a sign of the emerging technology’s advance in Hollywood.

Lions Gate Entertainment has agreed to give Runway, one of several fast-evolving AI startups, access to its content library in exchange for a new, custom AI model that the studio can use in the editing and production process. 

The deal—the first of its kind for Runway and one that could become a blueprint in the entertainment industry—comes as creatives, actors and studio executives debate whether to use the new technology and how to protect their copyright material. Advocates say generative AI can enhance creators’ work and help a cash-strapped industry save time and money.

Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate Studio, expects the company to be able to save “millions and millions of dollars” from using the new model. The studio behind the “John Wick” franchise and “Megalopolis” plans to initially use the new AI tool for internal purposes like storyboarding—laying out a series of graphics to show how a story unfolds—and eventually creating backgrounds and special effects, like explosions, for the big screen. 

“We do a lot of action movies, so we blow a lot of things up and that is one of the things Runway does,” Burns said.

«

Runway, it should be pointed out, is one of the AI startups against which a copyright case is proceeding. And this is also not going to be a popular move at all.
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ITV launches ITV Kerching • Advanced Television

»

ITV has launched its new consumer-facing affiliate marketing brand, ITV Kerching – a browser extension which aims to simplify the process of finding discount codes across hundreds of online retailers.

Available from the ITVX website and mobile app, ITV Kerching uses tech company Kindred’s technology to search for discount codes from retailers to help consumers search for the best price available for their online purchases.

Following activation, when a user lands on a retailer’s website, coupons are searched for, applied and redeemed with minimum effort.

ITV research found that 79% of ITVX viewers already use discount codes and one-third said their usage has increased in the last year. Among those that don’t use discount codes, 48% say they don’t know where to look, a problem that ITV Kerching solves by doing the hard work for you.

The launch of ITV Kerching is being supported by marketing promotion across ITV’s linear channels, ITVX, social media and email marketing.

In addition to the launch, ITV is also investing up to £8.5m of advertising inventory across ITV’s channels and ITVX in return for a minority equity stake in Kindred, the company powering ITV Kerching.

«

Google long since passed ITV for UK advertising revenue; so the plan now is to find any additional revenue you can, even if it’s down-the-sofa stuff like this.
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Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac review – Musk’s Twitter takeover • The Guardian

James Ball:

»

Even people who never used Twitter more or less know its story over the last few years: Musk bought it, gave it a juvenile new name, X, and the whole thing seems to have been a complete mess that has made everyone miserable, including Musk himself.

That makes the job of New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac in their chronicle of the takeover and its resulting fallout, a difficult one: almost anyone who might actually read this book is pretty familiar with how things have played out. How can you make a story compelling when each step along the way has already been so heavily covered?

Conger and Mac’s answer to that is their astonishing ability to take the reader into almost every room that mattered during the contentious $44bn acquisition. The book opens with a Twitter data scientist getting ready to meet Musk, ostensibly in a bid to keep his job. The employee, however, has already decided he’s quitting and is instead using the opportunity to level with the new boss. The encounter goes predictably badly, leading him to accuse Musk of being one of the most gullible men on the planet. The book records Musk’s response as being two words long: “Fuck you.”

At other moments, the narration seems to know Musk’s exact movements when he was at home with his then-girlfriend Claire Elise Boucher (better known as the musician Grimes), or the conversations that take place on his plane. Such is the apparent omniscience that impressive accounts of goings-on in boardrooms and executive suites during the takeover seem par for the course.

Musk himself did not grant the authors an interview. Some of their insights come from court documents and other reporting, but there is no doubt that Conger and Mac enjoyed unmatched access to a range of characters from all sides. You couldn’t hope for a better ringside seat on the unfolding drama.

«

Twitter (now X) has given rise to a multitude of books, charting its rise and plateau and now fall. This certainly looks worth the time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The killing of more than ten people and wounding of hundreds in Lebanon by exploding pagers has raised many questions. CC-licensed photo by Hades2k 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Ride on time. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

New Instagram changes for teens include private accounts and other restrictions • WSJ

Julie Jargon:

»

Instagram is placing teens in a protective bubble.

Starting this week, it will begin automatically making youth accounts private, with the most restrictive settings. And younger teens won’t be able to get around it by changing settings or creating adult accounts with fake birth dates.

Account restrictions for teens include direct messaging only with people they follow or are already connected to, a reduction in adult-oriented content, automatic muting during nighttime hours and more.

Building on changes to teen accounts it announced earlier this year—and following years of criticism about child safety—the Meta Platforms-owned social network said it would shift 100 million teenagers in the US and around the world into the guardrailed accounts. The move applies to all accounts with an under-18 birth date, though teens 16 and older will be able to change their settings without parental approval.

Any new teen accounts will be similarly restricted starting Tuesday. Parents will no longer have to manually enter those settings using Instagram’s parental supervision tool.

Teens are unlikely to be happy with the changes. Instagram is expecting to lose “some meaningful amount of teen growth and teen engagement,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in an interview. “I have to believe earning some trust from parents and giving parents peace of mind will help business in the long run, but it will certainly hurt in the short term.”

Instagram plans to go even further, starting next year: Using artificial intelligence, it said, it will identify children who are lying about their age—then automatically place them into the restricted teen accounts.

«

There’s a writeup at The Guardian too, quoting Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly killed herself in 2017 after viewing suicide-related content shown to her via Instagram’s algorithm. So it’s only taken them seven years to get to this.
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Hezbollah pagers explode in apparent attack across Lebanon • WSJ

Adam Chamseddine, Summer Said and Stephen Kalin:

»

Pagers carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon in what appeared to be an unprecedented attack that authorities said injured more than 2,700 and killed eight [update: at least 11 – Overspill Ed] across Lebanon.

Many of the affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days, people familiar with the matter said. A Hezbollah official said many fighters had such devices, speculating that malware might have caused the devices to explode. The official said some people felt the pagers heat up and disposed of them before they burst.

Hezbollah said a number of pagers carried by its members exploded simultaneously at 3:30 p.m. local time. It couldn’t immediately be determined what caused the blasts, which were spread out across the country in several areas where Hezbollah has a heavy presence.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for the attack. Both said civilians were killed, and Hezbollah threatened to retaliate. The Israeli military declined to comment.

Iranian state television said the country’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was injured by his pager but was conscious and not in danger. Iran is the main supporter of Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist group that has grown into one of the world’s best-armed nonstate militias.

«

No details at the time of compilation, but here’s the obvious method: infiltrate the supply chain and pack C-4/Semtex into the pagers. The details of how the battery charge is diverted into the explosive is for the bombmakers. That’s the “new shipment”. Hezbollah had stopped using mobile phones because they considered them unsafe for various reasons – including the fact that Israel, apparently, killed a Hamas operative using a boobytrapped one in 1996.

Hezbollah has been indiscriminate with its attacks: in July, one of its rockets hit a playground and soccer field in northern Israel, killing nine children and injuring 20 more. Making pagers explode is indiscriminate too: among those killed on Tuesday was the 10-year-old daughter of a Hezbollah operative who was standing by her father.

The US said it had nothing to do with it. Unconnected: the American University of Beirut Medical Center replaced the pagers of all doctors and staff at the end of August following an upgrade in April. (Thanks Jimbo.)
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Streaming struggles with churn as even buzzy shows can’t keep subscribers • Deadline

Katie Campione:

»

Even as streaming continues to grow, subscribers are still cycling through the premium services to watch their favorite shows, rather than committing to any or all of them.

According to Samba TV‘s latest State of Viewership Report, U.S. households watched a record level of streaming content in the first half of the year, up 40% from the same time frame in 2023. However, the same report also states that about 44% of subscribers are only willing to watch one or two platforms per six months.

Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) platforms are still consistently adding subscribers each quarter, but cancellations each quarter have also grown, and the services only added about 4.8m net subscribers in Q1 2024 — down more than 3m from the previous quarter.

Samba’s data shows that viewers are generally invested in a specific piece of content, choosing to leave the platform after they’ve finished watching. The only exception to this is Netflix, which is unsurprising given that the streamer has proven highly effective at using its algorithm to draw users to new content and keep them engaged on the platform. It’s a tool that many of the newer platforms have yet to perfect.

Netflix had the lowest level of churn and also represented 60% of the Top 50 shows in the first half of the year with series like Fool Me Once, Griselda, American Nightmare, Bridgerton and The Gentlemen in the Top 10.

Elsewhere, subscription cyclers come back for buzzy new shows, Samba says, including Peacock’s Ted, AppleTV’s Masters of the Air, and FX’s Shōgun, which aired in Hulu and Disney+. New seasons of House of the Dragon (the second most-popular premiere of the half, behind Fool Me Once), True Detective, and Reacher were also a big draw.

But still, once those shows are over, subscribers often leave the service until they’re enticed back again for another anticipated release.

«

Fabulous irony: I’ve been glued to the BBC’s Sherwood series, which is completely bingeable on iPlayer. Meanwhile, Apple TV+ parcels out one episode per week of Slow Horses.
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Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the “thoughts” of OpenAI’s latest model • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Unlike previous AI models from OpenAI, such as GPT-4o, the company trained o1 specifically to work through a step-by-step problem-solving process before generating an answer. When users ask an “o1” model a question in ChatGPT, users have the option of seeing this chain-of-thought process written out in the ChatGPT interface. However, by design, OpenAI hides the raw chain of thought from users, instead presenting a filtered interpretation created by a second AI model.

Nothing is more enticing to enthusiasts than information obscured, so the race has been on among hackers and red-teamers to try to uncover o1’s raw chain of thought using jailbreaking or prompt injection techniques that attempt to trick the model into spilling its secrets. There have been early reports of some successes, but nothing has yet been strongly confirmed.

Along the way, OpenAI is watching through the ChatGPT interface, and the company is reportedly coming down hard on any attempts to probe o1’s reasoning, even among the merely curious.

One X user reported (confirmed by others, including Scale AI prompt engineer Riley Goodside) that they received a warning email if they used the term “reasoning trace” in conversation with o1. Others say the warning is triggered simply by asking ChatGPT about the model’s “reasoning” at all.

«

Simon Willison (a smart developer, for those who don’t know) has a good writeup of what he reckons is going on with the “reasoning”. Ben Thompson (in his paywalled Stratechery) got it to solve a 7×7 crossword, and John Gruber got it to solve a logic puzzle that I found too exhausting to fight through.

It’s getting closer to something that “reasons”.
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TikTok fights ban in court hearing, facing skeptical judges • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell and Eva Dou:

»

The fate of the wildly popular TikTok app hangs in the balance after the company tried to persuade a Washington appeals court Monday to halt a fast-approaching ban on the platform’s use across America.

A deep legal discussion over the potential ban’s constitutionality Monday morning offered no clear answers, leaving the company’s fate uncertain even as it nears a Jan. 19 deadline to divest from Chinese ownership, with a ban coming into place if it hasn’t done so by that date.

The political backdrop is striking: Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are both seizing on the viral short-video platform to vie for young voters, even though both the Trump and Biden administrations backed banning it.

In Monday morning’s hearing in federal D.C. Court of Appeals, the panel of three judges — Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judges Neomi Rao and Douglas H. Ginsburg — grilled TikTok attorney Andrew Pincus on why he thought the company’s right to free speech outweighed national security concerns over its ownership, citing wartime precedents of the United States curbing the broadcast of foreign propaganda into America.

The judges pressed Pincus on a hypothetical scenario involving a war between the United States and a foreign country, asking whether Congress would be within its right to bar “the enemy’s ownership of a major media source” — in line with Congress’s designation of TikTok and other China-based apps as controlled by a “foreign adversary.”

They also cited the government’s concern over how ByteDance developers in China could curate TikTok’s recommendation algorithm for American users.

Pincus argued that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company in China, is a private company, not a state-owned enterprise, and that the United States isn’t at war with China. The judges didn’t seem wholly convinced.

«

An information war is still a war, after all.
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Mozilla exits the fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users as of the time of Tuesday’s announcement. By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users.

Mozilla had telegraphed its plans to scale back on its fediverse investments earlier this year after the CEO stepped down. At the time, Mozilla board member Laura Chambers took over the job as the interim CEO of Mozilla Corporation through the end of 2024. Shortly after the change in leadership, Mozilla said it would refocus its product strategy around Firefox and AI and significantly scale back or even shutter other efforts. Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down.

The redirection of Mozilla’s efforts came after its flagship product, the Firefox web browser, spent years losing market share. That left room for other competitors, like the startup Arc, to take hold in the alternative browser market.

Months prior to this change in strategy, Mozilla had been touting the fediverse’s potential, but under Chambers, the company said that a more “modest approach” to the fediverse would have allowed it to participate with “greater agility.”

«

Mozilla is really hunkering down. The Mastodon server can’t have been costing anything, but it seems like anything surplus is too much. Presently Mozilla has nine products (but that includes Relay and the VPN). Odd to abandon the VPN: companies like Nord are making good money from them (even though their adverts wildly exaggerate the need for them).
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CMA objects to Google’s ad tech practices in bid to help UK advertisers and publishers • GOV.UK

»

An investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally found that Google is using anti-competitive practices in open-display ad tech, which it believes could be harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers.

As set out in a statement of objections issued to Google today (Friday 6 September), the CMA has provisionally found that, when placing digital ads on websites, the vast majority of publishers and advertisers use Google’s ad tech services in order to bid for and sell advertising space.

The CMA is concerned that Google is actively using its dominance in this sector to preference its own services. Google disadvantages competitors and prevents them competing on a level playing field to provide publishers and advertisers with a better, more competitive service that supports growth in their business.

In its 2019 market study into digital advertising, the CMA found that advertisers were spending around £1.8bn annually on open-display ads, marketing goods and services via apps and websites to UK consumers.

…The CMA has provisionally found that, since at least 2015, Google has abused its dominant positions through the operation of both its buying tools and publisher ad server in order to strengthen AdX’s market position and to protect AdX from competition from other exchanges. Moreover, due to the highly integrated nature of Google’s ad tech business, the CMA has provisionally found that Google’s conduct has also prevented rival publisher ad servers from being able to compete effectively with DFP, harming competition in this market.

«

This may look abstruse and acronym/abbreviation-laden, but it’s the same topic as the DOJ trial in the US: Google abuses its position at both ends of the advertising market (selling space to advertisers, finding buyers for publishers’ space, aka “inventory”) to charge excess fees.
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Is My Blue Your Blue?

»

Colour perception is tricky to measure–vision scientists use specialized calibrated equipment to measure colour perception. Graphic designers use physical colour cards, such as those made by Pantone, so that they can communicate colours unambiguously. Here we use your monitor or phone to test how you categorize colours, which is far from perfect, since your calibration may differ from mine.

The validity of the inference is limited by the calibration of your monitor, ambient lighting, and filters such as night mode. Despite these limitations, the results should have good test-retest reliability on the same device, in the same ambient light, which you can verify by taking the test multiple times. If you want to compare your results with friends, use the same device in the same ambient light.

Getting outlier results doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your vision. It might mean you have an idiosyncratic way of naming colours, or that your monitor and lighting is unusual.

«

Fun game! When you see a colour on the screen, press the “This is blue” or “This is green” button at the bottom. Then keep on going. Apparently my green pushes over into most people’s blue. Look, you just need to move your idea of “blue”.
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South Korea: the deepfake crisis engulfing hundreds of schools • BBC News

Jean Mackenzie and Leehyun Choi:

»

South Korean journalist Ko Narin published what would turn into the biggest scoop of her career. It had recently emerged that police were investigating deepfake porn rings at two of the country’s major universities, and Ms Ko was convinced there must be more.

She started searching social media and uncovered dozens of chat groups on the messaging app Telegram where users were sharing photos of women they knew and using AI software to convert them into fake pornographic images within seconds.

“Every minute people were uploading photos of girls they knew and asking them to be turned into deepfakes,” Ms Ko told us.

Ms Ko discovered these groups were not just targeting university students. There were rooms dedicated to specific high schools and even middle schools. If a lot of content was created using images of a particular student, she might even be given her own room. Broadly labelled “humiliation rooms” or “friend of friend rooms”, they often come with strict entry terms.

Ms Ko’s report in the Hankyoreh newspaper has shocked South Korea. On Monday, police announced they were considering opening an investigation into Telegram, following the lead of authorities in France, who recently charged Telegram’s Russian founder for crimes relating to the app. The government has vowed to bring in stricter punishments for those involved, and the president has called for young men to be better educated.

Telegram said it “actively combats harmful content on its platform, including illegal pornography,” in a statement provided to the BBC.

The BBC has viewed the descriptions of a number of these chatrooms. One calls for members to post more than four photos of someone along with their name, age and the area they live in.
“I was shocked at how systematic and organised the process was,” said Ms Ko. “The most horrific thing I discovered was a group for underage pupils at one school that had more than 2,000 members.”

In the days after Ms Ko’s article was published, women’s rights activists started to scour Telegram too, and follow leads. By the end of that week, more than 500 schools and universities had been identified as targets. The actual number impacted is still to be established, but many are believed to be aged under 16, which is South Korea’s age of consent. A large proportion of the suspected perpetrators are teenagers themselves.

«

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Agenda Hero: we make calendars magically simple

»

We make calendars magically simple. An AI companion for calendars you already use and any new ones you create

«

Neat: I gave it an image of a spreadsheet of a set of tennis matches (without saying they were tennis matches anywhere; they were just described as “Mixed”) and it correctly created the calendar events and added a tennis ball in front of each event.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A significant number of hard drives with music recordings from the 1990s are unreadable – meaning a huge amount of original sessions have been lost. CC-licensed photo by slgckgc 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google serves AI slop as top result for one of the most famous paintings in history • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

The first thing people saw when they searched Google for the artist Hieronymus Bosch was an AI-generated version of his Garden of Earthly Delights, one of the most famous paintings in art history.

Depending on what they are searching for, Google Search sometimes serves users a series of images above the list of links they usually see in results. As first spotted by a user on Twitter, when people searched for “Hieronymus Bosch” on Google, it included a couple of images from the real painting, but the first and largest image they saw was an AI-generated version of it.

I was able to confirm that Google Search was serving this AI-generated image to users yesterday, but Google removed it from search results at some point on Sunday night.

“Search is designed to show helpful and high quality information – including representative imagery in knowledge panels  – while giving people tools to help them make sense of what they find online,” a Google spokesperson told me in an email. “Given the scale of the open web, however, it’s possible that our systems might not always select the best images regardless of how those images are produced, AI-generated or not. When we receive user feedback about potential issues, we work to make timely improvements.”

Google was pulling the image from the personal website of Andrea Concas, who according to his Linkedin is an “Art Tech Entrepreneur” and the founder of an “NFT Magazine to be read and collected on Ethereum.”

«

What this is really showing is that Google Search hasn’t been reliable for a long, long time: it wasn’t necessarily linking to what was really the most authoritative site. It was more like luck, and the lack of enough AI-generated junk, that kept search looking believable. Now? All bets are off.
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Amazon mandates five days a week in office starting next year • The Guardian

Guardian staff and agencies:

»

Amazon said on Monday it would require employees to return to the office five days a week, effective 2 January.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Andy Jassy, the CEO, said in a note to employees.

The e-commerce giant’s previous office attendance requirement for its workers was three days a week. Amazon workers can claim “extenuating circumstances” or request exceptions from senior leadership, according to Jassy’s memo.

“If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.” He cited improved collaboration and connection between teams as reasons for the new requirement as well as the ability to “strengthen our culture”.

As part of an organizational restructuring, Amazon is looking to reduce the number of managers in its organization and boost the number of individual contributors by the end of the first quarter of 2025 to reduce bureaucracy. Like other technology companies, Amazon grew rapidly at the start of the coronavirus pandemic then laid off wide swaths of its staff.

“We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way, including the US headquarters locations (Puget Sound and Arlington),” Jassy said.

Since Covid lockdowns first forced workers home four years ago, employers and employees have clashed over how many days of the work week must be spent in the office. In May last year, employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters staged a walkout protesting against changes to the e-commerce giant’s climate policy, layoffs and a return-to-office mandate.

«

A trend gathers steam.
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Exclusive: how Intel lost the Sony PlayStation business • Reuters

Max Cherney:

»

Intel lost out on a contract to design and fabricate Sony’s PlayStation 6 chip in 2022, which dealt a significant blow to its effort to build its fledgling contract manufacturing business, according to three sources with knowledge of the events.

The effort by Intel to win out over Advanced Micro Devices in a competitive bidding process to supply the design for the forthcoming PlayStation 6 chip and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co as the contract manufacturer would have amounted to billions of dollars of revenue and fabricating thousands of silicon wafers a month, two sources said.

Intel and AMD were the final two contenders in the bidding process for the contract.

Winning the Sony PlayStation 6 chip design business would have been a victory for Intel’s design segment and would have doubled as a win for the company’s contract manufacturing effort, or foundry business, which was the centerpiece of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s turnaround plan.

Gelsinger announced plans for Intel to create a foundry unit in 2021 and formally launched it at an event in San Jose, California, in February of this year. The PlayStation chip deal originated in Intel’s design segment, but would have been a boon to the financial performance of the foundry business after this year’s separation.

«

Missed out on making 100m chips over five years or so: couldn’t agree on the price (or, perhaps a better characterisation, Intel’s profit). And Intel just had a big board meeting at which one member quit over the latest plans for the future. Things really aren’t looking good.
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The prospect of the childless city • Financial Times

Emma Jacobs:

»

Randal Cremer is one of several planned primary school closures and mergers in inner London triggered by low birth rates, families moving away because of expensive childcare, Brexit, and parents re-evaluating their lives during the pandemic. The biggest factor, says Riley, is that “housing is just becoming unaffordable”. Philip Glanville, mayor of Hackney, calls it “the acute affordability crisis”. Retaining children in the area, he says, requires an intervention from central government, to provide “meaningful investment in social housing, match wel fare support with the real cost of housing, and put controls on rocketing rents”.

Hackney is not the only area in the capital that is losing children. London Councils, which represents the 32 boroughs and the City of London Corporation, predicts a 7.6% decrease in reception pupil numbers across the city between 2022-23 and 2026-27, the equivalent of about 243 classes.

A future with dwindling numbers of children is one many cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, are grappling with. In Hong Kong, for every adult over 65 there are, to put it crudely, 0.7 children, and in Tokyo it is even fewer (0.5).

Even before the pandemic, Joel Kotkin, author of The Human City wrote a decade ago about the prospect of a childless city, saying that US cities “have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children . . . The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating ‘creative class’ — a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students — occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich.”

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(Should be free to read)

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Inside Iron Mountain: it’s time to talk about hard drives • Mixonline

Steve Harvey:

»

A few years ago, archiving specialist Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services did a survey of its vaults and discovered an alarming trend: Of the thousands and thousands of archived hard disk drives from the 1990s that clients ask the company to work on, around one-fifth are unreadable. Iron Mountain has a broad customer base, but if you focus strictly on the music business, says Robert Koszela, Global Director Studio Growth and Strategic Initiatives, “That means there are historic sessions from the early to mid-’90s that are dying.”

Until the turn of the millennium, the workflow for record releases was simple enough. Once the multitrack was mixed, the 2-track master was turned into a piece of vinyl, a cassette tape or, starting in 1982, a compact disc, and those original tapes—by and large— then went into storage. Around 2000, with the advent of 5.1-surround releases, then in 2005 with the debut of the Guitar Hero video game, things started to get complicated. When rights holders went to the vaults to transfer, remix and repurpose some of their catalog tracks for these new platforms, they discovered that some tapes were deteriorating while others were unplayable. Not all assets had been stored under optimum conditions. Some recordings had been made on machines that were now obsolete, in formats that could no longer be easily played. And some recordings were missing.

In short, for the past 25 or more years, the music industry has been focused on its magnetic tape archives, and on the remediation, digitization and migration of assets to more accessible, reliable storage. Hard drives also became a focus of the industry during that period, ever since the emergence of the first DAWs in the late 1980s. But unlike tape, surely, all you need to do, decades later, is connect a drive and open the files. Well, not necessarily. And Iron Mountain would like to alert the music industry at large to the fact that, even though you may have followed recommended best practices at the time, those archived drives may now be no more easily playable than a 40-year-old reel of Ampex 456 tape.

«

As much as anything, even if the hard drive isn’t digital mush, does the version of Pro Tools that it was recorded on still function?
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iOS 18 is a smart upgrade, even without the AI • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

You know this is a big update when an entirely new Passwords app is only, like, the fourth most interesting thing going on. It’s self-explanatory, and after poking around for a bit, I’m convinced that this is an app for your parents who refuse to learn how to use a password manager. You can save passwords and access them from your iOS, iPad, and macOS devices, as you’d expect. But you can also share individual passwords or groups of passwords with other people, which would be handy for families and people in the same household.

The catch, of course, is that everyone needs to be in the Apple ecosystem, and since I frequently jump between iOS and Android, it’s not something I can really use in the long term. Incidentally, using a first-party Apple password manager would also make switching away from iOS in the future that much harder, which is probably no accident. But if my parents were all in on Apple, I’d absolutely make sure they were using it.

One feature I know I’ll be using for the long haul? Transcription in Voice Memos. This might be one for my fellow journalists, but friends, it is good. For years, I’ve used Pixel phones to record and transcribe interviews, and the Pixel has basically remained unchallenged as the best tool for the job. In iOS 18, Voice Memos will finally transcribe your recordings, in real time or after the fact, and it’s on par with the Pixel Recorder app as far as quality goes. It may not be a feature for the masses, but if you know, you know.

A new Control Center and a more customizable app grid don’t look like much on paper. And plenty of people will probably just leave them alone, which is fine. But if you don’t mind putting in a little effort, you’ll find iOS 18 pretty rewarding — no artificial intelligence required.

Still, AI is the big missing piece here.

«

The upgrade is less and less compelling. It’s gone from “must-have” to “oh, has it?”
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Apple suddenly drops NSO Group spyware lawsuit • SecurityWeek

Ryan Naraine:

»

Apple has abruptly withdrawn its lawsuit against NSO Group, citing increased risk that the legal battle might unintentionally reveal sensitive vulnerability data and difficulties in acquiring essential information from the spyware vendor.

In a court filing Friday, Apple said continuing the lawsuit now poses “too significant a risk” of exposing the anti-exploitation and threat intelligence efforts needed to fend off the very adversaries involved in the legal dispute.

“When it filed this lawsuit nearly three years ago, Apple recognized that it would involve sharing information with third parties. However, developments since then have reshaped the risk landscape associated with sharing such information,” Apple said.

“Apple knows and appreciates that this Court would take the utmost care with the sensitive information relevant to this case. But it is also aware that — now more than ever — predatory spyware companies, including those not before this Court, will use any means to obtain this information,” the company added.

“Any disclosure, even under the most stringent controls, puts this information at risk. Due to the developments since this suit was filed, proceeding forward at this time would now present too significant a risk to Apple’s threat-intelligence program.”

The case, originally filed in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, sought to to hold NSO Group accountable for hacking into Apple’s iOS platforms with so-called zero-click exploits to spy on researchers, journalists, activists, dissidents, academics, and government officials.

…On Friday, Apple also cited concerns that NSO Group and unidentified officials in Israel may have taken actions to avoid producing information during discovery. “This means that going forward with this case will potentially involve disclosure to third parties of the information Apple uses to defeat spyware while Defendants and others create significant obstacles to obtaining an effective remedy,” the company said.

«

That’s certainly the problem with a lawsuit like this: you don’t trust the other side to play by the rules – and you’re suing them because they didn’t play by the rules.
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Going the distance at the tram driver Olympics • The New York Times

Amelia Nierenberg:

»

The driver braked hard and came to a screeching stop. Fans gasped, awed at the precision. Referees conferred, making sure all was aboveboard.

“We’re ready to rumble,” said Markus Chencinsky, 50, a driver from Vienna.

Despite the adrenaline, the speed and the thousands of eyes, this was not a demolition derby or a stunt-driving expo. Instead, the competitors facing off on Saturday in a central square of Frankfurt were the captains of Europe’s tram systems. They had come to Germany’s financial hub to vie for the trophy at the 11th European Tramdriver Championship.

The annual public transit jamboree might best be described as tram dressage. The drivers coaxed their commuter chariots through an obstacle course meant to test their whimsy, mettle and precision.
“We try to mirror the entire range of skills a driver should have,” said Wieland Stumpf, the president of the championship.

Some events focused on safety: Drivers had to emergency brake at a precise spot, just as if a cyclist had swerved in front of them. Another tested their ability to multitask: Could they remember a series of symbols that appeared on mock traffic signs? A few challenges evaluated the smoothness of their touch: Drivers had to come to a stop so gently that water did not slosh out of a bowl that was filled to the brim. (A front-mounted camera showed every lost droplet: the less spilled, the more points.)

One test was downright counterintuitive: Tram billiards, in which a driver steers the vehicle to gently knock a pool cue attached to a stand into a billiard ball on a table. (The highest possible score for the billiards portion was 500 points, awarded if the ball rolled to a stop right in the middle of the table.)

“It’s not often you’re trying to hit something with your tram,” joked Victoria Young, 39, of Edinburgh. “You’ve just got this feeling inside you that says, ‘I should be stopping now.’”

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Excel Olympics, tram Olympics. We are not short of Olympics.
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FUBAR Mode • Noan

Neal Mann works in venture capital (having formerly worked in journalism):

»

If you want to understand how poorly most people have grasped the impact AI could have on business, the statement ‘AI isn’t ready for enterprise’ is the place to start. The logic goes that AI is not ready for enterprise because the output people are getting is not accurate enough to make their jobs easier and businesses more efficient. Microsoft recently had a contract for co-pilot canceled because the output was the same as a ‘middle school presentation’. Spend five minutes searching for co-pilot on social media and you’ll see similar responses. 

Advocates of this position essentially believe AI will be ready for enterprise when the models have improved and are betting on those improvements solving the accuracy problem. But it’s not that AI isn’t ready for enterprise, it’s that enterprise business structures as they stand will never be ready for AI.

Most people don’t realize this because their experience of enterprise is siloed – they’ve often worked in an individual department. If they’re in the investment community, they may never have worked in an enterprise-scale organisation at all. If we start from a place of believing AI automation of a business is possible then it’s irrelevant either way.

There there is a much deeper problem that needs to be dealt with – the knowledge that underpins the organisation, that defines it, and its processes, is often a chaotic, self-contradictory mess of disconnected documents, fragmented files and siloed concepts.

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A lot of his conclusions resemble, for me, the excitement from the 1980s about expert systems – that you’d pour experts’ expertise into a computer and it would regurgitate it as required. It didn’t work out that way, though.
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Why GB News is angrier than ever • Financial Times

Henry Mance with a long read about life inside GB News:

»

All the board members have actively supported conservative politics. None has prior experience in TV. Alan McCormick, the chairman, explained: “Ask anyone under 50 and almost no one receives their news and debate via television, this is fast becoming a bygone era, we need fresh thinking.” Three years after launching as a TV channel, GB News sees the future elsewhere.

Marshall and GB News’s other owner, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum, have bankrolled the broadcaster. In the year ending May 2022, its pre-tax loss was £30.7m. The following year losses widened to £42.4m. Marshall and Legatum agreed to put in a further £60m. 

“It’s never going to make enough money,” says Gill Hind, a media analyst at Enders Analysis.

In the US, Fox News and other cable news channels are paid by cable companies for the right to transmit them. UK channels, in contrast, are almost entirely reliant on advertising. Financially, GB News really isn’t Fox News: its revenues were £15.5m last year, while Fox News’s were about $3bn. Total losses have now exceeded £100m.

Billionaires tend to tire of losing such sums, even on passion projects: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made cuts at The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 and which lost $77m last year. “Paul and the Legatum guys have deep pockets, but they are not infinite,” says one person who has worked with them. “He likes new toys . . . GB News is a very demanding baby,” said another. Having bought The Spectator, Marshall is among a small group of bidders for The Telegraph, expected to cost somewhere below £600m. Those outlets have a record of profits.

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(The link should make the article free to read, at least for some of you.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists have shown – IgNobel-y – that if you flip a coin , it tends to land on the same side it started. CC-licensed photo by Nicu Buculei 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. Flipping heck. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US government pushes Nvidia and Apple to use Intel’s foundries: Department of Commerce Secretary Raimondo makes appeal for US-based chip production • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

»

During a meeting with U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expressed frustration with America’s reliance on TSMC to produce advanced chips. After this, Raimondo (via CNBC) went on private meetings with some public market investors, including shareholders of tech giants Nvidia and Apple, encouraging them to push their companies to use US foundries to produce AI chips.

The discussions between the investors and the Secretary were not publicly revealed. Still, sources say that the latter highlighted the growing geopolitical risk around Taiwan, especially as China is eyeing to invade the de facto country. Aside from this, Washington is also investing more on the American semiconductor industry than the last 28 years combined, so the White House is likely keen on pushing American companies to use locally produced chips.

Intel is gunning to become one of the top players in the foundry business, aiming to go head-to-head with TSMC and Samsung. However, recent developments revealed that Intel Foundry Services (IFS) is struggling to gain traction, causing the company to lose $1.6bn and practically making its stock price fall by 30% overnight. Because of this, Intel is reportedly considering spinning off its manufacturing division and other non-crucial business units, similar to how AMD spun off GlobalFoundries in 2008.

However, it’s also in the interest of the Biden administration that Intel succeeds, especially as it is one of the biggest recipients of funds under the CHIPS Act. Although sources say that the federal government is delaying the disbursement of CHIPS Act money to Team Blue until it can get its act together, it seems that the government still wants to see them succeed. Furthermore, while Raimondo did not mention Intel during the meetings, its status as one of the foremost chipmakers in the U.S. has likely been discussed privately.

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This is a touch ironic – Intel is using TSMC to do some of its foundry work itself. Maybe at some point Intel will be struggling badly enough that TSMC will buy it.
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Homing pigeon missiles honored with Ig Nobel Prize • The Register

Richard Currie:

»

With less than a month to go before the Nobel Prizes are handed out for the most worthy scientific discoveries of the preceding year, it would be remiss of The Register not to observe the honors conferred by the gong’s bratty little brother, the Ig Nobel Prize.

The satirical ceremony has been run annually since 1991 by the scientific humor mag Annals of Improbable Research, which serves the laudable goal of highlighting “research that makes people laugh… then think.” In other words, the quirky, trivial, inane, and insane.

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I won’t include all of them, but these were rather good:

»

Probability Prize: František Bartoš et al, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started. “Fair Coins Tend to Land on the Same Side They Started: Evidence from 350,757 Flips,” arXiv 2310.04153, 2023.

Biology Prize: Fordyce Ely and William E Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk. “Factors Involved in the Ejection of Milk,” Journal of Dairy Science, vol. 3, 1941.

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Though I thought that the IgNobels used to be awarded for science that “could not, and/or should not, be repeated”.
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The Plaude NotePin is a great AI voice recorder, and it’s totally doomed • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

Kudos to Plaud for one thing: in a year otherwise marred by high-profile failures and oh so much AI vaporware, it made an AI gadget that does exactly what it claims to do and does it pretty well. The gadget is called the NotePin, and it’s a $169, pill-shaped voice recorder that can transcribe, summarize, and pull important information out of your audio. This is something current AI systems can actually do well! There’s good and mature tech at every step along the pipeline here, from tiny microphones to speech-to-text transcription to natural-language processing and AI summarization. The NotePin does it well.

But the reason the NotePin works is also the reason I wouldn’t recommend buying one. AI voice recording is great and handy and being commoditized at an absolutely blistering pace. With iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia, you get transcriptions and summarization built into the Voice Memos app. Google’s Pixel Recorder app is terrific and is built into both the Pixel phones and the Pixel Watch. You can also get similar features from lots of apps. Do you need a dedicated voice recorder?

This is, of course, the eternal question about AI assistants as a whole. Are they a feature of your existing devices or a gadget category unto themselves? Plaud’s argument for dedicated hardware is about the same as all the other AI startups: that ease of use is everything.

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Agree – hardware is hard, but this is hardware which is being supplanted at top speed.
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The price of privacy: how paywalled cookie banners are redefining digital revenue streams • Conroyp

Paul Conroy:

»

For many ad-supported online publications, users refusing to consent to cookies used for personalised advertising can lead to a significant drop in ad revenue. Depending on the site niche and userbase, personalised ads can deliver in the region of 50% more revenue than the non-personalised kind. The legislation which led to the creation of these CMPs [Consent Management Platforms, aka cookie notices] state that it’s not legal to outright block someone who says “no” to their data being shared, so what can publishers do to try to fill this revenue gap when they see users declining consent?

A number of large European publications have begun changing their CMPs in an effort to plug this gap. Rather than the traditional “Accept” and “Reject” buttons, the options on these sites are now closer to “Accept” and “Reject tracking by paying a small fee”. The “Reject” option is modified to ask users to make up the difference in lost revenue by paying a small amount to gain access.

It’s an interesting approach from publishers struggling in a cut-throat market, but is it legal? In April 2024, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued a revised ruling on Meta’s “Pay or Okay” model, which has significant implications for large online platforms and potentially for media publishers in the future.

…In response, publishers in countries like Spain and Germany have introduced a novel concept, linking a paywall to the “reject” option. On websites such as elpais.es and bild.de users are presented with a stark choice: accept cookies or pay a small fee to access content. This fee works like a paywall, giving access to a version of the site without tracking cookies, or in many cases, any display ads at all. This model, while controversial, has opened up a potentially-valuable new revenue stream for publishers.

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The Sun and The Mirror and some others are trying this: either accept the cookies, or pay £4.99 per month (per month!) to reject. Amazing: that would be equivalent to a paywall on its own.
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Spotify says it accounted for just $60k of $10m streaming fraud case • Music Ally

Stuart Dredge:

»

Last week, we reported on the case of a US producer arrested and charged with multiple felonies relating to streaming fraud. Michael Smith is accused of fraudulently obtaining more than $10m in royalty payments from streaming services.

This morning, there’s a very interesting development. Spotify has gone on the record to say what its share of those royalty payouts was.

“Spotify invests heavily in automated and manual reviews to prevent, detect, and mitigate the impact of artificial streaming on our platform,” its spokesperson told Music Ally.

“In this case, it appears that our preventative measures worked and limited the royalties Smith was able to generate from Spotify to approximately $60,000 of the $10,000,000 noted in the indictment.”

“As Spotify typically accounts for around 50% of streamshare, this shows how effective we are at limiting the impact of artificial streaming on our platform,” continued the spokesperson.

Well then. The streaming service that claims to account for 50% of streamshare only paid out 0.6% of the royalties in this alleged case of streaming fraud.

«

Which leaves a comparatively small group of suspects who could have paid out on that sort of scale: Apple Music, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Deezer. Perhaps more will come out in the case.
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Own a virtual piece of Tannadice Park! • Dundee United Football Club

»

United supporters are being offered the opportunity to own a digital piece of the hallowed Tannadice turf following the launch of an innovative new partnership with Sportli!

Through Sportli’s unique platform, fans can now purchase and own virtual sections of the pitch at The CalForth Construction Arena at Tannadice Park. Each virtual area represents a real-life segment of the stadium, offering fans a new way to connect with the club and their favourite players.

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Feel like they missed a trick here – they could have let them name a star *and* own a crater on the moon as well.
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Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation • Lieff Cabraser

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On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier B.V., John Wiley & Sons, Wolters Kluwer NV, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), on behalf of a putative class of scientists and scholars who allege that these six world’s-largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research.

As detailed in the complaint, the defendants’ alleged scheme has three main components. First, an agreement to fix the price of peer review services at zero that includes an agreement to coerce scholars into providing their labour for nothing by expressly linking their unpaid labour with their ability to get their manuscripts published in the defendants’ preeminent journals.

Second, the publisher defendants agreed not to compete with each other for manuscripts by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to only one journal at a time, which substantially reduces competition by removing incentives to review manuscripts promptly and publish meritorious research quickly.

Third, the publisher defendants agreed to prohibit scholars from freely sharing the scientific advancements described in submitted manuscripts while those manuscripts are under peer review, a process that often takes over a year. As the complaint notes, “From the moment scholars submit manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property, to be shared only if the Publisher Defendant grants permission. Moreover, when the Publisher Defendants select manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants will often require scholars to sign away all intellectual property rights, in exchange for nothing. The manuscripts then become the actual property of the Publisher Defendants, and the Publisher Defendants charge the maximum the market will bear for access to that scientific knowledge.”

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Academic publishers are under attack in all sorts of ways. This might come to nothing – it still needs to rise to the status of a class action, though that’s a low bar – but even the fact it’s possible is surprising.
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Is anyone out there? • Prospect Magazine

James Ball:

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If you’ve ever walked a city street so late at night that it’s very early in the morning, you may have been greeted by a strange and unbidden thought. In the eerie stillness, it can feel for a moment as though you’re the last person alive. The usual throngs are gone, and the absence of what should be there is impossible to ignore—until some other person, off to start their working day, breaks the spell. The world is still there.

It is hard, in any real-world city, to maintain the illusion of being the only person for any length of time. But the internet is different. There is always an element of unreality to an online interaction with another human: how do we know for sure that they are who they say they are? Can we be certain they’re even actually a person?

This is the idea at the core of what became known as Dead Internet Theory, a joke-cum-conspiracy that says if you’re reading these words online, you’re the last person on the internet. Everyone else is a bot. The other commentators on Reddit? Bots. The people in the videos or the podcasts you listen to? Bots. What’s filling the junky websites that we all can’t help but click? You guessed it. They’re all bots, and you’re the guinea pig in the perverse experiment of some unknown power.

Dead Internet Theory is, if anything, a thought experiment. We’ve learned that we can’t necessarily trust what we read or who we meet online—so what happens if we take that notion to the extreme? If you were the last actual human on the internet, how long would it take for you to notice?

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Neat question.
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The exact hour you hit peak vacation happiness—and how to make that feeling last • WSJ

Jen Rose Smith:

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studies suggest that holiday blahs set in more commonly than many would like to admit, especially for travelers who linger in one place for a long time. To understand why fun sometimes trails off so quickly, we turned to scientists who examine vacationing. Their work can both help explain why fun peters out, and offer tips on how to hack your brain’s source code to optimize vacation enjoyment.

Let’s dig into the findings. A 2019 survey of tourists at an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic determined that vacationers’ average happiness rose steadily from the moment they left home, then peaked around hour 43 of a trip.

Key to this good-vibes spike is “dishabituation,” a perspective refresh one gets from a change of pace, says neuroscientist Tali Sharot, who helped interpret the survey results.

“The word people used more than any other to describe the parts of the holiday they liked best was ‘first,’” said Sharot. “First view of the ocean, first cocktail, first sand castle.” A daiquiri or two later, and the thrill starts to subside.

“You kind of habituate to joy, to the great things around you,” said Sharot, whose recent book, “Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There,” co-authored with Cass R. Sunstein, offers strategies to disrupt the lulling effects of routine. Sharot argues that finding ways to dishabituate—again and again—is the secret to making the most of every precious vacation day.

Long trips give your brain ample time to adjust to new surroundings—precisely the shift that leads to a drop-off in pleasure. Instead plan shorter, more frequent getaways, which can jolt your perspective with repeated doses of novelty. “You’re less likely to habituate,” said Sharot, noting that a three-day escape leverages the 43-hour sweet spot. (The benefits of brief trips are particularly salient for Americans, who get less time off than any other nationality surveyed in Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report.)

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The challenge of getting younger editors for Wikipedia is being taken seriously – but what’s the answer? CC-licensed photo by Roger 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Edited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Chats with AI bots found to damp conspiracy theory beliefs • Financial Times

Michael Peel:

»

Conspiracy theorists who debated with an artificial intelligence chatbot became more willing to admit doubts about their beliefs, according to research that offers insights into dealing with misinformation.

The greater open-mindedness extended even to the most stubborn devotees and persisted long after the dialogue with the machine ended, scientists found.

The research runs counter to the idea that it is all but impossible to change the mind of individuals who have dived down rabbit holes of popular but unevidenced ideas.

The findings are striking because they suggest a potential positive role for AI models in countering misinformation, despite their own vulnerabilities to “hallucinations” that sometimes cause them to spread falsehoods.

The work “paints a brighter picture of the human mind than many might have expected” and shows that “reasoning and evidence are not dead”, said David Rand, one of the researchers on the work published in Science on Thursday.

“Even many conspiracy theorists will respond to accurate facts and evidence — you just have to directly address their specific beliefs and concerns,” said Rand, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

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The paper’s full text is available at the link. Getting a chatbot to talk to people is certainly a bonus – those things will have a lot more patience than a human.
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Triple hearsay: original sources of the claim that Haitians eat pets in Ohio admit no first-hand knowledge • Newsguard

Sam Howard and Jack Brewster:

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In just days, a bizarre and baseless claim accusing Haitian migrants of eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, went from an obscure Facebook post in a private group to a talking point by Republican Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

The journey of the viral claim from vague, third hand gossip among Ohio neighbors to the presidential debate stage — where it was broadcast to 67 million people — is as stunning as the claim itself, according to those who started it all. 

NewsGuard identified and tracked down the two people central to the claim: Erika Lee, the Springfield resident who wrote the original Facebook post, and Kimberly Newton, the neighbor who had provided her with a third-hand account of the rumor, making Lee’s social media post a fourth-hand account: the alleged acquaintance/cat owner; Newton’s friend; Newton; and Lee, who posted it on Facebook. 

In exclusive interviews, NewsGuard spoke both with Lee, a 35-year-old hardware store worker who has lived in Springfield for four years, and Newton, her neighbor and a 12-year resident of Springfield. The interviews reveal just how flimsy and unsubstantiated the rumor was from the beginning — based entirely on third hand hearsay. Yet it quickly gained traction and, remarkably, found its way to Trump’s lips on a national stage. 

“I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat,” Newton said about the rumor she had passed on to her neighbor, Lee, the Facebook poster. Newton explained to NewsGuard that the cat owner was “an acquaintance of a friend” and that she heard about the supposed incident from that friend, who, in turn, learned about it from “a source that she had.” Newton added: “I don’t have any proof.” 

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Facebook: a much, much more efficient way to spread “friend of a friend” rumours.
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OpenAI releases new o1 reasoning model • The Verge

Kylie Robison:

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OpenAI is releasing a new model called o1, the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have been trained to answer more complex questions, faster than a human can. It’s being released alongside o1-mini, a smaller, cheaper version. And yes, if you’re steeped in AI rumors: this is, in fact, the extremely hyped Strawberry model.

For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a “preview” to emphasize how nascent it is.

ChatGPT Plus and Team users get access to both o1-preview and o1-mini starting today, while Enterprise and Edu users will get access early next week. OpenAI says it plans to bring o1-mini access to all the free users of ChatGPT but hasn’t set a release date yet. Developer access to o1 is really expensive: In the API, o1-preview is $15 per 1 million input tokens, or chunks of text parsed by the model, and $60 per 1 million output tokens. For comparison, GPT-4o costs $5 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens.

The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details. He says o1 “has been trained using a completely new optimization algorithm and a new training dataset specifically tailored for it.”

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Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? • The Guardian

Stephen Harrison:

»

In Katowice, Poland, at last month’s annual Wikimania conference – an event that feels a bit like an international summit of librarians crossed with Comic-Con – many of the speakers highlighted how Wikipedia faces an existential threat of fading into obscurity or disrepair. But there was also talk of a solution that may help secure Wikipedia’s future, or at least prevent its premature demise: recruiting more younger editors from generation Z and raising their awareness of how widely Wikipedia content is used across the internet.

Wikipedia operates on a model of unpaid and independent volunteers who create, update and maintain the content. Casual editors may make minor stylistic edits to a page, while others devote substantial time to creating full-fledged articles. A significant number of Wikipedia contributors are already gen Z; according to a 2022 survey, about 20% of Wikipedia editors are between the ages of 18 and 24. Although this is roughly reflective of the global population, there is a clear desire to increase this percentage.

As a tech writer, and in my research of Wikipedia for my novel The Editors, I have often heard the same handful of issues that dissuade the younger generation from joining the cause. First and foremost, the smartphone is gen Z’s preferred internet access device, but it’s not an easy tool for editing Wikipedia. Even the savviest digital natives find it frustrating to edit the encyclopedia with a small screen.

There are exceptions. Hannah Clover, a 22-year-old Canadian, was the youngest ever winner of “Wikimedian of the Year” at last month’s Wikimania. She also happens to be a rare breed: a highly prolific Wikipedian who has made more than 75% of her edits using mobile devices. A lot of those were edits she made on the go, while commuting on the bus or during shift breaks at her former job at McDonald’s. For Clover, adding to the global encyclopedia helped provide a sense of purpose. “Serving ice-cream to people isn’t really that much of a world-changing endeavour,” she told me.

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Suspicious phrases in peer reviews point to referees gaming the system • AAAS

Jeffrey Brainard:

»

When University of Seville researcher Maria Ángeles Oviedo‑García began to look at the peer reviews some journals publish alongside their papers, she was surprised to see the same vague, generic phrases kept turning up.

“In abstract, the author should add more scientific findings.” “Discuss the novelty and clear application of the work in the abstract as well as in introduction section.”

She ultimately identified 263 suspicious reviews prepared for 37 journals in multiple disciplines between 2021 and this year. One reviewer used duplicated phrases in 56 reviews, she reported last month in Scientometrics.

It’s an unusually detailed analysis of a little-noticed scheme that may be allowing some researchers to reap undeserved benefits for boilerplate or downright manipulative reviews. The practice may also be compromising the integrity of the scientific literature. “Some other researchers will probably base their future research on those fake-reviewed papers, and it’s scary,” especially for ones about health and medicine, says Oviedo-García, who primarily studies marketing and tourism.

Oviedo-García and other research integrity experts suspect the reviewers worked off a template to quickly crank out reports. They could then take credit for the work on their CVs to gain a boost in professional evaluations. Some may have additional self-interest: Several reviewers asked the author to include citations to their own papers, and some authors complied.

The reviews Oviedo-García analyzed appeared almost exclusively in journals from MDPI, which publishes reviews alongside many of its papers if the author agrees. (Reviewers are named if they consent.) The privately held company based in Switzerland publishes all its articles open access, charging authors a fee and promising prompt publication.

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Once more we discover a problem with the open access model.
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Celebrity Number Six and the unreal power of crowdsourced investigations • Links I Would GChat You

Caitlin Dewey on the crowdsourced discovery of the identity of a face on a set of old curtains (really):

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This is viral frivolity of the purest and highest order: a whole lot of hijinx and hysteria for a “mystery” whose stakes could not conceivably be lower. But it’s also a testament to the growing power and efficacy of crowdsourced investigations — for good as well as for evil. In the past five months alone, online sleuths have closed out three high-profile, long-running “internet mysteries,” culminating with Celebrity Number Six. Recent crowdsourced investigations have also cracked cold cases, outed January 6 rioters and advanced historic research, said Kurt Luther, a professor of computer science and the director of Virginia Tech’s Crowd Intelligence Lab.

Empowered with new generative AI and facial recognition tools that make their work more effective, and armed with far more free time than experts could ever muster, these sleuths have raised significant questions about privacy, vigilantism and the so-called wisdom of crowds. But when they get it right … it’s kind of magical.

“There have been so many misidentifications,” Luther acknowledged. “But there have been so many successes, as well: missing people found, criminals identified — there are a lot of compelling examples of the power of crowdsourced investigations.” 

Identifying “Six” might seem trivial next to something like, you know, solving a 50-year-old homicide. But the technologies and social dynamics at play in r/CelebrityNumberSix are actually pretty similar to those playing out in other online investigative communities, Luther said. For years, Sixers have deployed a mix of conventional and open-source investigative techniques to try to identify the woman on the curtain: contacting the original fabric supplier, for instance, or running the stylized print through facial recognition engines.

Over the past 18 months, as generative AI tools became both more powerful and more accessible to the wider public, members of the community began attempting to create more photorealistic, 3D images of Celebrity Number Six, rather like a police sketch artist drawing out a portrait. Last week, a 20-year-old Redditor named u/StefanMorse tried a slightly different approach, shading the print with skin-like colors but leaving it two-dimensional. When uploaded to PimEyes, the terrifying facial recognition search engine beloved by many a TikTok doxxer, that colourised version of the Number Six image repeatedly matched the obscure Spanish model Leticia Sardá.

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Simultaneously we can solve ages-old puzzles like this, and yet we can’t locate ten-year-old web pages which have been scrubbed from the internet and the Wayback Machine.
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New Google Wallet features for travelers and commuters • Google Blog

Jenny Cheng, VP and GM of Google Wallet:

»

People are increasingly looking for ways to digitize everyday items — with one of the top requests being a digital ID. Last year we began rolling out the ability to save select state-issued digital IDs to Wallet. Starting soon, we’ll begin beta testing a new type of digital ID in Google Wallet, giving more people in more places a way to create and store a digital ID, now with a U.S. passport. This new ID pass works at select TSA checkpoints, saving you time and stress at the airport when you’re traveling domestically.

Creating an ID pass is easy: select the prompt in the Google Wallet app to “create an ID pass with your U.S. passport” and follow the instructions to scan the security chip in the back of your passport. You’ll be asked to take a selfie video to verify your identity, and Google Wallet will notify you when your ID pass is ready (typically within a few minutes). While ID passes are accepted at select TSA checkpoints today, we’re working with partners so you can use digital IDs in even more situations — for example, in the future we believe you should be able to use digital ID for things like account recovery, identity verification and even car rentals. This technology is in its early stages, so it’s important to know that a digital ID in Google Wallet is not a replacement for your physical ID. For now, you need to carry a physical ID with you when traveling.

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This is quite an advance. Unusual too for Google get a step ahead of Apple on something like this. Though.. what if your phone is out of juice at your destination?
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Five reasons I think Apple will be the surprise winner in the AI race • Tom’s Guide

Ryan Morrison:

»

Apple may have been late to the generative AI game, lagging behind Google, Microsoft and newcomers like OpenAI and Anthropic, but it is quickly catching up. It could easily surpass the capabilities of the current industry leaders.

While it is true that Apple didn’t jump on the large language model bandwagon soon after ChatGPT launched, unlike Google and Microsoft, the Cupertino company has been heavily involved in machine learning and forms of AI for decades, using it throughout its operating systems.

This heritage and other reasons, including a focus on privacy, deep software and hardware integration, and access to personal data, are why I think Apple is well-placed to lead the AI pack.

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He suggests privacy, integration of hardware and software, personal context (on the phone), simplicity of focus, and AI being built into the camera. Whether that will really create an edge over Google – even on the Pixel? – is an open question, for now.
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How China has ‘throttled’ its private sector • Financial Times

Eleanor Olcott and Wang Xueqiao:

»

“China used to be the best VC destination in the world after the US,” says one Beijing-based executive, referring to the business of private investment in high-risk start-up companies.

Founders and investors harbour few hopes of a return to the glory years before the Covid-19 pandemic, when the likes of Alibaba and Tencent took advantage of rapid economic growth and the rise of the mobile internet to become globally significant technology companies.

“The whole industry has just died before our eyes,” the executive continues. “The entrepreneurial spirit is dead. It is very sad to see.”  

The downbeat mood is reflected in the statistics. In 2018, at the height of VC investment, 51,302 start-ups were founded in China, according to data provider IT Juzi. By 2023, that figure had collapsed to 1,202 and is on track to be even lower this year.

Keyu Jin, associate professor at the London School of Economics, says the industry “has been critical to spur China’s entrepreneurial dynamism”.

“The outflow of global investment and the massive drop in the valuation of Chinese companies will impinge on the nation’s innovation drive,” she warns.

The crisis in the sector partly reflects the slowdown in the Chinese economy, which has been buffeted by the protracted Covid-19 lockdowns, the bursting of its property bubble and the stagnation of its equity markets. As bilateral tensions have risen, US-based investors have also largely pulled out.

But it is also the direct result of political decisions taken by President Xi Jinping that have dramatically changed the environment for private business in China — including a crackdown on technology companies regarded as monopolistic or not attuned to Communist party values, and an anti-corruption crusade that continues to ripple through the business community.

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That’s going to cause a dearth of successful companies in a few years’ time; Xi may have cause to regret it. Unless the plan is that only state-sponsored companies get to do tech, and be big.
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Mark Zuckerberg says he’s done apologizing • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff:

»

Shortly after hopping on stage, [Mark] Zuckerberg joked that he might need to schedule his next appearance in order to apologize for whatever he was about to say. After a beat, he added that he was just kidding and that, in fact, his days of apologizing are over.

Zuckerberg has had something of a rebrand recently. He raises cattle in Hawaii now, has long bouncy curls and a gold chain, and commissions Roman-style statues of his wife. On stage, the Facebook founder wore a boxy T-shirt he designed himself alongside fashion designer Mike Amiri that read “learning through suffering” in Greek letters.

The tongue-in-cheek comment about apologizing was a reference to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who himself addressed a flub he’d made on the Acquired podcast earlier this year, via a pre-recorded video on a screen hanging over the crowd. Huang’s original comment — that he never would have started Nvidia if he knew what he did today — was grossly taken out of context, he said. In the video, he clarified that he absolutely would start Nvidia again, and that his comment was more about the blissful ignorance of startup founders.

While Zuckerberg’s opening comment was just a friendly jab at Huang, it set the tone for Zuckerberg’s new attitude toward life and business. The founder of Facebook has spent a lot of time apologizing for Facebook’s content moderation issues. But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control.

“Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”

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Are emoji becoming too abstruse – and yet also too specific? CC-licensed photo by Forsaken Fotos 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

That Olympic breakdancer everyone laughed at? She just became the world No.1 • WSJ

Joshua Robinson and Andrew Beaton:

»

Rachael Gunn, as it says on her passport, was the break dancer whose performance launched a thousand memes and earned her exactly zero votes from the judges the whole time she was in Paris.

But it also paved the way for something else. A month after the Games, Raygun is now the No. 1 breaker in the world. 

This might seem like an egregious mistake to anybody who actually watched breaking’s Olympic debut—or to the millions who didn’t but caught the clips that set the internet on fire. Raygun, a college lecturer in Sydney who focuses on “the cultural politics of breaking,” lost her three dance-offs, or battles, by a combined score of 54-0.

Except this isn’t some kind of prank. Instead, her rise to the top is explained by the esoteric rules of the little-known World DanceSport Federation, which felt compelled to issue a lengthy statement this week explaining how Raygun really became the top-ranked breaker. 

According to the WDSF’s Breaking Rules and Regulations Manual, the standings are based on athletes’ top four performances over the previous 12 months. And last October, Raygun earned a whole raft of points when she claimed first place at the Oceania Continental Championships. 

Since then, those points have only become more valuable. That’s because there haven’t been any chances for breakers to accumulate them for most of the past year. From the start of 2024 through the Paris Olympics, the WDSF intentionally stopped holding ranking events so that the breakers could “focus solely on the last part of their Olympic qualification without the added pressure.” Neither qualifying nor the Olympics had points on offer either because of the limited athlete quotas.

Once the Olympics ended, many of the results included in the rankings simply expired, the WDSF said. That left plenty of breakers with just one event’s worth of ranking points.

That’s how Raygun’s lone first-place finish propelled her into a points tie with another “B-Girl” named Riko from Japan. Raygun won the No. 1 slot over Riko in the end based on Article 5.1.1 of the bylaws, which settles ties based on the level of the competition where the points were earned.

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You do need something today to tell people to amaze them. And this is it.
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New feature alert: access archived webpages directly through Google Search • Internet Archive Blogs

Chris Freeland:

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In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.

Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time. 

At the Internet Archive, our mission is to provide, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The Wayback Machine, one of our best-known services, provides access to billions of archived webpages, ensuring that the digital record remains accessible for future generations.

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That mission statement is quite similar to Google’s. This is certainly a useful thing. Are other search engines going to get it too?
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9/11 memes have taken over the internet • Rolling Stone

David Mack:

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Olivia, a 21-year-old college student, was sitting in an English class at her Minnesota school last week when her professor began talking about the challenges in writing about traumatic events. But when he used 9/11 as an example, and described to the class how hectic things seemed that day, she realized just how she felt — or rather, didn’t feel — about the attacks. “Being terminally online is wild [because] someone mentioned 9/11 in my class today and I genuinely forgot that not everyone thinks it’s funny now,” she subsequently wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), favourited more than 10,000 times.

“I had this moment of realization within myself that this should be having an impact on me and it weirdly isn’t,” Olivia recalled to Rolling Stone, asking that her last name not be used due to the sensitivities around 9/11. (She has since taken down the tweet.) “I think it’s been watered down a lot for our generation. It’s a moment of levity, this very heavy moment. For our generation, it’s very almost casual.”

Olivia is not alone. To be on social media in 2024 is to be swimming in jokes and memes about 9/11. Things that might once have been whispered among friends are now shared by meme accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. On TikTok, videos contrasting the year 2024 with 2001 (often ending with someone reacting to the planes hitting towers) frequently went viral. While on X, a famous photo of President George W. Bush being informed by his chief of staff that the U.S. was under attack is now frequently used to mock everything from Ozempic to J.D. Vance to the Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef. Want to be overly dramatic about a minor event in your life? Why not use a video or GIF of Caitlyn Jenner standing in a sea of American Flags, solemnly saying, “9/11”? Or you could keep things simple and just say, “This was my 9/11.”

As the world marks 23 years since the attacks, the ways in which people talk — and joke — about the tragedy have evolved dramatically, especially on the internet.

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It’s not surprising, though, that people for whom the events lie outside living memory won’t be able to grasp how serious it felt at the time. In the days after the attacks, the US public mood wanted to bomb the culprits into their constituent atoms.
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AI voice analysis for diabetes screening shows promise • Medscape

Marilynn Larkin:

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An artificial intelligence (AI)–driven voice algorithm showed “excellent agreement” with the American Diabetes Association (ADA) risk test in detecting adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D), research presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) 2024 Annual Meeting revealed.

The AI model detected T2D with 66% accuracy among women and 71% in men, and there was 93% agreement with the questionnaire-based ADA risk score, demonstrating comparable performance between voice analysis and an accepted screening tool.

…The AI algorithm analyzed various vocal features, such as changes in pitch, intensity, and tone, from a total of 607 recordings to identify differences between individuals with and without diabetes. This was done using two techniques: One that captured up to 6000 detailed vocal characteristics, and a deep learning approach that focused on a refined set of 1024 key features.

The voice-based algorithm achieved good overall predictive capacity (AUC = 75% for men, 71% for women) and correctly predicted 71% men and 66% of women with T2D. The model performed even better in women aged 60 years or older (AUC = 74%) and in those with hypertension for both men and women (AUC = 75%).

“This study represents a first step toward using voice analysis as a first-line, highly scalable T2D screening strategy,” the authors concluded.

“The next studies will have to demonstrate the robustness of our approach in diverse populations and also include people living with prediabetes,” Fagherazzi said. “If proven reliable, we expect such technology to be available in the next 5-10 years. Then, it could be deployed easily at scale in millions of smartphones worldwide and reduce undiagnosed diabetes cases.”

…The reasoning behind this is “due to Hooke’s law, in which changes in the tension, mass, or length of the vocal folds,” mediated by different glucose levels, “may result in an alteration in their vibrational frequency,” [Dr Gianluca Iacobellis of the University of Miami Hospital Diabetes Service] explained.

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Amazing finding. (Hooke’s Law originally related to springs, but seems to work for vocal folds too.)
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Waymo cites possible ‘intentional contact’ by a bicyclist in SF • San Francisco Chronicle

Jordan Parker:

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A cyclist may have made intentional contact with a Waymo robotaxi during an alleged crash in San Francisco in July, according to documents provided to the California Department of Motor Vehicles by the robotaxi company.
 
The alleged collision between the cyclist and Waymo vehicle occurred just before 1 p.m. on July 6 at a parking garage exit on Mission Street between 7th and 8th Streets, according to documents. As the Waymo robotaxi was exiting the parking garage, it stopped for the cyclist, who was approaching the vehicle from the left side. 

While the robotaxi was stopped, the cyclist passed in front of it and appeared to dismount, according to the documents. “The cyclist then reached out a hand and made contact with the front passenger side of the stationary Waymo AV (autonomous vehicle), backed the bicycle up slightly, dropped the bicycle, then fell to the ground,” the documents said. 

The cyclist received medical treatment at the scene and was transported to the hospital, according to the documents. The Waymo vehicle was not damaged during the incident.

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Absolutely hilarious. What the cyclist seems to have overlooked is that there was a human in the driver’s seat of the Waymo car at the time, and no doubt there will have been cameras running on the car too. Sadly the document sent to the DMV doesn’t include them, but they’re going to be fun to look at. (Thanks Gregory for the link.)
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The real problem with emoji • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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Emoji ought to be as broadly expressive as possible. Guns—and swimming, and much more—would be most fruitfully emojified in the most generic, abstract way possible. Yet emoji seem to be evolving in the opposite direction. Unicode approves more new icons every year, with more specific and narrow intended meanings—a lime or a mythical phoenix, say. New emoji this year even include variants that specify which direction the picture faces—a person running to the right rather than to the left—a choice that only further plunges emoji-life into the murk of particulars.

This year, Apple also announced Genmoji, a forthcoming feature that uses AI to allow individual users to spawn what seems like any concept imaginable. The feature is meant to “match any moment perfectly,” according to Apple. An example shown in a marketing video turned the prompt “smiley relaxing wearing cucumbers” into, well, a yellow emoji head wearing cucumbers, spa-style; “lox bagel” produced a convincing rendition of that preparation. Users will also be able to create Genmoji that resemble real people in your photo albums—presumably adjusting them for specific situations.

That sounds fun but also doomed. Will Genmoji allow you to depict your mother holding a firearm? Apple didn’t respond when I asked what guardrails it might apply to user-created Genmoji. But some people will be bothered, no matter how the feature works. Consider a less charged but still controversial matter: Apple’s demo depicted a lox bagel eaten as a sandwich rather than open-faced, as some purists insist it should be eaten.

Whether textual or visual, languages are powerful because they allow an infinity of complex expression. And languages work because the communities that use them develop a shared understanding of their meaning. For years, emoji have been transforming from a sophisticated, powerful visual language capable of diverse expression into just a format for sending pictures that conform to the emoji visual style. To which I say, 🚮

«

Bogost seems to be complaining about a language gaining more dialects. Isn’t that a sign of a vibrant language, though?
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VR headset used to train Ukranian pilots to fly F-16s • UploadVR

David Heaney:

»

A simulator with a Varjo XR-3 headset is being used to train Ukrainian pilots to fly the F-16 fighter jets the country recently received.

Ukraine started receiving the first F-16s in August, intended to boost the country’s ability to repel attacks by Russian aircraft on its cities and infrastructure. Around 65 F-16s have been pledged to the country by NATO countries including the Netherlands and Denmark.

But Ukraine’s President Zelensky has publicly said that the limiting factor in utilizing these F-16s is the lack of pilots trained to fly them. Until now Ukraine’s air force has been using Soviet jets, which have significant differences.

To help make this F-16 training program faster, more convenient, and lower cost, Czech startup Dogfight Boss says it delivered to the Ukrainian Air Force a simulator that uses a Varjo XR-3 mixed reality headset alongside a replica F-16C cockpit.

Dogfight Boss says it spent almost a year fine-tuning the simulator with the help of European F-16 pilot instructors, and shared the following statement it says came from the Ukrainian Air Force: “Our pilots and cadets were deeply impressed by the advanced and realistic features of the F-16C Viper simulator. These features are essential for pilot training, providing an effective environment to practice with sophisticated flight systems, fine-tune their strategies, and prepare for future missions.”

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Proof is in the pudding, of course, but even so, must save a lot of flying time, and hence valuable fuel and costly wear on the plane.
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Bluesky catches up to X with native support for video • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Bluesky, the social networking startup now nearing 10 million users thanks to X’s ban in Brazil, will now allow users to share videos of up to 60 seconds in length on its platform, the company announced on Wednesday.

Designed as a decentralized version of X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky allows users to post text and images, reply and repost, and message users. However, unlike X, Bluesky lets users set up their own servers if they choose, pick their own algorithm, and decide how much or little they want their content moderated by subscribing to independent moderation services.

With native video support, the network will be able to better compete with other X rivals, including Instagram Threads and the decentralized service Mastodon, among others.

The company notes that videos will autoplay by default, but this can be turned off in the settings.

«

Every social network eventually turns into a video repository. I’m sure Elon won’t be worried: as long as Bluesky doesn’t introduce banking, it’s all fine. Both networks may be losing money at similar rates, unless Bluesky is staffed very thinly.
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Ex-Google exec said goal was to ‘crush’ competition, trial evidence shows • Reuters

Jody Godoy:

»

On the third day of the [Google Adtech] trial, prosecutors began to introduce evidence of how Google employees thought about the company’s products at the time when the government alleges it set out to dominate the ad tech market.

“We’ll be able to crush the other networks and that’s our goal,” David Rosenblatt, Google’s former president of display advertising, said of the company’s strategy in late 2008 or early 2009, according to notes shown in court.

Google denies the allegations, saying it faces fierce competition from rival digital advertising companies.
Rosenblatt came to Google in 2008 when it acquired his former ad tech company, DoubleClick, and left the following year. The notes of his talk showed him discussing the advantages of owning technology on both sides and the middle of the market.

“We’re both Goldman and NYSE,” he said, he said, according to the notes, referring to one of the world’s biggest stock exchanges at the time and one of its biggest market makers. “Google has created what’s comparable to the NYSE or London Stock Exchange; in other words, we’ll do to display what Google did to search,” Rosenblatt said.

By owning publisher ad servers, the advertiser ad network would have a “first look” at available spots for ads, he said according to the notes. He also said it was a “nightmare” for publishers to switch platforms. “It takes an act of God to do it,” he said, according to the notes.

Rosenblatt, now CEO of online luxury marketplace 1stDibs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brad Bender, another former DoubleClick executive, who worked at Google until 2022, testified at trial that he forwarded the notes to his team, calling them a “worthwhile read” at the time.

«

In retrospect, the DoubleClick acquisition should at least have had some sort of guardrails to ensure competitiveness. Instead, Google acquired an overwhelming share of the market via its search dominance.
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2021: Silencing the competition: inside the fight against America’s hearing aid cartel • The Big Newsletter

Matt Stoller, writing in 2021:

»

For decades, buying a hearing aid in the U.S. has been an experience in humiliation. Hearing loss is pervasive, with two thirds of people over the age of 70 experiencing some form of it. Despite that, only 20% of people who have hearing loss actually use hearing aids, and one of the big reasons is price. The average cost of such devices is $4700 per pair, for what is essentially a highly advanced adjustable microphone. With 40 million Americans suffering from some form of hearing loss, which can lead to dementia, a lot of people go without and just suffer, or don’t replace hearing aids when they break, because of this high price.

The reason for this excess cost is pure profit margin for the manufacturers. We know this because independent audiologists pay between three to four times as much as Costco does for the same device. So why are hearing aids so expensive? One reason is that the Food and Drug Administration requires a prescription to get one, making it hard to bring cheaper and more innovative devices to market. Hearing aids had traditionally required lots of adjustment and fitting from a specialist, and while specialists offer critical help, a hearing aid is basically just a microphone in your ear. That technology is much easier for individuals to set up with smartphones and other innovations in consumer electronics over the last ten years. “It just seems crazy that hearing aids haven’t become much less expensive, much like every other type of digital technology, and much more user friendly,” said Christine Cassel, the former CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Since 1993, advocates have been calling for the FDA to loosen these tight regulations, and the calls got louder over the years. In 2015, the President’s Council on Science and Technology issued a report seeking to make these devices more widely available. The next year, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine issued a similar report.

Finally, in 2017, Congress acted.

«

Stoller draws a direct line between those 2017 actions and the Apple announcement earlier this week that AirPods Pro will have hearing aid functionality. (Via John Naughton.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, increasingly heavy vehicles such as the Ford F-150 are leading to more and more pedestrian deaths in collisions. CC-licensed photo by F. D. Richards 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not pedestrian. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘Going back in time’: the schools across Europe banning mobile phones • The Guardian

Ashifa Kassam:

»

Four years after Calvijn College became one of the first schools in the Netherlands to go smartphone-free, it’s no longer an outlier. As students head back into classrooms across mainland Europe, a growing number of them will be forced to leave their mobile phones behind; In France, 200 secondary schools are testing a ban while French-speaking primary schools in Wallonia and Brussels, in Belgium, have moved forward with their own prohibitions. In Hungary, a new decree requires schools to collect students’ phones and smart devices at the start of the day.

Italy and Greece have adopted milder approaches, allowing students to carry their phones with them through the day but barring their use in classrooms.

For those at Calvijn College, the sweeping tide of change is thrilling. From the moment they began requiring students to either leave their phones at home or lock them up for the day, school officials watched as the culture of the school transformed.

“Basically what we had lost, we got back,” said Bakker. “The students playing with each other and talking to each other. And a lot less interruptions in the lessons.”

Other schools across the country began getting in touch, curious about the impact of the ban. In January 2024, the Dutch government entered the debate, urging schools to ban mobile phones, tablets and smartwatches from most secondary school classrooms across the country, The recommendation was recently extended to primary schools.

Late last year, as secondary schools across the Netherlands geared up to follow the recommendations, researchers at Radboud University seized on the chance to take a before and after snapshot of the change.

They polled hundreds of students and parents, as well as dozens of teachers, at two schools with imminent plans to do away with mobile phones on school premises, visiting the schools again three months after the ban was enacted.

About 20% of students reported that they were less distracted once smartphones were off limits, said Loes Pouwels, one of the researchers, while teachers described students as being more attentive and focused on their work in class. “So I think in terms of cognitive functioning, overall it was a positive thing.”

«

Australia thinking of doing the same. Can’t argue that they’re not distracting if you’re trying to work.
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Goodbye Tinder, hello Strava: have ‘hobby’ apps become the new social networks? • The Guardian

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Singletons looking to shack up with their soulmates online have relied on two key routes in the past decade or so: take your chance on dating apps, or befriend as many mutuals as possible on social media, in the hope that you find the one.

But some have found a third way, using services such as Goodreads and Strava to meet partners with whom they hope to spend the rest of their lives. Those couples proved to be trendsetters. So-called hobby apps – built around activites such as running, reading or movie-going – are having a moment, and not just for love.

It’s all part of a broader movement as people grow tired of the “digital town square” offered on Twitter/X and other social media platforms. At a time when many are abandoning Elon Musk’s social network over his attitude to “free speech” (which some see as “amplifying hate”), competing apps such as Bluesky and Threads are having a resurgence in users.

Whereas some users are switching to Twitter replicas, others are seeking refuge in apps that promise to connect them to people with whom they have common interests. Running app Strava has seen user numbers grow 20% in a year, according to digital market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That success has led it to add a messaging tool for users to keep in touch, alongside documenting their workouts. Knitting social network Ravelry, which is accessed through a number of third-party apps, has more than 9 million users. Goodreads has clocked up more than 150 million members.

Letterboxd, a film completist’s dream app, where you can tick off the latest movies you’ve seen, and review and rate them, alongside other cinephiles and the occasional famous actor or director, has gone from having 1.8 million users worldwide in March 2020 to more than 14 million users this summer.

«

It’s strange how this stuff comes around. You’re far more likely to find a soulmate in a shared pastime than on a speed dating night or a dating app. And people are now rediscovering that.
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Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads • The Record

Suzanne Smalley:

»

Ford Motor Company is seeking a patent for technology that would allow it to tailor in-car advertising by listening to conversations among vehicle occupants, as well as by analyzing a car’s historical location and other data, according to a patent application published late last month.

“In one example, the controller may monitor user dialogue to detect when individuals are in a conversation,” the patent application says. “The conversations can be parsed for keywords or phrases that may indicate where the occupants are traveling to.”

The tech — labeled as “in-vehicle advertisement presentation” — will determine where a car is located, how fast it is traveling, what type of road it is driving on and whether it is in traffic. It also will predict routes, speeds and destinations to customize ads to drivers, the application said.

The system could pull data from “audio signals within the vehicle and/or historical user data, selecting a number of the advertisements to present to the user during the trip,” the patent application said.

By monitoring dialogue between vehicle occupants the ad controller system can determine when to deliver audio versus visual ads, providing ads to drivers as they travel “through a human-machine interface (HMI) of the vehicle,” the application said.

«

Whoa whoa whoa. Adverts? In a car?? Based on your conversation??? This is immediately three strikes against Ford.
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TV news overtaken by digital rivals for first time in UK • FT

Daniel Thomas:

»

Television has ceased to be the main source of news in the UK for the first time since the 1960s as Britons turn increasingly to online news and social media apps, according to research by the media regulator.

Ofcom said on Tuesday that viewing of TV news had continued to fall steeply, with online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and digital versions of broadcasters now slightly more widely used as a source of news. 

In its annual study of audience habits, the watchdog said 71% of adults obtained news online, compared with 70% via TV — a finding it described as “marking a generational shift in the balance of news media”.

The reach of TV news has fallen from 75% last year. More than four-fifths of people between the ages of 16 and 24 obtained their news from social media, Ofcom found.

The report underlines the pressure on more traditional linear broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 to accelerate moves to digital platforms, which include their own streaming sites as well as social media apps such as TikTok. 

Broadcast executives are investing in creating TV and audio content specifically for such digital channels; the BBC, for example, is focused on growing its services such as iPlayer and Sounds. But they also need to cater for the now diminishing number of mainly older people who watch traditional TV. 

…TV remained the leading platform for news among older age groups, serving as the main source for 85% of people over 55, compared with only half of 16- to 24-year-olds.

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Linear TV will have fallen away too. Quite what the future looks like.. is probably some sort of YouTube/TikTok mixup.
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The US finally takes aim at truck bloat – The Verge

Andrew Hawkins:

»

This week, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stunned safety advocates by proposing new vehicle rules that it says will help reduce pedestrian deaths in America. The new rules appear aimed directly at the trend of increasingly massive SUVs and trucks, which have been shown to be more deadly to pedestrians than smaller and midsize vehicles.

Never in its 50-plus years in existence has the regulator issued new rules for automakers requiring them to change their vehicle designs to better prevent pedestrian fatalities. If enacted, the new rules could change how vehicles are designed in the US — permanently.

“It’s good to see NHTSA acknowledge that a myopic focus on pedestrian detection — which is imperfect — is no substitute for actually regulating car bloat,” said David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative and a Verge contributor. 

…SUVs and trucks, two of the most popular segments in the US, have become larger and heavier than ever before. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000 pounds (2.27 tons), compared to 22% in 2018, according to a recent investigation by The Economist. And with the shift to electric vehicles, many of those vehicles have become even heavier. The Ford F-150 Lightning has a curb weight of around 6,500 pounds, roughly 60% heavier than its gas equivalent.

Meanwhile, pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed in recent years. Between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities increased 57%, from 4,779 to 7,522, NHTSA reports. In 2022, 88% of pedestrian deaths occurred in single-vehicle crashes.

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America seems to be really bad at keeping its people alive, and only noticing that they’re dying in growing numbers long after it’s got out of control. Though of course the NHTSA isn’t going wild with this. It estimates that the changes it’s proposing will save.. 67 lives per year.
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Apple told to pay Ireland €13bn in tax by EU • BBC News

Charlotte Edwards and Theo Leggett:

»

Apple has been ordered to pay Ireland €13bn (£11bn; $14bn) in unpaid taxes by Europe’s top court, putting an end to an eight-year row.

The European Commission accused Ireland of giving Apple illegal tax advantages in 2016, but Ireland has consistently argued against the need for the tax to be paid.

The Irish government said it would respect the ruling. Apple said it was disappointed with the decision and accused the European Commission of “trying to retroactively change the rules”.

A separate European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling on Tuesday also brought a long-running case with Google to a close, with the company ordered to pay a €2.4bn (£2bn) fine for market dominance abuse.

The EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager praised both judgements. “Today is a huge win for European citizens and tax justice,” she said.

In the Apple case, the ECJ said: “The Court of Justice gives final judgment in the matter and confirms the European Commission’s 2016 decision: Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid which Ireland is required to recover.”

«

This has been chugging on for ages, and covers the period from 1991 to 2014 – 23 years! – when Ireland treated Apple’s Irish subsidiaries in an overly generous fashion.
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Google loses fight against $2.7bn EU antitrust fine • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday lost its fight against a €2.42bn ($2.7bn) fine levied by EU antitrust regulators seven years ago, one of a trio of hefty fines meted out to the company for various anti-competitive practices.

The European Commission fined the world’s most popular internet search engine in 2017 for using its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.

A lower tribunal had endorsed the EU competition enforcer’s decision in 2021, prompting Google to appeal to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union.

CJEU judges noted that EU law does not sanction the existence of a dominant position, but its abusive exploitation.

“In particular, the conduct of undertakings in a dominant position that has the effect of hindering competition on the merits and is thus likely to cause harm to individual undertakings and consumers is prohibited,” they said.

Google has racked up €8.25bn in EU antitrust fines in the last decade. It has challenged two rulings involving its Android mobile operating system and AdSense advertising service, and is now waiting for the judgments.

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A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money.
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Why AI is so bad at generating images of Kamala Harris • WIRED

Condé Nast:

»

When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it was quite obviously a fake, seeing as Harris is neither a communist nor, to the best of our knowledge, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably generated by X’s Grok tool, had only a passing resemblance to the vice president.

“AI still is unable to accurately depict Kamala Harris,” one X user wrote. “Looks like they’re posting some random Latina woman.”

“Grok put old Eva Longoria in a snazzy outfit and called it a day,” another quipped, noting the similarity of the “dictator” pictured to the Desperate Housewives star.

“AI just CANNOT replicate Kamala Harris,” a third posted. “It’s uncanny how failed the algorithm is at an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican heritage).”

Many AI images of Harris are similarly bad. Meanwhile, a tweet featuring an AI-generated video showing Harris and Donald Trump in a romantic relationship—it culminates in her holding their love child, which looks like Trump—has nearly 28 million views on X. Throughout the montage, Harris morphs into what look like different people, while the notably better Trump imagery remains fairly consistent.

…Despite being a prominent figure, Harris hasn’t been as widely photographed as Trump. WIRED’s search of photo supplier Getty Images bears this out; it returned 63,295 images of Harris compared to 561,778 of Trump. Given her relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is “a new celebrity,” as far as AI image makers are concerned, according to Cuenca Abela. “It always takes a few months to catch up,” he says.

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So both less photographed – offering less supply for the AI generators – and more difficult.
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Apple invents its own version of Google Lens called Visual Intelligence • Engadget

Pranav Dixit:

»

Apple has introduced a new feature called Visual Intelligence with the iPhone 16, which appears to be the company’s answer to Google Lens. Unveiled during its September 2024 event, Visual Intelligence aims to help users interact with the world around them in smarter ways.

The new feature is activated by a new touch-sensitive button on the right side of the device called Camera Control. With a click, Visual Intelligence can identify objects, provide information, and offer actions based on what you point it at. For instance, aiming it at a restaurant will pull up menus, hours, or ratings, while snapping a flyer for an event can add it directly to your calendar. Point it at a dog to quickly identify the breed, or click a product to search for where you can buy it online.

Later this year, Camera Control will also serve as a gateway into third-party tools with specific domain expertise, according to Apple’s press release. For instance, users will be able to leverage Google for product searches or tap into ChatGPT for problem-solving, all while maintaining control over when and how these tools are accessed and what information is shared. Apple emphasized that the feature is designed with privacy in mind, meaning the company doesn’t have access to the specifics of what users are identifying or searching.

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Picking this out because it’s based on a particular button on the iPhone, which is becoming festooned with buttons, compared to what people thought was going to happen a couple of years ago when it was rumoured that there wouldn’t be any buttons at all.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

When Jony Ive designs a button, you can bet it’s not like any other button. CC-licensed photo by Steven Lilley 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.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. All done up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

DOJ claims Google has “trifecta of monopolies” on Day 1 of ad tech trial • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

On Monday, the US Department of Justice’s next monopoly trial against Google started in Virginia—this time challenging the tech giant’s ad tech dominance.

The trial comes after Google lost two major cases that proved Google had a monopoly in both general search and the Android app store. During her opening statement, DOJ lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told US District Judge Leonie Brinkema—who will be ruling on the case after Google cut a check to avoid a jury trial—that “it’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” AP News reported.

“One monopoly is bad enough,” Wood said. “But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”

In its complaint, the DOJ argued that Google broke competition in the ad tech space “by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.”

The result of such “insidious” allegedly anti-competitive behavior is that today Google pockets at least 30 cents “of each advertising dollar flowing from advertisers to website publishers through Google’s ad tech tools … and sometimes far more,” the DOJ alleged.

Meanwhile, as Google profits off both advertisers and publishers, “website creators earn less, and advertisers pay more” than “they would in a market where unfettered competitive pressure could discipline prices and lead to more innovative ad tech tools,” the DOJ alleged.

On Monday, Wood told Brinkema that Google intentionally put itself in this position to “manipulate the rules of ad auctions to its own benefit,” The Washington Post reported.

“Publishers were understandably furious,” Wood said. “The evidence will show that they could do nothing.”

Wood confirmed that the DOJ planned to call several publishers as witnesses in the coming weeks to explain the harms caused. Expected to take the stand will be “executives from companies including USA Today, [Wall Street] Journal parent company News Corp., and the Daily Mail,” the Post reported.

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Apple’s iPhone 16 event: the eight biggest announcements • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

In addition to inheriting the iPhone 15 Pro’s Action Button, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus now come equipped with a handy new DSLR-like button that you can use to take pictures and videos as well as adjust settings. They also have rear cameras stacked atop one another that support spatial video recording for viewing on the Apple Vision Pro.

The iPhone 16 has a faster A18 processor to handle new AI features coming to the device. The 6.1-inch iPhone 16 starts at $799 and $899 for the 6.7-inch Plus version. They are available in white, black, green, pink, and blue and start shipping on September 20th.

…All of the iPhone 16 models are ready for Apple Intelligence — the new AI features Apple is launching in beta next month starting in English. These features include the ability to search for images in your library by describing them and creating custom emoji.

Yet Apple is also outfitting the iPhone 16’s Camera Control button with a new feature, called Visual Intelligence, which will automatically search for things you take photos of. You can also use it to perform actions, such as snapping a photo of a concert poster and easily adding it to your calendar.

…Later this year, Apple will make the AirPods Pro 2 available as an over-the-counter hearing aid. Apple is launching a couple of other hearing-focused features on the AirPods Pro 2, including a feature designed to protect hearing and a clinical-grade hearing test. These features become available in a free software update in more than 100 countries and regions this fall.

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Of the three picked out there, I’d say the hearing aids is the most interesting, given the ageing population: Apple is moving right to where its customers are going to be. Or possibly are.
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DOJ: Russia aimed propaganda at gamers, minorities to swing 2024 election • WIRED

David Gilbert:

»

In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.

In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: Along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the Good Old USA Project. The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing-state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full-time team dedicated to the cause.

On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the US Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the past two years been targeting Ukraine and, more recently, US elections. The Doppelganger campaign uses AI-generated content on dozens of fake websites designed to impersonate mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox Business, using a network of fake social media accounts to disseminate pro-Russian narratives targeting audiences across the globe. Doppelganger is a Kremlin-aligned disinformation campaign that was first linked to the Kremlin in 2023 by the French government.

«

Sure is a whole lot of disinformation going on. But.. gamers?
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EV battery makers have been doing it wrong this whole time • Clean Technica

Tina Casey:

»

[The work came from] a research team based at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center at Stanford University in California, headed up by Professor Will Chueh. The project was a collaborative effort in partnership with the Toyota Research Institute MIT, and the University of Washington.

The team took aim at the common wisdom for battery manufacturing, which holds that factories should hold a newly made lithium-ion battery for an initial charge lasting 10 hours at low current before setting it loose.

The 10-hour initial charge is costly and time-consuming, but the purpose is — or was — to reduce the loss of lithium up front, thereby increasing the lifespan of the battery.

Not so, the researchers discovered. They flipped the script and purposefully charged pouch-type EV batteries on a high current for just 20 minutes. They lost quite a bit of lithium at the outset, but they gained an average improvement of 50% in EV battery lifespan.

If you’re interested in the all the details, look up the study under the title, “Data-driven analysis of battery formation reveals the role of electrode utilization in extending cycle life,” published in the journal Joule on August 29.

The short version is that the low-current strategy was widely adopted under the assumption that minimizing lithium loss at the outset is the best way to extend battery life. The long initial charge enables a semi-solid layer to build up around the negative electrode, protecting it from side reactions that eat away at the remaining lithium with every subsequent charging cycle.

This layer, called SEI (solid electrolyte interphase), is described as “squishy,” which sounds a bit silly. However, it is not silly. Fine tuning the SEI is essential as the final, formative stage of battery manufacturing.

“Formation is the final step in the manufacturing process, so if it fails, all the value and effort invested in the battery up to that point are wasted,” explained lead researcher Xiao Cui in a press statement.

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Yuval Noah Harari’s apocalyptic vision • The Atlantic

Daniel Immerwahr:

»

[Yuval Noah] Harari sits above the fray of Silicon Valley politicking. The hope is that his elevated vantage will allow him to see farther. But just as it’s possible to be too narrowly focused and miss the forest for the trees, it’s also possible to be too zoomed-out and miss the forest for the solar system. Although Harari is a good guide to how future technologies might destroy democracy (or humanity), he’s less helpful on the present-day economics bringing those technologies forth.

The economics of the Information Age have been treacherous. They’ve made content cheaper to consume but less profitable to produce. Consider the effect of the free-content and targeted-advertising models on journalism: Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly a third of its newspapers and more than two-thirds of its newspaper jobs, to the point where nearly 7% of newspaper employees now work for a single organization, The New York Times. In the 21st-century United States—at the height and center of the information revolution—we speak of “news deserts,” places where reporting has essentially vanished.

AI threatens to exacerbate this. With better chatbots, platforms won’t need to link to external content, because they’ll reproduce it synthetically. Instead of a Google search that sends users to outside sites, a chatbot query will summarize those sites, keeping users within Google’s walled garden.

The prospect isn’t a network with a million links but a Truman Show–style bubble: personally generated content, read by voices that sound real but aren’t, plus product placement. Among other problems, this would cut off writers and publishers—the ones actually generating ideas—from readers. Our intellectual institutions would wither, and the internet would devolve into a closed loop of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four,” as the software engineer Tom Eastman puts it.

Harari has little to say about the erosion of our intellectual institutions. In a way, he is symptomatic of the trend. Although flesh and blood, Harari is Silicon Valley’s ideal of what a chatbot should be. He raids libraries, detects the patterns, and boils all of history down to bullet points. (Modernity, he writes, “can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”) He’s written an entire book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, in the form of a list. For readers whose attention flags, he delivers amusing factoids at a rapid clip.

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Just 15 countries account for 98% of new coal-power development • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

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Over the past 10 years, the global energy transition away from coal has accelerated. The number of countries with coal power under development (pre-construction and construction) has nearly halved from 75 in 2014 to just 40 in 2024. 

In addition, nearly all of the coal-power capacity under development (98%) is now concentrated in just 15 countries, with China and India alone accounting for 86%. 

This is according to Global Energy Monitor’s latest Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT) results, completed in July 2024. The GCPT catalogues all coal-fired power units 30 megawatts (MW) or larger biannually, with the first survey dating back to 2014. 

Despite the concentration of coal-plant development in fewer countries and projections that global coal demand could be peaking, new coal-fired power station proposals continue to outpace cancellations. 

In the first half of 2024, over 60 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity was newly proposed or revived, compared to the 33.7GW that was shelved or cancelled over the same period.

This article details some of the most significant trends driving the continued development of coal across the 15 largest markets, drawing insight from the GCPT, as well as wider context.  

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It is a puzzle how the countries which are moving on a big scale towards renewables are the ones which also are using coal in a big way, and making it bigger.
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‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper • The Guardian

Jack Apollo George:

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For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.

That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have made it possible to automate huge swaths of linguistic life, from summarising any amount of text to drafting emails, essays and even entire novels. These tools appear so good at writing that they have become synonymous with the very idea of artificial intelligence.

But before they ever risk leading to a godlike superintelligence or devastating mass unemployment, they first need training. Instead of using these grandiloquent chatbots to automate us out of our livelihoods, tech companies are contracting us to help train their models.

The core part of the job is writing pretend responses to hypothetical chatbot questions. This is the training data that the model needs to be fed. The “AI” needs an example of what “good” looks like before it can try to produce “good” writing.

As well as providing our model with such “gold standard” material, we are also helping it attempt to avoid “hallucinating” – a poetic term for telling lies. We do so by feeding it examples that use a search engine and cite sources. Without seeing writing that does this, it cannot learn to do so by itself.

Without better language data, these language models simply cannot improve. Their world is our word.

Hold on. Aren’t these machines trained on billions and billions of words and sentences? What would they need us fleshy scribes for?

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Entertaining. Also slightly worrying. Until the LLMs figure out how to interview people, though, journalism ought to survive.
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Inside the rise of bitcoin-powered pools and bathhouses • TIME

Andrew R. Chow:

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The scene inside Bathhouse, a spa in Manhattan, is one of complete serenity. Visitors recline in 105ºF pools, surrounded by cedar tiles and elegant marble slabs from Brazil. But just beyond closed doors, in harshly-lit back rooms, an unexpected source helps forge the bliss: rows and rows of continuously-running bitcoin mining computers.

The idea of a bitcoin mine heating a pool sounds strange. The machines run constantly to find new bitcoin and safeguard the bitcoin network. The heat they generate from their activity is extracted via pipes, and powers the Bathhouse’s heated pools and marble stones. Co-owner Jason Goodman says the technique allows him to warm his pools more efficiently than traditional methods, while also accruing a stockpile of bitcoin he hopes will increase in value going forward. 

Around the world, a handful of establishments are turning to the same methods in an attempt to harness energy from intensive computing for greater societal use, including to heat a town in Finland and an Olympic pool in Paris.

But while proponents argue that these solutions could lower local energy costs and reduce electricity and water usage, some environmentalists worry these small-scale methods obscure much bigger problems. Data centres use a massive and increasing amount of energy, with many of them powered by fossil fuels—and most of their heat waste isn’t being channelled into productive uses at all. 

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Long past the point at which bitcoin doesn’t make any sense now. Also, do data centres need spas and outdoor pools?
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The Texas billionaire who has Greenpeace USA on the verge of bankruptcy • WSJ

Benoît Morenne:

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Energy Transfer’s lawsuit [led by fossil fuel billionaire Kelcy Warren] alleges several Greenpeace entities incited the Dakota Access protests, funded attacks to damage the pipeline, and spread misinformation about the company and its project. The case is set for trial in February in a North Dakota state court, where both sides expect a fossil-fuel-friendly jury. Energy Transfer is seeking $300m in damages, which would likely wipe out Greenpeace USA, according to the group’s leadership. 

Deepa Padmanabha, Greenpeace USA’s acting co-executive director, said the lawsuit is “an existential threat” to the group.

In court papers, Greenpeace says it played a limited role in the protests, which it says were organized by Native American groups, and never took part in any property destruction or violence.

The litigation is unlikely to affect Greenpeace’s international operations. While the Greenpeace network’s coordinating body in the Netherlands is also a defendant, Energy Transfer may struggle to enforce any award against it because it doesn’t own assets in the U.S. But Greenpeace says losing its affiliate—and influence—in the U.S. would have a profound impact on the group’s ability to address climate change. 

Environmental leaders fear the demise of Greenpeace USA would send a chilling message to their movement. Josh Galperin, an associate professor of law at Pace University, said that environmentalists have long recognized that they can choke off pipelines by challenging them on legal grounds. Now, some oil-and-gas companies are realizing they can use litigation to stop green activists.

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Jony made a button • On my Om

Om Malik:

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Moncler is a luxury ski-apparel company that now makes all sorts of clothing — but is mostly known for its jackets and puffers with a big M logo. LoveFrom, Jony Ive’s design firm, and Moncler started working together four years ago and have come up with “LoveFrom, Moncler,” a three-in-one shell jacket that goes on sale later this month.

At its core is Moncore, a down-filled vest to which you can add a field jacket, a parka or a hooded poncho. None of this is new — companies have built layered outerwear for a long time. What’s new is how it all comes together — with a brand-new kind of button.

Sometimes a button is not just a button — it’s how you build the entire system. Ive focused on a button because that’s how every layer of the “four-in-one jacket” system comes together.

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“How could you connect something where you didn’t have to pay attention? Velcro’s sort of ingenious in that way. But I don’t think it’s satisfying,” Ive told Fast Company. “Explorations into all methods of attachment followed. “I tried to do better zippers, and zippers are really hard.”

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Ergo, buttons!

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“There wasn’t some arrogant ambition around disruption [of buttons]. It was a very gentle, humble exploration.”

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It’s a two-part design — one half of the button is on the base layer, Moncore vest. The other half, shaped like a donut, is on the other layers. To the touch, they feel solid, but there’s a piston inside the base layer. When the two halves come close, magnets inside the donut engage, pulling out the piston from the base layer and locking the two halves. To unlock, simply press the center. The result is a pressable button.

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Magnets, huh. Velcro isn’t good enough, pop-connection isn’t good enough.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified