The French ski resort of La Sambuy is now just a resort, after warming winters killed its pistes. CC-licensed photo by dmytrok 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. Piste off. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Self-publishers must declare if content sold on Amazon’s site is AI-generated • The Guardian

Ella Creamer:

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Amazon has introduced new rules and guidance for Kindle books generated by artificial intelligence tools, including the requirement that authors inform it when content is AI-generated.

The company announced the new rules on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Wednesday. It said in a statement: “Beginning today, when you publish a new title or make edits to and republish an existing title through KDP, you will be asked whether your content is AI-generated.” KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and put them up for sale on Amazon’s site.

Amazon also added a new section to its content guidelines focused on AI, which now includes definitions of “AI-generated” and “AI-assisted” content and states that sellers are not required to disclose when content is AI-assisted.

AI-generated content is defined by the company as “text, images or translations created by an AI-based tool”, even if substantial edits are made afterwards. AI-assisted content is classified as that created by authors and sellers themselves but where AI tools are used to “edit, refine, error-check, or otherwise improve”.

The guidelines also state that AI-based tools can be used to “brainstorm and generate ideas” without disclosure, as long as the text or images were ultimately created by the human author.

The new rules come weeks after the site removed suspected AI-generated books that imitated the work of real authors. In August, the author Jane Friedman complained that several books, which she believed were created by AI tools, were falsely listed as being written by her. The books were subsequently removed by Amazon.

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This is a great solution, because everybody always tells the truth when they’ve used AI to write a book, and Amazon has an AI detection system that is absolutely perfect in distinguishing AI-written content from human-generated stuff.
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French ski resort closes permanently because there’s not enough snow • CNN

Maya Szaniecki:

»

La Sambuy, a town which runs a family skiing destination near Mont Blanc in the French Alps, has decided to dismantle its ski lifts because global warming has shrunk its ski season to just a few weeks, meaning it’s no longer profitable to keep them open.

“Before, we used to have snow practically from the first of December up until the 30th of March,” La Sambuy’s mayor, Jacques Dalex, told CNN. Last winter, however, there was only “four weeks of snow, and even then, not much snow,” he added. That meant “very quickly, stones and rocks appeared on the piste.”

Able to open for fewer than five weeks during January and February, Dalex said the resort was looking at an annual operating loss of roughly €500,000 ($530,000). Keeping the lifts going alone costs €80,000 per year.

La Sambuy isn’t a huge resort, with just three lifts and a handful of pistes reaching up to a top height of 1,850 meters (about 6,070 feet).

…La Sambuy is not the only French ski resort facing a meltdown. Last year, Saint-Firmin, another small Alpine ski destination, opted to remove its ski lift after seeing its winter season dwindle from months to weeks, a situation also blamed on climate change.

Mountain Wilderness, a French environmental group, says it has dismantled 22 ski lifts in France since 2001, and estimates that there are still 106 abandoned ski lifts across 59 sites in the country.

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Twitter is still throttling competitors’ links; check for yourself • The Markup

Jon Keegan, Dan Phiffer and Joel Eastwood:

»

Twitter continues to slow traffic to competing sites nearly a month after it partially pulled back from such throttling, a Markup analysis has found.

Users of the social platform, now officially known as X, are made to wait on average about two and a half seconds after clicking on links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, the analysis found. That’s more than 60 times longer than the average wait for links to other sites.

While not included in our full tests, the delay appears to also include links to the new Threads platform, which like Facebook and Instagram is owned by Meta.

…Slowing traffic to websites can harm the companies that run the sites and the people who use them. Even a 2.5-second delay after clicking a link can feel extremely slow to users, potentially discouraging them from waiting around for content to load. A 2017 Google study found that the probability of a user “bouncing,” or abandoning a site, increased 32% when page load times increased to three seconds from one second.

Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Seth wrote that they hope X reverses its decision to impose a delay on Substack links. “Writers cannot build sustainable businesses if their connection to their audience depends on unreliable platforms that have proven they are willing to make changes that are hostile to the people who use them,” they said in an email.  Meta and Bluesky did not respond to a request for comment. 

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Elon Musk suggests he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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Elon Musk may flip the switch to make X — the social network formerly known as Twitter — an entirely subscription-based platform.

Musk brought up the idea of charging all users of X/Twitter during a wide-ranging conversation focused on AI that featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. “We’re moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system,” Musk told Netanyahu, claiming that “it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.” His comments were initially reported by Bloomberg’s Dave Lee.

Musk didn’t mention timing of his plan to charge X/Twitter users, nor did he say exactly how much it would cost other than to say a monthly fee of “a few dollars or something” would deter the creation of bot accounts. According to Musk, X has 550 million monthly active users, who share 100 million-200 million posts daily on the social network.

Musk has previously mulled the idea of putting Twitter entirely behind a paywall in internal conversations, according to industry news site Platformer. Musk, who also is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said X/Twitter ad sales have plunged 50% since he bought the company. “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load,” Musk posted on July 15.

«

OK, so I did use another part of this (evidently wide-ranging, and bizarre) conversation yesterday, but of course this is the bit that really focuses one’s attention. In passing: the photograph of Musk makes him look as though he’s made of wax and he’s under an infrared lamp. Meanwhile, Bluesky saw record signups after Musk’s announcement.

I’ll write at length about the potential efficacy of this idea on the Social Warming Substack on Friday.
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U.S. COVID levels approach pandemic’s 2020 peak • Fortune Well

Erin Prater:

»

US COVID infections are hovering near levels of the pandemic’s first peak in 2020, and approaching the Delta peak of late 2021, according to wastewater surveillance and modeling by forecasters.

It’s yet another sign that while the official pandemic state may be over, the days of COVID are far from it.

Viral wastewater levels are not far behind all of the pandemic’s 2020 peaks except for one—the initial peak of March 2020, which they’ve already surpassed. And they lag just slightly levels seen during the deadly Delta peak of late 2021, according to Biobot Analytics, which monitors such data for the federal government.

A forecast issued this week by Jay Weiland, a leading COVID modeler, came to the same conclusions. On Thursday, Weiland estimated that 650,000 Americans are becoming infected daily, with 1 in 51 Americans currently infected with COVID. 

«

I wonder about the forecasting here. Testing wasn’t as widespread in early 2020, so levels could have been higher then. And also: the difference is that huge tracts of the population is vaccinated now. The story says that hospitalisations and deaths are rising, but carefully avoids giving any numbers to compare that data with 2020.
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Why we procrastinate when we have long deadlines • Harvard Business Review

Meng Zhu:

»

“Can you get that to me by the end of the day?” isn’t a request many employees like to hear. But for many people, having shorter deadlines instead of longer ones — “Do you think you can do that by the end of the week?” — might actually help them complete a task and see their work as being less difficult.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, my colleagues Rajesh Bagchi and Stefan Hock and I demonstrate that longer deadlines can lead workers to think an assignment is harder than it actually is, which causes them to commit more resources to the work. This, in turn, increases how much they procrastinate and their likelihood of quitting. This is true even when the deadline length is incidental, such as when a venue or guest isn’t available for an extended period of time.

In our research we asked volunteers at a local community center to answer a short survey about retirement planning. We set two incidental deadlines. In one group, the online survey could be accessed throughout the next seven days, but the other group had 14 days. Results showed that participants who faced the longer deadline wrote longer responses to the survey and spent more time on it. But there was a catch: Those same participants were more likely to procrastinate and were less likely to complete the assignment than their time-constrained counterparts.

«

They could have just asked some journalists, who would have told them that given a day to write 1,000 words, they will do very little until they have around two hours left, and then break into a sprint.
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How a Ring camera can attract burglars (I learnt the hard way) • The Times

Louise Eccles:

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Professor Claire Nee, founder of the University of Portsmouth’s International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology, has interviewed hundreds of convicted burglars. She would not install a Ring doorbell or an alarm.

“The majority of burglars just put a balaclava on because they’re aware of video footage,” she said. “Alarms often actually attract burglars to houses. They are a wealth cue — it means there is going to be something worth stealing.

“Neighbours tend not to respond to alarms unless they go for ages and, even with monitored alarms [which call to police], you’re lucky if anyone arrives within 15 minutes. Most burglaries are over in eight to ten minutes.”

The best deterrents are secure window locks, indoor lights on a timer, external lights on a timer or sensor and double door locks or deadlocks, according to research published in 2019 by criminology professors at UCL and Nottingham Trent and Loughborough universities. They found that alarms increased the burglary risk because they suggested there were valuables and gave “a false sense of protection that makes such households ‘careless’.”

Nee suggests looking for places where people could get in by jumping gates or breaking weak window locks. “A burglar will much prefer to go to the rear of the house if they can,” she said. “That doesn’t mean they won’t go through the front door, because we are absolutely terrible at leaving our bags and car keys really near the front door.”

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iOS 17 release: everything you need to know about Apple’s big updates • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

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Announced at the company’s developer conference in June, iOS 17, iPadOS 17 and watchOS 10 add a much-improved keyboard with autocorrect that will let you swear, new standby modes, contact posters, greater customisation and the biggest reworking of the Apple Watch’s interface since launch.

Here’s what you need to know about the updates.

«

More and more there’s less and less to take much notice of; though Stage Manager seems to be tacking iPadOS more towards the full desktop metaphor, and the Apple Watch has changed what the buttons do: less swiping, more pressing.
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Why is Apple’s second-generation UWB chip exciting? • Estimote Blog

»

Another potential future application of the lower power UWB [ultra-wideband] chip [in the new iPhone and Apple Watch] might involve a technique named Downlink TDoA. This stands for “time difference of arrival,” a new standard championed by the FiRa organization. It lets UWB-enabled phones passively receive signals from UWB beacons or anchors.

Imagine your car in a tunnel where GPS is unavailable. UWB beacons in the tunnel transmit radio signals to your phone. Your phone captures these signals, and using the time difference of their arrival, it can calculate the exact position of the car inside the tunnel. With Downlink TDoA, beacons don’t collect any data from to the phone. The precise location is determined solely by the UWB chip on the phone. This approach is seen as safer and more privacy-centric than traditional real-time location systems (RTLS). As a result, it’s often referred to as Untracked Indoor Positioning.

This innovative, privacy-centric way of determining indoor positioning could also be applied in airports, malls, museums, and more. It could effectively deliver what the iBeacon promised years ago, but with inch-perfect accuracy and superior security.

To make such experiences possible, a low-power UWB processor like the second-gen chip is essential. The phone would need to constantly detect UWB signals from nearby beacons, and it’s crucial that this happens efficiently.

There’s also speculation that the UWB chip may eventually interact with Apple’s new smart glasses. This makes a lot of sense. Currently, Vision Pro determines its spatial orientation in a room using computer vision and image processing. Using the UWB chip and radio signals for this purpose would use order of magnitude less power. Preserving power could allow Apple to design more compact and lighter smart glasses in the future.

«

I always think that sentences beginning “Imagine your car…” or “There’s also speculation…” aren’t the most reliable guides to what’s going to happen, but the Vision Pro point might come through.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Light pollution is now so pervasive that astronomers have coined a word for wanting the darkness back: “noctalgia”. CC-licensed photo by Nikk 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. Gotta wear shades. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How to tell if your AI is conscious • The New York Times

Oliver Whang:

»

The fuzziness of consciousness, its imprecision, has made its study anathema in the natural sciences. At least until recently, the project was largely left to philosophers, who often were only marginally better than others at clarifying their object of study. Hod Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University, said that some people in his field referred to consciousness as “the C-word.” Grace Lindsay, a neuroscientist at New York University, said, “There was this idea that you can’t study consciousness until you have tenure.”

Nonetheless, a few weeks ago, a group of philosophers, neuroscientists and computer scientists, Dr. Lindsay among them, proposed a rubric with which to determine whether an AI system like ChatGPT could be considered conscious. The report, which surveys what Dr. Lindsay calls the “brand-new” science of consciousness, pulls together elements from a half-dozen nascent empirical theories and proposes a list of measurable qualities that might suggest the presence of some presence in a machine.

For instance, recurrent processing theory focuses on the differences between conscious perception (for example, actively studying an apple in front of you) and unconscious perception (such as your sense of an apple flying toward your face). Neuroscientists have argued that we unconsciously perceive things when electrical signals are passed from the nerves in our eyes to the primary visual cortex and then to deeper parts of the brain, like a baton being handed off from one cluster of nerves to another. These perceptions seem to become conscious when the baton is passed back, from the deeper parts of the brain to the primary visual cortex, creating a loop of activity.

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It’s a subtle discussion, though there seems to be a nod towards recursion as the definition (or causation, or essence) of consciousness, as previously discussed here.
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Antarctic sea-ice at ‘mind-blowing’ low alarms experts • BBC News

Georgina Rannard, Becky Dale and Erwan Rivault:

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The sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is well below any previous recorded winter level, satellite data shows, a worrying new benchmark for a region that once seemed resistant to global warming.

“It’s so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind-blowing,” says Walter Meier, who monitors sea-ice with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

An unstable Antarctica could have far-reaching consequences, polar experts warn. Antarctica’s huge ice expanse regulates the planet’s temperature, as the white surface reflects the Sun’s energy back into the atmosphere and also cools the water beneath and near it. Without its ice cooling the planet, Antarctica could transform from Earth’s refrigerator to a radiator, experts say.

The ice that floats on the Antarctic Ocean’s surface now measures less than 17 million sq km – that is 1.5 million sq km of sea-ice less than the September average, and well below previous winter record lows. That’s an area of missing ice about five times the size of the British Isles.

Dr Meier is not optimistic that the sea-ice will recover to a significant degree. Scientists are still trying to identify all the factors that led to this year’s low sea-ice – but studying trends in Antarctica has historically been challenging.

In a year when several global heat and ocean temperature records have broken, some scientists insist the low sea-ice is the measure to pay attention to.

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Still haven’t come across any good news about the climate itself.
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Call of Duty Warzone: does UK esports scene need more live events? • BBC News

Shaun Dacosta:

»

The World Series of Warzone (WSOW) held its global final in London over the weekend, and it came at an interesting time for the UK esports scene.

Earlier this month, the Call of Duty League team London Royal Ravens announced it was moving to the United States – leaving Britain without a dedicated team. But if you watched the WSOW final, based on the battle royale offshoot of the first-person shooter, you would think the UK esports scene was doing pretty well.

It drew a crowd of about 3,000 people, competitors from across the world and huge numbers tuned in to watch the event online.

BBC Newsbeat spoke to Call of Duty esports bosses Daniel Tsay and Rob Belk about their decision to hold the event in London. Product manager Rob said previous experience told them the crowd’s “hype and energy” would be “off the charts”.

“People are going to be cheering, people are going to be standing up.”

And general manager Daniel said one of the top requests from the Call of Duty community has been for a UK event. “So when the team were thinking ‘where can we go?’ London came fairly organically to the top of the list,” he said.

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$100,000 prize, livestream had 100,000 people logged on. That’s a little ahead of the number watching the UK winning a place in the Davis Cup tennis quarterfinals, a global competition, which hit about 85,000 at its peak.
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Musk and Netanyahu blame “armies of bots” for spreading antisemitism on X • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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The livestreamed event started with a one-on-one between Musk and Netanyahu that attracted more than 735,000 views. While much of the one-on-one focused on AI—which Musk claimed was “potentially the biggest civilizational threat” and Netanyahu called “a blessing and a curse”—the men also discussed their views on antisemitism and how Musk deals with hate speech on X.

“I know your commitment to free speech,” Netanyahu said about 20 minutes into the talk. “But I also know your opposition to antisemitism. You’ve spoken about it. You’ve tweeted about it. And all I could say is, I hope you find within the confines of the First Amendment the ability to stop not only antisemitism, or roll it back as best you can, but any collective hatred of people.”

Musk said that he was “sort of against attacking any group” but that defending free speech “does at times mean that there’s someone you don’t like who’s saying something you don’t like.” However, “that doesn’t mean, some sort of negativity should be pushed upon people,” Musk said, noting that X couldn’t afford to let the platform become “unpleasant,” because it would lose users. He said that’s why his platform works to de-amplify hate speech when it’s detected—”because we think probably that’s not what people want to hear.”

“Obviously, I’m against antisemitism,” Musk said. “I’m against anti-really anything that promotes hate and conflict.”

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*me: stares into camera, blinks very slowly*
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The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it • Space

Paul Sutter:

»

What good are night-adapted senses in nocturnal species if the night sky isn’t much darker than the daytime sky? Researchers have identified several species whose circadian rhythms are getting thrown off, making them vulnerable to predation (or, the reverse: the inability to effectively locate prey).

Given the harmful effects of light pollution, a pair of astronomers has coined a new term to help focus efforts to combat it. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and a letter to the journal Science, is “noctalgia.” In general, it means “sky grief,” and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.

Thankfully, there is a way to tackle noctalgia, just as there are ways to combat climate change. On the ground, efforts have sprung up across the globe to create dark-sky reserves, where surrounding communities pledge not to encroach with further expansions of light pollution. Still, those are usually in extremely remote and inaccessible regions of the globe, so other efforts have focused on working with community and business leaders to install night-friendly lighting, such as devices that turn off automatically or point only at the ground (or are simply not used at all).

Tackling satellite-based pollution is another matter, as that will require international cooperation and pressure on companies like SpaceX to be better stewards of the skies they are filling with equipment.

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Neat word.
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US argues Google wants too much information kept secret in antitrust trial • Reuters

Diane Bartz:

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The US Justice Department on Monday objected to removing the public from the court during some discussions of how Google prices online advertising, one of the issues at the heart of the antitrust trial under way in Washington.

The government is seeking to show that Alphabet’s Google broke antitrust law to maintain its dominance in online search. The search dominance led to fast-increasing advertising revenues that made Google a $1 trillion company.

David Dahlquist, speaking for the government, pointed to a document that was redacted that had a short back and forth about Google’s pricing for search advertising.

Dahlquist then argued to Judge Amit Mehta, who will decide the case, that information like the tidbit in the document should not be redacted. “This satisfies public interest because it’s at the core of the DOJ case against Google,” he said.

Speaking for Google, John Schmidtlein urged that all discussions of pricing be in a closed session, which means the public and reporters must leave the courtroom.

It is not unusual in merger trials for information like market share and business and pricing strategies to be redacted.

And sometimes the redactions are broader since, essentially, the companies want the information hidden and the government lawyers fighting the merger are working flat out to win rather than worrying about over-sealing, said Katherine Van Dyck, an experienced litigator and senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

“Litigation is a pretty grueling process,” she said.

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Offset market hit by fresh allegations of false CO2 claims • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Natasha White:

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A popular category of carbon offsets held by a number of major publicly traded companies is significantly more prone to greenwashing than previously feared, according to a new investigation of the financial instruments.

The conclusion is based on work done by a team of 14 researchers in association with the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. The study looked at so-called REDD+ credits, which represent roughly a quarter of carbon offsets issued globally.

“Many of the researchers have been studying carbon-offset quality for many years, and even we were surprised,” Barbara Haya, director at the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project and the lead researcher behind the report, said in an interview. “We found problems under every stone we turned.”

The findings may have serious implications for companies that have based their climate statements on the offsets probed in the study. That list includes Shell Plc, Eni SpA and Delta Air Lines Inc., according to an analysis of public data by Carbon Market Watch, a nonprofit that commissioned the Berkeley research.

The study also has ramifications for the traders of offsets, according to Gilles Dufrasne, global carbon markets lead at Carbon Market Watch.

Traders and companies that end up buying offsets need to “do some work to figure out which ones are worth something and which ones are worth nothing,” Dufrasne said. “Most credits probably don’t represent any climate benefit.”

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Which is why I mentioned last week that Apple ought to look closely at its carbon offset programs. They’re a classic form of greenwashing.
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What’s lost when the New York Times sports section goes away • The Washington Post

Barry Svrluga:

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Forget print vs. online for a minute, because that war has been over for a long time. The stories and the analysis, the commentary and the accountability journalism — broadly holding the powers that be responsible for how they treated people, narrowly holding teams responsible for the moves they made — were all housed in one place.

Which is not to say the Times won’t still make an impact in sports journalism. The Athletic, the subscription-based website the Times bought for $550m that it will use to replace its sports content, has many capable and talented reporters and editors, and it has produced good work. It’s just hard to imagine, going forward, that it will have 400 of them. And if the reporters go away, so does their ability to dissect the moves of specific franchises for the fans who care so deeply about them. Pro teams have been in the business of generating their own content for more than a decade now, and some of it — behind-the-scenes videos in particular — can be moving. But it’s not critical — ever. That’s a loss.

…There are still great sports writing and sportswriters out there. Where it and they are found is changing. ESPN no longer has a magazine. Sports Illustrated is no longer owned by a journalism company. The New York Times is closing its sports section. The craft is undergoing an overhaul, produced by nontraditional outlets seeking different audiences.

Maybe that’s just fine, a natural and necessary evolution. But I can’t help but think that something is being lost — something has been lost — in all of this. The idea that sports are a valuable and vital part of culture, worthy of being packaged with international and national news, alongside coverage of the theater and art and style. The idea that deep reporting and elegant writing can elevate the understanding of sports, that the stories a publication’s best writers produce can enhance the experience of watching a competition, not just reproduce what everyone saw.

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There were four hundred people on the NYT’s sports section? Jeepers. I much preferred the writing in Sports Illustrated, back in the day: well-researched articles written with a languid style well removed from the raw Weetabix of the NYT’s style.
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Windows and Surface chief Panos Panay is leaving Microsoft • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Panay’s departure from Microsoft is somewhat abrupt. Just last month, Panay mentioned he was excited to appear at Microsoft’s special event that’s set to take place on Thursday, September 21st, where the company is poised to reveal the latest additions to its Surface lineup and “AI innovation.” However, Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw tells The Verge Panay will not appear at this week’s event.

Panay first joined Microsoft in 2004 as a group program manager. After overseeing the company’s Surface line and other key products, Panay became the company’s chief product officer in 2018, where he led the development of Windows 11. In 2021, Panay was promoted to executive vice president as part of the top leadership team that directly advises Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

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Apparently Panay is heading directly to Amazon to head its hardware division. The Surface line never quite made the impact that Microsoft wanted for it; the idea that it would transform the Windows laptop and tablet market by being a north star for product manufacture to all the PC and tablet OEMs didn’t materialise. Expect the Surface line to be quietly deprecated after this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tying a chatbot to a self-driving car’s system means it can explain what it’s doing to operators. CC-licensed photo by zombieite 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.

Last Friday there was another post at the Social Warming Substack. It was about the one social network nobody’s been able to build.

A selection of 11 links for you. I checked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google to pay California $93m over location-tracking claims • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Google has agreed to pay $93m to the state of California to settle claims it tracked the location of users without their knowledge. Under the terms of the proposed agreement, Google must also provide more information about the location data it collects on users.

The settlement follows a “multi-year” investigation by California’s Department of Justice, which found that Google deceived users into thinking they weren’t getting tracked when they actually were. According to the complaint, Google continued to collect and store location data on users even when they disabled the “Location History” setting within its apps and services, allowing the company to use this information for targeted advertising.

Google has since addressed the issues outlined in the complaint, with company spokesperson José Castañeda telling The Verge the allegations are “based on outdated product policies we changed years ago.” California now requires Google to disclose that the location data they collect on users might be used for ad personalization, provide more transparency about location tracking, as well as offer detailed information about the data it collects on its website.

“Our investigation revealed that Google was telling its users one thing — that it would no longer track their location once they opted out — but doing the opposite and continuing to track its users’ movements for its own commercial gain,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta says in a statement.

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So far Google has paid out $570m to settle similar cases in 42 states. This case covers 2014 to 2018, a period when it was making operating income of around $20bn per quarter.
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Slack is basically Facebook now • The Atlantic

Ian Bogost:

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Slack embraces both the light and dark sides of social-media life. A work-chat self now feels distinct from a work self, let alone a whole self. As on social media, the urge to weigh in, react, inveigh—in short, to post—has taken over, whether or not actual work is being facilitated in the process. As on social media, extreme positions proliferate on Slack, with workplace posts reading more like takes than like office talk. Even my Atlantic colleagues’ reactions to Slack’s rebrand seem profoundly overstated, shared because the software and the moment conspired to make them share-worthy.

Slack’s new redesign, with its fresh prods to engage, makes the software feel even more like social media. The interface has always seemed hell-bent on getting you back into the program, even if you’d prefer to do the actual work that your job demands. An icon flags unread posts in brightly colored circles. Channel names are bold until you scroll up and down to clear them. Why pick up the phone when you can do an audio “huddle” inside of a DM? Almost all software wants you to look at it, but Slack, a supposed productivity tool meant to help knowledge workers recover from their email, demands more fixation than email ever did.

So there is a refreshing honesty in the Slack update that my colleagues are lamenting. It admits that work is secondary. Making deals, managing employees, designing products, executing marketing—all of those activities are surely worthwhile pursuits for knowledge workers. But as with all of the great enterprise software that preceded it, one now gets those things done in spite of Slack rather than by means of it. Most important, for the workers using Slack, is using Slack.

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I used Slack briefly at The Guardian. Stopped using Slack quite quickly because of its amazing potential for being the time equivalent of a black hole.
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What do view counts mean on X, Tiktok, and Netflix? • NY Mag’s Intelligencer

John Herrman:

»

The internet promised, among other things, absolute audience surveillance, full measurability, and perfect knowledge of who was watching what, when, and for how long. What it delivered, instead, was metric tons of metric bullshit. Endowed with new powers of self-measurement, media companies, advertising firms, and online platforms have turned metrics into something approaching misinformation.

They’re suspicious, context-free numbers, produced in private, selectively shared to tell just the right stories: 264 million peripheral “views” for an X video, on a platform whose owner is simultaneously talking about “unregretted user-minutes;” three billion “family daily active people” making some sort of contact with four distinct but overlapping social-media platforms owned by Meta; 83 million people “watching” a streaming movie by allowing it to play for at least two minutes, or yet another Netflix show “surpassing the billion-hour mark in viewing time.”

In the abstract, metrics are powerful not just for what they convey — power, authority, popularity — but because they imply measurement by some sort of agreed-upon standard. In reality, online, they tend to supply math problems: vexing equations with missing variables and euphemistic names. There are numbers everywhere, and they mean nothing.

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Apple puts top Apple Silicon exec in charge of Apple Watch blood glucose monitoring project • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Apple’s efforts to bring glucose-monitoring features to the Apple Watch are housed under the company’s Exploratory Design Group team. The project was led by engineering executive Bill Athas until 2022, when he unexpectedly passed away.

Today’s report [by Bloomberg] explains that the team was “overseen on an ad-hoc basis” by former Athas deputies in the months following his passing. Those people reported directly to Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies.

Now, Apple has enlisted Tim Millet to oversee the team working on Apple’s noninvasive blood sugar monitoring technology. Millet has been at Apple for 19 years and has been “one of Srouji’s top two lieutenants for a decade.”

…Apple’s work on noninvasive blood sugar monitoring dates back to 2011 and is viewed as a “moonshot-style project,” with the idea originating during the Steve Jobs era. In February, it was reported that Apple had hit multiple “major milestones” in its work on this technology.

The company’s end goal is to bring this functionality to the Apple Watch, though it’s still years away from that becoming a reality.

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Both Microsoft and then Google put a fair bit of effort into creating glucose-measuring contact lenses; Google abandoned it in November 2018. Apple just still keeps going, despite never having said it is doing it.
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Battle of the ages: how America’s gerontocracy is a challenge for democracy • Financial Times

Eva Xiao:

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[90-year-old California senator Dianne] Feinstein, the oldest member of the chamber, took an extended leave of absence this year following a bout of shingles. As a result, it made it difficult for Democrats, who have a razor-thin majority in the Senate, to push through appointees and legislation. Though Feinstein will step down in 2024, she has resisted calls to retire earlier amid long-running concerns over her memory.

Worries over his health have also plagued Joe Biden, the oldest president in US history, who at 80 years old is running for re-election in a likely rematch against Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, 77. Both men have been urged by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, 76, to “stand aside” and make way for the next generation.

In August, a poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicated that three-quarters of the public think Biden is too old to serve as president for another term, including more than two-thirds of Democrats.

Yet unease over America’s gerontocracy is two-fold: while there are concerns over physical fitness and mental competency, a political class dominated by older people has other consequences.

Similar to other minority groups, the severe underrepresentation of young people likely means their interests are not being adequately addressed by policymakers, argue social scientists, which could contribute to political apathy among youth.

Legislatures should “somewhat resemble the population to make decisions that resemble what the overall population wants”, says Stockemer.

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Then again, you look at some of the younger members – Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Bobert, Matt Gaetz – and you might ask: do we want it to look exactly like the population? (Yes, AOC is the counterpoint.)
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Battery cell prices plunge in August, close to tipping point for the end of ICE vehicles • RenewEconomy

Giles Parkinson:

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The price of battery cells has plunged in the last month, taking it below a key benchmark for the first time in two years, and close to the “tipping point” where the price of battery-powered EVs (electric vehicles) can match that of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars.

According to leading analysts Benchmark Lithium, the global weighted average price of lithium ion battery cells fell 8.7% in August, taking it below the $US100/kWh mark for the first time since August, 2021.

It is now priced at $98.2/kWh, a 33% drop from the recent high in March last year of $US146.4/kWh, and is the result of a drop in key commodity prices, including lithium, nickel and cobalt.

Importantly, it is now not far from the $US80/kWh cell price that is crucial to delivering a $US100/kWh battery pack – the level that is considered a tipping point because it will allow EV makers to build electric cars that cost the same as petrol and diesel alternatives.

“The energy and transport revolution continues!” said Gerard Reid, a leading energy analyst and head of Alexa Capital. Reid said the price of lithium battery cells have fallen 80% in a decade, and will continue to fall as they deliver better performance.

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Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found • Chemistry World

Anthony King:

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A world-beating deposit of lithium along the Nevada–Oregon border could meet surging demand for this metal, according to a new analysis.

An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago. This is notably larger than the lithium deposits found beneath a Bolivian salt flat, previously considered the largest deposit in the world. Mining at the site is, however, contested by Native Americans for whom the area is sacred, and is believed to be where a massacre took place in 1865.

‘If you believe their back-of-the-envelope estimation, this is a very, very significant deposit of lithium,’ says Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven University and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. ‘It could change the dynamics of lithium globally, in terms of price, security of supply and geopolitics.’

New in situ analysis reveals that an unusual claystone, composed of the mineral illite, contains 1.3% to 2.4% of lithium in the volcanic crater. This is almost double the lithium present in the main lithium-bearing clay mineral, magnesium smectite, which is more common than illite.

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One suspects there’s going to be a lot of prospecting in volcanic craters all of a sudden.
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LINGO-1: exploring natural language for autonomous driving • Wayve

Rudi Rankin:

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The lack of explainability in machine learning models is a common concern, as the decision-making process often seems like a black box. However, by leveraging language, we can shed light on how AI systems make decisions.

Creating natural language interfaces could allow users to engage in meaningful conversations with AI models, enabling them to question choices and gain insight into scene understanding and decision-making.

…LINGO-1 can generate a continuous commentary that explains the reasoning behind [autonomous vehicle] driving actions. This can help us understand in natural language what the model is paying attention to and what it is doing. Below are a few examples:

In this first video, LINGO-1 describes the actions it takes when it overtakes a parked car.

LINGO-1: I’m edging in due to the slow-moving traffic
LINGO-1: I’m overtaking a vehicle that’s parked on the side
LINGO-1: I’m accelerating now since the road ahead is clear.

Here is LINGO-1’s explanation as the car approaches a zebra crossing.

LINGO-1: I’m maintaining my speed; the road continues to be clear
LINGO-1: I’m now decelerating, braking, and coming to a stop
LINGO-1: Remaining stopped at the zebra crossing
LINGO-1: I’m now accelerating from a stopped position
LINGO-1: I’m accelerating as the road is clear.

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‘A Pandora’s box’: map of protein-structure families delights scientists • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

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Last year, Google DeepMind used AlphaFold to predict the structure of nearly every known protein from organisms with genome data, amassing some 214 million structures in the AlphaFold database, which is hosted by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK.

Scientists found the resource instantly handy, but many of them looked only at a single structure, or family of related structures, says Martin Steinegger, a computational biologist at Seoul National University, who was interested in mapping the relationships of the entire database. “I thought it would be interesting to see how big our structural universe really is.”

To do this, a team co-led by Steinegger and computational biologist Pedro Beltrao, at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, developed a tool that quickly could compare every structure in the database, based on similarities in their shape. This identified more than 2 million ‘clusters’ of similarly shaped proteins in the AlphaFold database.

…Next to nothing is known about more than one-third of the protein clusters. “I really hope that biologists put some light on this darkness,” Steinegger says.

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Although it is a direct quote from one of the scientists in Switzerland, I don’t think “Pandora’s box” is quite the right phrase for this. But notice how machine learning is providing the scaffolding for new scientific understanding.
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VPNs, Verizon, and Reels: how students are getting around TikTok bans • The Verge

Monica Chin:

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When he first read the email announcing that public universities in Texas had been asked to ban the use of TikTok on their campuses, UT Dallas student Eric Aaberg feared the worst. As a full-time content creator with over 10,000 followers on the platform, the app was central to his life. Would he be forced to delete it? Would he be punished if he were caught using it?

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, are you serious?’” Aaberg recalls. “That’s so BS. There’s no way.”

Then he learned the reality. UTD was making TikTok inaccessible on its campus-provided networks. For him, that was the extent of the ban.

Aaberg immediately relaxed. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’” he says.

…among college students — by far the demographic who use the app the most — the reaction has been much more subdued. It’s best summed up, students say, as a collective eye roll and a quick jump into the Settings app.

“They really just did not care”
Thomas Pablo, a sophomore at the University of Oklahoma, describes the day his school announced a TikTok ban as an utter non-event. “It was just another Monday,” he recalls.

It happened suddenly — one day, TikToks loaded in the app and in mobile browsers, and the next day, they didn’t. But Pablo and all of his friends knew instinctively what to do: turn off the Wi-Fi and use data. For the past several months since the ban, he’s been switching his phone’s internet on and off around four times per day. Others he knows do it much more often.

Pablo never discussed or brainstormed methods with other students, nor did he hear any outcry about the new restriction. The student body, quietly, in unison, added Wi-Fi toggling to their daily routine. “Everyone was so nonchalant about it,” Pablo says. “They really just did not care.”

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Very reminiscent of the early Napster, and its successors such as Limewire: colleges tried to ban it but the students were smarter.
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Oh no, not more tech stuff! • Financial Times

Emma Jacobs:

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One minute you’re admiring the sky, the next you are an “old man yell[ing] at cloud”, to quote The Simpsons. And so it came to pass for me when Apple announced at its product launch that the new iPhone 15 would use a USB-C charger instead of its proprietary lightning cable.

Of course, Apple being Apple, it positioned the switch as a gift the tech group had bestowed on its fan base, instead of what it actually was: complying with an EU directive the company had fiercely resisted.

Last year, the European parliament announced that by autumn 2024, the USB-C would “become the common charging port for all mobile phones, tablets and cameras”. Next time you’re at an Apple store, instead of paying for your iPad, why not reframe the transaction as your decision to bequeath the company some money, and see how that grabs the “geniuses”.

My reaction to hearing the charger news was exasperation at Apple’s sleight of hand but also at the prospect of yet more stuff. Like many, I already have a box full of expired tech bits and bobs: cables, chargers and some random paraphernalia that might just come in handy one day. In the FT’s recent office reorganisation, I unearthed yet more expired tech.

…The short-term pain of Apple ditching its lightning charger will be worthwhile in the end, I know. Ultimately, it will reduce electronic waste. As Material Focus, a non-profit working to recycle electrical goods, says, e-waste is the UK’s “fastest growing waste stream, with 155,000 tonnes of electricals thrown away every year and 527mn items hoarded in homes”.

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It’s a bit tedious to point it out, but Apple’s first use of USB-C was in 2015, on the one-port Macbook. It could have kept Lightning on the iPhone for another year. Lightning is 11 years old, and USB-C is all over the place. Would you really rather have micro-USB or mini-USB?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Bellagio in Las Vegas is among the MGM casinos hit by ransomware – hacked perhaps via a phone call.CC-licensed photo by Guillermo Moreno 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. Good luck with that. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Microsoft publishes garbled AI article calling tragically deceased NBA player “useless” • Futurism

Victor Tangermann:

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Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s career with the Boston Celtics and Orlando Magic.

But in an unhinged twist on what was otherwise a somber news story, Microsoft’s MSN news portal published a garbled, seemingly AI-generated article that derided Hunter as “useless” in its headline.

“Brandon Hunter useless at 42,” read the article, which was quickly called out on social media. The rest of the brief report is even more incomprehensible, informing readers that Hunter “handed away” after achieving “vital success as a ahead [sic] for the Bobcats” and “performed in 67 video games.”
Condemnation for the disrespectful article was swift and forceful.

“AI should not be writing obituaries,” posted one reader. “Pay your damn writers MSN.”

“The most dystopian part of this is that AI which replaces us will be as obtuse and stupid as this translation,” wrote a redditor, “but for the money men, it’s enough.”

It’s not the first time Microsoft — a major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI — has embarrassed itself with AI-generated content on MSN. It made headlines last month, for instance, after publishing a similarly incoherent AI-generated travel guide for Ottawa, Canada that bizarrely recommended that tourists visit a local food bank. It deleted the bizarre article after criticism.

“The article was not published by an unsupervised AI,” Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, claimed to The Verge at the time. “In this case, the content was generated through a combination of algorithmic techniques with human review, not a large language model or AI system.”

The full story is that back in 2020, MSN fired the team of human journalists responsible for vetting content published on its platform.

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So hard to figure out what the moral is here. So very hard.

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Why more Baby Boomers are sliding into homelessness • WSJ

Shannon Najmabadi:

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Judy Schroeder was living a stable retirement in the affluent Florida enclave of Naples. Then her apartment building was sold to a new owner during the pandemic and she lost her part-time job working at a family-owned liquor store.

What followed was a swift descent into homelessness.

Faced with a rent increase of more than $500 a month, Schroeder, who had little savings and was living month-to-month on Social Security, moved out and started couch surfing with friends and acquaintances. She called hundreds of other landlords in Naples and southwest Florida but failed to find anything more affordable. She applied for a low-income housing voucher. She began eyeing her 2004 Pontiac Grand Am as a last resort shelter.

“I never thought, at 71 years old, that I would be in this position,” she said.

Baby boomers, who transformed society in so many ways, are now having a dramatic effect on homelessness. Higher numbers of elderly living on the street or in shelters add complications and expenses for hospitals and other crisis services. The humanitarian problem is becoming a public-policy crisis, paid for by taxpayers.

Aged people across the US are homeless in growing numbers in part because the supersize baby boomer generation, which since the 1980s has contributed large numbers to the homeless population, is now old. But other factors have made elderly people increasingly vulnerable to homelessness, and the vast numbers of boomers are feeding the surge. 

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The combination of increasing lifespans and fixed incomes.
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Why voice failed as a platform • Talking To Computers

Dustin Coates in 2019 finished writing a book about how to build “skills” and “actions” for Amazon’s Alexa and Google; by 2021 he felt it wasn’t going to take off:

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First, Not the reasons why voice failed: not due to a lack of adoption. In 2021, US adults with a smart speaker totalled 87.7 million, out of 255 million total. Germany saw 17.9 million out of 69 million, and the UK was at 19.7 million out of 52 million. Leaving the home, the same year there were 127.1 million smart assistant users in cars. 2022 numbers showed 35% of Americans “reached” by smart speakers. While overall growth might now be slowing, these are very healthy adoption metrics, and these studies are also showing that people didn’t buy and then drop, but were instead using their devices regularly.

Privacy concerns: the adoption numbers show it, but it’s worth speaking to this directly, as the critics from this angle tend to over-extrapolate their POV to the population at large. Privacy concerns did not lead to a failure of voice devices.

The truth is this: most people make a calculation between privacy and received value. No, I don’t have data to back this up, but it seems pretty obvious. People are willing to carry microphones around all day via their smartphones because they feel that they are getting enough value in return for the risk. Same thing for security cameras connected to the cloud. Same thing, it would seem, for smart speakers.

Big tech investment: finally, this wasn’t an area that just never took off due to underinvestment. Amazon’s hardware group lost $3bn in a single quarter in 2022—and it wasn’t Kindle losing all of that money. In 2019, Amazon had 10,000 employees on Alexa. Google likewise had put significant money towards Assistant, even if never to the level of Amazon. Microsoft, Samsung, and Apple have also all invested heavily in voice assistants.

Lack of first party investment didn’t lead to voice’s failure as a platform. It was for reasons more inherent to voice.

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He then goes on to specify why it did fail. You might guess a few, but they’re worth looking at.
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Solar exports from China increase by a third • Ember

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The data reveals that Europe accounted for 52.5% of the value of China’s solar exports in the first half of 2023. 

Solar modules, which are fully assembled solar panels, accounted for 90% ($23.8 bn) of China’s total solar exports by value in the first half of 2023. Over the last 12 months, China exported 111 GW of solar modules to Europe, the same amount as the total installed PV capacity of the United States. With a total over the last 12 months of 19 GW, Brazil is the largest single destination for China’s solar module exports outside of Europe.

Solar cells, which are unassembled parts that make up solar panels, made up the remaining 10% of China’s solar exports by value ($2.5 bn). The main export destinations for solar cells were Türkiye (33%), India (17%), Cambodia (15%), Thailand (10%) and South Korea (4%). 

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As the report notes, “China currently produces around eight out of every ten solar panels, and the growth in Chinese exports has global implications for the scale-up of clean power.” Not half.
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SoftBank’s Arm soars nearly 25% in market debut to $65bn valuation • Reuters

Manya Saini, Niket Nishant and Echo Wang:

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Shares in SoftBank’s Arm Holdings soared almost 25% above their Nasdaq debut price on Thursday, rekindling investor hopes for a turnaround in the moribund market for initial public offerings (IPO).

The stock, which had opened at $56.10, notched a 24.68% gain to close at $63.59, giving the British chip designer a valuation of $65bn in its return to public markets following a seven-year absence. The IPO had priced at $51.

Arm’s strong performance suggests that investor demand for initial public offerings, which had been hit hard over the last two years by geopolitical tensions and higher interest rates, may be on the rebound, market participants said.

“It is a successful IPO,” said Salman Malik, partner at Anson Funds in Toronto. “It will have a positive impact on the IPO pipeline and shows the AI theme is alive and kicking.”

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Softbank bought Arm for $32bn back in September 2016. So it hasn’t particularly made its money back, once you account for the stock jump.

Bit hard to see how Arm can make that valuation, though. Is its total profit over its lifetime going to be that big?
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A phone call to helpdesk was likely all it took to hack MGM • FT via Ars Technica

Mehul Srivastava and Hannah Murphy:

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A cyber criminal gang proficient in impersonation and malware has been identified as the likely culprit for an attack that paralysed networks at US casino operator MGM Resorts International.

The group, which security researchers call “Scattered Spider,” uses fraudulent phone calls to employees and help desks to “phish” for login credentials. It has targeted MGM and dozens of other Western companies with the aim of extracting ransom payments, according to two people familiar with the situation.

The operator of hotel casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, including the Bellagio, Aria, Cosmopolitan, and Excalibur, preemptively shut down large parts of its internal networks after discovering the breach on Sunday, one of the people said.

The effort to contain the hackers caused chaos. Slot machines stopped working, electronic transfers of winnings slowed down, and key cards for thousands of hotel rooms no longer functioned. MGM did not respond to a request for comment.

The FBI said it was investigating, and the Nevada Gaming Control Board was informed of the breach’s impact, with the state’s governor, Joe Lombardo, coordinating with local and national law enforcement, the board said in a statement.

…The gang learns about individuals from social media profiles in order to impersonate them and make phone calls in English to glean passwords or digital codes needed to access networks.

The group’s members are likely based in the UK or Europe, Carmakal said. “They’re successful because they are very good at research and have good skills,” he added.

At a sprawling company such as MGM, with thousands of employees and several overlapping networks, shutting down some internal functions to contain the breach would be a standard approach, said Steve Stone, head of Rubrik Zero Labs, another cyber security company.

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‘Get back into the kitchen’: what happened when Jill Scott and Gary Neville swapped social media accounts • The Guardian

Luke McLaughlin:

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Neville and Scott have teamed up to take part in The Social Swap, a Heineken campaign to highlight the issue of gender bias on X, formerly known as Twitter.

In April, they swapped accounts for five days, continuing to share opinions on football as they normally would. Unbeknown to Twitter users, for that short time, a message directed at Neville was in fact to Scott, and vice versa. The results were as illuminating as they were worrying and Neville, like Scott, was in disbelief at the level of ignorance on show.

“I’ve seen some of the replies that have come into Jill, which were my tweets,” Neville says. “‘Get back in the kitchen’, ‘Stick to the game you know, love’, that type of condescending, ignorant tweet … there’s no doubt that in football, women who have an opinion on men’s football basically get told to go back in their box.”

The issue of equality for women’s sport has been close to Neville’s heart since childhood. “When I go back to my life with my family – my mum got banned from playing football for the boys’ team in the 70s,” Neville says. “It made the local newspaper because the FA banned her from playing football.”

With two daughters, aged 13 and 14 and who are keen football fans, Neville is all the more focused on striving for equality. Not just when it comes to playing football, but simply women talking about the game that some, judging by the frequently warped environment of social media, regard as an exclusively male pursuit. Heineken, as part of its campaign, has partnered with Arwen, an AI-powered online moderation tool that allows users to filter negativity from their social media feeds.

“They watch Salford and Manchester United every single week with me,” Neville says of his daughters. “My youngest probably knows more about the Salford/United players than I do. The idea they can’t have an opinion on football without having their gender referred to is ridiculous.”

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AI spokesperson video creator • HeyGen

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Translate your videos seamlessly with one click, using a natural voice clone and authentic speaking style!

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There are a few videos using this floating around the net: they’re amazingly impressive. The system needs about 30 seconds of training of video and voice, and can then translate what’s said in the video into multiple languages in the speaker’s voice including the lip movements. It’s an incredible demonstration.
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Lead poisoning causes trillions of dollars in economic damage each year • Vox

Dylan Matthews:

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Pure Earth, the largest nonprofit working on lead contamination internationally, recently conducted a massive survey of products in 25 low and middle-income countries, from Peru to Nigeria to India to the Philippines, to test for lead levels in household goods. In their sample they found high levels of lead in 52% of metal and 45% of ceramic foodware (a category including dishes, utensils, pots and pans), as well as 41% of house paints and 13% of toys.

This has major consequences. A new paper in Lancet Planetary Health, authored by economist Bjorn Larsen and Ernesto Sánchez-Triana, World Bank’s global lead for pollution management, tries to quantify the scale of the lead problem globally.

The authors estimate that some 5.5 million people die prematurely due to lead exposure every year, and that the problem as a whole imposes a social cost of $6 trillion a year. That equals 6.9% of total world GDP.

These are massive numbers, and it’s worth putting them into context: 5.5 million deaths from lead in 2019 exceeds the number of people who died that year from car accidents (1.2 million), tuberculosis (1.18 million), HIV/AIDS (863,837), suicide (759,028), and malaria (643,381) combined. If accurate, the figure means that a little under one in 10 deaths globally can be traced to lead. Meanwhile, a social cost of 6.9% of global GDP exceeds a recent World Bank estimate of the social cost of air pollution, which added up to 6.1% of GDP.

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More countries are concerned about the iPhone 12’s EMF radiation profile • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

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For many people, the iPhone 12 effectively disappeared from the market on Tuesday, when Apple introduced iPhone 15 models and stopped selling the 12, first released in October 2020. In Europe, however, the iPhone 12 remains a notable device, as a number of countries are following France’s lead in looking into the device’s electromagnetic profile.

What kicked off the unexpected concern about a nearly three-year-old phone was France’s National Frequency Agency (ANFR). On the same day as Apple’s fall product announcements, the ANFR informed Apple that the iPhone 12 exceeds European Union regulations for Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), the rate at which a human body would absorb radiation from a device. A translated version of the ANFR report has the agency calling on Apple to withdraw the iPhone 12, “quickly remedy this malfunction,” and if not, “recall copies already sold.”

There are two measures of SAR for a device operating in the same frequency range as an iPhone, per EU standards. The “head and trunk” value, taken to protect against “acute exposure effects on central nervous tissues” when a phone is against the head or in a pants pocket, must not exceed 2 Watts of power per kilogram of body tissue, averaged over six minutes. When the phone is held in the hand or in clothing or accessories, for a “limbs” value, it’s 4 W/kg.

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This is a bizarre story. First: SAR is nonsense. There’s no evidence at all that (electromagnetic, not nuclear) radiation from phones causes cancers; if it did, we’d be seeing growing incidence, rising in line with the adoption of mobile phones in countries. But we aren’t. Second: the phones of the 1990s had far higher SARs than modern ones. Still no incidence. Still, it keeps testers happy.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Fans in Discord are buying what they think are real Harry Styles songs – but they’re more likely AI-generated. CC-licensed photo by Raph_PH 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. Don’t worry, darling. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Earth “well outside safe operating space for humanity”, scientists find • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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Earth’s life support systems have been so damaged that the planet is “well outside the safe operating space for humanity”, scientists have warned.

Their assessment found that six out of nine “planetary boundaries” had been broken because of human-caused pollution and destruction of the natural world. The planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing.

The broken boundaries mean the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed from the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, to the start of the industrial revolution. The whole of modern civilisation arose in this time period, called the Holocene.

The assessment was the first of all nine planetary boundaries and represented the “first scientific health check for the entire planet”, the researchers said. Six boundaries have been passed and two are judged to be close to being broken: air pollution and ocean acidification. The one boundary that is not threatened is atmospheric ozone, after action to phase out destructive chemicals in recent decades led to the ozone hole shrinking.

The scientists said the “most worrying” finding was that all four of the biological boundaries, which cover the living world, were at, or close to, the highest risk level. The living world is particularly vital to the Earth as it provides resilience by compensating for some physical changes, for example, trees absorbing carbon dioxide pollution.

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The ozone boundary is notably one that was breached, and then recovered. It is feasible. But we need governments to pay attention.
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The spectre of AI-generated ‘leaked songs’ is tearing the Harry Styles fandom apart • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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Over the last few weeks, a flurry of Harry Styles and One Direction snippets—which are short samples of a track designed to prove legitimacy so people will pay of the full thing—have begun popping up on YouTube, TikTok, and, most importantly, Discord, where they are being sold. The problem is no one can tell which, if any, of the songs are real, including AI-analysis companies who listened to the tracks for 404 Media.

“400$ FOR TWO OUTTAKES,” Wxytiv posted in a Discord beneath two snippets called Part_of_Me_snip.mp3 and I_Just_Wanna_Love_You_snip.mp3. In another Discord, they posted multiple “Announcements” per day teasing the release of leaked tracks and repeatedly threatening to leave the Discord forever if people don’t show sufficient deference to them: “Would y’all like to proceed to a group-buy for Don’t Let It Break You Heart multitracks + 2 other version ? 125/$250.” In a separate but connected Discord called THEFINAL, users are directed to PayPal money to a few different accounts to buy the full songs: “I’m sending $1 but I’m sending more when I get paid sorry,” one user posted.

Meanwhile, Styles fans are readily sending money via PayPal to a series of middlemen who claim to have the full tracks. They are also dissecting copyright databases looking for any evidence of the songs’ existence, checking to see if the snippets are deleted from social media via copyright takedown from the rights holders as “proof” they are real, and reaching out to anyone associated with One Direction in an attempt to try to learn more information about the songs.

… To complicate matters even more, the same people who are selling leaks they insist are genuine are also posting tracks they disclose are AI-generated in an attempt to prove their leaks are real. Their argument is that the AI tracks sound bad in contrast to the “real” leaks, therefore proving they’re authentic.

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Clever. Sneaky. AI for sure.

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How 9/11 affected the digital future • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

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what’s striking today is how cavalier and dismissive Silicon Valley thinkers were. All of those early legislative and regulatory debates were happening at a time when the prospect of a sustained terrorist attack was simply unthinkable. It isn’t just that, post 9/11, we end up with the Patriot Act (which is 200x more intrusive than the Clipper Chip). It’s also that the idea that you could dismiss terrorist threats as just big-government paranoia went from totally reasonable to holy-shit-so-tone-deaf.

That all changes on 9/11, and that never really changes back. You can see it in a December 2001 essay by Adam Penenberg. Penenberg is writing as a critic of mass government surveillance. But even as a critic, he asserts: “Worrying is a waste of time. Surveillance is here. It was inevitable. But the surveillance state is not.”

The monthly Cyber-Rights Now column is gone by 2001. WIRED doesn’t try to galvanize opposition to the Patriot Act the way it tried to oppose the Clipper Chip, and the Communications Decency Act [in the mid-90s]. The ground has shifted at that point. There were, in the public imagination, real threats and real villains again.

The result was an era of bifurcated administrative capacity. There was, in the years that followed, a voluminous surveillance state. The NSA, FBI, and CIA had limitless funding, their own court system, bipartisan political consensus, and willing defenders in elite opinion circles. All other government agencies — the FCC, FTC, FEC, DOJ etc — were still red tape in need of cutting/meddlesome regulators/a beast that needed to be starved so that innovators could innovate.

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Tennis ball wasteland? Game grapples with a fuzzy yellow recycling problem • AP News

James Martinez:

»

Tennis has a fuzzy yellow problem most players don’t think about when they open can after can of fresh balls, or when umpires at U.S. Open matches make their frequent requests for “new balls please.”

Because tennis balls are extremely hard to recycle and the industry has yet to develop a ball to make that easier, nearly all of the 330 million balls made worldwide each year eventually get chucked in the garbage, with most ending up in landfills, where they can take more than 400 years to decompose. It’s a situation highlighted by Grand Slam events like Flushing Meadows, which will go through nearly 100,000 balls over the course of the tournament.

That harsh reality in an age of heightened environmental awareness has sent ball makers, recyclers and the game’s worldwide governing body scrambling for solutions, and spurred sustainability activists to sound the alarm in online posts that pose the question: Are tennis balls a disaster for the planet?

“Tennis balls, like a lot of objects, are made to be indestructible, which means they’re very resistant to mechanical processing,” said Nickolas J. Themelis, director of Columbia University’s Earth Engineering Center. “But do you take a useful object that lasts forever and say people shouldn’t use it because it lasts forever? That’s nonsense.”

…The biggest barrier to recycling the rubber in the ball is the difficulty of removing the felt from the rubber core because of the tight glue designed to hold that cover on when it’s thwacked by a racket. And the felt is also a problem: a blended combination of wool and nylon that cannot be recycled.

What’s more, the core of most top-level tennis balls — such as the Wilson U.S. Open extra-duty model in play at Flushing Meadows — is only made from newly created, virgin rubber, which activists say leads to deforestation of rubber trees in the Amazon.

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Not enough dogs in the world, apparently.
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Coke’s latest mystery flavor is AI-generated • CNN Business

Danielle Wiener-Bronner:

»

For about a year and a half, Coca-Cola has experimented with limited-edition beverages that have mystery tastes — most of them with vague, futuristic concepts and undisclosed flavors.

The latest one, Coca-Cola Y3000, fits the bill. The one distinction: It’s supposed to taste like the future. Fittingly, the soft-drink giant used artificial intelligence to help determine the flavor and packaging.

It’s important for Coca-Cola to keep customers — particularly younger ones — excited about Coke, its more-than-a-century-old signature product. In recent years, health-conscious consumers have shied away from sugary beverages, making it trickier for soda sellers to market their legacy brands. Coca-Cola has used its Creations platform, responsible for limited-edition flavors like Y3000, to try to make the brand resonate with younger consumers.

Like all Creations drinks, Coca-Cola Y3000 is designed to taste mostly like Coke, with a bit of something else. To come up with that extra note of flavor, and the packaging design, Coca-Cola turned to AI.

The company relied on regular old human insights by finding out what flavors people associate with the future. Then it used AI to help figure out flavor pairings and profiles, a spokesperson said. For the product’s packaging — which appears to allude to a Y2K aesthetic with funky bubbles, pink and blue coloring and a pixelated logo — Coca-Cola used AI-generated images to create a mood board for inspiration. The aluminum can even gives credit where it’s due, prominently noting it’s “Co-Created with AI.”

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That sweet, sweet taste of marketing. AI! It’s toasted!
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People keep swallowing AirPods • Android Authority

Ryan McNeal:

»

Tanna Barker, a resident of Utah, is going viral after admitting she gulped down one of her AirPods. In the video, she explains that she ran into a friend while on a walk. During the conversation, she took one of the earbuds out of her ear to hear more clearly. Barker then decided to take her vitamins and popped the AirPod in her mouth, only to realize that the vitamins were still sitting in her hand.

“Halfway through my walk, I decided to take my vitamins, so I put my vitamins in, took a drink, and I was like, man, those are stuck,” Barker says. “So I guzzled my water, kept on going, said bye to Kathleen, and went to go get my AirPod. And my pills were in my hand. I swallowed my AirPod.”

Thankfully, it appears that she is okay and is taking the whole situation in stride, even taking moments to laugh at herself. Baker says she immediately called doctors and friends for advice. They reportedly all told her the same thing — to let it pass naturally.

Among other things, you may be wondering if that AirPod still works. Well, as it turns out, the answer is probably yes. Back in 2021, a woman from Massachusetts also swallowed an AirPod, thinking it was a vitamin. She was surprised to learn it still worked when she tried to record a voice note, and it captured the sound of her stomach.

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“No, I’m not worried about stereo any more, just one is fine thanks.” (This also harks back to the chewing gum-sized iPod shuffle, which in 2005 carried the warning “do not eat iPod shuffle”.)
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Arrested development: “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson • The Guardian

Gary Shteyngart:

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There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the “his eyes lit up” school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter. It feels as though, for instance, there are hundreds of pages from start to finish relaying the same scene: Musk trying to reduce the cost of various mundane objects so that he can make more money and fulfil his dream of moving himself (and possibly the lot of us) to Mars, where one or two examples would have been enough. To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best.

«

The idea of Isaacson as a sort of Dan Brown of biographers is both funny and alarming. Shteyngart’s review is so good it could have been written by Marina Hyde. Read it, particularly for his insight about the meaning of “X”. (Thanks wendyg for the link.)
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Facebook Messenger phishing wave targets 100K business accounts per week • Bleeping Computer

Bill Toulas:

»

The hackers start by sending [Facebook] Messenger phishing messages to Facebook business accounts pretending to be copyright violation complaints or requests for product information.

…The malware collects all the cookies and login data stored on the victim’s web browser into a ZIP archive named ‘Document.zip’. It then sends the stolen information to the attackers via Telegram or Discord bot API.

Finally, the stealer wipes all cookies from the victim’s device to log them out of their accounts, giving the scammers enough time to hijack the newly compromised account by changing the passwords.

As it can take a while for social media companies to respond to emails about hijacked accounts, it gives the threat actors time to conduct fraudulent activities with the hacked accounts.

Although the attack chain isn’t novel, the scale of the campaign observed by Guardio Labs is alarming. The researchers report roughly 100,000 phishing messages per week, sent mainly to Facebook users in North America, Europe, Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia.
​
Guardio Labs reports that the scale of the campaign is such that approximately 7% of all of Facebook’s business accounts have been targeted, with 0.4% having downloaded the malicious archive.

To be infected by the malware, the users still have to execute the batch file, so the number of hijacked accounts is unknown, but it could be significant.

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Doing the maths, that’s 400 downloading the malware each week; unknown number actually running it. A threat, sure, but not quite the end of the world.
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Execs flee The Messenger mess and its ‘mad dog’ boss • Daily Beast

Lachlan Cartwright:

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The honeymoon is well and truly over at [media site] The Messenger, where just four months since launching two key business executives have quit and others are looking to leave, Confider has learned.

Mia Libby, who joined The Messenger as chief revenue officer in November last year, resigned earlier this month, and Stephanie Parker, who was head of marketing since December, has also exited the troubled startup. Three people familiar with the situation say both women resigned following clashes with Richard Beckman, The Messenger’s president, who earned the nickname “Mad Dog” for his hard-charging ways at Condé Nast, where he once broke an employee’s nose.

“Beckman is at the center of the problems—the two women left because of him. More are looking to leave,” one well-placed Messenger mole told Confider. Beckman wildly claimed in an interview before the launch that The Messenger planned to turn a profit and generate an eye-watering $100m in revenue in 2024, but thus far the only prominent advertiser the site has consistently drawn has been Interactive Brokers LLC, a firm that buys and sells stocks, bonds, and some crypto.

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I’ve never seen a link from The Messenger being shared on any platform, nor visited its website. All I hear is about how badly it’s going. Place your bets on how long before it hits the iceberg.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Staff at Twitter faced Elon Musk’s manic insistence on moving a server farm in a mad hurry last Christmas. It went badly. CC-licensed photo by Torkild Retvedt 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. Make backups. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Apple’s first ‘carbon neutral’ products are a red herring • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

According to Apple, “select case and band combinations of Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2, and Apple Watch SE” will be carbon neutral. To know if a product is carbon neutral, look for a new logo saying so on the package. Apple says it was able to reduce emissions from materials, electricity, and transportation in production of the watches, in part by getting more of its suppliers to switch to clean energy. Any remaining pollution was offset through nature-based projects like restoring forests so that they can capture more CO2. Apple also says it will match customers’ expected electricity use for charging carbon-neutral Apple Watch models with investments in renewable energy projects.

The company is also replacing leather with “a luxurious and durable microtwill” it calls FineWoven. The material is made with nearly 70% postconsumer recycled content, and Apple says it has “significantly lower” carbon emissions than leather. Cattle are a big source of greenhouse gas emissions because cows burp out methane, which is even more potent than CO2 when it comes to its ability to trap heat on the planet.

…The good news is that Apple’s gross carbon emissions are falling, according to its latest environmental progress report. It produced the equivalent of 20.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022. That just has to drop to net zero by the end of the decade if the company wants to meet its climate goals. Like Octavia Spencer says in her role as Mother Nature in a skit Apple played during today’s event, “Don’t disappoint your mother.”

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I thought that the environmental element of Apple’s presentation was pretty good; the skit wasn’t terrible. The contrast with, well, every other tech company, for which environmental questions don’t even seem to get asked, is quite stark. Though it might be worth asking about that work on “restoring forests”: carbon offsets are often a terrible scam.
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The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will let you film spatial video you can watch on the Vision Pro • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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The newly announced iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will soon let you capture “spatial video” that you can watch on the forthcoming Apple Vision Pro headset.

The new phones will be able to use the main and ultrawide cameras to “create a three-dimensional video,” Apple SVP Greg Joswiak said during Tuesday’s Wonderlust event. You’ll then be able to watch the video captured from those cameras on the Apple Vision Pro, which the company is still planning to release in early 2024.

“This is really important, as your iPhone is with you all the time, so you won’t ever miss capturing a special moment using spatial video, like your family’s beach vacation,” Joswiak said.

The ability to record spatial video on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max is set to arrive “later this year,” according to an Apple press release. However, we don’t know if you’ll be able to watch those spatial videos in 3D on any other devices — the press release only specifies the Vision Pro — but we’ve asked Apple if it can clarify.

«

This was entirely predictable: of course you want to be able to create 3D content for this new platform, and have an easy way for the users of your other platforms to do it. (I felt I had predicted it, but the closest was in June, just after the unveiling, when I wrote “I wonder if the 3D cameras are going to be sold separately [of the Vision Pro] at some stage”. Does this count?)

People are going to use this for sports videos shot from the courtside, and it’s going to be amazing. Smart move by Apple: limited to the top-end iPhones for now, probably all of them next year.
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Slug & Lettuce pub group to charge more at peak hours • BBC News

Oliver Smith:

»

The pub group that owns Slug & Lettuce and Yates bars has said it will charge about 20p more per pint during peak hours due to cost increases.

Stonegate Group, the UK’s biggest pub chain, says 800 of its 4,000 pubs will introduce “dynamic pricing” during evenings and weekends. It said the price rise reflected the higher costs the company was facing, including extra security.

Peak-time pricing is used by other sectors like travel when demand spikes.

Stonegate said customers would be alerted to the price increases through notices in their pubs.
The move prompted an angry response from some customers on social media. “It’s already happening at my local pub – something like £3.40 a pint before 7pm, £4.20 after. It’s backfired I think, it’s often empty after 7pm,” said one.

“If they push on with this there will be no such thing as a busy Stonegate pub,” said another.

The company has introduced temporary price increases before. The chain charged up to 50p a pint more when England football matches were shown in their pubs during the last two world cups. Prices returned to normal after the matches.

Ride-sharing companies like Uber also use peak-time pricing, and it is commonly used by the hotel and airline industries.

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This is a slightly concerning development. What next? Pricier food at specific times in restaurants? Or at specific tables? It’s the opposite of Happy Hour.
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Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his ‘maniacal sense of urgency’ at Twitter • CNBC

Walter Isaacson, in another extract from his Musk biography:

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“Does this timeframe seem like something that I would find remotely acceptable?” Musk asked. “Obviously not. If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.”

It was late at night on December 22, and the meeting in Musk’s 10th floor conference room at Twitter* had become tense. He was talking to two X infrastructure managers who had not dealt with him much before, and certainly not when he was in a foul mood.

One of them tried to explain the problem. The data-services company that housed one of Twitter’s server farms, located in Sacramento, had agreed to allow them some short-term extensions on their lease so they could begin to move out during 2023 in an orderly fashion. “But this morning,” the nervous manager told Musk, “they came back to us and said that plan was no longer on the table because, and these are their words, they don’t think that we will be financially viable.”

The facility was costing Twitter more than $100m a year. Musk wanted to save that money by moving the servers to one of Twitter’s other facilities, in Portland, Oregon. Another manager at the meeting said that couldn’t be done right away. “We can’t get out safely before six to nine months,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Sacramento still needs to be around to serve traffic.”

…”All you need to do is just move the f—ing servers to Portland,” [Musk] said. “If it takes longer than 30 days, that would blow my mind.” He paused and recalculated. “Just get a moving company, and it will take a week to move the computers and another week to plug them in. Two weeks. That’s what should happen.”

Everyone was silent. But Musk was still warming up. “If you got a godd— U-Haul, you could probably do it by yourself.” The two managers looked to see if he was serious. Two of Musk’s top loyalists, Steve Davis and Omead Afshar were also at the table. They had seen him like this many times before, and they knew that he might be.

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(* The original article says “X, formerly Twitter”, and uses “X” rather than “Twitter”. But at the time these events occurred, it was still Twitter. So I’ve edited it.) The collision between Twitter’s inertia and Musk’s impatience makes for a fun tale, though the outcome wasn’t positive.
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Amateurs pile into 24-hour options: ‘it’s just gambling’ • WSJ

Gunjan Banerji:

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Not long ago, options trading was seen as best left to professionals with access to sophisticated trading tools and data. Now, a new generation of rookie speculators have been trying to strike it big betting on short-term options.

Shorter-dated options, expiring in five or fewer days, accounted for about half of all options-market activity as of August, according data provider SpotGamma, up from around one-third three years ago. Individual investors made up 27% of all activity in options as of June, up from 23% at the start of 2020, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. For popular one-day options tied to the broad S&P 500 index, individual investors made up around one-third of all trades, according to exchange-operator Cboe Global Markets. 

A study by finance experts at the London Business School estimated that most individual options traders lose money. Between November 2019 and June 2021, such investors notched losses of some $2.1bn, with the hits concentrated in shorter-dated trades, the study concluded.

“We should stop pretending that’s what’s going on is investing,” said Benjamin Edwards, a professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who has studied securities law. “It’s just gambling.”

Investment professionals have been closely tracking the activity of the rookie traders. Some pros say that wild options activity at the start of the pandemic contributed to mammoth one-day stock moves.

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People don’t learn, do they. Dunning and Kruger should demand royalties or something.

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Google monopolized internet search for a decade, landmark antitrust trial hears • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early:

»

The trial is set to last 10 weeks, as the government makes its case that Google leveraged its market power and wealth to strangle competition. Google spent billions on deals with companies such as Apple and Samsung to make itself the default search browser on their devices, which the government alleges shut out competition and allowed Google to attain a monopoly on searching the internet.

Google denies the Justice Department’s allegations. The company’s longtime chief legal officer, Kent Walker, has argued that consumers can still freely use any rival search engines and that Google’s services represent only a fraction of the ways that people browse the internet.

Google also claims its industry dominance – the government alleges it has about a 90% share of the US search market – is the result of providing a better product than its competitors.

In the government’s opening statements, a Justice Department lawyer, Kenneth Dintzer, laid out the case against Google. Dintzer argued the trial will show that Google maintained a monopoly over search for the past decade through exclusionary deals with device makers that cut out competitors. He also alluded to Google’s attempts to block access to documents and auto-delete internal messaging to stymie antitrust enforcement.

The Justice Department filed its suit in 2020, but later joined in an additional suit against Google brought by attorneys general from more than three dozen states and territories. The states’ case will also be heard during the trial, with antitrust lawyer William Cavanaugh acting as lead attorney for that lawsuit. Cavanaugh also delivered an opening statement on Tuesday, presenting an argument on how Google withheld parts of its services in order to disadvantage competitors.

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Certainly going to be interesting to see how the Justice Department gets on. Google has rehearsed these arguments for decades, in many different legislatures.
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Hackers are salivating over electric cars • The Atlantic

Patrick George:

»

Car hacking may call to mind action-movie-like scenes of millions of Teslas being remotely seized by terrorist groups and commanded to drive into hospitals. That’s thankfully far-fetched. The bigger risk is to personal and financial information related to various digital add-ons and connected features, which are essentially unavoidable with modern EVs—as is the requirement that you pay for them over time. Mercedes-Benz will unlock more horsepower for up to $90 a month, BMW lets its cars’ safety cameras record 40-second snapshots of video for $39 a year, and Ford’s BlueCruise hands-off driver-assist feature is now $75 a month.

Many major automakers have big plans for this approach, if they don’t already offer them: Ford just made a big executive hire from Apple to grow future subscription revenue, while General Motors plans to offer more than 50 such features by 2026. And rather than conveniently listing these costs online, some automakers have you find out via the car’s infotainment system itself.

Understandably, these moves have not gone over well with the car-buying public. A BMW plan to charge $18 a month for heated seats (it’s always heated seats, somehow) in countries including the United Kingdom and Korea proved so unpopular that BMW just announced it will be dropping the idea entirely. The company still plans to offer subscriptions for software such as automated parking help, and Jay Hanson, a BMW spokesperson, told me that such subscriptions offer drivers a level of flexibility they’ve never had before. “A customer may choose to add a feature that was not specified when the vehicle was originally ordered,” he said, “or experiment with a feature by purchasing a short-term trial before committing to a purchase.”

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But more than that, they want money, because they’re going to lose what they now get from making tons of replacement parts and selling them to networks of dealers. The hackers, meanwhile, don’t like the idea of being nickel-and-dimed.
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Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows • The Register

Richard Speed:

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Microsoft has made it clear: it will ax third-party printer drivers in Windows.

The death rattle will be lengthy, as the timeline for the end of servicing stretches into 2027 – although Microsoft noted that the dates will be subject to change. There is, after all, always that important customer with a strange old printer lacking Mopria support.

Mopria is part of the Windows’ teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance’s mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then.

Since Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has baked Mopria support into the flagship operating system, with support for devices connected via the network or USB, thanks to the Microsoft IPP Class driver. Microsoft said: “This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on.”

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That ever-delightful rigmarole of running a wizard to install a printer driver after half an afternoon’s search across the internet and then finding that the printer didn’t like the driver – those days will be gone, all gone.
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Autonomous truck platoons are a bust, but they work if you put them on rails • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

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Platoons of driverless cargo trucks cruising across highways is one of those tempting technocrat ideas that doesn’t look like it will pan out. As autonomous driving technology matured in the middle of the last decade, we saw trials of the concept, but human truck drivers do more than just throttle, steer, and brake, and they aren’t likely to be replaced soon.

A better idea would be to shift some of that cargo to our underutilized railways where the idea of platooning is an old one, better known as a “train.” Parallel Systems hopes to do just that with its second-generation autonomous battery-electric freight railcar.

“Our goal is to transfer more of the trucking traffic onto the railroad. In order to do that, the railroad needs to be far more flexible,” explained John Howard, co-founder and vice president of operations at Parallel Systems.

Instead of a conventional train with one or more locomotive cars pulling a long chain of unpowered cargo cars, each rail car is a self-powered electric vehicle. “It’s essentially like a skateboard where you can put individual metal containers on top, you can stack them two high,” Howard told me. “They can stack together to make platoons—they push on each other. But the value proposition is that each individual car can break off and go to where it needs to go,” he explained.

“When you’re looking at a terminal, a traditional freight train is about three miles long, which means you need a place to park three miles of a rolling stock. You need a buffer of about 300 containers. You have trucks going back and forth. It’s a big operation with a lot of real estate and a lot of cost. Our vehicles can interface like a semi truck to go directly where they need to go, load and unload you to get out of the way,” Howard told me.

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There’s something quietly hilarious in the self-driving car business reinventing the train – on rails.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Periscope lenses have been available on smartphones for some years – but still aren’t common. Will Apple change that? CC-licensed photo by Judith Jackson 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.

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

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

Elon Musk let Russia scare him • The Atlantic

Anne Applebaum:

»

The New Yorker has also described how Ukrainian soldiers abruptly lost their access to Starlink on the battlefield during a different set of land operations. Isaacson’s version of the maritime story implies that all of the drones in the operation washed ashore that evening. But recently in Ukraine, I met some of the engineers who helped design the unmanned sea vehicles, including an engineer who was involved in the first attempt to hit Russian ships in Sebastopol. They told me that not all of the drones involved were lost. Some returned back to base, undamaged.

Here is the part you might not have heard, or not registered: the same team launched a similar attack again a few weeks later. On October 29, a fleet of guided sea drones packed with explosives did reach Sebastopol harbor, using a different communications system. They did hit their targets. They put one Russian frigate, the Admiral Makarov, out of commission. The team believes that they damaged at least one submarine and at least two other boats as well.

And then? Nuclear war did not follow. Despite Musk’s fears, in other words—fears put into his head by the Russian ambassador, or perhaps by Putin himself—World War III did not erupt as a result of this successful attack on a Crimean port. Instead, the Russian naval commanders were spooked by the attack, so much so that they stuck close to Sebastopol harbor over the following weeks.

For their own security, I am choosing not to publish the names of the engineers. I was introduced to them by a tech executive I met on a previous trip to Ukraine, when I was writing about drone operations more broadly. This team has shown off its unmanned boats before, so I am not revealing secrets when I write that they are small, black, and hard to see on the water, and have a very long range—now more than 650 miles, the engineers told me.

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Of course the Russians who spoke to Musk led him up the garden path about what they would do. Because he’s an idiot and/or easily flattered/scared.
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2023 on track to be world’s hottest year on record, at 1.5ºC above pre-industrial • ABC News

Tom Saunders:

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This year is now almost certain to become Earth’s warmest on record after a hot July and August saw global temperatures reach the Paris Agreement target of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels.

This is the first time the 1.5ºC threshold has been passed for more than one month, and only the second time it has ever been exceeded, behind February 2016.

Data released last week from Copernicus, a branch of the European Union Space Programme, shows August was 1.59ºC warmer than 1850-1900 levels, following a 1.6ºC increase in July.

The recent records have now lifted the year-to-date global temperature to the end of August to 1.35ºC above pre-industrial levels, just 0.01ºC behind 2016 — the current record holder, according to Copernicus data.

While the latter months of 2016 cooled off, global temperatures this year have been building, a trend likely to continue as El Niño develops further.

…The world’s waters have been so warm in 2023 that seven out of a possible eight months have entered the top 30 warmest on record, including four of the top five.

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A marker of failure, and inertia – in the form of resistance to change. But now the planet is changing, faster and faster. Wonder if some of the American politicians will argue that since we’re now already at 1.5ºC there’s no point trying to ameliorate it.
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Huawei watchers and the land of magical thinking • Digits to Dollars

Jonathan Goldberg:

»

This weekend, the big news in certain circles was the news about Huawei’s new Mate 60 flagship smartphone and the seemingly miraculous Kirin 9000s chip that powers it. This chap has riveted everyone’s attention as it seems to raise questions about the efficacy of the US government’s restrictions on Huawei and China’s access to advanced manufacturing processes.

…We know that Huawei has been investing heavily in fabs in recent years. We saw signs of that in their investments in third parties, but it is also reasonable to assume they spent a lot of time and money working with SMIC [China’s chip fab] engineers, efforts that would not show up publicly. Critically, we do not know what the yield of this chip is and whether it is remotely profitable for SMIC. SMIC has been held to DUV machinery, cut off from ASML’s EUV machines by US actions. Their 7nm process is probably the limit of what they can produce without access to EUV. And let’s not forget that labels like “7nm” are marketing terms. In terms of actual comparisons what matters most is transistor density, and on this metric this source claims SMIC is about 10% behind what TSMC labels 7nm. There is a non-zero chance that SMIC is actually struggling to build these parts and is losing a lot of money in the process. (Again, we may never see this in their public accounts, as someone, somewhere is likely subsidizing this work.)

Most people assume that SMIC is pushing the boundaries of what DUV can accomplish. Unless Huawei and SMIC have made some incredible, secret breakthrough, this means there is no future for this process. Maybe they can squeeze out a bit more density for one more round, but beyond that they would be breaking the laws of physics. So while the Kirin 9000 is a real achievement, we are highly skeptical that this really changes anything.

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As Goldberg points out, those screaming about this chip showing the sanctions haven’t worked are essentially ignoring the reality, because doing so suits their own agenda.
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Twitter appears to throttle New York Times • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be attempting to limit its users’ access to The New York Times.

Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC, according to NewsWhip’s data on 300,000 influential users of X.

The drop in engagement in Times posts seems isolated to X: NewsWhip data showed that engagement with Times links shared on Facebook remained consistent relative to other outlets.

“There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August,” NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson told Semafor.

Times employees had already taken note of the pattern, as high-profile attempts to share Times articles failed to travel on the platform. For instance, earlier this week, former President Barack Obama shared multiple New York Times articles on X about healthcare costs, which the service said reached fewer than 900,000 and 800,000 users respectively. The number was far lower than any other post shared by the former president since X began sharing that data publicly earlier this year — for comparison, a Politico link shared by the president got nearly 13 million views.

«

Hanlon’s Law may apply, but Musk makes everything worse.
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Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote • The Guardian

Elif Batuman:

»

The other day, I was looking for a quote in Proust, so I thought I would ask ChatGPT. Here’s how it went.

EB: Is there a passage in In Search of Lost Time when Proust talks about how love affairs repeat themselves, and says that when you’re writing about a love affair in the past, you’re often drawing inspiration from a different love affair in the present?

CHATGPT: Yes, there is a passage in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (also known as “Remembrance of Things Past”) where he discusses the repetition of love affairs and the influence of present experiences on writing about past love affairs. The passage can be found in the first volume of the novel, “Swann’s Way” (Du côté de chez Swann).

In this passage, Proust reflects on how our present emotions and experiences often color our memories of the past. He suggests that when we write about a past love affair, we might unknowingly be influenced by the emotions and experiences of a current or recent love affair. This blurring of past and present emotions can result in the repetition of themes and feelings in our writing.

The idea of how love affairs repeat themselves and how we are influenced by our present experiences when writing about the past is a recurring theme in Proust’s work, as he delves into the complexities of memory, perception, and the nature of human emotions.

Please note that the specific wording and context of the passage may vary depending on the translation and edition of the novel. If you’re interested in exploring this theme further, I recommend reading “Swann’s Way” to experience Proust’s beautiful prose and intricate exploration of love, memory, and the passage of time.

«

There’s a lovely meta-joke in Batuman’s efforts to pin down something “remembered” by a machine about a piece of work that is all about remembering.
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What does it cost to try to stay young forever? Inside the hyped-up world of anti-ageing • The Globe and Mail

Alex Cyr:

»

Toronto’s Longevity House, a 9,000 square-foot facility that opened in 2021 and charges $100,000 for a lifetime membership, offers clients access to a suite of services such as red-light therapy, chakra therapy and electrical muscle-stimulation suits.

In the United States, startup Ambrosia started offering infusions of blood from teenagers and young adults in 2016, charging US$8,000 a litre, only to be shut down that same year after being dubbed unsafe by the FDA.

The dearth of robust scientific studies on these treatments is making some experts question their effectiveness and safety. Brett Finlay, a B.C.-based microbiologist and co-author of The Whole-Body Microbiome, says he wants to wait for results from clinical trials before believing in any trendy anti-ageing method. The problem, he said, is the length of time it takes to collect such data. One longitudinal ageing study from the Netherlands that set out to study the change in physical, emotional, cognitive and social functioning of people as they age has been continuing since 1992.

In the absence of data, Finlay fears that internet movements such as taking steroids for muscle growth or applying snake venom to wrinkles are motivating demand for quick fixes, which are clouding tried and true healthy practices.

“The truth is that we already have anti-ageing methods, but they are incredibly boring and hard: It is exercise, eating a balanced diet with lots of fibre, good sleep and cultivating a good community of people around you,” said Finlay, adding that these lifestyle practices have been shown to reduce stress and inflammation, which are correlated with some of the most prevalent causes of death such as obesity-caused illnesses, diabetes, cancer, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“Trends and fads come and go, whereas science just plods along and slowly gives us answers.”

«

Apparently Peter Thiel wants to be cryogenically frozen when he dies. I say, why wait? Anyhow, anti-ageing is reckoned to be a $63bn industry worldwide. Or you could follow Finlay’s rather cheaper advice.
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China sows disinformation about Hawaii fires using new techniques • The New York Times

David Sanger and Steven Lee Myers:

»

When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced.

The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.

For China — which largely stood on the sidelines of the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections while Russia ran hacking operations and disinformation campaigns — the effort to cast the wildfires as a deliberate act by American intelligence agencies and the military was a rapid change of tactics.

Until now, China’s influence campaigns have been focused on amplifying propaganda defending its policies on Taiwan and other subjects. The most recent effort, revealed by researchers from Microsoft and a range of other organizations, suggests that Beijing is making more direct attempts to sow discord in the United States.

«

Guess they’ll have to duke it out with the Russians trying to do the same. Also, why is China bothering with stuff that Marjorie Taylor Greene does for free using the interstellar gas in her head?
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August 2020: What is a periscope lens for smartphone cameras? • How To Geek

Harry Guinness in August 2020:

»

There just isn’t enough room to add a 12mm lens to a phone that’s only 8mm thick. Unless you do it sideways.

A periscope lens works much like a periscope on a submarine. Light enters the front element and is then reflected 90 degrees by an angled mirror. It passes through any other lens elements before hitting the camera sensor and is then recorded as a photo. By changing the direction in which the light travels, longer lenses don’t have to be as deep because they can be wide.

For phone manufacturers, this is a serious advantage. It’s much more practical to find the necessary space for a longer telephoto lens horizontally than it is to shrink the sensor or make a thicker phone.

This way, manufacturers aren’t limited to 50mm-equivalent lenses with 2x optical zoom (or, at a push and with some dubious marketing, 3x). It makes 100mm- (around 5x zoom) or even 200mm-equivalent (around 10x zoom) lenses possible.

…Chinese manufacturers (Oppo and Huawei, in particular) have been playing around with them for several years. The five-camera Huawei P40 Pro+ has a 10x periscope telephoto lens that’s equivalent to a 240mm lens on a full-frame camera.

The more widely available Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra has a 5x telephoto periscope lens that’s roughly equivalent to a 100mm.

«

So Apple’s three years late to this particular party, and is believed to be reserving this only for the top-end phone. However this article from May 2023 shows only seven phones you can buy, from five manufacturers, which incorporate periscope cameras. Maybe not that common, then.
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Qualcomm to supply Apple with 5G chips until 2026 under new deal • Reuters via MSN

Stephen Nellis:

»

Qualcomm said on Monday it had signed a deal with Apple to supply 5G chips until at least 2026, at a time when the iPhone maker faces increased challenges in China and looks to reinforce its supply chains elsewhere.

The deal extends a relationship worth billions of dollars to Qualcomm for at least three years beyond what was expected and indicates Apple is not rushing out its own modem, despite moving all its computers to processing chips of its own design.

Qualcomm shares were up 4% in early afternoon trade. The company is the leading designer of modem chips that connect phones to mobile data networks. Apple shares rose 0.5%.

San Diego, California-based Qualcomm previously signed a chip supply deal with Apple in 2019, after the two companies settled a protracted legal battle.

That supply agreement ends this year, meaning that the iPhones that Apple is expected to announce on Tuesday would be the last phone debut under that deal.

«

Well this rather puts the kibosh on those stories from a couple of years ago, such as this one in November 2021 that “At today’s Investor Day event, Qualcomm CFO Akash Palkhiwala said that Qualcomm expects to supply just 20% of Apple’s modem chips in 2023.” Clearly, Qualcomm and Apple have patched things up (or that the 2019 purchase of most of Intel’s modem division for $1bn has completely fizzled).
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Billpayers could miss out on £1bn a year in savings due to wind auction error • Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit

George Smeeton:

»

Offshore wind costs reached a record low strike price of around £50 per megawatt-hour (in current prices) in the Contracts for Difference (CfD) Allocation Round 4 (AR4) auction held in 2022. Despite subsequent project cost inflation due to the post-pandemic economic recovery, the gas crisis, and rising interest rates, offshore wind remains around a third cheaper than forecast wholesale prices set by gas of around £100/MWh for the middle of this decade.

However, the Administrative Strike Price (ASP) that caps CfD auction bids was not adjusted to reflect this inflation for the AR5 CfD auction held this year. By contrast, the Irish Government allowed for supply chain inflation in its recent auction, which has successfully secured 3GW of offshore wind capacity at competitive prices.

As a result, out of the UK’s 5GW of ‘shovel ready’ offshore wind projects that could be delivered in the mid-2020s, it appears that none have bid into AR5 and all could now face delays. Had these projects been able to secure contracts, even with higher strike prices they would have paid back £1bn per year in the mid-2020s, a saving that could now be delayed.

Commenting on the results, Jess Ralston, Energy Analyst at ECIU, said:

“The key point here is that even with inflation, offshore wind is still about a third cheaper than gas power stations with the price of gas set to remain higher than before the crisis.

“The more renewables, the less gas you have to buy. By failing to back offshore wind, the Government has added around £1 billion a year to energy bills in coming years.”

«

Easy to forget that it’s not a forgone conclusion that you’ll get the cheaper energy built; governments have to take the right decisions too. The UK government didn’t, here.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The user interface of streaming services is remarkably bad. But why? CC-licensed photo by Michael Sheehan 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 was another post last Friday at the Social Warming Substack: it’s about LinkedIn. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Start your liveblogs. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Experts fear crooks are cracking keys stolen in LastPass breach • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults.

Taylor Monahan is lead product manager of MetaMask, a popular software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Since late December 2022, Monahan and other researchers have identified a highly reliable set of clues that they say connect recent thefts targeting more than 150 people, Collectively, these individuals have been robbed of more than $35 million worth of crypto.

Monahan said virtually all of the victims she has assisted were longtime cryptocurrency investors, and security-minded individuals. Importantly, none appeared to have suffered the sorts of attacks that typically preface a high-dollar crypto heist, such as the compromise of one’s email and/or mobile phone accounts.

“The victim profile remains the most striking thing,” Monahan wrote. “They truly all are reasonably secure. They are also deeply integrated into this ecosystem, [including] employees of reputable crypto orgs, VCs [venture capitalists], people who built DeFi protocols, deploy contracts, run full nodes.”

Monahan has been documenting the crypto thefts via Twitter/X since March 2023, frequently expressing frustration in the search for a common cause among the victims. Then on Aug. 28, Monahan said she’d concluded that the common thread among nearly every victim was that they’d previously used LastPass to store their “seed phrase,” the private key needed to unlock access to their cryptocurrency investments.

«

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From Netflix to HBO, the terrible design of streaming is ruining TV •

Jesus Diaz:

»

Each platform has its own flavor of bad. On Apple TV+, for example, the “continue watching” menu is hidden under the fold. Good luck watching the credits on Netflix—they automatically skip to serve up a new episode. Hulu makes viewers hunt for the very show they were just watching. And Amazon Prime has turned its streaming service into an all-you-can-eat buffet of video content that requires watchers to surf its interface as if they were looking for the best deal on toilet paper.

Across the board, the streamers have terrible landing pages and subpar curation algorithms. Playback buttons routinely fail to work properly, and using the time slide to scrub to the right point in the video still feels as fun and precise as playing Tetris with your toes.

In a silo, these UX sins are an annoying, but ultimately ignorable, trade-off for easy-to-access content. But it’s 2023, and really, there’s no excuse for an entire genre of digital tools to so blatantly ignore the basics of good design. I had to wonder: Why do the platforms that are supposed to bring us pleasure seem passionately invested in planting anti-UX mines all over their interfaces? I asked a few experts in the field for their take.

The most glaring issue with the streaming interface is how hard they make it to keep watching a show. On AppleTV+ and Disney+, in particular, finding the “continue watching” feature requires a long scroll. “As UX designers and users of these services, we find this extremely annoying,” Carsten Wierwille tells me over an email interview.

Wierwille, CEO of digital design studio Ustwo, blames the entertainment industry’s fear of the new. Instead of reinventing the TV experience, as streaming promised to do, the platforms have copied some of cable’s worst traits in a quest to hook viewers and maintain subscriptions. Wierwille ventures that the buried “continue watching” menu is likely the victim of marketing objectives. Streamers reserve the prime screen real estate to promote new or popular content, which he says fits with traditional TV design patterns of prioritizing content based on who pays the most for “preferred placement” rather than prioritizing the user needs.

«

It’s true: their design is terrible. (John Siracusa made this point, less prominently but no less well, in January 2022.)
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Nobody will tell you the ugly reason Apple acquired a classical music label • The Honest Broker

Ted Gioia:

»

If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music to subscribers it wouldn’t buy a label that records so many works in the public domain. This is the first warning sign.

My favorite offerings on the BIS label are the Bach cantatas recorded by Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki. (I recommended them last year in my article about the cantatas.)

The BIS label has also released the full Beethoven symphony cycle—performed by the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä, as well as lots of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and other core contributors to the classical repertoires. However, unlike the cantatas, these other BIS albums are seldom the most esteemed versions on the market.

But how many music fans searching for Beethoven or Mozart on streaming are picky about conductors and orchestras? If the first search results are the Minnesota Orchestra are they really going to dig deeper to find the Berlin Philharmonic?

Of course, some unique offerings can be found on BIS—especially of obscure Nordic composers. But do you really believe that Apple made this acquisition in order to corner the market on Kalevi Aho or Geirr Tveitt?

The very idea is ridiculous.

«

Gioia’s argument boils down to: Apple wants to be able to increase its profits (or reduce its losses) on Apple Music by offering music that is less encumbered by rights payments. I don’t find this persuasive: if that were the case, it would just buy a ton of music companies (which it could do, as Gioia admits, without breaking stride, apart of course from the antitrust challenge).

I think Apple is buying this classical music company precisely because people who like classical music are, indeed, picky about which performance, which conductor, which orchestra. I don’t want the Portsmouth Sinfonia’s version of Beethoven No.5; I want Karajan. (Though you may enjoy the contrast between the content on those two links.)
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The untold story of Elon Musk’s support for Ukraine • The Washington Post

Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk’s biographer, detailing what happened over the derailed attack on Russian ships:

»

My phone started vibrating with messages from Musk.

“This could be a giant disaster,” he texted. I went behind the bleachers to ask him what the problem was. He was in full Muskian crisis-hero-drama mode, this time understandably. A dangerous issue had arisen, and he believed there was “a non-trivial possibility,” as he put it, that it could lead to a nuclear war — with Starlink partly responsible. The Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet based at Sevastopol in Crimea by sending six small drone submarines packed with explosives, and it was using Starlink to guide them to the target.

Although he had readily supported Ukraine, he believed it was reckless for Ukraine to launch an attack on Crimea, which Russia had annexed in 2014. He had just spoken to the Russian ambassador to the United States. (In later conversations with a few other people, he seemed to imply that he had spoken directly to President Vladimir Putin, but to me he said his communications had gone through the ambassador.) The ambassador had explicitly told him that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would lead to a nuclear response. Musk explained to me in great detail, as I stood behind the bleachers, the Russian laws and doctrines that decreed such a response.

What the Ukrainians did not know was that Musk decided not to enable Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast. When the Ukrainian military learned that Starlink would not allow a successful attack, Musk got frantic calls and texts asking him to turn the coverage on. Fedorov, the deputy prime minister who had originally enlisted his help, secretly shared with him the details of how the drone subs were crucial to their fight for freedom.

«

So it wasn’t Musk alone who decided; Russia persuaded him. Showing precisely why you shouldn’t put these decisions in the hands of someone who doesn’t understand politics. “Russian laws and doctrines”, huh.
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The value of a customer • Asymco

Horace Dediu:

»

the picture becomes clearer. The iPhone customer is 7.4 times more valuable than the Android customer. This is more impressive than the 4x rule I had 10 years ago. The reasons are mainly that my anecdotes were from developers who sold products in the US or EU whereas expansion of smartphones to 7 billion global users has drawn in more lower spending customers.

But Apple’s base has also grown to over 1 billion users (650 million store users). This highlights that Apple has effectively grown and discriminated customers effectively. It obtained not just 1 billion customers but the best 1 billion customers.

How to discriminate effectively is the holy grail of marketing. The naïve approach is to keep prices high. But that usually only results in a “luxury” branding and a small base that tends not to grow. The alternative “premium” approach is to offer functionality and multiple tiers and distribution options and financing and merchandising. There is no simple formula.

The bottom line is that Apple’s approach is attracting 650 million $10/month app spenders. When we factor in additional subscription services, we get to the juggernaut that is Apple Services. This analysis has shown how difficult it is for anyone to come close to this quality of revenue.

As we look forward to Spatial Computing, the idea of increasing that spend from $10/month for a small glass rectangle in your palm to perhaps $100/month for an immersive 360-degree 3D experience does not sound too crazy.

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Building Meta’s Threads app (real-world engineering challenges) • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz got insights from the team that built Threads:

»

What was a difficult challenge which arose?

Making an engaging feed for Threads was the biggest one. On a microblogging site, the thing that is most relevant is what is happening right now. It needs to capture what everyone is talking about, and present choices for which conversations to dive into. 

There’s a balance between immediacy and helping the user find content from someone they’re most likely to engage with. At the same time, other apps in the space have proved you don’t need an extensive graph of connections in order to serve relevant and interesting content. 

We’ve talked on the Threads team about how we’d like to reduce our reliance on users manually curating follow graphs. However, to reduce reliance on manual curation, you need to understand what these posts are about, and know what is going on in the world – which are both challenging, to say the least!

«

There’s plenty more very insider-y stuff which will fascinate anyone who has had to run a skunkworks-style project inside a bigger organisation.
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iPhone 15 Pro Max with periscope lens, anticipated to capture nearly 40% of new iPhone production • Trendforce

»

In regard to specifications for the iPhone 15 series, several noteworthy hardware upgrades have been made. Compliance with EU regulations has led Apple to jump on the USB Type-C bandwagon this year. The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus will come with significant camera upgrades, sporting a 48MP main sensor to align with the Pro series. Furthermore, they will also be featuring Apple’s Dynamic Island. On the other hand, the Pro series promises cutting-edge processor upgrades, increased Dram capacity, and introduces a titanium-aluminum alloy frame. The Pro Max also intends to elevate mobile photography to the next level with its exclusive periscope lens.

Advances in technology, while exciting, can also ratchet up the intricacies of mass production. Reports of component snags and assembly issues have surfaced as production of the new iPhone models revs up in the third quarter. The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, in particular, have been grappling with lower-than-expected yield rates for their new 48MP cameras. Meanwhile, the Pro series is confronting challenges with panel and titanium alloy frame assembly. However, evidence suggests that the Pro series is likely to overcome its obstacles more swiftly than its non-Pro counterparts.

«

Trendforce has a helpful graphic that tells you everything about the models forecast to be unveiled on Tuesday. Not sure there’s anything else you need Tim Apple or the other folk to tell you apart from the price. (I think the “periscope” lens means it actually moves out from the back towards the object, rather than popping up from the top, but we await that clarification.)

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Washington, D.C.’s secret carpool cabal is a daily slug fest • Car and Driver

Elana Scherr:

»

Every city has its secrets. Washington, D.C., may have more than most, but I wasn’t there to dig up bodies, corporeal or political. My interest in visiting our nation’s capital was to find out more about a covert society, an organization of carpoolers who use codes and word of mouth to work around D.C.’s notorious traffic jams and exorbitant tolls. Under cherry blossoms light as dreams and in the long shadow of the Washington Monument, I set out in search of slugs.

The origins of slugging are murky, buried somewhere in the smoggy ’70s, when the Shirley Highway (I-395) from Virginia to D.C. became the first U.S. freeway to implement a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane. Those early carpool lanes were strict, initially requiring four occupants (now three), so commuting drivers would fill their seats by swinging by the bus stop and sniping riders. Eventually, the bus lines had more hopeful carpoolers than mass-transit riders, and the bus drivers began referring to the faux passengers as false coins, also known as slugs.

Undeterred by the slander, the slugs claimed the nickname and the practice grew in popularity, developing set locations and traditions. When the Virginia Department of Transportation partnered with the private toll-road operator Transurban in the early 2000s, multiperson vehicles were exempted from the expensive fees to encourage carpooling, thus keeping the fast lanes flowing free. Slugging is symbiotic—no money changes hands, but all parties benefit.

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It’s maybe not tech (though it is fuel efficiency!) but it’s fascinating. (Thanks Paul C for the tip.)
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Low-nicotine cigarette maker 22nd Century pursues strategic alternative amid financial struggles • Winston-Salem Journal

Richard Craver:

»

In May, 22nd Century provided its first annual fiscal revenue projections as a publicly-traded company at a range of $105m to $110m for 2023. That would represent a 69% to 77% increase from $62.1m in fiscal 2022.

However, to put that revenue range into perspective, the U.S. traditional cigarette marketplace has about $60bn in annual sales, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis.

Other anti-smoking advocates say an FDA emphasis on very-low nicotine cigarettes could steer tobacco consumers toward potentially less harmful products, such as electronic cigarettes, heat-not-burn cigarettes and moist snuff.

Anti-smoking advocates say that if the FDA is successful in mandating very-low nicotine cigarettes, some smokers may go to a black market to buy those made outside the U.S. with current nicotine levels.

Smokers could decide to consume more very-low-nicotine cigarettes in order to gain the same nicotine levels as they are accustomed to now.

“Their basic strategy is fundamentally flawed — tobacco use is a widely and correctly understood as a nicotine-seeking behavior,” said Clive Bates of Counterfactual, a London-based public health and sustainability consultancy.

“So, what does a product with negligible nicotine, but all the toxicity of a conventional cigarette, offer the consumer?”

«

22nd Century, which got loads of backing from the US FDA, is essentially heading for bankruptcy. There’s an amazing thread by the American Vapor Manufacturers, who make vaping products, pointing out all the positive coverage 22nd Century got, and yet now barely a peep.

I don’t hold any torch for vaping, but it’s an enormously safer (and more sociable) way of consuming nicotine than burning tobacco.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What exactly caused the Baby Boom in the middle of the 20th century? CC-licensed photo by Erin Warren on Flickr.

There’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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

UK data watchdog to review period and fertility apps amid security concerns • The Guardian

Hibaq Farah:

»

The UK data watchdog is to review period and fertility tracking apps after users expressed concerns over data security.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced the move after it commissioned research showing that half of women have concerns about how their data is used by the apps.

The poll of more than 1,150 women showed that a third of women have used apps to track their periods or fertility. Women said transparency over how their data was used and how secure it was were bigger concerns – at 59% and 57% of respondents respectively – than cost and ease of use when it came to choosing an app.

More than half of the people who use the apps also noticed an increase in baby or fertility-related adverts after signing up, with 17% finding the adverts distressing.

Emily Keaney, deputy commissioner of regulatory policy at the ICO, said the review intended to establish “both the good and the bad” of how the apps work.

She said: “These statistics suggest data security is a significant concern for women when it comes to choosing an app to track their periods or plan or prevent pregnancy. That’s not surprising, given the incredibly sensitive and personal information involved. Once we have more information, we will explore next steps, but we will not hesitate to take regulatory action to protect the public if necessary.”

The regulator will look into identifying potential harms and negative impacts on users. This includes confusing privacy policies that do not allow users to easily understand what they have consented to, whether the apps request and store unnecessary volumes of data and if users are receiving upsetting targeting advertising that they did not sign up to.

«

Might also look at the app frameworks, since developers typically include third-party code that will do all sorts of intrusive things.
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‘Ritual mass murder’ report in Chapel St Leonards was yoga class • BBC News

Pritti Mistry:

»

A yoga class was mistaken for a “ritual mass murder” scene after members of the public saw several people lying on the floor and reported it to police.

Five police cars descended on the North Sea Observatory in Chapel St Leonards, Lincolnshire, on Wednesday night.

Yoga teacher Millie Laws said she thought reports of her being a “mass murderer” were a “joke at first”.

Lincolnshire Police confirmed everyone was safe and well, and the call was made with “good intentions”.

The 22-year-old teacher said she was teaching seven students at the Seascape Cafe, which is inside the building, when she saw two dog walkers peering closely through the glass window during the Shavasana or relaxation stage of the class.

“They’re [students] laying down with blankets over them, their eyes are closed. It’s very dark in there. I just had candles and little tea lights lit the whole room, and I was just walking around playing my drum. I had a nice floaty top on with large bell sleeves,” she said. “A couple with some dogs just came up to the window and were having a look in, but they walked off really quickly and I didn’t think anything of it.”

Laws continued: “I didn’t know until after we left that these people phoned in saying that there was a mass murderer; they were wearing a robe and they were walking over all of the people, and it looked like some kind of ritual, and that the people on the floor were actually dead. I guess from the outside view it could look like that, because they’re all really still, very nice and relaxed.

«

What. A. Story. Dog walkers do all the hard work of finding dead bodies: have you ever noticed how many “missing body found” reports stem from people walking their dog(s)? Now including when the bodies are not yet dead, apparently.
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ChatGPT fails in languages like Tamil and Bengali • Rest of World

Andrew Deck:

»

Less than a year after launch, ChatGPT is being used all over the world, generating Amazon listings in China and call center scripts in the Philippines. But while ChatGPT thrives in English, Spanish, Japanese, and other dominant languages, it struggles to produce the same quality of text in languages like Bengali, Swahili, Urdu, and Thai — languages that have millions of speakers, but appear much less often online.

When Rest of World tested ChatGPT’s ability to respond in underrepresented languages, we found problems reaching far beyond translation errors, including fabricated words, illogical answers and, in some cases, complete nonsense.

Take Tigrinya, a language which has over 7 million speakers, with the vast majority located in Eritrea and the northern part of Ethiopia. Tigrinya shares a similar script to Amharic, a more dominant Ethiopian language, but there are significant differences between the two. When asked to list examples of African countries, ChatGPT mixed up Tigrinya and Amharic, adding characters that don’t exist in Tigrinya. It created an output to this simple question that is challenging to read for native speakers of both languages.

… Much has been made of the tendency of AI chatbots to “hallucinate” — shorthand for fabrications that chatbots state as facts. This problem is common with ChatGPT responses in low-resource languages. But in multiple instances, rather than generating fake numbers or other facts, Rest of World found that ChatGPT simply makes up words.

«

This is one of those obvious-when-you-consider-it things, but that doesn’t make it any less bad. What it means is that the gap in usability of AI will grow wider between English and other languages.
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Apple stock hit by China worries ahead of iPhone 15 launch • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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Investor alarm that China may be cracking down on officials’ iPhone use has knocked $200bn off Apple’s market value, casting a shadow over next week’s launch of its latest smartphone.

Beijing’s reported curbs on government iPhones, alongside a resurgent Huawei, threaten to derail what should have been a moment of triumph for Apple: unseating Samsung at the top of the smartphone market.

Before the China turmoil, analysts had predicted that the launch of the iPhone 15 would put Apple within reach of becoming the world’s biggest smartphone maker by volume for the first time.

However, Apple’s shares have fallen by about 6% over the course of the past two days, as investors fretted about its fate in China, which makes up roughly a fifth of its revenue.

“A decade ago it seemed inconceivable that Apple could wrestle the top spot from Samsung but it could be that we’re on the cusp of that milestone,” said Ben Wood, analyst at CCS Insight. “They will be tantalisingly close but the Chinese market will play a pivotal role.”

Several reports surfaced this week suggesting that Beijing has ordered public officials in certain government departments not to use iPhones or other foreign devices for work.

Bank of America has estimated that China accounts for up to 50m iPhone sales annually and that such a ban could cost Apple 5-10m units a year.

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Nothing official from the Chinese government, of course.
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Understanding the Baby Boom • Works in Progress

Anvar Sarygulov & Phoebe Arslanagic-Wakefield:

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[In the 1930s] Despite the organised resistance of groups like Alliance nationale, at least some European demographers doubted whether falling birth rates were truly reversible, or even arrestable. In 1936 Dr Carr Saunders, an English biologist, eugenicist, and later Director of LSE, wrote: 

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once the small voluntary family habit has gained a foothold, the size of the family is likely, if not certain, in time to become so small that the reproduction rate will fall below replacement rate, and that, when this happened, the restoration of a replacement rate proves to be an exceedingly difficult and obstinate problem.

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But even as Carr Saunders wrote those words, he was being proved wrong. Something was happening, in Europe and farther afield. Something we are still trying to understand today: the Baby Boom. 

The Baby Boom was an unexpected change in direction from the century of falling fertility that had taken place in Europe and North America. Contrary to the popular belief that it was triggered by soldiers returning home from World War Two, the Boom in fact began in the mid-1930s. It was not simply an American or British phenomenon either. The demographic wave swept over Iceland, Poland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Austria, the Czech Republic, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, and Finland. Thousands of miles across the sea, it even happened in Australia and New Zealand. 

And yet Carr Saunders’ doubt had been extremely well justified. 

For wherever and whenever we have had data and since the Industrial Revolution – with the crucial exception of the Baby Boom – it has been a nearly iron law of fertility that higher incomes are associated with lower birth rates. A key mechanism for this is likely to be that rising living standards effectively increase the costs of having a child, from lost wages for working women to reduced time for increasingly accessible leisure activities.

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But that doesn’t explain the Baby Boom. This analysis does point to the multiple elements that probably do – with the Amish acting as a control group.
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Buzzy AI startup for generating 3D models used cheap human labour • 404 Media

Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler:

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An artificial intelligence company, whose founder Forbes included in a 30 Under 30 list recently, promises to use machine learning to convert clients’ 2D illustrations into 3D models. In reality the company, called Kaedim, uses human artists for “quality control.” According to two sources with knowledge of the process interviewed by 404 Media, at one point, Kaedim often used human artists to make the models. One of the sources said workers at one point produced the 3D design wholecloth themselves without the help of machine learning at all.

The news pulls back the curtain on a hyped startup and is an example of how AI companies can sometimes overstate the capabilities of their technology. Like other AI startups, Kaedim wants to use AI to do tedious labor that is currently being done by humans. In this case, 3D modeling, a time-consuming job that video game companies are already outsourcing to studios in countries like China.

…After the publication of this article, Kaedim rebranded its website to make it clearer that humans are involved in the company’s production of 3D images.

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Smart way to get that sweet, sweet VC money.
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With SBF, Gisele, and Michael Lewis at the peak of the crypto craze

Zeke Faux:

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when we sat down, Wu and a colleague bragged to me about a Zelda-like play-to-earn game on their blockchain that had attracted 40,000 users in less than a month. They said the game was teaching people about DeFi — decentralized finance, a way of trading without a central counterparty — and letting them earn high returns. It sounded a lot like Axie Infinity. I couldn’t believe they were pitching it with a straight face after Axie’s collapse. “You can get 10% in DeFi,” Wu said. “You can be a true freelancer. There are literally people who quit their jobs. It’s not magic. If you know what you’re doing here, you’re going to change your life.”

Michael Wagner, the founder of a space-themed crypto game called Star Atlas, even cited Axie Infinity as a proof of concept. Instead of colorful blobs and Smooth Love Potions, Star Atlas players had to buy spaceship NFTs to earn atlas tokens, and he told me he’d already sold nearly $200 million worth of them. But when I asked if I could try out the game, he said it didn’t exist yet. Even though he’d already sold the spaceships, he said it would be at least five years before the game was ready. “It’s very early stage,” he said. “We believe the game could bring in billions of users.”

Another crypto executive showed me a digital image of a sneaker that he’d bought for $8 and that he said was now worth more than $1 million. He told me that recently, all owners of these imaginary sneakers had been issued an image of a box, which was it self worth $30,000. When he opened the box, he found another pic ture of sneakers and another box, each of them valuable in their own right. “It’s this never-ending Ponzi scheme,” he said happily. “That’s what I call Ponzinomics.”

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And that always ends well, right? Taken from Faux’s new book “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall”, which sounds like a rollicking read.
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New Elon Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma • CNN Politics

Sean Lyngaas:

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Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”

As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.

Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials, according to Isaacson, whose new book is set to be released by Simon & Schuster on September 12.

Musk’s concerns over a “mini-Pearl Harbor” as he put it, did not come to pass in Crimea. But the episode reveals the unique position Musk found himself in as the war in Ukraine unfolded. Whether intended or not, he had become a power broker US officials couldn’t ignore.

The new book from Isaacson, the author of acclaimed biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, provides fresh insights into Musk and how his existential dread of sparking a wider war drove him to spurn Ukrainian requests for Starlink systems they could use to attack the Russians.

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Musk is an idiot. Why would Russia hit Crimea with nukes, when that’s territory that it views as its own? And you know that any effort by the US government to educate him about the strategic realities would be a waste of time. What a situation.
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Apple is reportedly spending ‘millions of dollars a day’ training AI • The Verge

Monica Chin:

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Apple is investing millions of dollars per day into artificial intelligence, according to a new report from The Information. The company is reportedly working on multiple AI models across several teams.

Apple’s unit that works on conversational AI is called “Foundational Models,” per The Information’s reporting. It has “around 16” members, including several former Google engineers. It’s helmed by John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI, who was hired in 2018 to help improve Siri. (Giannandrea has reportedly “expressed skepticism to colleagues about the potential usefulness of chatbots powered by AI language models.”)

Additional teams at Apple are also working on artificial intelligence, per The Information. A Visual Intelligence unit is developing an image generation model, and another group is researching “multimodal AI, which can recognize and produce images or video as well as text.”

These models could serve a variety of purposes. A chatbot is in the works that would “interact with customers who use AppleCare”; another would make it easier to automate multistep tasks with Siri.

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“Millions of dollars a day” sounds like someone got their calculator out on being told Apple is spending about a billion dollars on AI per year. (My guess. A billion per year is $3m; 2bn is $6m; and so on.) Given that Apple spends about $30bn per year on R+D, that isn’t actually a dramatic amount.

But look, anything that can improve Siri is going to be welcome.
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Will we ever be able to detect AI usage? • TechnoLlama

Andres Guadamuz:

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Why, you may ask, do we need to detect AI in the first place? The detection of AI use in everyday life is becoming increasingly important for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, transparency and trust are foundational to the relationship between technology and its users, as AI tools become more integrated into our daily routines, from personalised content recommendations to LLMs, it’s crucial for users to be aware of when and how these systems are making decisions on their behalf. Knowing when AI is at play can help individuals better understand the rationale behind certain outcomes, whether it’s a movie suggestion on a streaming platform or a financial advice from a robo-advisor.

Secondly, the ethical implications of AI are vast and varied. By detecting AI use, we can ensure that these systems are being employed in ways that align with societal values and norms, and with the user’s own acceptance of AI. For instance, in areas like hiring or lending, where decisions can have profound impacts on individuals’ lives, it’s essential to know if an AI is involved, potentially perpetuating biases or making uninformed decisions. Furthermore, as concerns about privacy and data security grow, being aware of AI’s presence can help individuals protect their personal information and avoid potential misuse. In essence, detecting AI use promotes accountability, ensuring that these powerful tools are used responsibly and ethically in our ever-evolving digital landscape.

Thirdly, if we’re going to continue using essays as means of assessment, we may need to find out for certain if AI is being used.

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I tried to think of a refutation of the importance of using essays as a means of assessment, but given that the point of an essay is to get people to show they can organise their thoughts and pick the important from the wrong or trivial, it’s hard to say that doesn’t matter in the world of work.
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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.

The UK’s National Air Traffic Control has explained how a peculiar flight plan lead to chaos in a new report. CC-licensed photo by Mark Hodson Photos 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.

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

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

Government denies U-turn on encrypted messaging row • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman, Tom Gerken and Chris Vallance:

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platforms like WhatsApp, Signal and iMessage say they cannot access or view anybody’s messages without destroying existing privacy protections for all users, and have threatened to leave the UK rather than compromise message security.

The debate has raged for several months and for some it has turned into an argument about privacy versus the protection of children. The government insists it is possible to have both.

The Online Safety Bill is due to become law in autumn and cleared its final stage in the House of Lords on Wednesday before returning to the commons.

The government has denied that its position has changed. In a statement in the House of Lords, the minister, Lord Parkinson, clarified that if the technology to access messages without breaking their security did not exist, then Ofcom would have the power to ask companies to develop the ability to identify and remove illegal child sexual abuse content on their platforms.

Indeed, the Bill already stated that the regulator Ofcom would only ask tech firms to access messages once “feasible technology” had been developed which would specifically only target child abuse content and not break encryption.

The government has tasked tech firms with inventing these tools.

“As has always been the case, as a last resort, on a case-by-case basis and only when stringent privacy safeguards have been met, [the Bill] will enable Ofcom to direct companies to either use, or make best efforts to develop or source, technology to identify and remove illegal child sexual abuse content – which we know can be developed,” said a government spokesperson.

Some security experts suggest such tech tools may never exist, and the tech firms themselves say it is not possible.

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Lovely solution: the government is telling the tech firms to invent a totally new mathematics. I suppose that quantum computing might, somehow, someday, make such decryption possible, but essentially it’s asking them to invent the mathematical equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
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Experts warn RAAC concrete affects thousands of UK buildings – BBC News

Pallab Ghosh:

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Tens of thousands of government and privately owned buildings should be safety checked because of crumbling RAAC concrete, experts say.

The team that alerted the government to the problems posed by the concrete said safety checks will need to be regular.

The Loughborough University team told BBC News about their research and their advice for dealing with the problem. Prof Chris Goodier said most affected buildings were probably not dangerous but should be inspected just in case. “We’ve suddenly found out that a certain proportion of our building stock is not as good as we thought it was,” he said. “It’s a small proportion but we have millions of buildings – even if its just one% of 10 million that’s 100,000,” he said.

Prof Goodier said that as well as government buildings such as hospitals, court houses and prisons, an unknown number in the private sector offices and warehouses were also potentially affected because they contained the concrete, also known as reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC).

His team is advising the government to send surveyors to assess the affected buildings, most of which the researchers expect to be found not to have any dangerous flaws. But they will require regular inspections.

Others buildings may need areas reinforced or have certain areas closed and a small number may need to be rebuilt. But in the longer term, the team says a new approach will be needed of regular inspections and management of possibly tens of thousands of buildings, according to Prof Sergio Cavalaro from the Loughborough team.

“Buildings that were not inspected will now need to be inspected. We need to intensify these inspections. But that will be a challenge because there are so many buildings that need inspections. So we may lack the qualified people to do it in a timely fashion,” he said.

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You simply couldn’t get a better metaphor for the neglect of the country’s infrastructure. A neat, quick, cheap construction material whose lifespan ended during the Conservative administration. And what did that administration do about it? Nothing.
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Read-it-later app Matter can now transcribe your favorite podcasts • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Matter, a GV-backed read-it-later app that competes broadly with apps like Pocket and Instapaper, though with more of a focus on reading recommendations, is today launching a new way to use its app. The company this morning is debuting “Readable Podcasts,” a feature that will let you save favorite podcasts and transcribe their audio to text. By doing so, you can use Matter’s other tools to interact with the podcast content as you would a saved article, including by doing things like highlighting, taking notes and sharing quotes.

As you listen to the podcast, the audio transcript and text are kept in sync so you can seamlessly switch back and forth between listening and reading. This allows you to pause the podcast if you want to re-read a particular section or look up something the podcast hosts were discussing.

Or, if you’re trying to get through a dense podcast more quickly, the feature would allow you to skim the transcript so you could just jump to the key areas of interest, instead of having to fast-forward or listen to the audio at a faster speed.

According to Matter co-founder Ben Springwater, the new feature is powered by the combination of a third-party transcription service along with Matter’s own proprietary system to label speakers and ensure transcript quality.

What’s more, users don’t have to give up their favorite podcast app in order to use the new functionality. That is, instead of subscribing to a podcast in Matter itself, you’ll instead share the podcast you want to transcribe from your existing podcast app using the Save extension from the iOS Share Sheet. At launch, Matter supports Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Castro and Pocket Casts.

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I wonder whether the transcription will remove all the little noises – the ums and ers. I can see the potential attraction (we read faster than we listen, though perhaps not with podcasts at 2x speed) but think it will show how rambling some people are.

There’s a neat circularity: a lot of podcasts now are people reading their newsletters.
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Khosla Ventures backs carbon removal company with lung-like material • CNBC

Catherine Clifford:

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The founders of the startup, named Spiritus after the Latin word for “breath,” began work in December 2021, and the company is officially coming out of stealth on Wednesday, with the announcement of an $11 million funding raise led by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, with other investors including Page One Ventures.

Spiritus has built a novel approach to direct air carbon capture that relies on a material that absorbs carbon dioxide passively. Critically, Spiritus has developed a particular architecture that mimics the alveoli in the lungs in order to maximize the surface area for carbon dioxide to make contact with the material.

This lung-like material, technically called a “sorbent,” will be shaped in round balls and laid out like artificial fruits in a carbon-capture orchard, CEO Charles Cadieu and CTO Matt Lee told CNBC in a phone interview on Tuesday.

When the lung-like “fruit” have been collected from the carbon “orchard,” they will be put in a container, where low heat will be applied to remove the carbon dioxide. The desorption process will be powered by clean energy to ensure the process is a not adding emissions to the atmosphere. Once the CO2 has been removed from the lung-like fruit, the sorbent can then be returned to the carbon orchard and reused.

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Or, you know, just plant a whole load of trees. But where’s the 100x return in trees?
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The gold jewellery made from old phones • BBC Future

Anna Turns:

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As I walk into her small demo laboratory, Hayley Messenger, a chemist specialising in sustainable precious metals, explains why nothing here is labelled: “Everything is a secret!” she says, pouring a ‘”magic green solution” into a one-litre-capacity (35oz) glass flask of fragmented circuit boards.

She and a team of chemists and chemical analysts, together with Canadian start-up Excir, have invented and patented a clean, energy-efficient way which they claim extracts 99% of gold from the printed circuit boards found inside discarded laptops and old mobile phones. Later this year, the Royal Mint is opening a new multi-million-pound factory which will be able to process 90 tonnes of circuit boards per week once fully operational, recovering hundreds of kilogrammes of gold every year.

When the luminous mixture starts to fizz, Messenger screws the lid on, then places the flask on a tumbling machine to shake the contents. In just four minutes, any gold dissolves and leaches out into the liquid.

“This all happens at room temperature and it’s very quick,” says Messenger who explains that this chemical solution gets reused up to 20 times, with the concentration of dissolved gold increasing each time.

When another mystery solution is added, the gold becomes solid metal again. This powder is filtered out and melted down in a furnace into thumbnail-sized nuggets.

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This story felt vaguely familiar, and for good reason: the press release trailing this came out in March 2022. Progress, of sorts.
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Upscale.media

PixelBin:

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Typically, if you wish to increase the resolution of a low-quality image, you’ll just end up with a bigger low-quality image. Instead, Upscale.media’s AI technology maintains natural image details without losing the quality – quite unbelievable, if you ask us

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Now you can get AI to upscale your photos – that is, fill in fine detail if you want to zoom in on something, or if you’ve got a pixellated photo from somewhere. Five free downloads, or quite cheap PAYG offerings otherwise.
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Ryanair boss calls air traffic chaos report rubbish • BBC News

Katy Austin and Lora Jones:

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[Ryanair boss Michael] O’Leary told the BBC that the disruption will cost the airline between £15m and £20m in refunds for hotels, food and alternative travel arrangements.

He said that “there won’t be any issues” for customers claiming costs, but demanded that Nats, which controls the UK’s air traffic services, “accepts responsibility for its incompetence”.

Marion Geoffroy, managing director at Wizz Air UK, said that it, along with its customers, had “suffered severe disruption” because of cancellations and accommodation costs.

Tim Alderslade, chief executive of Airlines UK, said: “Airlines cannot be the insurer of a last resort. We can’t have a situation whereby airlines carry the can every time we see disruption of this magnitude.”

The group represents the likes of British Airways, EasyJet, Jet2, Ryanair, Virgin Atlantic and Tui. EasyJet boss Johan Lundgren also said that “many questions are still left unanswered” after Nats published an initial report into what exactly caused the system failure.

“An incident on this scale should not have happened and must not happen again,” he added, saying that he was looking forward to a more “wide-ranging” review.

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The NATS report itself, into a calamitous failure of the air routing systems on August 28, explains how it happened (as does the BBC story): a route was entered which had two waypoints with the same designator. Even though they were 4,000 miles apart, the routing software became confused because of the way routing is done: you start from the beginning and search forwards to the end, and then you start from the end and search backwards. But the identical waypoint designators made it seem like the end and the start were the same, and yet not the same.

No word on how old the system is (though this subsystem has been in continuous operation since 2018, apparently) or what it runs on, or is written in; but a software fix was deployed by last Monday.
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IBM taps AI to translate COBOL code to Java • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

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COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959. It’s had surprising staying power; according to a 2022 survey, there’s over 800 billion lines of COBOL in use on production systems, up from an estimated 220 billion in 2017.

But COBOL has a reputation for being a tough-to-navigate, inefficient language. Why not migrate to a newer one? For large organizations, it tends to be a complex and costly proposition, given the small number of COBOL experts in the world. When the Commonwealth Bank of Australia replaced its core COBOL platform in 2012, it took five years and cost over $700m.

Looking to present a new solution to the problem of modernizing COBOL apps, IBM today unveiled Code Assistant for IBM Z, which uses a code-generating AI model to translate COBOL code into Java. Set to become generally available in Q4 2023, Code Assistant for IBM Z will enter preview during IBM’s TechXchange conference in Las Vegas early this September.

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Hurrah for translating old COBOL code, but — into Java? Who’s going to check that? What’s the confidence level in what is output?
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LinkedIn is getting personal and deep beyond the job searches • The Washington Post

Danielle Abril:

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After the pandemic blurred the lines between work and home, many employees reprioritized their lives, giving more emphasis to well-being and family. As a result, workers have become comfortable getting personal on LinkedIn, sharing engagement announcements, their fertility journeys, cancer diagnoses, relationship statuses, funny pet moments, even what they cooked for dinner. Though many post this content sparingly, some say it humanizes themselves to their professional network. Others say their stories tie in with lessons that could be applied to business, while some find the content annoying.

LinkedIn may be benefiting from shifts in the social media landscape. X, formerly known as Twitter, has lost many of its power users as the app becomes less functional for free accounts under billionaire owner Elon Musk. Meanwhile, after an impressive debut, Threads, the latest app from Facebook owner Meta, has seen a slowdown in activity. Instagram and TikTok continue to thrive among younger users, especially with video content.

LinkedIn says its user engagement doubled during the beginning of the pandemic and experienced a 40% rise between 2021 and 2023. The number of users who visit the site at least once a month is forecast to increase by more than 8 million to 84.1 million by 2027, with Gen Z serving as a major driver or growth, data from market research company Insider Intelligence shows. In that same period, Facebook users are expected to decline by 600,000 to 177.3 million, and Instagram’s users are forecast to grow by 20.2 million to 155.4 million.

LinkedIn says it saw a jump in personal posts during the height of the pandemic, but that has since slowed. To ensure people’s feeds stay useful, the company made changes to its algorithm. It now surfaces more posts from people’s direct connections and followers as well as those from people outside their networks that are grounded in professional knowledge and advice. Still, LinkedIn content is mirroring a larger societal shift that is happening in the workplace.

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Still wonder about LinkedIn. What sort of social network is it really?
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Mozilla report finds that new cars give out lots of your info • Gizmodo

Thomas Germain:

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Bad news: your car is a spy. If your vehicle was made in the last few years, you’re probably driving around in a data-harvesting machine that may collect personal information as sensitive as your race, weight, and sexual activity. Volkswagen’s cars reportedly know if you’re fastening your seatbelt and how hard you hit the brakes.

That’s according to new findings from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project. The nonprofit found that every major car brand fails to adhere to the most basic privacy and security standards in new internet-connected models, and all 25 of the brands Mozilla examined flunked the organization’s test. Mozilla found brands including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, and Subaru collect data about drivers including race, facial expressions, weight, health information, and where you drive. Some of the cars tested collected data you wouldn’t expect your car to know about, including details about sexual activity, race, and immigration status, according to Mozilla.

“Many people think of their car as a private space — somewhere to call your doctor, have a personal conversation with your kid on the way to school, cry your eyes out over a break-up, or drive places you might not want the world to know about,” said Jen Caltrider, program direction of the *Privacy Not Included project, in a press release. “But that perception no longer matches reality. All new cars today are privacy nightmares on wheels that collect huge amounts of personal information.”

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Cars have become computers, but their privacy policies haven’t kept up (at least in the US; in Europe they’d be held back by the GDPR). One does wonder quite how your car collects data about your sexual activity. Perhaps better not to ask.
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