The Chinese company BYD has morphed from smartphone battery maker to world’s biggest EV maker. How big can it get? CC-licensed photo by Rutger van der Maar 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. Never heard it coming. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

2023 confirmed as world’s hottest year on record • BBC News

Mark Poynting and Erwan Rivault:

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The year 2023 has been confirmed as the warmest on record, driven by human-caused climate change and boosted by the natural El Niño weather event.

Last year was about 1.48ºC warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the EU’s climate service says.

Almost every day since July has seen a new global air temperature high for the time of year, BBC analysis shows.
Sea surface temperatures have also smashed previous highs.

The Met Office reported last week that the UK experienced its second warmest year on record in 2023.

These global records are bringing the world closer to breaching key international climate targets.

“What struck me was not just that [2023] was record-breaking, but the amount by which it broke previous records,” notes Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University. “The margin of some of these records – which you can see on the chart below – is “really astonishing”, Prof Dessler says, considering they are averages across the whole world.

<img src="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/62BB/production/_132257252_global_temp_lines_ribbon_prev_high_640-nc-2x-nc.png.webp&quot; width="100%"

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As the BBC Environment Editor also pointed out, even with everything we know, 80% of the world’s total energy still comes from fossil fuels. 2023 won’t be the last record-breaking year for so many environmental records, none of them good.
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Mr Bates vs The Post Office depicts one of the UK’s worst miscarriages of justice: here’s why so many victims didn’t speak out • The Conversation

Grace Augustine, Jan Lodget and Mislav Radic are professors of management and social sciences:

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Today, we know the Post Office wrongly prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters for theft, false accounting and related charges because of technical faults in the Horizon IT system, and these accusations persisted for 16 years – from 1999 to 2015, which equates to an average of roughly one person charged each week.

By and large, most sub-postmaster victims did not speak out about the injustice they faced. Some took years to come forward, and many still prefer to remain anonymous. As depicted in the drama, the first journalist to help break the story, who was from Computer Weekly, was only able to identify and vet seven victims for her story – and it was published ten years after the Post Office began falsely accusing sub-postmasters of various crimes. So where were the other victims?

Based on a detailed analysis of hundreds of transcripts from the public inquiry and interviews with sub-postmasters across the UK, our ongoing research has enabled us to identify the four main barriers that the victims of this scandal faced when it came to speaking out.

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Briefly: they were told they were the only ones; they were stigmatised in their communities where they were seen as thieves; they couldn’t defend themselves (because the Post Office, bringing the prosecution, denied them a fair trial); the Post Office was (incredible as it now seems) the nation’s most trusted brand, selling stamps which had the Queen’s head on; and the computer systems were treated as infallible.

There’s a lot of whistleblowing to come on this. But it speaks to something deeper in corporate culture: of nobody challenging what is wrong despite suspicions.
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The “10,000-hour rule” was debunked again in a replication study. That’s a relief • Vox

Brian Resnick:

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This week, the journal Royal Society Open Science published a replication of an influential 1993 study on violin players at a music school in the journal Psychological Review.

The original finding was simple, and compelling: The very best, expert players — those who were considered elite — were the ones who had practiced the most. The conclusions implied that deliberate practice was the most important ingredient needed to achieve elite status, more important than inborn characteristics like genetics, or personality.

Perhaps you’ve heard of this. The idea was then popularized in the book Outliers by journalist Malcolm Gladwell. He dubbed it the “10,000-hour rule.” “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness,” Gladwell wrote, drawing on anecdotes from famous success-havers (like Bill Gates and the Beatles), but also on the 1993 paper (which according to Google Scholar has been cited more than 9,800 times).

The replication — conducted by Brooke Macnamara and Megha Maitra of Case Western Reserve University — included a somewhat larger sample size and tighter study controls, and was preregistered (meaning that the scientists locked their methods and analysis plans in place before they collected any data, preventing them from retroactively changing their premise to fit their findings).

It finds that practice does matter for performance, but not nearly as much as the original article claimed, and surprisingly, it works differently for elite performers.

“In fact, the majority of the best violinists had accumulated less practice alone than the average amount of the good violinists,” the authors write. Practice still mattered: It accounted for 26% of the difference between good violinists and the less accomplished students. But the original study claimed that practice accounted for 48% of the difference.

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You’re surely familiar with this: people in the same pursuit as you who are simply better at it, apparently effortlessly. Genetics? Something in early childhood? Both?
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Substack says it will remove Nazi publications from the platform • Platformer

Casey Newton:

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Substack is removing some publications that express support for Nazis, the company said today. The company said this did not represent a reversal of its previous stance, but rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies.

As part of the move, the company is also terminating the accounts of several publications that endorse Nazi ideology and that Platformer flagged to the company for review last week.

The company will not change the text of its content policy, it says, and its new policy interpretation will not include proactively removing content related to neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. But Substack will continue to remove any material that includes “credible threats of physical harm,” it said.

In a statement, Substack’s co-founders told Platformer:

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If and when we become aware of other content that violates our guidelines, we will take appropriate action. 

Relatedly, we’ve heard your feedback about Substack’s content moderation approach, and we understand your concerns and those of some other writers on the platform. We sincerely regret how this controversy has affected writers on Substack. 

We appreciate the input from everyone. Writers are the backbone of Substack and we take this feedback very seriously. We are actively working on more reporting tools that can be used to flag content that potentially violates our guidelines, and we will continue working on tools for user moderation so Substack users can set and refine the terms of their own experience on the platform. 

«

Substack’s statement comes after weeks of controversy related to the company’s mostly laissez-faire approach to content moderation. 

In November, Jonathan M. Katz published an article in The Atlantic titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” In it, he reported that he had identified at least 16 newsletters that depicted overt Nazi symbols, and dozens more devoted to far-right extremism. 

Last month, 247 Substack writers issued an open letter asking the company to clarify its policies. The company responded on December 21, when Substack co-founder published a blog post arguing that “censorship” of Nazi publications would only make extremism worse.

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The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that [claims it] can use your apps for you • The Verge

David Pierce:

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Rather than build a bunch of APIs and try to convince developers to support the R1, though, Rabbit trained its model on how to use existing apps for itself. The large action model, or LAM, was trained by humans interacting with apps like Spotify and Uber, essentially showing the model how they work. The LAM learned what a Settings icon looked like, how to know when an order was confirmed, and where the search menus are. All that, Lyu says, can be applied to any app anywhere.

The R1 also has a dedicated training mode, which you can use to teach the device how to do something, and it will supposedly be able to repeat the action on its own going forward. Lyu gives an example: “You’ll be like, ‘Hey, first of all, go to a software called Photoshop. Open it. Grab your photos here. Make a lasso on the watermark and click click click click. This is how you remove watermark.’” It takes 30 seconds for Rabbit OS to process, Lyu says, and then it can automatically remove all your watermarks going forward.

How all of this actually works in practice, though, is the real question. You’ll be able to do some things on the R1 itself, and there’s a web portal called Rabbit Hole through which you log in to all your various services. And if you want to, say, teach the device how to use Photoshop, you’ll be able to boot one of Rabbit’s virtual machines and teach it there rather than using your own device and software. But how that will work with lots of users, on lots of devices and platforms, will be tricky to get right.

Rabbit’s approach here is pretty clever. Getting anyone to support a new operating system is tough, even if you’re a tech giant, and the LAM way subverts that by just teaching the model how to use apps.

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Really need to see this in action. It seems like an abstraction device: do we need to abstract across Photoshop and phones when good integration could mean that you just use the appropriate platform whenever you want?
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US moves closer to filing sweeping antitrust case against Apple • The New York Times

David McCabe and Tripp Mickle:

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Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple’s payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said.

Senior leaders in the Justice Department’s antitrust division are reviewing the results of the investigation so far, said two of the people. The agency’s officials have met with Apple multiple times, including in December, to discuss the investigation. No final decision has been made about whether a lawsuit should be filed or what it should include, and Apple has not had a final meeting with the Justice Department in which it can make its case to the government before a lawsuit is filed.

The Justice Department is closing in on what would be the most consequential federal antitrust lawsuit challenging Apple, which is the most valuable tech company in the world. If the lawsuit is filed, American regulators will have sued four of the biggest tech companies for monopolistic business practices in less than five years. The Justice Department is currently facing off against Google in two antitrust cases, focused on its search and ad tech businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon and Meta for stifling competition.

The Apple suit would likely be even more expansive than previous challenges to the company, attacking its powerful business model that draws together the iPhone with devices like the Apple Watch and services like Apple Pay to attract and keep consumers loyal to its products.

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The DoJ is going to get nowhere unless it can show that Apple has effective monopolies in those markets which would necessitate providing public APIs. Watch? Maaaybe. iMessage? Nope. Payments? Perhaps. But none is a slam dunk. Lina Khan might like antitrust lawsuits, but she has a poor record so far.
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How BYD grew from a phone battery maker to EV giant taking on Tesla • CNBC

Arjun Kharpal and Evelyn Cheng:

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Elon Musk dismissed BYD in 2011 by laughing at their products during a Bloomberg interview.

“Have you seen their car?” Musk quipped. “I don’t think it’s particularly attractive, the technology is not very strong. And BYD as a company has pretty severe problems in their home turf in China. I think their focus is, and rightly should be, on making sure they don’t die in China.”

BYD did not get wiped out. Instead, BYD dethroned Tesla in the fourth quarter as the top EV maker, selling more battery-powered vehicles than its US rival.

“Their goal was to be China’s largest auto manufacturer and put China manufacturing on the map,” Taylor Ogan, CEO of Snow Bull Capital, said of BYD’s long-standing ambition.

So how did the Chinese company, which began by making phone batteries, become an electric car giant?

While BYD is now known as an electric car giant, its tentacles stretch into many areas from batteries to mining and semiconductors, which is a large reason behind its success.

Chemist Wang Chuanfu founded BYD in 1995 in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, China’s massive tech hub. It was founded with 20 employees and 2.5 million Chinese yuan of capital, or $351,994 at today’s exchange rate.

In 1996, BYD began manufacturing lithium-ion batteries, the type that are in our modern day smartphones. This coincided with the growth of mobile phones. BYD went onto supply its batteries to Motorola and Nokia in 2000 and 2002, respectively, two of the mobile phone industry’s juggernaughts at the time.

In 2002, BYD listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, riding the wave of its success in lithium-ion batteries. It wasn’t until 2003 that BYD acquired a small automaker called Xi’an Qinchuan Automobile.

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As Benedict Evans points out, there’s a lot here which resembles the story of China and smartphones: started out with Americans thinking they could do it all, then thought that Chinese products were just junk (see also: Japanese cars v Americans), then saw China come in and eat up the low end.
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Scientists discover 100 to 1,000 times more plastics in bottled water • The Washington Post

Shannon Osaka:

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A new paper released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found about 240,000 particles in the average liter of bottled water, most of which were “nanoplastics” — particles measuring less than one micrometer (less than 1/70th the width of a human hair).

For the past several years, scientists have been looking for “microplastics,” or pieces of plastic that range from one micrometer to half a centimeter in length, and found them almost everywhere. The tiny shards of plastic have been uncovered in the deepest depths of the ocean, in the frigid recesses of Antarctic sea ice and in the human placenta. They spill out of laundry machines and hide in soils and wildlife. Microplastics are also in the food we eat and the water we drink: In 2018, scientists discovered that a single bottle of water contained, on average, 325 pieces of microplastics.

But researchers at Columbia University have now identified the extent to which nanoplastics also pose a threat.

“Whatever microplastic is doing to human health, I will say nanoplastics are going to be more dangerous,” said Wei Min, a chemistry professor at Columbia and one of the authors of the new paper.
Scientists have also found microplastics in tap water, but in smaller amounts.
Sherri Mason, a professor and director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pa., says plastic materials are a bit like skin — they slough off pieces into water or food or whatever substance they are touching.

“We know at this point that our skin is constantly shedding,” she said. “And this is what these plastic items are doing — they’re just constantly shedding.”

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First plastics: 1869. Will the last ones be made before 2069? Or are we just going to live with them as a sort of nano-sized global warming?
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Asking people to “do the research” on fake news stories makes them seem more believable, not less • Nieman Journalism Lab

Joshua Benton:

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There sure seems to be something about opening up a new tab to research a false story that makes it seem more believable, at least to a meaningful share of people.

Why would that be the case? One potential culprit is data voids. That term was coined by Microsoft’s Michael Golebiewski in 2018 “to describe search engine queries that turn up few to no results, especially when the query is rather obscure, or not searched often.”

Fake news stories, especially their wilder variants, are often spectacularly new. Part of their shock comes from presenting an idea so at odds with reality that their key words and phrases just haven’t appeared together online much. Like, before Pizzagate, would you have expected a Google search for “comet ping pong child rape pizza basement hillary” to turn up much? No, because that’s just a nonsense string of words without a bonkers conspiracy theory to tie it all together.

But imagine that, in 2016, someone heard that conspiracy theory in some remote tendril of the web and — seeking to SOTEN! [search online to evaluate news] — went to Google and typed those words in. What results would it have returned? Almost certainly it would have shown links to pro-Pizzagate webpages — because those were the only webpages with those keywords at the time. The bunkers always have a time advantage over the debunkers, and data voids are the result.

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This isn’t a short piece (and this part seems to me the nub of it) but the ramifications are important: research doesn’t necessarily quash fake news.
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Why do we work so much? • Psychology Today

Peter Gray:

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in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes (1930/1963) predicted that, by the end of the 20th century, because of automation, the average workweek would be about 15 hours. That, he predicted, would be sufficient to produce everything we need for a comfortable life. In one sense he was right: Automation has greatly reduced the amount of human work, whether physical or mental, required to produce everything we reasonably need. But he was wrong in his prediction that we would work less. The average work week for most today is little different than it was a hundred years ago. Why?

…We live in a world where less work is needed, but we have not adapted our economic system in a way that permits less work for most people. We still have a system of work for wages as the means of distributing what people need, and we still have wages set at a level that, for many people, necessitates many hours of work to support themselves and their family. The powers at the top of our economic hierarchy (the so-called “job creators”) have no interest in increasing wages (for anyone other than themselves), so most people still need to work about 40 hours a week to support themselves and their family.

Instead of reducing work, our approach has been to continuously create new jobs. Some of these jobs are useful, with social value, but many are not. In fact, as anthropologist David Graeber has argued in his book Bullshit Jobs (2018), many add no social value or are even harmful to society and the environment (see my previous post for examples).

We could, if we had the political will, reduce through legislation the hours people must work, thereby improving lives and, at the same time, benefiting the environment. We could increase the minimum wage and decrease the workweek gradually, over time, in steps that would not dramatically disrupt the economy, eventuating in something close to the 15-hour week predicted by Keynes.

Or we could, as some have proposed, provide a universal basic income, paid for by increased taxes on the very rich.

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The puzzle of why there’s so much work about continues to puzzle economists too.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, LG is showing off its new (optionally) see-through TV. Think it will ever go on sale? CC-licensed photo by LG 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.

Magic: The Gathering publisher admits using AI art after banning AI art • Polygon

Oli Welsh:

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Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast has been forced to admit that it published a marketing image for the game featuring “some AI components,” despite an initial insistence that the art was “created by humans and not AI.” Wizards of the Coast had banned the use of AI artwork in its products in 2023, after AI-generated artwork appeared in a Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook and caused an outcry.

The image, since deleted, was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by the official Magic: The Gathering account on Jan. 4. It showed five Magic cards resting on a valve-powered device next to a pressure gauge, in a brass-and-wood-filled steampunk laboratory setting. “It’s positively shocking how good these lands look in retro frame,” the post read.

Many fans were quick to point out elements in the image that bore the hallmarks of generative AI — in particular, difficulty rendering fine details in a consistent way (around bunches of cables, for example, or on the dial of the pressure gauge). But the Magic account initially dismissed these claims.

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However…

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“Well, we made a mistake earlier when we said that a marketing image we posted was not created using AI,” the Magic account said in a statement posted to X on Jan. 7. “As you, our diligent community pointed out, it looks like some AI components that are now popping up in industry standard tools like Photoshop crept into our marketing creative, even if a human did the work to create the overall image.”

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AI hypocrisy is going to catch a lot of people out this year.
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OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles • The Verge

Emilia David:

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In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit. It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.

However, the company maintained its long-standing position that in order for AI models to learn and solve new problems, they need access to “the enormous aggregate of human knowledge.” It reiterated that while it respects the legal right to own copyrighted works — and has offered opt-outs to training data inclusion — it believes training AI models with data from the internet falls under fair use rules that allow for repurposing copyrighted works.

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Essentially, OpenAI says “regurgitation” of training data is a problem that can occur when the same article appears many times in training data, and that the NYT examples of that are from intentionally careful prompts.

I wonder how the court case will work, if it gets that far: will OpenAI be required to have a version of ChatGPT that was running when the NYT did its prompts? Seems a big ask, yet also necessary for the case.
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Dutch man sabotaged Iranian nuclear program without Dutch government’s knowledge: report • NL Times

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In 2008, a Dutchman played a crucial role in the United States and Israeli-led operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. The then 36-year-old Erik van Sabben infiltrated an Iranian nuclear complex and released the infamous Stuxnet virus, paralyzing the country’s nuclear program. The AIVD recruited the man, but Dutch politicians knew nothing about the operation, the Volkskrant reports after investigating the sabotage for two years.

A few years ago, the Volkskrant revealed that the Dutch intelligence services AIVD and MIVD had recruited the infiltrator in this sabotage operation. But at the time, it was believed to have been an Iranian engineer. In the meantime, the newspaper continued to investigate the matter, speaking to dozens of people involved, including 19 employees of the AIVD and MIVD.

They told the newspaper that Dutchman Van Sabben infiltrated the underground nuclear complex in the city of Natanz and installed equipment infected with the highly sophisticated Stuxnet virus. According to the newspaper, the software cost over a billion dollars to develop. It caused a large number of nuclear centrifuges to break down, delaying the nuclear program by several years, according to estimates.

No one in the Netherlands knew that this new type of cyber weapon was being used in the operation, the Volkskrant wrote. According to the investigative journalists, the intelligence services knew they were participating in the sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program but not that their agent was bringing in Stuxnet. “The Americans used us,” one intelligence source told the Volkskrant.

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Oh yes but that’s not really spy stu–

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Van Sabben immediately left Iran after successfully sabotaging the country’s nuclear program, the researchers concluded. He died two weeks later in a motorcycle accident near his home in Dubai. Nothing points to foul play, the Volkskrant said after speaking with people at the crash scene. Though, an anonymous MIVD employee told the newspaper that Van Sabben “paid a high price.”

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One of the two writers on the Volksrant piece (subscriber-only, paywalled) is Kim Zetter, who literally wrote the book on Stuxnet, so this is highly likely to be accurate.
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I want my Vision Pro(TV)! • On my Om

Om Malik:

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The rumour machine can finally turn itself off — Apple has announced that its spatial computer, Vision Pro, is going on sale on January 19. It will start taking pre-orders for the $3,500 device, which ships on February 2nd. And I am excited. Let me rephrase that — I am super excited. My excitement stems from my hands-on experiences with the device.

Apple touts Vision Pro as a new canvas for productivity and a new way to play games. Maybe, maybe not. Just as the Apple Watch is primarily a health-related device that also does other things, including phone calls, text messages, and making payments. Similarly, the primary function for Vision Pro is ‘media’ — especially how we consume it on the go. Give it a few weeks, and more people will come to the same conclusion.

…There will be a lot of talk about Vision Pro. There will be obvious commentary about it being a disappointment. In time, we will come to realize that this was Steve Jobs’ parting gift to the company he co-founded. He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, who then shared this in his book:

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….[Jobs] “very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. ‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”

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I don’t know about you, but I am excited and will be getting up early to order a unit for myself.

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Spatial video of sports is going to be really interesting, and surely a key selling point.
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iPhone owners get $92 payouts from Apple in phone-throttling settlement • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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US-based iPhone users are finally getting long-awaited payments to compensate them for Apple’s decision to throttle the performance of iPhones with degraded batteries.

Apple agreed to settle with iPhone users in March 2020, but class-action lawsuits and settlements often take years to be resolved and paid out. This case took a few years because the settlement’s court approval was temporarily vacated on appeal but later reinstated.

The settlement was for a minimum of $310m and a maximum of $500m, including attorney’s fees of $80.6m and the costs of distributing the settlement fund. Apple agreed to provide $25 payments to affected users for each eligible iPhone, though that amount could have increased or decreased based on the number of approved claims.

It seems the standard payment increased, as various people reported getting $92.17 payments this past weekend. I was one of the people who received an email notice stating I was eligible for the settlement about 3.5 years ago, and I submitted a claim on July 24, 2020. I received a $92.17 deposit to my bank account on Saturday that was labeled “IN RE APPLE INC Payouts.”

iPhone owners were required to submit their claims by October 6, 2020. The payments were for US-based owners of an iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, or SE who “experienced diminished performance” on their devices while running affected versions of iOS before December 21, 2017.

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The UK version of this case got its go-ahead near the end of last year (Apple denies its claims), so shall we put a date in the diary for 2030?
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SWATting: the new normal in ransomware extortion tactics • The Register

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle:

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Extortionists are now threatening to “swat” hospital patients — calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims’ homes — if the medical centers don’t pay the crooks’ ransom demands.

After intruders broke into Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s IT network in November and stole medical records – everything from Social Security numbers to diagnoses and lab results – miscreants threatened to turn on the patients themselves directly.

The idea being, it seems, that those patients and the media coverage from any swatting will put pressure on the US hospital to pay up and end the extortion. Other crews do similar when attacking IT service provider: they don’t just extort the suppliers, they also threaten or further extort customers of those providers.

“Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center was aware of cyber criminals issuing swatting threats and immediately notified the FBI and Seattle police, who notified the local police,” a spokesperson told The Register today. “The FBI, as part of its investigation into the cybersecurity incident, also investigated these threats.”

The cancer center, which operates more than 10 clinics in Washington’s Puget Sound region, declined to answer additional comments about the threats.

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Of course, if American police weren’t on a hair trigger to go and shoot people, there wouldn’t be the same risk. Good luck getting British police to turn up with guns in response to a random phone report.
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I’ve looked through LG’s new transparent OLED TV and seen something special • The Verge

Chris Welch has gone to CES so none of us has to:

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LG has seemingly decided that the time has come to ship a real, bona fide transparent TV that people will actually be able to buy this year. At some undisclosed date. For what’s certain to be an exorbitant amount of money.

The company has announced the OLED Signature T (you can guess what the T stands for) here at CES 2024. The product that LG demoed for press in Las Vegas isn’t exactly “final.” The 77-inch display won’t be changing at all, but the company hasn’t decided whether it’ll come bundled with all the side furniture you see in these photos or if it’ll sell those items separately.

Behind the OLED T’s transparent panel is a contrast film that, with the push of a button on the remote, can be raised to make the TV look like any regular OLED, or lowered if you want to see what’s behind the screen.

The TV has custom widgets that take up only a lower section of the screen, which seems like an idea that LG carried over from its roll-up TV.

…here’s one downside: when the contrast filter is up, the OLED T technically isn’t on par with LG’s very best conventional OLEDs like the G series. It lacks the Micro Lens Array technology that has led to major brightness improvements for that line. I’m an unabashed display nerd, so if I owned this thing, I think it would constantly eat at me that it’s an inferior TV compared to the G4 or, if you want to go even fancier, LG’s wireless M series, which does include MLA. And this TV is destined to cost far more than either of those.

You’re making objective sacrifices for the transparency trick, so it’s worth considering how quickly the novelty of this TV might wear off. For certain people, maybe never. But me? I can’t help but feel like I’d be over the whole schtick within a matter of days.

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Um, back up a minute. LG’s roll-up TV? Ah, a 2019 thing that.. never appeared anywhere. As this won’t.
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May 2022: Lessons of Boeing’s cultural decline–and how it can recover • From Day One

Jennifer Haupt, in May 2022:

»

Boeing, a creator of the jet age, was once seen as a prestigious American corporate icon. Yet the company’s relationships with employees, investors, and business partners went into a tailspin after its merger with rival McDonnell Douglas in 1997. That’s the thesis of journalist Peter Robison, author of Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, who spoke at a From Day One conference in Seattle about how this revered corporation went astray by neglecting some of its original core values, and what other companies can learn from this cautionary tale.

“The conflict ensued almost immediately with a strike that was the largest white-collar strike in U.S. history at the time,” said Robison, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek. “A federal mediator talked with an engineer I also interviewed who said, ‘This company is doomed.’ The reason he gave was that on one side you had hunter- killer assassins, the McDonnell Douglas side, which was more stockholder focused, and on the Boeing side, you had boy scouts who were customer- and product-focused. So when you look at the Max tragedy, you have to look at the DNA that started with that merger. It had impacts that lasted that long,” he said in a fireside chat with Marissa Nall, staff reporter of the Puget Sound Business Journal.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the Boeing 737 MAX airliner worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 after 346 passengers died in two crashes.

«

..and now the 737 Max 9 is grounded. And things are getting worse, as this from The Air Current published on Monday suggests:

»

United Airlines has found loose bolts and other parts on 737 Max 9 plug doors as it inspects its fleet of Boeing jets following the Friday rapid depressurization aboard an Alaska Airlines jet of the same make, according to three people familiar with the findings.

The discrepant bolts and other parts on the plug doors have been found on at least five aircraft, one of the people told The Air Current.

«

Not saying the company is doomed, but things aren’t looking too clever right now.
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How to put right a grave British miscarriage of justice • FT

The FT’s Editorial Board (ie, this is the view of the paper):

»

The most talked-about holiday TV viewing in Britain was not a Hollywood blockbuster or a Netflix fantasy drama. It was a dramatisation of the real-life scandal of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly accused by the Post Office of theft and false accounting that were in fact the result of a faulty computer system. Many were jailed or ruined. Some convictions have been overturned, and a public inquiry is under way. Yet the TV drama has galvanised public outrage and pressure to end delays in compensating victims. This is one of the UK’s widest miscarriages of justice in recent years. It is a lesson for organisations everywhere, especially in the era of AI, in the perils of putting blind trust in technology.

Between 1999, when the Post Office introduced the Horizon IT system supplied by Fujitsu, and 2015, more than 700 local sub-postmasters — who provide post office services often as part of wider businesses — were prosecuted for alleged shortfalls in accounts. For historical reasons, the Post Office can bring its own prosecutions, without the police, and sub-postmasters’ contracts with the state-owned company made them liable for making good any losses. Lives were destroyed and reputations besmirched. At least four people took their own lives.

…A final priority is to secure accountability, via the public inquiry and a police investigation, for what went wrong. No executives of the Post Office or Fujitsu, which took control of the British computer company ICL in 1998, have been punished. Yet Post Office managers, including former chief executive Paula Vennells, continued to insist Horizon was “robust”, and to allow sub-postmasters to be hounded, even as evidence to the contrary piled up.

It is surely time to strip the Post Office of its anachronistic right to bring private prosecutions. Police are now investigating potential “fraud offences” related to the Post Office’s clawback of millions of pounds from sub-postmasters that was never actually missing. But that process could take years.

«

An obvious move would be to call for whistleblowers from inside Fujitsu and the Post Office, and offer them protection from prosecution. And then grind the liars and those who were responsible into the dust.
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My presentations • Douglas McCarthy

As a followup to yesterday’s item about the National Gallery no longer being able to charge for images of non-copyright items, here’s a set of presentations made by McCarthy, who describes himself as an “open access and cultural heritage specialist”.

Of particular interest is the one called “Insert Coin”, which if you work through it shows that a lot of museums (etc) which charge for image licensing actually lose money on it because of the cost of getting people to look after licences, etc. So they should be happy about the recent Court of Appeal ruling.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A recent court decision means the National Gallery can no longer charge licensing fees on images of works that are out of copyright. CC-licensed photo by Dániel Bagó 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. Happy new year, let’s do better! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The Plagiarism War has begun • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost wondered whether his academic work would survive the sort of examination that brought down Claudine Gay:

»

On December 29, I downloaded my thesis from the institutional repository at UCLA, where I had earned my doctorate, signed up for an iThenticate account [for the Turnitin plagiarism-detection software], and arranged for The Atlantic to pay the standard rate of $300 to analyze my dissertation’s 68,038 words.

Then I started to wonder what the hell I was doing. I had fairly strong confidence in the integrity of my work. My dissertation is about how to do cultural criticism of computational works such as software, simulations, and video games—a topic that was novel enough in 2004, when I filed it, that there wasn’t a ton of material for me to copy even if I’d wanted to. But other factors worked against me. Like Gay, who submitted her dissertation in 1997, I wrote mine during a period when computers were commonplace but the scholarly literature wasn’t yet easily searchable. That made it easier for acts of plagiarism, whether intended or not, to go unnoticed. Was it really worth risking my career to overturn those rocks?

On the principle that only a coward hides from the truth, I pressed the “Upload” button on the iThenticate website, waited for the progress bar to fill, then closed my laptop. When I came back for my report the next day, it felt a little like calling up my doctor’s office for the news, possibly bad, about whatever test they had run on my aging, mortal body. I took a breath and clicked to see my result.

It was 74. Was I a plagiarist? This, apparently, was my answer. Plagiarism isn’t normally summed up as a number, so I didn’t know quite how to respond. It seemed plausible that 74 might be a good score. Turns out it wasn’t

«

This was a brave move. The score is a percentage – but, and it’s a building-sized but, Turnitin doesn’t understand time, so things written after the suspected document will also count if they derive from it. (Bogost has written books building on his earlier work.) In reality once you weeded out those, and boilerplate (such as “reproduced with permission of the copyright owner”) his number was much, much, much lower. (Gay’s thesis was written in 1996, when Turnitin wasn’t even an idea.)

But there’s a plagiarism-detection feeding frenzy just now, being fed by a right-wing venture capitalist who wants to bring down the whole of MIT. Buy popcorn.
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Google settles $5bn lawsuit for ‘private mode’ tracking • BBC News

Annabelle Liang:

»

Google has agreed to settle a US lawsuit claiming it invaded the privacy of users by tracking them even when they were browsing in “private mode”.

The class action sought at least $5bn (£3.9bn) from the world’s go-to search engine and parent company Alphabet.

…Lawyers representing Google and its users did not immediately respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers put a scheduled trial for the case on hold in California on Thursday, after lawyers said they had reached a preliminary settlement.

Judge Rogers had rejected Google’s bid to have the case dismissed earlier this year, saying she could not agree that users consented to allowing Google to collect information on their browsing activity. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. However, lawyers are expected to present a formal settlement for the court’s approval by February 2024.

The class action, which was filed by law firm Boies Schiller Flexner in 2020, claimed that Google had tracked users’ activity even when they set the Google Chrome browser to “Incognito” mode and other browsers to “private mode”. It said this had turned Google into an “unaccountable trove of information” on user preferences and “potentially embarrassing things”.

It added that Google could not “continue to engage in the covert and unauthorized data collection from virtually every American with a computer or phone”. Google said it had been upfront about the data it collected when users viewed in private mode, even if many users assumed otherwise.

«

Things aren’t going well for Google’s lawyers in the US: paying $700m to settle a suit brought by states on antitrust and the Play Store; lost to Epic Games.
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Court of Appeal ruling will prevent UK museums from charging reproduction fees—at last • The Art Newspaper

Bendor Grovesnor:

»

A recent judgement on copyright in the Court of Appeal (20 November) heralds the end of UK museums charging fees to reproduce historic artworks. In fact, it suggests museums have been mis-selling “image licences” for over a decade. For those of us who have been campaigning on the issue for years, it is the news we’ve been waiting for.

The judgement is important because it confirms that museums do not have valid copyright in photographs of (two-dimensional) works which are themselves out of copyright. It means these photographs are in the public domain, and free to use.

Museums use copyright to restrict the circulation of images, obliging people to buy expensive licences. Any thought of scholars sharing images, or using those available on museum websites, was claimed to be a breach of copyright. Not surprisingly, most people paid up. Copyright is the glue that holds the image fee ecosystem in place.

What has now changed? Museums used to rely on the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, which placed a low threshold on how copyright was acquired; essentially, if some degree of “skill and labour” was involved in taking a photograph of a painting, then that photograph enjoyed copyright. But subsequent case law has raised the bar, as the new Appeal Court judgement makes clear.

In his ruling (THJ v Sheridan, 2023), Lord Justice Arnold wrote that, for copyright to arise: “What is required is that the author was able to express their creative abilities in the production of the work by making free and creative choices so as to stamp the work created with their personal touch”. Importantly, he went on: “This criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom”. In other words, if the aim of a museum photograph is to accurately reproduce a painting (which it must be), then it cannot acquire copyright.

«

The judgment was made in November, but this article only appeared near the end of December. Why? Because the THJ v Sheridan case is about something totally different – whether there’s copyright in an options trading software interface. But it reads across (as they say) to museums and images. Even more remarkable: the National Gallery actually lost money in its image licensing scheme.
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Chinese student Kai Zhuang found in Utah after cyber kidnapping scam, police say • The Washington Post

Jennifer Hassan:

»

A 17-year-old Chinese student who went missing in Utah last week has been found unharmed, police said, adding that he appeared to be the victim of an elaborate “cyber kidnapping” scheme, a “disturbing criminal trend” in which scammers put people under duress and convince their families that they are being held for ransom.

Kai Zhuang, who was living in Riverdale, was discovered “alive but very cold and scared” inside a tent in remote mountains near Brigham City, Riverdale Police Chief Casey Warren said in a statement Sunday. The teen was probably instructed by those conducting the scam to isolate himself, he said.

Exchange students, particularly from China, are often targeted in virtual kidnapping cases, Warren said, adding that victims “often comply out of fear that their families will be harmed if they do not comply with the cyber kidnappers.” Warren did not identify the perpetrators in Kai’s case or where they were operating from, and said police were still investigating.

According to the FBI, while the crime can take on myriad forms, it is “always an extortion scheme” in which families are tricked into believing that a loved one has been abducted and are coerced into paying a ransom, though the person claimed to be missing has not actually been taken. Families are often sent voice recordings and photos by the perpetrators in a bid to convince them that the crime is taking place, the Riverdale police statement said.

…Police said that the teen was being “manipulated and controlled” by the perpetrators in the days before he was found and that he apparently “was isolating himself at the direction of the cyber kidnappers.”

«

It isn’t exactly this Black Mirror episode, but not that far away. (In passing: the twist at the end of that episode is one of the smartest I’ve ever seen in skewing your view of the protagonist.)

One also wonders if this scheme is going to migrate to the UK and/or Europe. If so, consider yourself forewarned.
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Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th. “This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

“We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership,” the company wrote. Customers have the option of paying an additional $2.99 per month to keep avoiding advertisements.

The rest of the email summarizes the many benefits of a Prime subscription — no doubt an attempt to keep customers from canceling over this decision. Verge readers were none too pleased about the initial news back in September.

Amazon Prime currently costs $14.99 each month or $139 annually. (Prime Video can be subscribed to individually for $8.99/month.)

«

If you’re a Prime Video subscriber in the UK, you’ll also have had the “yeah anyway adverts” email. One can’t help thinking that Amazon could have taken a lesson from Apple and pretty much anyone else by not spending $715m on “The Rings of Power”, a LOTR series which was such a yawnathon that it only had a 37% completion rate (50% passes muster at Prime, apparently) and then (or roughly simultaneously) spending more than $200m on Citadel, a would-be action blockbuster series beset with “creative differences” and which was so derivative I didn’t finish the first episode. They’d have been $1bn to the better and maybe we wouldn’t have had the ads.

Slow Horses and Reacher: lower budget, book adaptations, hit the target.
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Bird’s bankruptcy is bad news for scooter commuters — and cities • The Washington Post

Megan McArdle:

»

If you’ve visited a major city in the past five years, you’ve probably seen Bird’s black-and-white scooters all over the place — perhaps even one or two being driven on the sidewalk. Now the company is in the same position that its scooters are often left in: tipped over on the ground and obviously in need of repair.

In theory, bankruptcy can manage Bird’s repair by allowing it to shed debt and bring costs in line with spending. The company has filed for a Chapter 11 reorganization, from which its operations could conceivably emerge lean and strong enough to carry its investors to the land of profits, and its users everywhere they want to go within about a 10-mile radius.

In practice, though, Bird’s predicament raises questions about the viability of the whole business of “shared micromobility.”

Bird invented this industry in 2017, a major service not just to those of us who love zipping hither and yon but also, I’d argue, to all the cities where they operate. Yes, many folks resent sharing roads and sidewalks with the scooters. But every time a scooter substitutes for a car trip, it means fewer greenhouse emissions, less air pollution and noise, less traffic, and less danger to pedestrians.

All this is valuable! So why isn’t Bird making money?

…Bird’s business, for example, is in many ways more analogous to Avis or Hertz than a tech company, with its high capital expenditures on vehicles and substantial labor costs to keep those vehicles serviced and positioned in the areas of highest demand. Except that there are a lot more close substitutes for a scooter — walking, transit, Uber — than there are for rental cars. So scooter companies can’t necessarily charge what it costs to provide the service. This is one explanation for Bird’s $471.3m operating loss last year. As money becomes more expensive, these kinds of losses become untenable.

«

Though as McArdle points out, rival Lime is (non-GAAP) profitable; micromobility can be made to work, but it’s tricky.
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Ski resorts battle for a future as snow declines in climate crisis • The Guardian

Sandra Laville:

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In the ski resorts of Morzine and Les Gets in the French Alps, the heavy rainfall meant that full opening of resorts was delayed until two days before Christmas, leaving the industry and the millions of tourists planning trips to stare at the sky in hope.

But no amount of wishing and hoping will overcome what is an existential threat to skiing in the Alps, an industry worth $30bn (£23.8bn) that provides the most popular ski destination in the world.

The science is clear, and is spelled out in carefully weighed-up peer reviewed reports. The most recent, this year, warned that at 2ºC of global heating above pre-industrial levels, 53% of the 28 European resorts examined would be at very high risk of a scarce amount of snow.

Scarce snow has been defined as the poorest coverage seen on average every five years between 1961 and 1990.

If the world were to hit 4ºC of heating, 98% of the resorts would be at very high risk of scarce snow cover. [Overspill note: if we hit 4ºC of heating, pretty much everyone will have much more serious concerns than how many ski runs are open.]

Another study has revealed the way in which snow cover in the Alps has had an “unprecedented” decline over the past 600 years, with the duration of the cover now shorter by 36 days.

Some respond by holding on to the idea that skiing will and can survive if global temperatures are kept to the limits set by the Paris agreement, and if the industry adapts.

…This year 500 professional winter sports athletes published a letter calling for greater climate action by FIS [International Ski Federation]. They highlighted a competition schedule that forced skiers to take air flights backwards and forwards over the Atlantic from week to week, creating unnecessarily large carbon footprints, and called on the federation to open the season later and end it earlier to respect the changing climate.

«

Ironically, the most effective climate action at present has been taken by whoever at Boeing didn’t properly secure the door frame on one of its planes, leading to the grounding of 737 Max 9 models for an indefinite period.
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Chief executive of collapsed crypto fund HyperVerse does not appear to exist • The Guardian

Sarah Martin:

»

A man named Steven Reece Lewis was introduced as the chief executive officer of HyperVerse at an online global launch event in December 2021, with video messages of support from a clutch of celebrities released on Twitter the following month, including from the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and actor Chuck Norris.

Promotional material released for HyperVerse, which was linked to a previous scheme called HyperFund, said Reece Lewis was a graduate of the University of Leeds and held a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge. A brief career summary of Reece Lewis, which was presented in a video launch for potential investors, said he had worked for Goldman Sachs, sold a web development company to Adobe and launched an IT start-up firm, before being recruited to head up HyperVerse by the HyperTech group. This was the umbrella organisation for a range of Hyper-branded crypto schemes.

Lee spoke at the launch event as “chairman” of the HyperTech group, while Xu was introduced as the group’s “founder”. The company praised Reece Lewis’s “strong performance and drive”, citing his credentials as the reason for his recruitment.

Guardian Australia has confirmed that neither the University of Leeds nor the University of Cambridge has any record of someone by the name Steven Reece Lewis on their databases. No records exist of Steven Reece Lewis on the UK companies register, Companies House, or on the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Adobe, a publicly listed company since 1986, has no record of any acquisition of a company owned by a Steven Reece Lewis in any of its public SEC filings. It is understood that Goldman Sachs could find no record of Reece Lewis having worked for the company.

Guardian Australia was unable to find a LinkedIn profile for Reece Lewis or any internet presence other than HyperVerse promotional material.

…A report from the US-based blockchain analysts Chainalysis estimates consumer losses to HyperVerse in 2022 amounted to US$1.3bn (A$1.92bn).

«

But but but, you say, Steve Wozniak and Chuck Norris vouched for him! Not so fast: you can hire them through the Cameo website to read out a script saying almost anything. Including what a wonderful person you are, even if you don’t exist.
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🔮 The horizon for 2024: AI & energy #1 • Exponential View

Azeem Azhar:

»

We are at the very peak of fossil fuel use globally. Coal, which powered the Industrial Revolution from the mid-17th century, will be in decline from now on. As we defossilize, technology-driven energy systems (like solar) will guarantee a declining price ceiling for energy, freeing us of the vagaries of commodity-driven energy provision.

Solar power capacity additions are racing ahead. Renewable investment has exceeded fossil fuel investments for six years. Chinese solar panel prices dropped some 40+% this year to as low as 12.2c a watt, strengthening the case for the ongoing deployment of solar.

The rapid improvements in the technoeconomics of solar are making it increasingly appealing—and making forecasts progressively ropey. External forecasters are having to revise their estimates upwards. Our internal models are more bullish than these because we place more weight on learning effects and positive feedback loops.

EVs are on a tear with more than 40 million in use. Compared to earlier years, consumers have a choice of a more comprehensive selection of EVs.

The virtuous cycle is taking hold. As the market grows, more firms enter. They compete: offering consumers diversity and innovation. In this case, prices come down, and range — the most critical buying factor for an EV — increases.

«

Azhar is always an optimist, and on these particular topics he tends to be proven correct.
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BT to turn 60,000 redundant street cabinets into EV charge points • The Sunday Times

Nicholas Hellen:

»

BT is revealing plans to convert 60,000 of its dark-green “street cabinets” into electric car-charging stations, in a boost for drivers who worry about where they can top up their vehicles.

At present, Britain has 53,906 public chargers. Many are in petrol stations but only an estimated 20,000 can be found on residential streets, often built into lampposts.

BT’s new pavement chargers, which will be able to power six cars at a time, will output the same 7.4kW as a standard domestic charger. This means an electric vehicle will need to be plugged in for up to six hours for a full recharge.

The initiative will be particularly welcomed by the many drivers without access to off-street parking, or any other way of installing a charger at their home, which leaves them reliant on public chargers. Many say they are put off buying an electric vehicle (EV) due to the dearth of street chargers.

Speaking ahead of the launch at a tech event in Las Vegas, Tom Guy, managing director of Etc, the startup incubation arm of BT Group, said: “It’s for all those customers who don’t have a driveway and are woefully undersupplied.”

There are almost 1 million fully electric cars on the roads, and the government has set a target of 300,000 public chargers by 2030.

The telecoms giant said the cabinets, which are a familiar sight on pavements all around Britain, are becoming increasingly redundant because they contain copper-based wiring for broadband and phone services.

«

Smart thinking by BT (which logically will thus transform into a conglomerate buying and selling electricity, apart from the many non-comms things it already does). Of course the government missed its 2023 target of having at least six rapid (or better) chargers at each motorway service area in England; only 39% did. Four of the 119 have no rapid charging. Spectacularly useless.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The singer Bing Crosby revolutionised recording technology because he was exhausted from making so many shows. Silicon Valley was the winner. CC-licensed photo by Ryan 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 the last post of the year! Happy Christmas and New Year! Thanks for all the support and feedback and links. Back on Monday January 8.

A selection of 9 links for you. Read at your leisure. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The year the Millennials aged out of the internet • The New York Times

Max Read, in an opinion piece:

»

Something is changing about the internet, and I am not the only person to have noticed. Everywhere I turned online this year, someone was mourning: Amazon is “making itself worse” (as New York magazine moaned); Google Search is a “bloated and overmonetized” tragedy (as The Atlantic lamented); “social media is doomed to die,” (as the tech news website The Verge proclaimed); even TikTok is becoming “enjunkified” (to bowdlerize an inventive coinage of the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, republished in Wired). But the main complaint I have heard is was put best, and most bluntly, in The New Yorker: “The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.”

It’s indisputable that we are living through a transitional period in the short history of the internet. The end of the low interest-rate era has shaken up the economics of startups, ending rapid-growth practices like “blitzscaling” and reducing the number of new internet businesses vying for our attention; companies like Alphabet and Facebook are now mature and dominant businesses instead of disruptive upstarts. But I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.

For more than a decade now, millennials like myself have effectively (and, in the case of our cohort’s richest member, Mark Zuckerberg, quite literally) run the internet. We were the earliest adopters of smartphones and we once consistently (not that I’d brag about it) led the generational pack in screen time. Over that period we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and molded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.

This now seems to be changing. There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.

…We’ve been used to wielding an innate understanding of the web’s capabilities and culture to our advantage; our knowledge of “how to search Google” and “how to use emoji” and “how to deploy the ‘Sarcastic Wonka’ meme,” which may once have given us an edge in multigenerational workplaces and social settings, is simply irrelevant to people younger than us.

«

Happy Christmas! And new year!
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Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

»

An 18-year-old hacker who leaked clips of a forthcoming Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order.

Arion Kurtaj from Oxford, who is autistic, was a key member of international gang Lapsus$. The gang’s attacks on tech giants including Uber, Nvidia and Rockstar Games cost the firms nearly $10m.

The judge said Kurtaj’s skills and desire to commit cyber-crime meant he remained a high risk to the public. He will remain at a secure hospital for life unless doctors deem him no longer a danger.

The court heard that Kurtaj had been violent while in custody with dozens of reports of injury or property damage. Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his acute autism so the jury was asked to determine whether or not he committed the alleged acts – not if he did so with criminal intent.

A mental health assessment used as part of the sentencing hearing said he “continued to express the intent to return to cyber-crime as soon as possible. He is highly motivated.”

The jury was told that while he was on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and in police protection at a Travelodge hotel, he continued hacking and carried out his most infamous hack.

Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Fire stick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.

Kurtaj stole 90 clips of the unreleased and hugely anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6.

He broke into the company’s internal Slack messaging system to declare “if Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code”.

«

Surely this guy will get a visit in the next few weeks from a recruiter at GCHQ. Not that we’ll ever find out. That’s the most amazing bit of improvisatory hacking I’ve ever heard of.
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How pro-Russian ‘yacht’ propaganda influenced US debate over Ukraine aid – BBC News

Olga Robinson, Shayan Sardarizadeh and Mike Wendling:

»

A website founded by a former US Marine who now lives in Russia has fuelled a rumour that Volodymyr Zelensky purchased two luxury yachts with American aid money.

Despite the false claim, the disinformation plot was successful. It took off online and was echoed by members of the US Congress making crucial decisions about military spending.

It was an incredible assertion – using two advisers as proxies, Mr Zelensky paid $75m (£59m) for two yachts.

But not only has the Ukrainian government flatly denied the story, the two ships in question have not even been sold. Despite being false, the story reached members of the US Congress, where leaders say any decision on further aid to Ukraine will be delayed until next year.

…The story first emerged in late November on an obscure YouTube channel – one with only a handful of followers and just a single video in its feed.

The next day, it was picked up by a site called DC Weekly, alongside pictures of the two yachts – called Lucky Me and My Legacy – and documents purportedly confirming the sale of the boats to Zelensky’s associates.

But the luxury yacht brokers where both vessels are listed for sale said that the allegations are false. The sales documents appear to be forgeries. And instead of having been purchased by Zelensky or his close advisers, both Lucky Me and My Legacy are still up for sale.

The DC Weekly story touched off a blaze of online speculation, with multiple sources linking to the story and content citing the story across multiple platforms.

However, the site is not, as the name implies, a weekly publication – nor is it based in the US capital.
Research by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, disinformation researchers at Clemson University, shows that DC Weekly was started by John Mark Dougan, a former US Marine and Florida police officer who moved to Russia in 2016.

Mr Dougan spent three years as a deputy with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office. After he left in 2009 he started a website spreading rumours about his former employers.

«

America elects idiots as legislators, part 945. (Plenty of examples available in the UK too.)
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Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount CEOs hold exploratory merger talks • FT

Anna Nicolaou, James Fontanella-Khan and Christopher Grimes :

»

Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount Global are in early talks to merge, in a media deal that would combine the owner of HBO and CNN with the studio behind the Mission Impossible films and CBS News. 

Warner chief executive David Zaslav and Paramount chief Bob Bakish discussed a possible deal over lunch at Paramount’s offices in New York this week, according to three people familiar with the matter. The talks were at an early stage and a deal might not materialise, these people cautioned.

The conversation was more of an expression of interest by Zaslav than an offer, according to one of the people familiar with the meeting between the two executives. Billionaire Shari Redstone, who controls Paramount, has also held preliminary talks with Skydance, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick, run by David Ellison.

The discussions with Warner Bros, first reported by Axios, come as US media groups are struggling to improve their profitability after waging a costly “streaming war” against Netflix. Big entertainment groups including Warner, Paramount and Disney have been on a cost-cutting mission as they try to shrink losses running into the billions of dollars from their video streaming services.

«

More fallout from Netflix’s win in the streaming wars. Who’s big enough to stand alone? Netflix, Amazon, Apple. Any others?
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‘A mass exodus’: why so many LA restaurants are closing • SF Gate

Karen Palmer:

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pandemic-era government assistance in the form of Paycheck Protection Program loans and the Restaurant Revitalization Fund ran out long ago, and commercial rents in Los Angeles remain staggeringly high.

Operators are also feeling a major squeeze due to rising food and labour costs. Industry vet Jeremy Adler, who is a partner in the Santa Monica Southeast Asian restaurant Cobi’s and is in construction on a new restaurant in Mar Vista, points to expensive liquor licenses and new California laws like Assembly Bill 1228 as challenges for owners. AB 1228 is intended to create a liveable wage by raising the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 in April 2024.

“That law puts pressure on independent restaurants as well,” Adler says. “When the average profit margin at a restaurant is 5-7%, 1% really matters.”

“The economics of owning a restaurant are completely out of whack right now,” says seasoned chef Chris Feldmeier, who shuttered his Silver Lake Spanish restaurant Bar Moruno in November. “We used to try to keep our labour costs under 30%, but now they’re inching up closer to 40%. With cooks making $22 to $25 an hour, it’s just hard for a small, private restaurant.”

Ciccolella adds, “It’s impossible to get quality food at a fair price. I have to sell my lobster roll for $29 at the restaurant, but I can sell it for $20 at my new Little Anchor truck because it’s just me and I don’t have all the labour costs.”

Manzke and the others also note that the Hollywood strikes this year were a major blow to restaurants.
“We always had a lot of support from Netflix at Republique. There would be someone there from the company every night, and that just stopped overnight,” he says. “Los Angeles is so tied to the entertainment industry.”

“We used to cater for all of the studios in Culver City, and that completely went away,” Ciccolella says. Adler, meanwhile, notes that event business in early December, usually a way for restaurants to balance out the slower weeks at the end of the month, was also severely mitigated by the strike.

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So the TL;DR is: the places where Hollywood’s writers and actors did their side business suddenly found they didn’t have any writers or actors. Double whammy for all the wait staff looking for acting jobs by slipping their details to directors. Perhaps a few more streaming merger negotiations will help matters.
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Tech billionaires need to stop trying to make the science fiction they grew up on real • Scientific American

Charlie Stross, who actually is a SF author:

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We were warned about the ideology driving these wealthy entrepreneurs by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the ethical artificial intelligence team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specializing in existential threats to humanity. They named this ideology TESCREAL, which stands for “transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism.” These are separate but overlapping beliefs in the circles associated with big tech in California.

…TESCREAL is also heavily contaminated with Christian theological reasoning, [John] Campbellian white supremacism, Randian ruthlessness, the eugenics that was pervasive in the genre until the 1980s and the imperialist subtext of colonizing the universe.

But there is a problem: SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to earn a living: any foresight is strictly coincidental. We recycle the existing material—and the result is influenced heavily by the biases of earlier writers and readers. The genre operates a lot like a large language model that is trained using a body of text heavily contaminated by previous LLMs; it tends to emit material like that of its predecessors. Most SF is small-c conservative insofar as it reflects the history of the field rather than trying to break ground or question received wisdom.

Science fiction, therefore, does not develop in accordance with the scientific method. It develops by popular entertainers trying to attract a bigger audience by pandering to them. The audience today includes billionaires who read science fiction in their childhood and who appear unaware of the ideological underpinnings of their youthful entertainment: elitism, “scientific” racism, eugenics, fascism and a blithe belief today in technology as the solution to societal problems.

In 2021 a meme arose based on writer and game designer Alex Blechman’s tweet about this issue (which was later posted to Mastodon):

»

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

«

It’s a worryingly accurate summary of the situation in Silicon Valley right now: the billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we’re trapped in the passenger seat.

«

That idea of SF as an early self-feeding LLM (though aren’t all literary genres therefore that?) is novel.
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Researchers fear the spoken ‘r’ is ready to roll away from the last bastion of rhoticity in England • Phys.org

»

How do you pronounce your “r”s towards the ends of words like Shearer, purr, nerd and pore? And what about those in car, bird and her?

Chances are that if you are English, you will likely soften it out so that it sounds more like an elongation of the vowel, rather than the kind of “r” you find in words such as red or right.

The evidence is, according to Lancaster University researchers, that “r”s are becoming a thing of the past in England—apart from in Blackburn, where the “r” is still very much rolling.

Traditionally, parts of Lancashire have very clearly articulated “r”s, similar to the stereotype of Cornwall and the West Country. The pronunciation of these “r”s towards the ends of words is called rhoticity.

In fact, historically, hundreds of years ago, people throughout England used to pronounce strong “r”s. But now, says the research paper, these strong “r”s are definitely dying out.

In Blackburn, young speakers do mostly say their “r”s, but they are, according to the research team, phonetically very weak and often difficult to perceive. And they pronounce them less frequently than older speakers.

According to lead researcher Dr. Danielle Turton, who worked with Dr. Robert Lennon on the research project, the “r” in the spelling for speakers from these areas means that it should be pronounced like an “r” at the beginning of a word, rather than just creating a longer vowel.

“Speakers from places like Blackburn usually differentiate between pairs of words such as ‘stellar’ and ‘stella’, whereas most of England would consider them to be the same,” says Dr. Turton.

“However, for the youngest speakers in Blackburn, these ‘r’s are very weak, which raises the question of whether future generations will even hear these weak ‘r’s at all and whether this distinction will eventually fade away. Accent change is often like a puddle: it dries up in most places and leaves remnants around the edges, hence why Cornwall and East Lancs behave similarly here today.”

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Read more about rhoticity – you thought it was the thing they turned the chicken on, didn’t you? – in the full paper.
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AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism • Dan McQuillan

dan mcquillan is, well, taking no prisoners:

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Faced with social structures whose foundations have been eaten away by decades of privatisation and austerity, the political response is to pump money into ‘frontier AI’ while hyping it up as the most awe-inspiring technology since the Manhattan Project. The Prime Minister says he will “harness the incredible potential of AI to transform our hospitals and schools” while ignoring leaking roofs in the NHS and the literally collapsing ceilings in local schools. This focus on the immaterial fantasies of AI is a deliberate diversion. When large language models are touted as passing basic medical exams, it’s because they’ve absorbed answers from across the internet. They are incapable of the embodied understanding and common sense that underpin medicine, education or any other form of care.

One thing that these models definitely do, though, is transfer control to large corporations. The amount of computing power and data required is so incomprehensibly vast that very few companies in the world have the wherewithal to train them. To promote large language models anywhere is privatisation by the back door. The evidence so far suggests that this will be accompanied by extensive job losses, as employers take AI’s shoddy emulation of real tasks as an excuse to trim their workforce. The goal isn’t to “support” teachers and healthcare workers but to plug the gaps with AI instead of with the desperately needed staff and resources.

Real AI isn’t sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form. Like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable. Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn’t provide insights as it’s just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences. The logics of ranking and superiority are buried deep in the make up of artificial intelligence; married to populist politics, it becomes another vector for deciding who is disposable.

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How Bing Crosby made Silicon Valley possible • The Honest Broker [not Roger Pielke]

Ted Gioia:

»

Long before he became chief engineer for Bing Crosby Enterprises, Jack Mullin was a major in the US Army Signal Corp, who spent a lot of time listening to Nazi radio broadcasts during World War II. Unlike his colleagues, Mullin was puzzled by the classical music he heard coming out of Germany—it sounded like live performances by orchestras, but somehow he doubted that the Berlin Philharmonic was really giving a concert so late at night.

After the end of the war, he solved the mystery. The army sent him to Germany to document their electronics technology, and he discovered magnetic tape recorders. This device, known as the Magnetophon was even used by Hitler to pre-record speeches, which could later be broadcast on the radio as live announcements.

Mullin returned to California, after the war, with two of these tape recorders, and plenty of tape, along with instruction manuals and schematic drawings. His goal was to create his own tape recording equipment with American parts.

On May 16, 1946, Mullin gave a demonstration of German Magnetophons at the NBC Studio in San Francisco. The buzz it created soon led to the launch of Ampex.

…Ampex, launched in San Carlos, California in 1944 is the key connecting point between music storage and data storage. That tiny startup, according to Silicon Valley historians Peter Hammar and Bob Wilson, was involved directly or indirectly in the launch of “almost every computer magnetic and optical disc recording system, including hard drives, floppy discs, high-density recorders, and RFID devices.”

Crosby himself moved to Silicon Valley in 1963, buying a home in Hillsborough for $175,000. (The house was recently listed for $14m.) According to his son Nathaniel, Crosby and his wife Kathryn didn’t want to raise their children in Hollywood. A few months later, they moved to an even larger house on the other side of town.

By any measure, Bing Crosby’s life was an amazing success story. And he understood the financial upside enough to become a West Coast distributor for both Ampex and 3M magnetic tape. But if he had taken equity positions in Silicon Valley startups, instead of just financing them as a customer and distributor, he might have become the godfather of high tech—and the Crosby family would be on the Forbes billionaire list today.

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Thanks for the link (well worth reading in full!) to Mark C, who points out “in light of the Apple Watch problems: how Bing Crosby enabled a whole US industry to rip off German tech, patent-free”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK government has a plan to digitise and then destroy old wills – a move like that which helped spark the Windrush crisis. CC-licensed photo by Ken Mayer 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. Just one more! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders • The Guardian

Daniel Boffey:

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The police will be able to run facial recognition searches on a database containing images of Britain’s 50 million driving licence holders under a law change being quietly introduced by the government.

Should the police wish to put a name to an image collected on CCTV, or shared on social media, the legislation would provide them with the powers to search driving licence records for a match.

The move, contained in a single clause in a new criminal justice bill, could put every driver in the country in a permanent police lineup, according to privacy campaigners.

Facial recognition searches match the biometric measurements of an identified photograph, such as that contained on driving licences, to those of an image picked up elsewhere.

The intention to allow the police or the National Crime Agency (NCA) to exploit the UK’s driving licence records is not explicitly referenced in the bill or in its explanatory notes, raising criticism from leading academics that the government is “sneaking it under the radar”.

Once the criminal justice bill is enacted, the home secretary, James Cleverly, must establish “driver information regulations” to enable the searches, but he will need only to consult police bodies, according to the bill.

Critics claim facial recognition technology poses a threat to the rights of individuals to privacy, freedom of expression, non-discrimination and freedom of assembly and association.

Police are increasingly using live facial recognition, which compares a live camera feed of faces against a database of known identities, at major public events such as protests.

Prof Peter Fussey, a former independent reviewer of the Met’s use of facial recognition, said there was insufficient oversight of the use of facial recognition systems, with ministers worryingly silent over studies that showed the technology was prone to falsely identifying black and Asian faces.

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The Tories: famously the party that wants to keep the government out of people’s lives.
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Tesla recalls over two million cars due to Autopilot concerns • Consumer Reports

Keith Barry:

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A preliminary evaluation of Autopilot after the software update was installed on CR’s [Consumer Report’s] Tesla Model S suggests that the fix is insufficient, a CR safety expert says, explaining that it’s still too easy for drivers to misuse the feature.

“Although we welcome some of the changes that Tesla made as part of the most recent software update, including warning text that’s easier to read, the new software doesn’t go far enough to prevent misuse or address the root causes of driver inattention,” says Kelly Funkhouser, associate director of vehicle technology at CR’s Auto Test Center. 

For example, we were still able to engage and use Autopilot after covering the in-car driver monitoring system camera. “Drivers can still use Autopilot if they’re looking away from the road, using their phone, or otherwise distracted,” says Funkhouser. “We know that drivers who have the ability to misuse a system such as Autopilot will do so unless the software prevents it,” she says. Our top-rated ADA [active driver assistance] systems use driver-monitoring cameras to prevent this kind of foreseeable misuse. 

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Remains to be seen if this fix will be satisfactory for the US’s NHTSA, which ordered the recall/update.
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Why is the US is producing more oil than ever? • The Atlantic

Rogé Karma, on the US producing about a fifth of world oil production in 2023:

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By boosting domestic oil supply, the Biden administration seems to be contributing to the very problem it claims to want to solve.

The reality is more complicated. “Pushing for reductions in U.S. oil production is like squeezing a balloon—the production will ‘pop out’ somewhere else,” writes Samantha Gross, an energy-and-climate expert at the Brookings Institution. The world’s energy needs are growing rapidly, which means oil companies are going to supply it regardless of what the White House does.

If the US were to cut back tomorrow, prices would rise. In the short term, this would lead to less consumption and lower emissions. But those high prices would only entice producers in other countries to step in, as many did in the months after Russia’s invasion. For that reason, reductions in US oil production could actually result in higher overall emissions. The US has one of the least emissions-intensive oil industries on the planet. Shifting production to countries with looser standards would likely be worse for the climate.

But the deeper explanation for the Biden administration’s actions has to do with the politics of climate change. Put simply, pursuing a decarbonization agenda requires Biden to maintain political support, and there is no surer way to lose political support than by presiding over high gas prices. Biden’s approval rating has tracked gas prices for most of his presidency (although he hasn’t yet benefited from recent improvements), and the drop in prices in the months leading up to the 2022 midterms may have contributed to Democrats’ unexpectedly strong performance in those elections. Plus, when the price of energy goes up, the price of everything else tends to rise as well, sparking further inflation.

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Well, OK. Though sometimes it takes a real external shock to force a change in behaviour. The 1973 oil shock changed behaviours. In the intervening 50 years, we’ve gotten used to surplus when all the requirements are for less.
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YouTube is the last bastion of unbiased journalism in India • Rest of World

Sonia Faleiro:

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[Ravish] Kumar is one of several high-profile Indian journalists who have left mainstream media organizations over the past few years and turned to YouTube and other social media platforms instead. These journalists see their own channels as the only way to continue their work in a country where the government is hounding noncompliant media out of their jobs. Ahead of the general election expected to take place in April or May 2024, in which Modi is standing for a third term, social media may be the last space to share unbiased news. “The idea is to report the news the old-school way,” Faye D’Souza, a former executive editor at the media company Times Network, told Rest of World. “To calmly tell people what is going on.”

But going solo is punishing work in a country that the World Press Freedom Index now ranks 161st out of 180. A YouTube channel or Instagram account does not offer the same protections as working for a mainstream media company: There is little financial security, legal support, or physical protection. Alone in their own homes, several of India’s best-known journalists told Rest of World they are fearful for their future. They spoke of online threats and warnings over the phone, of being frozen out by friends and family; of fears their equipment could be seized, their homes raided, or they could be thrown into jail.

For many, the NDTV takeover that inspired Kumar’s resignation was a nail in the coffin for journalism in India. Akash Banerjee, who hosts the political satire channel The DeshBhakt (The Patriot) on YouTube, said he had lawyers in place. “Because I know the knock on my door is inevitable. The government has a way of getting to you.”

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Bloomberg: Vision Pro production moving at full speed, February launch planned • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

Bloomberg reports that Apple is ramping up production of its impending Vision Pro headset. The current goal is for the first units to be ready by the end of January, with a retail launch planned for February.

Mark Gurman writes that Vision Pro production is “running at full speed” in Apple’s factories in China, and has been for several weeks:

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Production of the new headset is running at full speed at facilities in China and has been for several weeks, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The goal is for customer-bound units to be ready by the end of January, with the retail debut planned for the following month, the people said.

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The report does note, however, that “last-minute production hiccups or other snags” could still impact Apple’s timeline. Still, the company has a clear goal in mind and is currently on track to meet that goal.

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Yes, of course the Bloomberg story contains a caveat. That February date is interesting: pep up the end of the January-March quarter by selling some of the most expensive items it’s ever made, perhaps.
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Reliving my memories in Apple Vision Pro almost brought me to tears • Inverse

Raymond Wong:

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I noted in my viewing session last time that the 3D has just the right amount of depth, not too strong or too weak — or because you can look at them in an “Immersive” view where the border of the video becomes glowy and dream-like to give it characteristics of a memory. Either way, spatial videos feel alive. The dream-like memory border sells that feeling pretty well.

In one spatial video, my mom and I were having dim sum at a restaurant, and I was explaining to her what the Apple Vision Pro is and what it does. It was recorded last weekend, so the memory was fresh in my mind. Rewatching the video inside of the Vision Pro, it was as if we were transported back to the restaurant, sitting across from each other over a table of dishes. I kept tilting my head a lot, almost in disbelief at how surreal it was to see my mom talking, laughing, and eating in spatial video.

My mom was who got me interested in technology, and I don’t think I would have a career writing about new consumer tech if not for her interest in it. To me, these convos are very precious, so to see them replayed with a sense of presence really tugged at my heartstrings. At one point, I fought back a few tiny tears, if only because there were three Apple reps sitting next to me.

Self-aware of EyeSight and the possibility that they might be able to see my tears, I asked if they could see my eyes on the Vision Pro’s outside display. I was told they couldn’t. Pre-release software, you know? I obviously couldn’t confirm that myself as the person wearing Vision Pro. At a certain distance and window size, spatial videos can look life-sized. But even when I “pushed” the video window farther away (enabled by looking at the bar at the bottom of the window and then pushing it farther from me), seeing my mom in 3D made me emotional. I even laid back on the sofa and placed the virtual video on the ceiling.

«

Another account of using this stuff, and even allowing for the fact that Apple must be choosing these folk carefully, it’s evident that spatial video is something special.
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Ministry of Justice plan to destroy historical wills is ‘insane’, say experts • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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“Sheer vandalism” and “insane”. This is how leading historians have described government plans to destroy millions of historical wills to save on storage costs.

The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitising and then throwing away about 100m paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save £4.5m a year.

But Tom Holland, the classical and medieval historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, said the proposal to empty shelves at the Birmingham archive was “obviously insane”. Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Germany and modern Europe, said “to destroy the original documents is just sheer vandalism in the name of bureaucratic efficiency”.

Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as “bananas” and “a seriously bad idea”.

The government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of “famous people” – likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales – but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept.

It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost. Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links.

The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October. The apparent vulnerability was also revealed this month when the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the former prime minister Boris Johnson both claimed they could no longer access WhatsApp messages sought by the UK Covid-19 public inquiry.

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Short memories in government: the Windrush scandal followed the destruction of hundreds of landing cards.
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Apple loses attempt to halt Apple Watch sales ban – The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Apple has lost its bid to delay an import and sales ban [starting December 26] on the Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2. In a filing on Wednesday, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) denied Apple’s motion to stay the ban while awaiting an appeal.

…The ban is only in effect in the US, and third-party retailers such as Best Buy will still be able to sell the pair of watches until their supplies run out. Although Apple’s attempt to stop the ban has failed, it still has a chance to undo the decision if President Joe Biden vetoes it. However, as my colleague Victoria Song points out, Apple getting a presidential veto “would be like lightning striking the same place twice.”

«

Ben Thompson made the good point on his Dithering podcast that Biden might not want to be seen acting to help out a “big tech” company against a smaller one. It’s not as if Apple is short of money to pay Massimo, which won the patent argument at the ITC; nor that Apple hasn’t been shy of asserting its patents when it can. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
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AI machine cannot be called an inventor, rules UK supreme court • FT

George Hammond:

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The UK’s Supreme Court has ruled that a machine cannot be named on a patent as the inventor of new products or ideas, in a landmark decision that tackles the issue of who — or what — can claim credit for innovative creations.

The country’s highest court unanimously rejected a challenge, which has been working its way through the courts since 2018, that would have seen artificial intelligence tools designated as inventors. Wednesday’s decision puts an end to the case in the UK.

The case goes to the heart of questions about what rights and protections machines deserve. Those questions have grown increasingly complex as a result of rapid developments in the technology this year, which have included AI matching or outperforming humans on a range of tasks. 

The advances are challenging existing legal frameworks in the UK and elsewhere, designed to strictly uphold the rights of human inventors.

Handing down the Supreme Court’s judgment on Wednesday, Lord Kitchin said: “We conclude that an ‘inventor’ must be a natural person. Only a person can devise an invention.”

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Though the US Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on this, that’s the same direction that it’s going in. Certainly makes sense: we’re humans! We’re the ones! This should forestall things until aliens get here and start showing off their tricks.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How much sugar was removed from people’s diets in the UK by a £300m tax system? A lot less than you think. CC-licensed photo by Uwe Hermann 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.

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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.

TikTok allowing under-13s to keep accounts, evidence suggests • The Guardian

Hibaq Farah and Dan Milmo:

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TikTok faces questions over safeguards for child users after a Guardian investigation found that moderators were being told to allow under-13s to stay on the platform if they claimed their parents were overseeing their accounts.

In one example seen by the Guardian, a user who declared themselves to be 12 in their account bio, under TikTok’s minimum age of 13, was allowed to stay on the platform because their user profile stated the account was managed by their parents.

The internal communication sent in the autumn involved a quality analyst – someone who is responsible for any queries related to moderating video queues – who was asked by a moderator whether they should ban the user’s account.

The advice from the TikTok quality analyst was that if the account bio said it was managed by parents then moderators could allow the account to stay on the platform. The message was sent into a group chat with more than 70 moderators, who are responsible for looking at content mostly from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

It has also been alleged that moderators have been told in meetings that if a parent is in the background of a seemingly underage video, or if the bio says an account is managed by a parent, those accounts can stay on the platform.

Suspected cases of underage account holders are sent to an “underage” queue for further moderation. Moderators have two options: to ban, which would mean the removal of the account, or to approve, allowing the account to stay on the platform.

A staff member at TikTok said they believed it was “incredibly easy to avoid getting banned for being underage. Once a kid learns that this works, they will tell their friends.”

TikTok said it was false to claim that children under 13 were allowed on the platform if they stated in their bio that the account was managed by an adult.

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Who you going to believe, your lying eyes or TikTok’s PR person?
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Next Beeper Mini fix requires users to have a Mac • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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The developers behind Beeper Mini are continuing with their effort to make iMessage for Android function despite Apple’s mitigations, and the latest “fix” requires Beeper Mini users to have access to a Mac.

On Reddit, the Beeper Mini team says that the Mac-based fix coming on December 20 stabilizes iMessage for Beeper Cloud and Mini, and it “works well” and “is very reliable.”

It is unclear how many Android users have a Mac or have a friend with a Mac to rely on, but the fix requires using a Mac to connect to iMessage on Beeper. According to Beeper Mini’s developers, registration data from an actual Mac has to be sent to Apple to use iMessage on Beeper. Beeper has been using its own Mac servers to provide that information to Apple, but that resulted in thousands of Beeper users having the same registration info, which was an “easy target for Apple.”

The Beeper update will instead generate unique registration data for each Mac, making it harder for Apple to tell which users are accessing iMessage through an Android device.

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Oh good grief. Don’t tell me, the next forced update to Beeper will require users to have an iPhone.
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A bitter pill for public health • The Critic Magazine

Christopher Snowdon:

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claiming that the UK sugar tax had led to a 10% reduction in the amount of sugar consumed in soft drinks. Although one of its authors admitted that a decline of this magnitude “might sound modest”, it was presented as a win for public health. The preposterous pressure group Action on Sugar called for the tax to be “extended to other categories” and the 10% figure soon found its way into the National Food Strategy and several World Health Organisation reports.

Last week the study was retracted, along with an editorial titled “UK sugar tax hits the sweet spot” that had been published in the British Medical Journal claiming that the tax was “working exactly as intended”.

It turns out that tax has not been not working exactly as intended. In a new version of the study, the authors estimate that the decline in sugar consumption from soft drinks was just 2.7%, barely a quarter of the original figure, and that in contrast to the original study, which claimed that there had been no change in soft drink sales, the volume of soft drinks rose by 2.6%.

The decline in sugar consumption was originally said to be 30 grams per household per week. In the new study, it is estimated to be 8 grams per household per week. That works out at less than two calories per person per day. To get an idea of how little that is, get a slice of bread and take the tiniest nibble off one of the corners. That is the amount of calories reduced by a tax that costs consumers £300m a year.

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Snowdon tends to start from a place of “this won’t work” about such taxes used to change behaviour, but in this case he turns out to have been dead right.
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Inside The New York Times’ big bet on games • Vanity Fair

Charlotte Klein:

»

n the ninth floor of the New York Times headquarters, high above the bustling newsroom, a group of editors are doing the Sunday crossword. Or, rather, they’re undoing it. The editors already accepted this submission, one of the 150 to 200 puzzles arriving weekly, and are now working through it clue by clue—questioning, waffling, rewriting. They nitpick and fact-check. They debate the timelessness of a hint; whether the solver’s reaction will be Oh, I guess versus Aha!

…Joel Fagliano, sporting a New York Times T-shirt, a hoodie, and Allbirds sneakers, hunches over his computer and clicks around the grid while reading each clue and its answer aloud. Fagliano, known for never letting a meeting run long, works efficiently but also lets the group nerd out when appropriate. Like now. “All right, ‘Norwegian city depicted in’—oh really? I didn’t know Oslo was in the background of The Scream,” Fagliano says. He pulls up an image of the iconic Edvard Munch painting. “Hard to say what’s back there,” he chuckles, squinting at the ghostly image. “It seems like it’s sort of a whirling.”

The other editors are similarly skeptical as to whether the city of Oslo, the answer to the proposed clue, is clearly identifiable in the painting. “It’s just a blur. Maybe Munch says it was. I know it’s in Oslo,” says Iverson, referring to the physical location of the work. “If the painting is in an Oslo art gallery, I like that,” Ezersky says. Fagliano, still googling, adds, “This says they located the spot to a fjord overlooking Oslo.”

«

Sweet mother of god. 1) That is TOO MANY PEOPLE. American newspapers suffer from chronic overemployment, and this is a classic case. The Guardian, whose crosswords have a world-beating reputation, has one or two people who check the crossword. 2) That crossword clue is atrocious. You’d either know the answer, or guess it, but that’s an appalling way to clue anything.
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Is this the end of geofence warrants? • Electronic Frontier Foundation

Jennifer Lynch is the EFF’s general counsel:

»

Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if not impossible—for Google to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant, a change we’ve been asking Google to implement for years.

Geofence warrants require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or devices located within a geographic area during a time period specified by law enforcement. These warrants violate the Fourth Amendment because they are not targeted to a particular individual or device, like a typical warrant for digital communications. The only “evidence” supporting a geofence warrant is that a crime occurred in a particular area, and the perpetrator likely carried a cell phone that shared location data with Google. For this reason, they inevitably sweep up potentially hundreds of people who have no connection to the crime under investigation—and could turn each of those people into a suspect.

Geofence warrants have been possible because Google collects and stores specific user location data (which Google calls “Location History” data) altogether in a massive database called “Sensorvault.” Google reported several years ago that geofence warrants make up 25% of all warrants it receives each year.

Google’s announcement outlined three changes to how it will treat Location History data. First, going forward, this data will be stored, by default, on a user’s device, instead of with Google in the cloud. Second, it will be set by default to delete after three months; currently Google stores the data for at least 18 months. Finally, if users choose to back up their data to the cloud, Google will “automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google.”

«

It’s a sort of arms race between legal loopholes and technological ones.
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Studios are loosening their reluctance to send old shows back to Netflix • The New York Times

John Koblin and Nicole Sperling:

»

For years, entertainment company executives happily licensed classic movies and television shows to Netflix. Both sides enjoyed the spoils: Netflix received popular content like “Friends” and Disney’s “Moana,” which satisfied its ever-growing subscriber base, and it sent bags of cash back to the companies.

But around five years ago, executives realized they were “selling nuclear weapons technology” to a powerful rival, as Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, put it. Studios needed those same beloved movies and shows for the streaming services they were building from scratch, and fueling Netflix’s rise was only hurting them. The content spigots were, in large part, turned off.

Then the harsh realities of streaming began to emerge.

Confronting sizable debt burdens and the fact that most streaming services still don’t make money, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have begun to soften their do-not-sell-to-Netflix stances. The companies are still holding back their most popular content — movies from the Disney-owned Star Wars and Marvel universes and blockbuster original series like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” aren’t going anywhere — but dozens of other films like “Dune” and “Prometheus” and series like “Young Sheldon” are being sent to the streaming behemoth in return for much-needed cash. And Netflix is once again benefiting.

Ted Sarandos, one of Netflix’s co-chief executives, said at an investor conference last week that the “availability to license has opened up a lot more than it was in the past,” arguing that the studios’ earlier decision to hold back content was “unnatural.”

“They’ve always built the studios to license,” he said.

As David Decker, the content sales president for Warner Bros. Discovery, said: “Licensing is becoming in vogue again. It never went away, but there’s more of a willingness to license things again. It generates money, and it gets content viewed and seen.”

«

This story could have been headlined “Studios are rediscovering their eagerness to make money from their content, who cares where it’s shown”. It also shows that Netflix has won the streaming wars. Now it’s just a question of which ones drop out and which ones can find a niche in which to thrive.
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Carter-Ruck and the Ponzi scheme • Tax Policy

Dan Neidle:

»

OneCoin was one of the biggest scams in history. There was no “mining”. There was no blockchain. The “exchange” presented fake prices, designed to make investors think the price of OneCoin was rising when, in reality, there was no price at all. OneCoin was a fraud from the start – a Ponzi [pyramid] scheme, where new investors’ money was used to pay old investors. It also had pyramid scheme features – existing investors were incentivised to sell packages to new investors, who’d pay up to €118,000 for worthless “training courses” accompanied by “tokens” that could be exchanged for OneCoins.

OneCoin it failed spectacularly in 2017, and its executives are all now either in jail or in hiding. Around $4bn was stolen from millions of investors. Its founder, Ruja Ignatova, is one of the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives.

Carter-Ruck is possibly the UK’s most well-known libel-specialist law firm. At some point in 2016 it decided to act for OneCoin and Ruja Ignatova. How did it make that decision?

I was a partner in a large law firm for many years. Before a partner could act for a new client, a team went through procedures to check the bona fides of that client and their business. This included searches of the internet and other open source materials, as well as searches of private databases. Partly this was about protecting the firm’s reputation. But also it was about the serious consequences for a law firm which facilitated criminal activity or received money that was the proceeds of crime. I am not giving away any secrets by saying this, because these are procedures followed by all UK law firms.

What would reasonable due diligence have found in mid-2016, if we limit ourselves to material available on the public internet?

«

Neidle’s dissection of this, and letters sent to various publications by Carter-Ruck, really is a delight. As a side note on the whole business, there’s a great deal of suspicion that Ignatova is now resting at the bottom of several lakes and/or concrete piles, as OneCoin is thought by some to have been a reservoir for some extremely shady money.

I wonder if Carter-Ruck’s bills were paid, and in what currency.
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Facebook is being overrun with stolen, AI-generated images that people think are real • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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In the photo, a man kneels in an outdoor sawmill next to his painstaking work: An intricate wooden carving of his bulldog, which he proudly gazes at. “Made it with my own hands,” the Facebook caption reads. The image has 1,300 likes, 405 comments, and 47 shares. “Beautiful work of art,” one of the comments reads. “You have an AMAZING talent!,” another says. “Nice work, love it!” “Awesome work keep it up.” 

This incredible work of art, a “wooden monument to my dog,” has been posted dozens of times across dozens of engagement bait Facebook pages. But every time, the man and the dog are different. Sometimes the dog is hyperrealistic. Sometimes the bulldog is a German Shepherd. Sometimes the man’s hair is slicked back, sometimes it stands up. Sometimes the man sits on the other side of the dog. Sometimes the man looks Latino, other times he looks white; clearly, it is a different man, and a different dog, in most of the images. 

Depending on the image, it is obvious, to me, that the man and the dog are not real. The dog often looks weirdly polygonal, or like some wood carving filter has been applied to an image of a real dog. Sometimes the dog’s ear has obvious artifacts associated with AI-generated images. Other times, it’s the man who looks fake. Variations of this picture are being posted all over Facebook by a series of gigantic meme pages with names like “Go Story,” “Amazing World,” “Did you know?” “Follow me,” “Avokaddo,” and so on.

Universally, the comment sections of these pages feature hundreds of people who have no idea that these are AI-generated and are truly inspired by the dog carving. A version of this image posted on Dogs 4 life has 1 million likes, 39,000 comments, and 17,000 shares. The Dogs 4 life account has spammed links to buy cheap, dog-branded stuff to the top of the comments section.

In many ways, this is a tale as old as time: people lie and steal content online in exchange for likes, influence and money all the time. But the spread of this type of content on Facebook over the last several months has shown that the once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.

It also shows Facebook is doing essentially nothing to help its users decipher real content from AI-generated content masquerading as real content, and that huge masses of Facebook users are completely unprepared for our AI-generated future.

«

And that last paragraph is the point, really. (Also, just as frustrating: there is a real man and the wooden dog he made.) How shocking of course that it should be Facebook’s denizens who aren’t willing to dig just a little bit to confirm whether something is real.
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Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore – The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day.

The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the media have written about how the internet has started to feel “placeless” and more ephemeral, even like it is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, “the age of social media is ending,” and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe artificial intelligence is flooding the internet with synthetic information and killing the old web. Behind these theories is the same general perception: Understanding what is actually happening online has become harder than ever.

…Consider TikTok for a second—arguably the most vibrant platform on the internet. Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East or incendiary commentary on the mass bombings in Gaza? Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend or gossip about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips racking up as many as half a billion views each—aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man. As a Verge headline noted earlier this month, “TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen.” Other platforms have the same issue: Facebook’s most recent “Widely Viewed Content Report” is full of vapid, pixelated, mostly repackaged memes and videos getting tens of millions of views.

The dynamic extends beyond social media too. Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers for most of the TV shows and movies in its library—more than 18,000 titles in all. The attempt at transparency caused confusion among some viewers: Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, which was streamed for 812 million hours globally. “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows – legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.

«

I thought I’d never seen The Night Agent, and then recalled that I’d watched the first five minutes or so and filed it in the “White House CIA conspiracy murder lone good guy” mental drawer, along with stuff like Salt (OK female lead but was written for Tom Cruise), White House Down, Designated Survivor, and so on. But the wider question is the big one: we’re now in a position where we’re trying to understand everything in the world, and that’s impossible.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Future Apple Watch buyers might have to take blood oxygen readings using more traditional methods if a trade ban is enforced. CC-licensed photo by Chic Bee on Flickr.

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

A selection of 8 links for you. Giving it 110%. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple halting Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales: Here’s why • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple has announced that it will soon halt sales of its flagship Apple Watch models in the United States.

The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.

The move comes following an ITC ruling as part of a long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo around the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Series 9 will no longer be available to order from Apple’s website in the US after 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 21. In-store inventory will no longer be available from Apple retail locations after December 24.

The International Trade Commission announced its ruling in October, upholding a judge’s decision from January. This sent the case to the Biden administration for a 60-day Presidential Review Period.

During this process, President Biden could veto the ruling, although this has not yet occurred. The Presidential Review Period expires on December 25, and Apple is making this announcement today to “preemptively” take steps to comply with the ITC’s decision.

Apple says that the ITC’s ban only impacts sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 because those devices offer blood oxygen monitoring capabilities. The lower-end Apple Watch SE, which lacks this sensor, is unaffected and will remain available for sale. 

The ITC’s decision only prohibits Apple from selling the affected Apple models. For now, this means the devices will remain available for purchase from other outlets including Amazon and Best Buy. Our friends over at 9to5Toys also have details on some get-the-while-can Apple Watch deals.

However, the order does block all Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 imports to the United States after December 25. At this point, Apple would also be prohibited from selling those devices to resellers, as well. So if the ruling is upheld, it could subsequently impact Apple Watch availability for other retailers as well. 

Meanwhile, any Apple Watch with a blood oxygen sensor that has already been sold is unaffected by today’s news. The blood oxygen sensor first debuted with the Apple Watch Series 6 in 2020.

«

Unwary you looks at this and thinks “wow, Apple is really screwed. No more Watch sales.” But as Neil Cybart points out, look closer: Apple’s basically telling everyone who wants a Watch to BUY IT NOW. The Christmas deadline for Biden to waive the ruling is close, but conveniently placed: imagine if it had been on December 18th, or 8th. But the day when the shops are all shut? Sail on.
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Are AI language models in hell? • Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan is an author and commentator:

»

You can get into deep debates about the role of language in the human mind, but no one would suggest that it repre sents the totality of our expe ri ence. Humans obviously enjoy a rich sensorium — one that goes way beyond the “big five”, by the way. Our language draws on these sensations; vibrates against them.

We have a world to use language in, a world to compare language against.

There’s the cosmic joke about the fish:

»

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then even tu ally one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

«

Now, imagine one language model saying to another: “What the hell is text?”

It gets worse. A language model’s expe ri ence of text isn’t visual; it has nothing to do with the bounce of hand written script, the cut of a cool font, the layout of a page. For a language model, text is normalized: an X is an X is an X, all the same.

Of course, an X is an X, in some respects. But when you, as a human, read text, you receive a dose of extra infor ma tion — always! The mono spaced grid of code tells you something (along with the syntax highlighting, of course). The “nothing to see here” of a neo-grotesque font tells you something. The wash of a web page’s muted back ground color tells you something.

Language models don’t receive any of this infor ma tion. We strip it all away and bleach the text pale before pouring it down their gullets.

It gets WORSE. How does time pass for a language model? The clock of its universe ticks token by token: each one a single beat, indivisible. And each tick is not only a demarcation, but a demand: to speak.

Think of the drum beating the tempo for the galley slaves.

The model’s entire world is an evenly-spaced stream of tokens — a relent less ticker tape. Out here in the real world, the tape often stops; a human operator considers their next request; but the language model doesn’t expe ri ence that pause.

For the language model, time is language, and language is time. This, for me, is the most hellish and horrifying realization.

We made a world out of language alone, and we abandoned them to it.

«

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Adobe abandons $20bn acquisition of Figma • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

Following mounting pressure from regulators in the UK and EU, Adobe and Figma announced on Monday that both companies are mutually terminating their merger agreement, which would have seen Adobe acquire the Figma product design platform for $20bn.

As a result of the termination, Adobe will be required to pay Figma a reverse termination fee of $1bn in cash.

“Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” said Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen in a statement. “While Adobe and Figma shared a vision to jointly redefine the future of creativity and productivity, we continue to be well positioned to capitalize on our massive market opportunity and mission to change the world through personalized digital experiences.”

Regulators cited Adobe’s near-monopoly in the design software market as they pushed back on the deal. By purchasing Figma, a fast-growing product design platform that’s now more popular than Adobe’s rival XD application, regulators worried that Adobe would harm innovation that could have occurred should Figma be allowed to flourish independently. Designers have expressed similar worries since the merger was announced in September 2022, but Adobe pushed back on those claims throughout the various ongoing probes.

In a letter dated December 14th, Adobe rejected remedies suggested by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to approve the merger following an in-depth antitrust probe.

«

Many toys being thrown out of the American pram, but allowing yet another tech company to become absolutely gigantic through another industry vertical seems a bad move (or lack of one).
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‘Hydrogen village’ plan in Redcar abandoned after local opposition • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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A plan to test the use of hydrogen to heat homes in a village in the north-east of England has been abandoned after months of strong opposition from concerned residents.

The government said the Redcar “hydrogen village” scheme, which had been expected to start in 2025, wouldnot go ahead because of insufficient local hydrogen production for the trial to replace the home gas supplies with the low-carbon alternative.

The decision ends months of protest against the scheme locals feared could raise energy bills and prove unsafe. A similar decision was taken in July, when plans to pilot hydrogen in Whitby, Cheshire, were scrapped after local opposition. Some residents raised concerns that they were at risk of becoming unwilling “lab rats” for a technology that would never take off in the UK.

The government is due to make a decision about whether its net zero climate plans will include replacing household gas with hydrogen by 2026. It will assess evidence from a pilot in Fife in Scotland, and similar schemes in Europe.

Many experts, including the government’s infrastructure tsars, believe that most households should switch to electric heating options, such as heat pumps, while hydrogen is used in heavy industry.

On Wednesday, the UK government formally backed plans to ban gas and “hydrogen-ready” boilers from new-build homes in England from 2025. [ie those homes will have heat pumps] Claire Coutinho, the energy security secretary, said: “Hydrogen presents a massive economic opportunity for the UK, unlocking over 12,000 jobs and up to £11bn of investment by 2030.”

The government said on Thursday it would back 11 new projects that planned to make “green hydrogen”, which is produced by splitting water molecules with renewable electricity. Other hydrogen types include blue hydrogen, which is extracted from fossil gas using carbon capture technology to prevent producing emissions.

«

The latter should be called “brown hydrogen” (why isn’t it? Who got to make that decision?), but anyway: this seems to be a quixotic attempt to make hydrogen happen, but hydrogen just doesn’t want to cooperate.
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September 2020: EV supplier Nikola: how to parlay an ocean of lies into a partnership with the largest auto OEM in America • Hindenburg Research

“Short-selling activist firm” Hindenburg Research in September 2020:

»

• Today, we reveal why we believe Nikola is an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies over the course of its founder and executive chairman Trevor Milton’s career.

• We have gathered extensive evidence—including recorded phone calls, text messages, private emails and behind-the-scenes photographs—detailing dozens of false statements by Nikola founder Trevor Milton. We have never seen this level of deception at a public company, especially of this size.

• Milton has managed to parlay these false statements made over the course of a decade into a ~$20 billion public company. He has inked partnerships with some of the top auto companies in the world, all desperate to catch up to Tesla and to harness the EV wave.

• We examine how Nikola got its early start and show how Milton misled partners into signing agreements by falsely claiming to have extensive proprietary technology.

•We reveal how, in the face of growing skepticism over the functionality of its truck, Nikola staged a video called “Nikola One in Motion” which showed the semi-truck cruising on a road at a high rate of speed. Our investigation of the site and text messages from a former employee reveal that the video was an elaborate ruse—Nikola had the truck towed to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill.

«

Monday: Milton sentenced to four years in prison. Short sellers don’t mess about.
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Musk’s X hit with EU’s first investigation of Digital Services Act violations • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

The European Union has opened a formal investigation into whether Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter) violated the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6% of global revenue. A European Commission announcement on Monday said the agency “opened formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.”

This is the commission’s first formal investigation under the Digital Services Act, which applies to large online platforms and has requirements on content moderation and transparency. The step has been in the works since at least October, when a formal request for information was sent amid reports of widespread Israel/Hamas disinformation.

The European Commission today said it “decided to open formal infringement proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act” after reviewing X’s replies to the request for information on topics including “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel.” The commission said the investigation will focus on dissemination of illegal content, the effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on X, transparency, and “a suspected deceptive design of the user interface.”

The illegal content probe will focus on “risk assessment and mitigation measures” and “the functioning of the notice and action mechanism for illegal content” that is mandated by the DSA. The commission said this will be evaluated “in light of X’s content moderation resources,” a reference to the deep staff cuts made by Musk since purchasing Twitter in October 2022.

«

Musk peevishly responded “Are you taking action against other social media? Because if you have those issues with this platform, and none are perfect, the others are much worse.”

Unfortunately, no Community Note on it yet.
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Seven months inside an online scam labour camp • The New York Times

Isabell Qian:

»

He had been promised a generous salary. A better work-life balance. A chance to live in the vibrant metropolis of Bangkok. His fluency in English would be put to good use as a translator for an e-commerce company, the recruiter had said.

More than anything else, Neo Lu, a 28-year-old Chinese office worker, believed the gig would be the new start he needed to save money for his dream of emigrating to the West. So in June of last year, he said his goodbyes, flew to Thailand and headed for his new job.

But when he arrived, his head was spinning from the scorching sun — and the feeling that something was very wrong. Instead of an office building in a city, Mr. Lu had been dumped at what looked like a labour camp haphazardly built on a patch of jungle and muddy fields.

Within the compound were spartan, low-rise concrete buildings with barred windows and doors. Two men in combat fatigues, carrying rifles, guarded the main entrance. High walls and fences topped with razor wire surrounded the compound, clearly meant to keep not only outsiders at bay, but also those inside from leaving.

As Mr. Lu quickly realized, there was, in fact, no translation job. No e-commerce company, either. It had all been part of a ruse, starting with a posting on a Chinese job forum, perfected by human traffickers to get people like him to travel to Thailand.

The traffickers had led Mr. Lu across the Moei River, a muddy waterway on Thailand’s porous border, and smuggled him, without his knowledge, into a remote corner of Myanmar. There, they handed him over to a Chinese gang that had paid for him.

Mr. Lu had essentially been abducted and sold into a criminal enterprise, far away from everything he knew.

That was how he became one of hundreds of thousands of people who have been trafficked into criminal gangs and trapped in what one research group has called a “criminal cancer” of exploitation, violence and fraud that has taken root in Southeast Asia’s poorest nations.

«

The “labour” involved running the “pig butchering” scams – where rich westerners are conned into sending more and more money to scams by people who pop up in their WhatsApp or similar messages.
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Bus times, stops and live maps • Bustimes

»

bustimes.org is the unofficial home of bus, coach, tram and ferry transport information

Search for places, operators or routes

Track buses and find bus stops

«

Made by Josh Goodwin: impressive. I do recall being in a ministerial meeting some time not long after 2010 which Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt were already attending, and the topic of bus timetables being free data coming up. Good to see it got past that hurdle, but having more buses would also be a good thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Stuck in a boring meeting? The CIA’s predecessor wrote a guide on how to make them as ineffective as possible during the Second World War. CC-licensed photo by Travis Wise on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Just updating the app, back soon. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

These AI-generated news anchors are freaking me out • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

»

startup Channel 1’s vision of a near-future where AI-generated avatars read you the news was a bit of a shock to the system. The company’s recent proof-of-concept “showcase” newscast reveals just how far AI-generated videos of humans have come in a short time and how those realistic avatars could shake up a lot more than just the job market for talking heads.

To be clear, Channel 1 isn’t trying to fool people with “deepfakes” of existing news anchors or anything like that. In the first few seconds of its sample newscast, it identifies its talking heads as a “team of AI-generated reporters.” A few seconds later, one of those talking heads explains further: “You can hear us and see our lips moving, but no one was recorded saying what we’re all saying. I’m powered by sophisticated systems behind the scenes.”

Even with those kinds of warnings, I found I had to constantly remind myself that the “people” I was watching deliver the news here were only “based on real people who have been compensated for use of their likeness,” as Deadline reports (how much they were compensated will probably be of great concern to actors who recently went on strike in part over the issue of AI likenesses). Everything from the lip-syncing to the intonations to subtle gestures and body movements of these Channel 1 anchors gives an eerily convincing presentation of a real newscaster talking into the camera.

Sure, if you look closely, there are a few telltale anomalies that expose these reporters as computer creations—slight video distortions around the mouth, say, or overly repetitive hand gestures, or a nonsensical word emphasis choice. But those signs are so small that they would be easy to miss at a casual glance or on a small screen like that on a phone.

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This is the future, isn’t it. Disinformation doesn’t have to just like on TikTok.
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Ukraine war: How TikTok fakes pushed Russian lies to millions • BBC News

Olga Robinson, Adam Robinson & Shayan Sardarizadeh:

»

A Russian propaganda campaign involving thousands of fake accounts on TikTok spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine has been uncovered by the BBC.

Its videos routinely attract millions of views and have the apparent aim of undermining Western support.
Users in several European countries have been subjected to false claims that senior Ukrainian officials and their relatives bought luxury cars or villas abroad after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

The fake TikTok videos played a part in the dismissal last September of Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, according to his daughter Anastasiya Shteinhauz.

The BBC has uncovered nearly 800 fake accounts since July. TikTok says it was already investigating the issue and says it has taken down more than 12,000 fake accounts originating in Russia.

Ms Shteinhauz told the BBC she found out about the Russian disinformation campaign when she received a surprising call from her husband while on holiday.

“OK, so now you’ve got a villa in Madrid,” he told her, before sending a link to a TikTok video narrated by an AI-generated voice that claimed she had bought a home in the Spanish capital.

…The videos sent to Ms Shteinhauz belong to a vast Russia-based network of fake TikTok accounts posing as real users from Germany, France, Poland, Israel and Ukraine.

Using a combination of hashtag searches and TikTok’s own recommendations, BBC Verify was able to trace hundreds of similar videos targeting dozens of Ukrainian officials.

«

So the information war goes on too.
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Modern Britain is a scene from ‘Slow Horses’ • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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[Mick] Herron’s spy-novel series [beginning with “Slow Horses”] is now 13 years old, the same age as Britain’s floundering Conservative government. After years of obscurity, his books are now best sellers, and Apple has so far adapted three for television under the name Slow Horses, after the first novel in the series. The reviews of the show’s newest season—which premiered late last month and is based on the third novel, Real Tigers—have been adulatory.

I live in Britain. Watching Herron’s stories unfold on-screen, I’m struck by what has—and hasn’t—happened since the first book in the series appeared. The Conservative Party has achieved Brexit and precious little else since 2010, leaving the country feeling pinched, and pessimistic, and stuck.

…When I first read Herron’s books, I wondered if the murk and mildew of Slough House were an elaborate cover. What better disguise for a great spy than masquerading as a terrible one? But the decrepit building isn’t a novelist’s ruse; the agents working there really are no-hopers, misfits, and has-beens cast out of Regent’s Park, MI5’s gleaming headquarters. “The Park” is everything Slough House is not—a high-tech paradise of ambitious Millennials wearing sharp suits and headset mics. Here is the difference between Britain’s self-image as an international colossus and the reality of its poor productivity and stagnant living standards.

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A delicious read. (The link should be free.)
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Seven things we learned analyzing 515m Wordles • The New York Times

Josh Katz and Aatish Bhatia:

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Millions of people play Wordle every day, and share, discuss and debate how they tried to win.

For the first time, we’ve analyzed how players performed in half a billion of those Wordle games over the past year and compared their results with the strategies that our WordleBot recommends.

Here are seven things we learned:

1. Of the top 30 starting words, ADIEU is the most popular but least efficient. Many, many words have been written about the best opening word for Wordle. Answering this question was, in fact, one of the motivations behind WordleBot’s development. In its robot brain, a handful of words — SLATE, CRANE, TRACE — are given the bot’s seal of approval as leading to the solution in the fewest guesses on average.

But for human Wordle players, the most popular opening word by some margin is ADIEU, with AUDIO, another four-vowel word, not far behind.

…3. More people solve Wordle on their first guess than can be explained by chance. …about one game in every 250, a reader gets the answer right on the first try. This is much more often than you’d expect if you just left things to chance, although not necessarily every case is outright cheating.

Some may be using a new window to make additional guesses after failing to solve the puzzle in six tries. [This is outright cheating by my rules – Overspill Ed.]

…5. The toughest words? Keep an eye on J. The hardest words to solve started with J, ended in Y or had a double letter somewhere. The hardest of all the words last year, JAZZY, has all three.

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I’m amazed anyone thinks it will help to figure out the vowels; getting the consonants narrows it more quickly, so you want a starting word that has the most – four, or five if you count Y. To forestall boredom, I work through the alphabet for the opening word’s starting letter. 50 days so far 🤞
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EPA: radiation from coal ash poses cancer risk • Earthjustice

Kathryn McGrath:

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently published a draft risk assessment stating that the health risks of radioactivity of coal ash are much greater than previously estimated.

This prompted more than 150 public interest groups to send a letter today urging the EPA to ban the widespread use of toxic coal ash in place of soil for construction and landscaping projects in residential areas.

The letter describes the draft risk assessment: “Radioactivity is released from coal ash in subsurface deposits when ash is used as fill. EPA found cancer risks exceeding health standards when coal ash is mixed with soil at ratios that include very small amounts of coal ash (1-2% of the soil mixture). When coal ash constitutes 8% of the soil mixture, EPA found cancer risks above 1 in 10,000 — the threshold for EPA regulation. These findings are alarming because coal ash used as fill is often not diluted nor covered with soil to shield its radioactivity.”

People may be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in coal ash that has been used as fill in neighborhoods, backyards, parks, and public areas, including playgrounds and school grounds. Exposure to excess levels of radiation causes cancer. Millions of tons of coal ash are used every year as a substitute for clean fill, and there are few restrictions and little to no oversight by EPA as to how it is used.

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Easily overlooked how coal is dirty and dangerous in multiple ways.
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The 1944 CIA guide to sabotaging meetings • Authentic Comms Strategic Consultancy

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Who wrote the CIA ‘sabotaging meetings’ guide and why?

Well, it wasn’t actually the CIA.

It was written by the OSS, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, who created it during the run up to the Second World War, to instruct and guide sympathetic Axis citizens to stir up sh*t (technical phrase).

The general idea was to create chaos at the coal face; empower potential allies and equip disgruntled citizens with the tools to disturb and disrupt businesses and organisations, with an apparent aim to cause rumbling difficulties in the economy.

In an eerie way, this rebellious guidance from nearly 80 years ago (!), resonates strongly today – think gerrymandering or deflection.

Some instructions are out of date, as you’d expect, while others sounded oddly familiar. The section entitled ‘General Interference with Organizations and Productions’ is bang on:

• Make “speeches” – Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

• Slow it down – advocate caution, avoid haste

• Where possible refer all matters to committees (never fewer than five) for “consideration”

• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

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I can’t find it now, but the New Yorker had a cartoon recently suggesting “the best way to keep meetings short” in which every participant had to be in the plank position.
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Why scientists are making transparent wood • Knowable Magazine

Jude Coleman:

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Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to create transparent wood, and he published his technique in a niche wood technology journal. The 1992 paper remained the last word on see-through wood for more than a decade, until a researcher named Lars Berglund stumbled across it.

Berglund was inspired by Fink’s discovery, but not for botanical reasons. The materials scientist, who works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, specializes in polymer composites and was interested in creating a more robust alternative to transparent plastic. And he wasn’t the only one interested in wood’s virtues. Across the ocean, researchers at the University of Maryland were busy on a related goal: harnessing the strength of wood for nontraditional purposes.

Now, after years of experiments, the research of these groups is starting to bear fruit. Transparent wood could soon find uses in super-strong screens for smartphones; in soft, glowing light fixtures; and even as structural features, such as color-changing windows.

“I truly believe this material has a promising future,” says Qiliang Fu, a wood nanotechnologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China who worked in Berglund’s lab as a graduate student.

Wood is made up of countless little vertical channels, like a tight bundle of straws bound together with glue. These tube-shaped cells transport water and nutrients throughout a tree, and when the tree is harvested and the moisture evaporates, pockets of air are left behind. To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues. After bleaching lignin’s color away or otherwise removing it, a milky-white skeleton of hollow cells remains.

This skeleton is still opaque, because the cell walls bend light to a different degree than the air in the cell pockets does — a value called a refractive index. Filling the air pockets with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls renders the wood transparent.

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Marketer sparks panic with claims it uses smart devices to eavesdrop on people • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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a marketing company called CMG Local Solutions sparked panic recently by alluding that it has access to people’s private conversations by tapping into data gathered by the microphones on their phones, TVs, and other personal electronics, as first reported by 404 Media on Thursday. The marketing firm had said it uses these personal conversations for ad targeting.

CMG’s Active Listening website starts with a banner promoting an accurate but worrisome statement, “It’s true. Your devices are listening to you.”

A November 28 blog post described Active Listening technology as using AI to “detect relevant conversations via smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices.” As such, CMG claimed that it knows “when and what to tune into.”

The blog also shamelessly highlighted advertisers’ desire to hear every single whisper made that could help them target campaigns: “This is a world where no pre-purchase murmurs go unanalyzed, and the whispers of consumers become a tool for you to target, retarget, and conquer your local market.”

The marketing company didn’t thoroughly detail how it backs its claims. An archived version of the Active Listening site provided a vague breakdown of how Active Listening purportedly works.

…In a statement emailed to Ars Technica, Cox Media Group said that its advertising tools include “third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by various social media and other applications then packaged and resold to data servicers.” The statement continues:

»

Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users, and can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.

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I noticed this website a couple of weeks ago, poked around a bit, and couldn’t figure out whether it was a spoof or overstated reality. Feels like the latter.
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Microsoft inches closer to glass storage breakthrough — but only Azure customers will benefit from it • TechRadar

Keumars Afifi-Sabet:

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Microsoft has released a paper for the widely-anticipated glass-based storage technology it’s backing to replace the conventional technology that’s fitted into the best hard drives and best SSDs out there today.

The 16-page academic paper, presented at the 29th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, outlines the principles behind the company’s plans to build a longlasting and highly efficient storage systems.

Made from quartz glass, the storage units will be primed for use in the cloud – which means Azure customers will be the first to benefit, and likely the only ones to benefit so long as the technology is embryonic in nature.

Project Silica has been years in the making – with Microsoft teaing a prototype as far back as 2019. It’s since expanded on its work ahead of designing a system that works in a remarkably similar fashion to the ceramics-based storage that Cerabyte is building.

“This paper presents Silica: the first cloud storage system for archival data underpinned by quartz glass, an extremely resilient media that allows data to be left in situ indefinitely,” the authors wrote. 

“The hardware and software of Silica have been co-designed and co-optimized from the media up to the service level with sustainability as a primary objective.”

Data is written in a square glass platter with ultrafast femtosecond lasers through voxels. These are permanent modifications to the physical structure of the glass, and allow for multiple bits of data to be written in layers across the surface of the glass. These layers are then stacked vertically in their hundreds.

To read data, they employ polarization microscopy technology to image the platter, while the read drive scans sectors in a Z-pattern. The images are then sent to be processed and decoded, which leans on machine learning model to convert analog signals to digital data.

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Was sounding great until that “machine learning” bit at the end. What happens in the remote future when those machine learning models aren’t available for whatever reason?
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Time for a complete re-think • Irish Golfer

Ivan Morris, who is a scratch (zero-handicap) golfer, on the proposed changes to golf balls in 2030 to make them fly less far:

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In modern golf, the ability to hit the same shot over and over is more important than the ability to play different (types of) shots. Top players must be bored to tears with the game they are asked to play for a living, and it is no fun to watch either. There was a time when the driver was the most difficult club in the bag to control. Now, it’s so forgiving one can blaze away without hardly a care in the world. The game has been manipulated by the ball and equipment manufacturers to a state where it has become too easy for pros while remaining more or less as difficult as ever for the club golfer.

Rory [McIlroy’s] best drives would need to be 50 yards shorter for him to notice any difference, while amateur players who shoot 80+ should be left alone to use all of the game-improvement technology they can get their hands on. I don’t understand why the manufacturers campaigned against bifurcation. It’s the 80+ shooters who buy their overpriced products, while the elites are given it for free. Plus, the 80+ shooters outnumber the pros by 100:1.

The manufacturers do not own the game and the game does not owe the manufacturers anything. It’s the manufactures who owe the game. The manufacturers must comply with whatever rules apply if they want to continue to exist. The USGA and R&A should make whatever rules they think are best for the whole game, not one cohort of it and certainly not for the manufacturers.

Meanwhile, the PGA Tour is fighting for its life. Having to deal with a super-rich, disruptive rival who is driving costs beyond what can be afforded. There is discontent everywhere. Amongst greedy pros who want to be paid more and more and sponsors who are being asked for more money for a diminished product. With charitable donations a certain casualty, what will the attitude of loyal, unpaid, and indispensable volunteers be? There is no doubt the PGA Tour model has been badly damaged, if not completely broken.

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The Ladies’ PGA (when, one wonders, will it become the WPGA?) also doesn’t like the proposed ball change. It’s interesting how some sports are resistant to technology improvement, and some aren’t. Tennis and squash have the same court dimensions as a century ago, and both have only put small limits on technology (eg racket size and stringing patterns). Golf, on the other hand, keeps redefining itself: limits on club length, on putter shape, and now balls.
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Planting trees seems like a great way to tackle climate change – but preserving forests might be even more important. CC-licensed photo by Dmitry Burdakov 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. One more week to go! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Rishi Sunak considers curbing social media use for under-16s • The Guardian

Aletha Adu and Dan Milmo:

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Rishi Sunak is considering limiting social media access for teenagers under the age of 16 to try to protect them from online harm, with reports suggesting a potential ban is on the cards.

The government is considering further action despite bringing in the Online Safety Act, which requires social media platforms to shield children from harmful content or face fines of up to 10% of a company’s global revenue.

A consultation would be launched in the new year, Bloomberg first reported, to explore the risks that children were exposed to while using social media.

While some sources told the news website that social media bans for under-16s were under consideration, a government spokesperson played down such a prospect on Thursday.

“From our point of view, we’re looking at ways to empower parents rather than crack down on anything in particular,” they said. “We’ve identified that there is a gap in research so we’ll be looking at what more research into it needs to be done, but nothing is yet signed off by ministers.”

The Molly Rose Foundation, a charity set up by the family of Molly Russell, who killed herself at the age of 14 after viewing harmful content on Instagram and Pinterest, said the emphasis of any review should be on giving more powers to the communications watchdog, Ofcom.

“It is clear that further measures are necessary to protect children from online risks,” said Andy Burrows, an adviser to the foundation. “But the emphasis should firmly be on strengthening the regulator’s hand to ensure platforms are no longer awash with a set of avoidable dangers.”

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Yet another wild surmise ejected from the implosion of the Conservative Party. Who does Sunak or his SpAds (special advisers, the political aides who suggest policy and run around making tea) think is going to be persuaded by this vague offering? It would require companies to get access to the birthdates, ie identification papers, for any child between 13 and 16. You could do it via the government, since it should hold that information, except do you want the government to coordinate with social media companies about your children?
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I saw my life in iPhone Spatial Video on Apple Vision Pro • CNET

Scott Stein:

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Apple has its own recording recommendations for spatial video, suggesting not to move too much and stay in well-lit areas. I broke a lot of those rules, floating around and sometimes going into dim spaces (a dark bar with CNET colleagues, or the museum and its glow-in-the-dark rocks). The results still worked well, but brighter places pop more.

The 30-frames-per-second frame rate limitation was also visibly apparent, especially with movement. I wish 60fps were possible. If someone’s running by fast, like my kids as I followed them in Central Park as they climbed a rock next to a pond near The Ramble, that frame rate can sometimes feel too choppy for my tastes in an extremely fast refresh-rate headset like Vision Pro.

…The most compelling experiences for me were playing clips where I held the iPhone near my own line of sight with family. A clip where I’m sitting around a table at Thanksgiving with my mom at my sister’s house, telling her I’m recording in 3D for a future project. She sort of raised her eyebrows a bit, and the way she looked at me in 3D — at a scale close to normal size, with her seeming to make eye contact — made me feel like I was almost there. It made me want to climb through that fuzzy-bordered window and join my family again on the other side.

With less motion, the frame rate limit doesn’t stand out as much. The more intimate framing is better suited for the contained nature of the spatial video playback frame, as well.

I also got a kick out of seeing some of my favorite exhibits at the Museum of Natural History in 3D. I went to the Hall of Ocean Life, where a trio of little tanks on the top floor house dioramas of prehistoric sea creatures that I’ve loved since I was a kid. I captured the ammonites and trilobites, gliding from case to case. In 3D on Vision Pro, it felt like a little home diorama revisited. I could see the joy of capturing little immersive installations, or spaces, that aren’t easy to go back to, and having them in front of you again. Given the subject matter, that smaller scale in that fuzzy frame was lovely.

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Keep saying, this is going to be big. Once people have them, obviously.
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I’ve used a foldable laptop for a month, and I’m ready to return to a clamshell • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Although foldable smartphones have been available for five years, the devices are still trying to justify themselves. And after using a foldable-screen laptop as my primary PC for about four weeks, I’m not sure they’re ready for prime time.

I’m leaving my time with HP’s first foldable laptop with a sense of anticipation for the future of laptops, which I think would benefit from a resurgence of creative ideas that cater to the unique ways people use their computers. But I seriously question if the benefits of having a 17-inch screen in a 12-inch laptop body are worth the trade-offs inherent in today’s foldable PCs.

Early participants in the foldable laptop world have an opportunity to define the space, while consumers can decide if this is something they even want. HP’s foldable is the most beefed-up option ever, and weeks of use have shown me a lot about what I want and don’t want to see when the dust settles.

Ultimately, the question I’m facing regarding foldable laptops is, “Why this instead of a clamshell or 2-in-1 laptop?”

…Foldables aren’t for people looking for a PC with a favorable price-to-performance ratio. But the value proposition of the Spectre Fold is even worse than we see with other foldable laptops.

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There’s a problem of a crease down the middle if you’re watching full-screen videos; but they’re also big and heavy. It
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UK spy agency GCHQ reveals its Christmas challenge for children. Can you solve it? • CNN

Hafsa Khalil:

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What do secret codes and kids have to do with Christmas?

GCHQ, the UK’s largest intelligence agency, has sent out its annual Christmas card, complete with a set of puzzles aimed at Britain’s youngest minds.

This year’s challenge is the “toughest” one yet, the organization said in a statement Thursday, with 11- to 18-year-olds facing a series of seven “complex puzzles” masterminded by the agency’s puzzlers to uncover the final festive message.

“Puzzles have been at the heart of GCHQ from the start. These skills represent our historic roots in cryptography and encryption and continue to be important to our modern-day mission to keep the country safe,” GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler said in the statement.

“Our puzzlers have created a Challenge which is designed for a mix of minds to solve. Whether you are an analyst, an engineer or a creative, there is a puzzle for everyone,” she added, calling it “one for classmates, family and friends to try to solve together.”

The puzzles are contained within GCHQ’s Christmas card, available to download.

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Well, I can do one of the maths sums easily enough.. Enterprising kids might enjoy it.
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Stop planting trees, says guy who inspired world to plant a trillion trees • WIRED

Alen Luhn:

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The popularity of planting new trees is a problem—at least partly—of [the ecologist Thomas] Crowther’s own making. In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab’s research suggested, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere. “This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date,” the study said. Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect.

This seemingly easy climate solution sparked a tree-planting craze by companies and leaders eager to burnish their green credentials without actually cutting their emissions, from Shell to Donald Trump. It also provoked a squall of criticism from scientists, who argued that the Crowther study had vastly overestimated the land suitable for forest restoration and the amount of carbon it could draw down. (The study authors later corrected the paper to say tree restoration was only “one of the most effective” solutions, and could suck down at most one-third of the atmospheric carbon, with large uncertainties.)

Crowther, who says his message was misinterpreted, put out a more nuanced paper last month, which shows that preserving existing forests can have a greater climate impact than planting trees. He then brought the results to COP28 to “kill greenwashing” of the kind that his previous study seemed to encourage—that is, using unreliable evidence on the benefits of planting trees as an excuse to keep on emitting carbon.

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Even so, trees remain the most effect direct carbon capture (DCC) systems we know of: no external power source required, self-feeding, no external infrastructure required, and so on.
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Beeper Mini’s iMessage fight with Apple is about platforms, protocols, and power • The Verge

David Pierce:

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What’s odd about this story is that you have two sides completely at odds, both saying entirely correct things. Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky has been telling anyone who will listen that SMS is insecure, that Apple is doing its users a disservice by requiring them to use such old and crummy tech to communicate with the vast majority of the world’s smartphone users, and that Beeper’s solution is both a better user experience and a better privacy solution. It’s all true: if you start from the premise that anything is better than SMS, which is a pretty reasonable premise for a lot of reasons, the Beeper way is a good one.

But here’s another way to look at it, which I suspect is the way Apple sees the situation: Who the hell is Beeper? This tiny company has effectively hacked a closed protocol, and now millions of iPhone users are potentially having their messages handled by a company they’ve never heard of. What’s worse, since they’re sending blue-bubble messages, those users will assume they’re sending encrypted messages through a trusted source — Apple — and they’ll never know about this intermediary that promises it’s trustworthy, but who really knows? Apple is well within its rights to run iMessage however it sees fit, and to kick out any provider or person it wants.

A fully interoperable, cross-platform messaging system would be a good thing for the world. I don’t think that’s particularly controversial. …It’s also not great how much of the world is wholly reliant on WhatsApp, a platform that has thus far mostly done right by its users but could change ownership, strategy, or business model at a moment’s notice. If messaging was based on open protocols, and you could talk to your friends across apps, the whole system would be more resilient and functional.

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I think the response to that is “And if my aunt had wheels, she’d be a bicycle”.
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The commercial surveillance marketing storm driving the Albertsons and Kroger deal • TechPolicy.Press

Jeffrey Chester:

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The insatiable quest to acquire more data has long been a force behind corporate mergers in the US—including the proposed combination of supermarket giants Albertsons and Kroger. Both grocery chains have amassed a powerful set of internal “Big Data” digital marketing assets, accompanied by alliances with data brokers, “identity” management firms, advertisers, streaming video networks, and social media platforms.

Albertsons and Kroger are leaders in one of the fastest-growing sectors in the online surveillance economy—called “retail media.” Expected to generate $85bn in ad spending in the US by 2026, and with the success of Amazon as a model, there is a new digital “gold rush” by retailers to cash in on all the loyalty programs, sales information, and other growing ways to target their customers.

Albertsons, Kroger, and other retailers including Walmart, CVS, Dollar General and Target find themselves in an enviable position in what’s being called the “post-cookie” era. As digital marketing abandons traditional user-tracking technologies, especially third-party cookies, in order to address privacy regulations, leading advertisers and platforms are lining up to access consumer information they believe comes with less regulatory risk.

Supermarkets, drug stores, retailers and video streaming networks have massive amounts of so-called “first-party” authenticated data on consumers, which they claim comes with consent to use for online marketing. That’s why retail media networks operated by Kroger and others, as well as data harvested from streaming companies, are among the hottest commodities in today’s commercial surveillance economy. It’s not surprising that Albertsons and Kroger now have digital marketing partnerships with companies like Disney, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Google and Meta—to name just a few.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently reviewing this deal, which is a test case of how well antitrust regulators address the dominant role that data and the affordances of digital marketing play in the marketplace.

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Supermarket mergers in the cause of data analysis certainly is a big step into a new age.
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Misunderstanding the fertility crisis • Quillette

Alex Nowrasteh on the reason why birthrates are dropping in the developed world:

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Tomorrow, I could book a flight to over 100 countries to see wondrous natural and man-made sights. There are thousands of good restaurants and bars within an hour’s drive. I could never hope to sample fully the range of tasty cuisine and alcoholic beverages available to me. The internet is at my fingertips, with billions of interesting articles, tweets, and videos that could fill my day. The number and quality of new books that I can download is difficult to even describe. Shooting ranges (I’m an American, after all), axe throwing, cigar lounges, rock climbing, and various novel and new exercise classes at gyms are close by—to say nothing of activities I’m not even aware of yet. And I have numerous friends and many potential friends who are just a phone call or text away. Streaming services bring the golden age of television and movies into my household. And the list goes on.

These and other options mean that every choice we make has a high opportunity cost regarding our careers and entertainment options. When countries develop, fertility falls for this and other reasons. New immigrants drop their fertility because the opportunity cost of raising children is higher in a country with enormous economic opportunities, high incomes, and vast cheap entertainment possibilities. 

But the effect isn’t limited to immigrants; it also crushes fertility for native-born Americans. Despite the nostalgianomics of Robert Reich and Josh Hawley, two-income households aren’t vastly more common than they used to be because of a brutal Malthusian competition for increasingly scarce resources. Women work because their wages are so much higher than they used to be. There isn’t a two-income trap—there’s expanded female economic opportunity, and this opportunity cost is contributing mightily to the decline in fertility.

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Nowrasteh has three children, in case you’re wondering, and says he’d lay down his life for any of them. I was a little dubious of his argument before he revealed that. But it certainly fits the pattern of growing per-capita GDP seeing lower fertility, and birth control leading to lower birthrates.
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Using AI to talk to the dead • The New York Times

Rebecca Carballo:

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Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were stacked against him?

The answers are rooted in William Lucas’s experience as a Black man from Harlem who made his living as a police officer, F.B.I. agent and judge. But Dr. Oney doesn’t receive the guidance in person. Her father has been dead for more than a year.

Instead, she listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone through HereAfter AI, an app powered by artificial intelligence that generates responses based on hours of interviews conducted with him before he died in May 2022.

His voice gives her comfort, but she said she created the profile more for her four children and eight grandchildren.

“I want the children to hear all of those things in his voice,” Dr. Oney, an endocrinologist, said from her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., “and not from me trying to paraphrase, but to hear it from his point of view, his time and his perspective.”

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Black Mirror from top to bottom and people don’t even realise they’re doing it. (Via John Naughton.)
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More questions than answers • Science

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel:

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Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year is the development of glucagon-like peptide–1 (GLP-1) agonists to treat obesity and weight gain, and this year’s discovery that they can blunt obesity-associated health problems. GLP-1 agonists have been around since 2005 to treat type 2 diabetes and were approved for weight loss as early as 2014. But it was only since 2021, when the GLP-1 drug semaglutide was approved (as Wegovy) for obesity (it is sold as Ozempic for diabetes), that the frenzy really began, and mainstream media started referring to them as “the medical sensation of the decade.”

…But for all their promise, GLP-1 agonists have raised more questions than they have answered—a hallmark of a true breakthrough. The first is about their cost and availability. These issues are likely to be worked out over the next few years, but for the moment, access to these drugs is limited. The cost can be over $1000 per month and is not always covered by insurance, if the medicine can even be obtained.

Over time, the price may well come down as supply goes up, and insurance will likely cover the medication as more benefits are demonstrated that save on health care costs down the line—both in terms of catastrophic disease and the need for additional medications required to treat other conditions known to be associated with excess weight. The pressure is on—and should stay on—the drug companies and insurance providers to work this out.

Other questions relate to the need to stay on the drugs indefinitely to avoid regaining weight. A major assumption is that these are lifetime drugs. Are there safety implications associated with long-term use? How will clinicians decide how much weight loss justifies lifetime use of the drug? And at what age? These concerns become more pronounced for younger patients who will be on the drug for longer; at the same time, obesity among adolescents is a pressing problem on multiple fronts.

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The question of who pays becomes different in the UK, where the issue is whether it’s worth funding past a certain age.
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A software update intends to make the Autopilot in two million Tesla cars in the US safer – but can it improve the drivers? CC-licensed photo by pedrik on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Look, no hands! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

ChatGPT to summarize Politico and Business Insider articles in ‘first of its kind’ deal • The Guardian

Blake Montgomery (and agencies):

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Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider and Politico, said on Wednesday it was partnering with OpenAI, which will pay the German media group to allow ChatGPT to summarize current articles in responses generated by the chatbot.

“ChatGPT users around the world will receive summaries of selected global news content from Axel Springer’s media brands,” which also includes the German tabloid Bild, the two companies said in a statement.

The chatbot’s answers will include material otherwise kept behind a paywall and offer “links to the full articles for transparency and further information”, they said. Axel Springer will be paid for making its content available to the US artificial intelligence firm, a spokesman for the media group told AFP. The deal is valid for several years and does not commit either side to exclusivity, leaving them free to sign new agreements, the spokesman said without giving more detail.

…The Axel Springer spokesman said that with the advent of platforms such as Google and Facebook, media companies had missed the opportunity to establish a new source of income “and we are all still running after the money”.

The partnership with OpenAI was “the first of its kind”, Axel Springer’s CEO, Mathias Döpfner, said in the statement.

“We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism – to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level,” Döpfner said.

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Enterprising move by Springer: if it is getting paid by OpenAI and will continue to get paid, it might have made a smart move.
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The cable news kayfabe is dead • Nieman Journalism Lab

Ben Collins:

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Too many news institutions have been sucked into the theatre of the absurd, and people are looking for champions who allude to that.

The good news is, the kids see the kayfabe of it all. They are now aware of the game within the game.

They aren’t watching the news because of it, but they are interested in how that kayfabe frames the ever-increasing powerlessness they feel in the ambient horrors playing in the background of their daily lives.

The cable news kayfabe, as you know, goes as follows: a powerful person says something shocking — a far-right politician launches a nativist talking point, or a billionaire speaks of a threat of financial doom if demands aren’t met. A more reasonable voice reacts, frequently asking to please remove the racism, but conceding an underlying but unprovable point that should never have been conceded. The story is framed as reaction to the initial statement, no matter how ludicrous or even impossible that initial statement is.

The reality, in this situation, is and has never been a consideration. This is how you build a world of kayfabe, and you have to turn off parts of your brain to enter it.

You can apply this to countless stories that required a nuance many mainstream news outlets have so far refused to deploy: the apocalyptic hype cycle and predictable burnout of AI, the Israel-Hamas war, TikTok’s influence on American culture and politics.

There are strict parameters on how we talk about each of these things. It’s a sort of news kayfabe: a binary, good guy–bad guy game we’ve invented that has all too often been infiltrated by all bad guys.

…Here’s the good news: The faster you stop playing those games, the faster you stop making Faustian bargains for access, the faster you stop presenting weird false choices that leave out seemingly every American under 40 years old, the faster we can gain their trust back.

The other good news is that they’re right. The kind of news that they want does not have these internecine power structures and middle school-style influence games built into it. That’s not a lot to ask.

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Certainly seems to be true of the American media ecosystem Collins lives in; I’d like to think that other countries do less badly. But he makes many good points.
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Dear journalists: here’s how to talk to women on the Hugging Face team • LinkedIn

Emily Witko (and coworkers):

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We here at Hugging Face have been noticing a concerning trend in tech journalism. The real achievements of women on our team often get overshadowed by a focus on personal, and sometimes very intrusive, details that aren’t relevant to their work. It’s time for that to change. Here’s a set of guidelines that the team has put together, aiming for a more respectful and balanced approach to reporting:

Highlight achievements: Center your articles on professional accomplishments, not on personal attributes like looks, age, or family status. This one is pretty self-explanatory, right folks?

Avoid gendered language: At the moment, we see lots of over-associating women with certain words and concepts, such as ‘children’ and ‘family.’ Proofread your articles to eliminate gendered descriptions that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes. 

• Problematic: Jane Janey, despite being a mother of two, has surprisingly managed to lead her team to develop a groundbreaking AI algorithm.
• Good: Jane Janey, an accomplished leader in her field, has successfully spearheaded the development of a groundbreaking AI algorithm with her team.

Respect privacy: Honour the interviewee’s wishes regarding the disclosure of personal information.

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There’s quite a few more advisements. I’m slightly surprised that journalists – and especially American journalists – would need telling any of this.
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Russian foreign intelligence service spotted exploiting JetBrains vulnerability • The Record

Jonathan Greig:

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Government agencies in the US, Poland and the UK said on Wednesday that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has been exploiting a vulnerability that was exposed earlier this year in a popular product from Czech software giant JetBrains.

Officials said they have notified dozens of companies across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia after discovering hundreds of compromised devices.

The agencies attributed the attacks to hackers within the SVR known as APT29 — also tracked by cybersecurity researchers as CozyBear or Midnight Blizzard — and said the “large scale” campaign began in September.

Microsoft previously said North Korean hackers were exploiting the bug — labeled CVE-2023-42793 — in September. It affects a product called TeamCity, which is used by developers to test and exchange software code before its release.

Now the SVR has been spotted “using the initial access gleaned by exploiting the TeamCity CVE to escalate its privileges, move laterally, deploy additional backdoors, and take other steps to ensure persistent and long-term access to the compromised network environments,” Wednesday’s alert said.

“Generally, the victim types do not fit into any sort of pattern or trend, aside from having an unpatched, Internet-reachable JetBrains TeamCity server, leading to the assessment that SVR’s exploitation of these victims’ networks was opportunistic in nature and not necessarily a targeted attack.”

The organizations attacked include an energy trade association; companies that provide software for billing, medical devices, customer care, employee monitoring, financial management, marketing, sales, and video games; as well as web hosting companies, tool manufacturers, and small and large IT companies.

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A story which comes the same day that the British government was warned that the UK is very vulnerable to ransomware attacks. It doesn’t rain but it pours.
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Tesla recalls two million cars with ‘insufficient’ Autopilot safety controls • The Washington Post

Leo Sands, Aaron Gregg and Faiz Siddiqui:

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Tesla is recalling more than two million vehicles to fix Autopilot systems that US safety regulators determined did not have enough controls to prevent misuse, the largest recall of Tesla’s driver-assistance software to date.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Tesla’s method of ensuring drivers are still paying attention while the driver-assistance system is activated is “insufficient.”

“There may be an increased risk of a crash,” the agency wrote, in some situations when the system is engaged “and the driver does not maintain responsibility for vehicle operation and is unprepared to intervene as necessary or fails to recognize when Autosteer is canceled or not engaged.”

The recall comes days after The Washington Post published an investigation that found Teslas in Autopilot had repeatedly been involved in deadly crashes on roads where the software was not intended to be used.

NHTSA said Tesla will send out a software update to fix the problems affecting its 2012-2023 Model S, 2016-2023 Model X, 2017-2023 Model 3, and 2020-2023 Model Y vehicles, effectively encompassing all Tesla vehicles equipped with Autopilot on US roads. Autopilot is a standard feature on Tesla’s vehicles; only some early Tesla models are not equipped with the software.

…The software update, which was to be deployed on “certain affected vehicles” starting Dec. 12, will add extra controls and alerts to “encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility,” the recall report said. The update also will include controls that prevent Autosteer from engaging outside of areas where it is supposed to work as well as a feature that can suspend a driver’s Autosteer privileges if the person repeatedly fails to stay engaged at the wheel.

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“Recall” in this context doesn’t actually mean “take back into its factories” – at least for Tesla, which can (as the story says) just send out a software update over the air; nobody’s car has to move an inch. The problem of inattentive or unready drivers, though, can’t be so easily fixed.
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20 things we learned from the Epic v. Google trial • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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I have spent 15 days reporting live from the Epic v. Google trial: an antitrust dispute over whether Google’s Android app store is an unfair monopoly. I’ve watched a parade of witnesses go by, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. We’re now in a weeklong break before both parties return on December 11th to make their closing arguments, after which a jury will decide who’s right. I’ve chronicled every major thrust, parry, and riposte leading up to that in our Verge StoryStream, writing nearly 600 dispatches from the courtroom so far.

But who’s got the time to dig through all that, am I right?

So here are straightforward versions of the 20 most interesting things we’ve learned — starting with the fact that Epic could win the whole thing.

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This was last week, but Hollister was right about Epic winning, and a number of the other details are just as interesting – notably No.9: “This trial destroyed any notion that Google treats developers fairly and equally”. Also No.13: profit margins for the Play Store were north of 70%.
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Cop28 is a farce rigged to fail, but there are other ways we can try to save the planet • The Guardian

George Monbiot:

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Since this horrible farce [of Cop] began 31 years ago, plenty of people have proposed reforms. The proposals fall into three categories. One is to improve the way consensus decisions are made. Well-meaning as these are, they’re futile: you can tweak the process, but it will remain dysfunctional.

Another approach is to replace consensus decision-making with voting, an option that remains, in draft form, in the UN rules. The obvious objection is that a majority would impose decisions on other nations. But this reflects a narrow conception of what voting could do. There are plenty of ways of ensuring everyone can be heard, without relying on crude binary choices. One of the most promising is the Borda count, a decision-making method first proposed in 1435.

The modified Borda count developed by the de Borda Institute looks especially useful. First, the delegates agree on what the principal issues are. These are then turned into a list of options, on which everyone is asked to agree (the options could range from the immediate phase-out of fossil fuels to planetary Armageddon). The options are listed on a ballot paper, and each delegate is asked to rank them in order of preference. A scoring system awards points for every ranking. The more options a delegate ranks, the more points each one is worth to them. This enables complex decisions to be made without excluding anyone.

The third approach, which could run alongside the second, is to bypass the Cop process by developing new binding treaties. The professor of environmental politics Anthony Burke suggests an approach modelled on the 2017 treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the 1997 anti-personnel mine ban convention and the 2008 convention on cluster munitions. In these cases, states and citizens’ groups frustrated with a lack of progress began building treaties without the participation of the powerful nations – the US in particular – that sought to resist them. They developed enough momentum not only to push the treaties through the UN general assembly, but also to establish new diplomatic norms that made defiance of the treaties much harder to justify, even for nations that refuse to ratify them.

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In retrospect, it’s absolutely incredible that the Montreal Protocol – to drastically cut CFC production and use – was agreed and implemented. Could it be done today?
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Bluesky isn’t a mere Twitter clone, says CEO Jay Graber • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

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As 2023 winds down, Bluesky, which still hasn’t opened up to all comers, has grown to 2.3 million users. Like Mastodon, Threads, and other refuges for Twitter expatriates, it hasn’t become the sort of one-stop conversation megahub that Twitter once was. Instead, an eclectic subset of the Twitter masses has landed there. CEO Jay Graber says the 30-person Bluesky team tried to recreate “the platonic ideal of microblogging as it once was” and calls out some constituencies who have bonded with the service: meme lovers, writers and artists, and people who find enforced pithiness to be a fun, creative challenge. (Bluesky has a 300-character limit.)

Why has Bluesky kept its invite system in place even though that means many would-be members still haven’t gotten in? “To be honest, we didn’t have the capacity to absorb all of that in a day,” says Graber. “It’s a full-time effort for engineers to scale up the service at the level that we were going. We actually have not had significant downtime, which is a testament to this controlled-growth strategy—you know, Twitter early on had a lot of failwhales.”

Whether you’re already on Bluesky or not, thinking of it purely as a Twitter-esque app misses the point. The app is just a testbed for the protocol the startup has been building to help nudge us out of the era of centralized social networking. And Graber—who got her job as CEO in 2021 after DMing Dorsey to express enthusiasm for the Bluesky project—says that the founding goal is soon to get its first major real-world test.

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That test will be in early 2024, when decentralisation will be tried, and the invite system will become redundant.
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Apple is holding the final nail for X’s coffin • Bloomberg

Dave Lee:

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To celebrate the return of such a man [as Infowars’ Alex Jones], Musk joined Jones in a live audio chat on Sunday. Other attendees included Andrew Tate, who faces rape and sex-trafficking charges, and Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who last week rattled off a raft of unfounded conspiracy theories on the debate stage. With saner minds abandoning X, this is the clientele that’s left.

Apple’s marketing team clearly wants no part of it. It’s among the companies that have decided to “pause” advertising on the platform, having previously been its biggest spender. While not mentioned directly, Apple was implied among the group — along with Disney, Walmart and others — that Musk recently told to go f— themselves.

But Apple holds an even greater power than that. Having decided X is too dangerous for its brand, the reinstatement of Jones now forces it to confront a bigger question: When does X become too dangerous for Apple’s users? Or when do Apple’s supposed corporate principles demand it no longer take the 30% it enjoys from sign-ups to X’s premium services? (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Apple has answered this question before. Jones’s InfoWars app was banned from the App Store in 2018. His content, the company said at the time, fell afoul of “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or place a targeted individual or group in harm’s way.” The company did not specify which specific material had forced it to act. The ban appears to remain in place today.

…The fallout would be several magnitudes greater were Apple to take any action against X. But on its current trajectory — with Musk himself amplifying some of the platform’s most vicious elements — there will come a time when inaction would be just as damaging to Apple.

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Musk’s X 2023 ad sales projected to slump to about $2.5bn • Bloomberg via MSN

Kurt Wagner:

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Elon Musk’s X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is on track to bring in roughly $2.5bn in advertising revenue in 2023 — a significant slump from prior years, according to people familiar with the matter.

X generated a little more than $600m in advertising revenue in each of the first three quarters of the year, and is anticipating a similar performance in the current period, according to a person familiar with the numbers. That compares to more than $1bn per quarter in 2022. 

Ad sales currently make up between 70% and 75% of X’s total revenue, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. That would imply 2023 sales of roughly $3.4bn, including sales from subscriptions and data licensing deals. 

The previously unreported sales figures underscore with greater clarity advertisers’ unease with how X is handling content moderation under Musk, and in particular the new owner’s posts that amplify antisemitic and other extremist views.

X executives had originally targeted $3bn in revenue from advertising and subscriptions in 2023, but will fall far short of that number, one of the people said. The annual number is still in flux because the holiday quarter isn’t yet over. 

“This presents an incomplete view of our entire business, as the sources you’re relying on for information are not providing accurate and comprehensive details,” said Joe Benarroch, head of business operations for X.

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For comparison, revenue in the year before Musk was $5bn (though it wasn’t profitable then either). No publisher would think they were making a roaring success of things if they halved income, though he may have halved – or cut even further – the outgoings.

What’s notable is that Wagner actually got a response from a human at the company. That’s how significant it sees both Bloomberg, and this revelation. Anyway, perhaps he can blame it all on whoever let that sink in, and the bozo who was holding it.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified