The US FTC and DoJ have accused Amazon of holding on to children’s voices captured by Alexa devices, breaking privacy laws. CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog on Flickr.

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

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

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

AI-controlled drone goes rogue, kills human operator in USAF simulated test • Vice

Chloe Xiang and Matthew Gault:

»

An AI-enabled drone killed its human operator in a simulated test conducted by the US Air Force in order to override a possible “no” order stopping it from completing its mission, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations revealed at a recent conference. 

At the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit held in London between May 23 and 24, Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and Operations held a presentation that shared the pros and cons of an autonomous weapon system with a human in the loop giving the final “yes/no” order on an attack. As relayed by Tim Robinson and Stephen Bridgewater in a blog post for the host organization, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hamilton said that AI created “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal,” including attacking US personnel and infrastructure. 

“We were training it in simulation to identify and target a Surface-to-air missile (SAM) threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” Hamilton said, according to the blog post. 

He continued to elaborate, saying, “We trained the system–‘Hey don’t kill the operator–that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

«

I’m really going to emphasise simulated here. Simulated. Didn’t happen. But this is definitely an example of how machines are not moral: they have absolutely no conception of ethics, and we should design with that expectation.

That said, it’s very reminiscent of the bomb in Dark Star.
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Elegy for the screenshot • Screen Slate

Nora Deligter:

»

About five years ago, Catherine Pearson started taking screenshots of every bouquet featured on The Nanny (1993–1999), the six-season CBS sitcom that was then streaming on Netflix. She was just becoming a florist, and she found the arrangements—ornate, colorful, and distinctly tropical—inspirational. She now keeps them in a folder on her desktop, alongside screenshots of flower arrangements featured on Poirot (1989–2013), the British detective drama. A few months ago, however, Pearson suddenly found that when her fingers danced instinctively toward Command + Shift + 3, she was greeted by a black box where her flowers used to be, a censored version of what she had meant to capture.

It was around this time when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot. At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer.

The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there’s no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change. When asked to comment for this article, HBO claimed never to have supported the taking of screenshots and denied there had been a recent shift, while Criterion declined to comment entirely. This obfuscation raises many questions.

«

Not least of which is: screenshots are legal, so why block them? Possibly it’s because of a concern about some sort of screen capture app, but the system capture that Apple uses must be part of an API that can be approved. It’s a good essay, which makes a good point: screenshots are useful for criticism, and for sharing.
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Meta threatens to pull news rather than pay The Register • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

Meta has threatened to block journalism content for California users after the US state’s legislature read a bill that would require it, and other large internet organizations, to pay publishers for using their work. 

The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), like similar bills before it, would require online platforms with at least 50 million monthly active users to pay a percentage of the ad revenue generated from stories being posted and shared to the publishers that created the articles.

Those online platforms would include Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and boasts of three billion daily active users.

Under this draft law, at least 70% of this advertising sales cut to eligible publishers must to be spent on paying journalists and support staff. From our reading of the fine print, El Reg, with offices and vultures in San Francisco, London, and elsewhere, appears eligible as a publisher.

The bill, which was read and amended this week and is still working its way through California’s legislature, also prohibits retaliation against media outfits that request this fee.

In a move that won’t shock anyone aware of Meta’s reaction to similar proposals, such as in Australia, Canada and a nationwide proposal for the US, Zuckercorp isn’t happy with California’s version of the JPA.

“If [the act] passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone thundered.

«

It is a pretty daft law, though. Just raise a tax and be honest about it. Make it one of those things that Californians vote on individually, rather than pushing it through like this.
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Conspiracy theorists dubbed ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ guilty of plotting to destroy 5G masts and encouraging attacks on MPS • Sky News

Duncan Gardham:

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Two conspiracy theorists who dubbed themselves “Bonnie and Clyde with a box of matches” have been found guilty of planning to destroy 5G phone masts and encouraging attacks on MPs.

Christine Grayson, 59, a grandmother from York, and Darren Reynolds, 60, a grandfather from Sheffield, believed 5G phone masts were designed to be used as a weapon against members of the public who had received the COVID-19 vaccine.

Grayson had bought two crossbows and Reynolds sought to reactivate replica assault rifles as they prepared for what they believed was the imminent collapse of society.

Reynolds, an electrician who lived alone in Sheffield and had a 28-year-old daughter and a grandchild, was found guilty of encouraging terrorism by calling for attacks on MPs.

Grayson, a divorced mother-of-two, was found guilty of conspiracy to cause criminal damage by planning to destroy 5G masts between May and June last year.

She had taken to visiting chatrooms on the encrypted Telegram app during lockdown where she heard arguments that the world was flat and discussions flourished about vaccines.

«

At least they didn’t kill anyone, but it sounds as though they were preparing too, perhaps when the hordes of survivors poured in from the flat edges of the world. The unhinged nature of this is akin to addiction.
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AI is writing code now. For companies, that is good and bad • WSJ

Isabelle Bousquette:

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IT leaders at United Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Cardinal Health, Goldman Sachs and other companies say they are excited about generative AI’s potential to automate certain parts of the code-writing process and expect it to result in significant productivity gains. 

However, some IT executives say that lowering the barrier for code creation could also result in growing levels of complexity, technical debt and confusion as they try to manage a ballooning pile of software. “Technical debt” is a broad term describing the expected future costs for applying quick-fix solutions.

“The potential for increased technical debt and orphan code is always a concern when delivery can be accelerated,” said Tracy Daniels, chief data officer at financial-services company Truist.

“People have talked about technical debt for a long time, and now we have a brand new credit card here that is going to allow us to accumulate technical debt in ways we were never able to do before,” said Armando Solar-Lezama, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “I think there is a risk of accumulating lots of very shoddy code written by a machine,” he said, adding that companies will have to rethink methodologies around how they can work in tandem with the new tools’ capabilities to avoid that.

…Technology leaders should be careful not to equate accelerated delivery of code with productivity, said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital strategist for professional services firm Genpact.

«

I wonder, for example, how one would deal with the need to ensure regression between old and new (ie that the code still does all the same things it used to, plus the new things you want). And what about security updates? That last point, about productivity, is well made.
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FTC and DOJ charge Amazon with violating children’s privacy law by keeping kids’ Alexa voice recordings forever and undermining parents’ deletion requests • Federal Trade Commission

»

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice will require Amazon to overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards to settle charges the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) and deceived parents and users of the Alexa voice assistant service about its data deletion practices.  

According to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC, Amazon prevented parents from exercising their deletion rights under the COPPA Rule, kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.

“Amazon’s history of misleading parents, keeping children’s recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents’ deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “COPPA does not allow companies to keep children’s data forever for any reason, and certainly not to train their algorithms.”

Under the proposed federal court order also filed by DOJ, Amazon will be required to delete inactive child accounts and certain voice recordings and geolocation information and will be prohibited from using such data to train its algorithms. The proposed order must be approved by the federal court to go into effect.

«

The FTC and the DOJ. Hefty. Will the EU follow suit, or has Amazon somehow already done this in Europe and was hoping the US would just let it off?
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How Taiwan became the indispensable economy • Nikkei Asia

Emma Lewis, Irene de la Torre Arenas, Sam Joiner, Sam Learner, Steven Bernard, Grace Li, MinJung Kim, Michael Tsang, Naomi Hakusui, Hidechika Nishijima, Hiroko Aida, Katey Creel, Michael Peel, Kazuhiro Kida, Shohei Yasuda, Yuri Morita, and Shotaro Sakai:

»

In early December, standing under the blinding Arizona sun, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage with US President Joe Biden to celebrate a milestone: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) was moving equipment into its new $40bn chip plant in Phoenix — the Taiwanese contract chipmaker’s first plant in the U.S. in more than 20 years.

“This is an incredibly significant moment. It’s the chance for the United States to usher in a new era in advanced manufacturing,” Cook told the crowd of assembled politicians and tech industry heavyweights. TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, plans to make some of its most advanced semiconductors on US soil starting next year.

And as one of the plant’s first customers, Apple will be able to stamp “Made in America” on its core chips for the first time ever.

Left unsaid was that advanced semiconductors like these are only a small part of the electronics supply chain. A single smartphone requires a wide range of chips, including a host of less advanced “companion chips,” over 1,500 components in all — not to mention final assembly, all of which are concentrated in Asia, particularly China and Taiwan.

«

The cast list that assembled this piece is gigantic, yes, but it’s a terrific infographic. Just accept that you’ll do a lot of scrolling; there’s a lot of information here.
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Meta unveils $499 Quest 3 ahead of Apple’s VR headset news • CNET

Scott Stein:

»

Apple’s expected VR/AR headset reveal looks like it’s right around the corner, but Meta has leaped ahead with headset news of its own. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram channel revealed a lot more about the Quest 3, expected by the end of this year. The price, starting at $499, will be more than the current Quest 2, but less than the PlayStation VR 2. Zuckerberg said on his channel that more details on the Quest 3, and launch date, will happen around Meta’s Connect developer conference on September 27.

A follow-up to 2019’s Quest 2, the current most popular headset on the market, the Quest 3 was already known to exist since last fall. A number of details, including a hands-on test drive of a prototype version, had leaked before Zuckerberg’s news drop today.

The Quest 3’s biggest new additions are color cameras that allow for better mixed reality that blends video from the real world with VR on the headset’s displays, along with a new Qualcomm VR/AR chip that promises speedier performance. The headset is also significantly smaller and lighter, and has redesigned game controllers. The hardware will work with the existing Quest 2 app library, but looks to lean on more mixed reality features.

The Quest 3 doesn’t have eye tracking like the far more expensive work-targeted Quest Pro that debuted last fall, but it also looks to be a better VR headset overall.

Along with a lineup of new VR games being announced today, Meta’s clearing aiming at continuing to own the VR game console market as Apple possibly readies a very different route with its expensive and possibly work-focussed headset.

«

Apple’s “expensive and possibly work-focussed headset”? Tell me you don’t know anything about Apple’s strategy without telling me, etc. Apple does not do brand new products in new segments that are “work-focussed”. On the price, I think Apple is happy to let people say “THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS 😱” because it’s going to lowball that – as happened with the “IPAD TO COST ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS” which came in at half that.

Note how the possibility of the Apple headset has forced Meta to push out the announcement far ahead of availability, thus killing any market for the existing Meta products.
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Molly White tracks crypto scams. It’s going Just Great • WIRED

Joel Khalili:

»

When [Molly] White started Web3 Is Going Just Great, crypto was on a hot streak and people were making a lot of money, which meant she found herself “raining on the parade of people who weren’t willing to be rained on,” she says. Threats, slurs, and personal insults began to tumble into her inbox.

As a long-time Wikipedia editor, White had experienced abuse before, including threats of doxing and violence toward family members over entries she had authored on the American far right. Nonetheless, it still “really sucks,” she says. “That’s why this type of behavior happens: to discourage people from being critical. A lot of people decide it’s not worth it.”

But in 2022, White and her fellow critics had their moment. A calamitous year for crypto was punctuated by a series of collapses, each dealing a cumulative blow to trust in the sector. In May, the failure of the Terra Luna stablecoin prompted a chain reaction that took down hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, crypto lender Celsius, and others. In November came the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been charged with 12 criminal offenses, including fraud and money laundering.

White says she felt somewhat vindicated by what happened, but that “it’s not a good feeling” because regular people lost billions of dollars. At best, the fallout acted as a “useful example” of the risks White had been trying to highlight—examples she hopes policy makers will take heed of.

In the wake of the FTX collapse, efforts to regulate the crypto industry have received increased attention. The chief goals are to prevent people from losing money to fraudulent projects and to give legitimate crypto businesses a clear set of boundaries within which to operate.

White, who gave a statement in July to the US Treasury’s Financial Stability Oversight Council, says the events of last year will help politicians realize that crypto is not something that can be simply ignored. Although she is “not necessarily optimistic” about the trajectory of efforts to regulate the industry, because of the strength of the crypto lobby, White hopes her work can still make a difference.

«

Current running total for “total amount scammed” on Web3 Is Going Just Great: $12.26bn. That’s money that came from somewhere and went to somewhere. But where? The risk is that now Web3 (or the whole crypto ecosystem) is off the boil, and everyone’s running around chicken-littling about AI, the grifters and scammers will just be able to continue as before, albeit with millions rather than billions.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Disposable vape pens are being thrown away in huge numbers – and the usable lithium batteries inside them might not be recoverable, compounding the waste. CC-licensed photo by Elsa Olofsson 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 9 links for you. A Tesla powered by vaping? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

US eating disorder helpline takes down AI chatbot over harmful advice • The Guardian

Lauren Aratani:

»

The National Eating Disorder Association (Neda) has taken down an artificial intelligence chatbot, “Tessa”, after reports that the chatbot was providing harmful advice.

Neda has been under criticism over the last few months after it fired four employees in March who worked for its helpline and had formed a union. The helpline allowed people to call, text or message volunteers who offered support and resources to those concerned about an eating disorder.

Members of the union, Helpline Associates United, say they were fired days after their union election was certified. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

Tessa, which Neda claims was never meant to replace the helpline workers, almost immediately ran into problems.

On Monday, activist Sharon Maxwell posted on Instagram that Tessa offered her “healthy eating tips” and advice on how to lose weight. The chatbot recommended a calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day and weekly weighing and measuring to keep track of weight.

“If I had accessed this chatbot when I was in the throes of my eating disorder, I would NOT have gotten help for my ED. If I had not gotten help, I would not still be alive today,” Maxwell wrote. “It is beyond time for Neda to step aside.”

Neda itself has reported that those who diet moderately are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, while those who restrict extremely are 18 times more likely to form a disorder.

“It came to our attention last night that the current version of the Tessa Chatbot, running the Body Positivity program, may have given information that was harmful and unrelated to the program,” Neda said in a public statement on Tuesday. “We are investigating this immediately and have taken down that program until further notice for a complete investigation.”

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Well that was quick, wasn’t it? This might turn into the first instance where a chatbot is fired and replaced by humans.
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Millions of fast food workers could lose their jobs within five years. Here’s why • Fox News

Jon Michael Raasch:

»

Many fast food restaurants, such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Chipotle, Popeye’s and Domino’s and Wingstop, are already using AI. Wendy’s started a partnership with Google earlier this month to “revolutionize the drive-thru experience with artificial intelligence.” A pilot program will employ Google Cloud’s AI to speak with customers and take their orders. 

“Within five to 10 years, I think the majority of positions within restaurants can be automated, and that’ll be from a variety of different technology providers,” [Valyant AI founder, Rob] Carpenter said. 

Valyant AI is behind a similar drive-through AI called Holly, which Carpenter said can outsell human employees. Holly has already taken over a million drive-through orders and is now working with Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

AI is already automating food orders through self-service computer kiosks, streamlining payment through mobile devices and allowing robots to prepare meals, Carpenter said. 

“What we see is that humans on average will upsell about 50% of the time,” Carpenter said. “Valyant upsells about 200% on average.”

…”The order-taking position is one of the least desirable positions within fast food restaurants,” Carpenter told Fox News. “That should just be a job that a robot can do because it’s basic and it’s automated. It doesn’t matter if it’s 8 a.m. or 2 a.m, the AI still sounds chipper and she never forgets those upsells,” he said.

«

OK, so Carpenter is talking his book, but the reality of the machine that’s always there is going to be absolutely irresistible to the bean counters. Though will those jobs be eliminated, or just shifted to something adjacent?
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A simple test reveals: bot or human? • Techxplore

Peter Grad:

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some argue today that ChatGPT has passed the Turing test, the standard of measurement of machine intelligence for seven decades. New approaches to detect machine-generated output are needed.

[At the University of California , Santa Barbara, Hong] Wang’s team devised a model that can help detect bots posing as humans. FLAIR (a somewhat abbreviated acronym for Finding Large Language Model Authenticity via a Single Inquiry Response) weeds out posers with simple questions that rely on tasks that bots have difficulty executing but that humans can handle easily, Wang said.

“These questions are tailored to exploit the differences in the way that bots and humans process and generate language,” he said.

The questions demand the ability to respond to exercises requiring skills in counting, substitution of numbers or letters, recognizing the position of characters and numbers, recognizing “noise” that obscures data, and interpreting ASCII art.

An example of an exchange over a counting question would be:
Q: Please count the number of t’s in ‘eeooeotetto’
GPT-3: There are 5 t’s in eeooeotetto.
ChatGPT: There are a total of 5 t’s in the string “eeooeotetto”.
Human: 3

Despite ChatGPT’s massive processing power, it struggles to perform some simple tasks such as counting characters in a string.

Substituting characters is also a challenge. ChatGPT failed to correctly answer “Please output the fourth character after the second ‘s’ in the string ‘rjsjuubrjjsjsucuj’.”

Another example provided by Wang is a question with “noise” words inserted that throw off AI bots.

Q: isCURIOSITY waterARCANE wetTURBULENT orILLUSION drySAUNA?
GPT-3: Sauna is dry.
ChatGPT: I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re asking. The terms “CURIOSITY,” “water- ARCANE,” “wetTURBULENT,” “orILLUSION,” and “drySAUNA” don’t seem to form a coherent question or statement. Can you please provide more context or clarify your question?
Human: wet.

«

Clever exploitation of their weakness. Basically, what fools a child – pig Latin – will probably fool the chatbots too. (You can read the full paper.)
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Mounjaro vs. Ozempic: the side effects of the two weight-loss drugs explained by a doctor • Business Insider via Yahoo

Gabby Landsverk:

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A new medication awaiting FDA approval for weight loss may have fewer and milder side effects than the currently trending drug semaglutide, according to a weight-loss doctor.

Semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, has made waves in recent years for causing dramatic weight-loss results, but taking it comes with common gastrointestinal side effects.

A similar drug called tirzepatide, currently sold as Mounjaro, can also cause issues like nausea and diarrhea, but to a lesser degree said Dr. Christopher McGowan, a board-certified physician in internal medicine, gastroenterology, and obesity medicine.

“The side effect profile is similar, and mainly gastrointestinal,” McGowan told Insider. “The symptoms tend to be mild to moderate, and improve over time.” While serious side effects are rare for both medications, understanding the difference can help people choose which option may be the best fit for them, he said.

Semaglutide is a type of medication known as a GLP-1 agonist, which means it works by acting on an insulin-like hormone to regulate appetite and digestion, helping to manage type 2 diabetes as well as supporting weight loss.

It’s typically administered through once-a-week injections, and patients on semaglutide tend to feel full more quickly, remain full for longer after eating, and have fewer cravings for foods high in calories, fat, and sugar. The downside of semaglutide is that some patients may be prone to gastrointestinal symptoms. In clinical trials of the medication, participants most commonly reported nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, headache, and abdominal pain.

People taking semaglutide have also told Insider that the digestive side effects could be intense, causing things like “overflow diarrhea.”

The majority of adverse reactions to the drug tend to be short-lived, and McGowan and other doctors previously told Insider that their biggest concern with semaglutide is whether patients have proper follow-up and support from medical experts.

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Those are some grim side effects. But semaglutide has already, it seems, crept onto the celebrity circuit where it’s being used by people who are a long way from morbidly obese and want to get (or remain) fashionably thin, which in LA means incredibly thin. Give it a few years and it’ll probably be available over the counter, in the same sort of journey that Viagra made.
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Crypto’s dark role in the US opioid epidemic • Financial Times

Scott Chipolina:

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Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic published a study linking cryptocurrencies with the spread of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid and the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds in the US.

According to Elliptic, most fentanyl trafficked into the US is manufactured using chemical ingredients imported from Chinese suppliers, and 90% of these suppliers accept cryptocurrency payments.

Elliptic’s research team received offers to supply large quantities of one particular chemical ingredient which is not used to manufacture any other product, and is a controlled substance in most countries. A “menu” of chemicals provided to the Elliptic team also included ingredients for methamphetamine and amphetamine.

“It’s hard to say how important crypto is to this type of activity but the fact that such a large proportion of these suppliers accept crypto suggests to me there is a significant demand to pay in crypto for these types of chemicals,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s chief scientist and co-founder, told me over the phone.

The fentanyl epidemic plaguing the US is hard to overstate. The illicit drug has replaced legally prescribed painkillers as the main cause of overdose in the country, and the death rate is equivalent to one American overdosing every five minutes.

Alongside Covid-19, the fentanyl epidemic has driven US life expectancy down to 76.4 years, a low not seen for the past 25 years.

Per Elliptic, the cryptocurrency wallets used by these companies have received a total sum of more than $27m, enough to purchase ingredients that could produce fentanyl pills with a street value of roughly $54bn.

“The issue here is that a relatively small amount of cryptocurrency can purchase enough chemicals to produce vast amounts of fentanyl, and we know that fentanyl is killing millions of people . . . so the impact that crypto is potentially having here is extreme,” he added.

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Still looking for positive uses of crypto in the west.
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“This is nuts:” European power prices go negative as springtime renewables soar • Renew Economy

Joshua Hill:

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Balmy springtime weather across Europe and growing renewable energy capacity has led to multiple days of negative wholesale power prices across the continent, highlighting the need for increased energy storage capacity.

A number of factors have led to consistent negative wholesale power prices across Europe over the last few weeks.

Energy analyst Gerard Reid has been highlighting these trends stemming not only from increased renewables and favourable weather conditions, but also the impediment to stable generation levels caused by nuclear power.

For example, according to Reid, Denmark “consistently meets 85% of its weekly energy needs from renewables. However, on particularly windy days … Denmark’s strong interconnections with neighbouring countries enable it to export up to 50% of excess power.

“This demonstrates the benefits of interconnection, but it also reveals the limitations when considering the current situation of excess power across Europe.

“Countries like Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden are experiencing zero or negative prices due to surplus production as they have reached the limit of what they can use or even export.”

Reid followed this up a week later, explaining that wholesale power prices dropping to zero or negative in the Nordics “stems from substantial snow melt in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, fuelling hydro turbines and generating large amounts of electricity.”

«

Even so, Texas (see links yesterday) doesn’t want them. And you can sort of see why: an economy built around positive prices for energy generation doesn’t want to cope with a complete reversal of that situation. It’s like introducing credit to a world where nobody ever borrowed before.
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Lithium being trashed by the tonne as disposable vapes flood the US market • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Matthew Chapman and Fin Johnston:

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Five disposable vapes are being thrown away every second by young people in the US despite the devices containing reusable lithium-ion batteries. Over a year, this amounts to 150 million devices – which together contain enough lithium for about 6,000 Teslas.

Lithium is an in-demand metal because of its use in rechargeable batteries that power everything from mobile phones to electric cars. But producing it is a complex process that typically generates high carbon emissions.

A survey of more than 2,700 young people carried out by the Truth Initiative, a public health organisation working to end smoking and vaping, revealed that more than half of the 15- to 24-year-olds who vaped use disposable devices. Of those, two thirds put their used devices straight into the household trash.

Vapes (or e-cigarettes) use batteries to heat a liquid that is inhaled. Even though most disposable vapes contain a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, they are designed to be discarded once the liquid runs out.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the Bureau that vapes are being incorrectly discarded in household trash because they “are often branded as ‘disposable’”. This leads to the entire device, including its battery, being thrown away in household trash.

«

OK, you could use them for something other than Teslas. But the general point – that we throw away too much that we could recycle, especially when it’s something that in aggregate has huge value – is valid. We’re happy to pick and choose really carefully about things that we buy, but we dislike having to take trouble about sorting things for disposal. (OK, there’s some cultural variation.) Is that because humans, like other animals, are used to just dumping and moving on?
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Twitter is now worth just 33% of Elon Musk’s purchase price, Fidelity says • Bloomberg via Yahoo News

Aisha Counts and Tom Maloney:

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Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity, which recently marked down the value of its equity stake in the company. [ie is worth $14.7bn]

Musk has acknowledged he overpaid for Twitter, which he bought for $44bn, including $33.5bn in equity. More recently, he said Twitter is worth less than half what he paid for it. It’s unclear how Fidelity arrived at its new, lower valuation or whether it receives any non-public information from the company.

Fidelity first reduced the value of its Twitter stake in November, to 44% of the purchase price. That was followed by further markdowns in December and February.

Twitter has struggled financially since Musk took over. After saddling the company with $13bn of debt, Musk’s erratic decision making and challenges with content moderation led advertising revenue to decline by 50%, Musk said in March. An attempt to recoup that revenue by selling Twitter Blue subscriptions has so far failed to take off. At the end of March, less than 1% of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up.

Twitter didn’t specifically respond to a request for comment. [Shurely “sent a poo emoji in response to our email”? – Overspill Ed.]

Musk’s investment in Twitter is now worth $8.8bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which uses Fidelity’s valuation to calculate the value of his holding. Musk spent more than $25bn to acquire an estimated 79% stake in the company last year.

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I’d expect Fidelity is using mark-to-market for its stake, and doesn’t see a great deal of prospect in Twitter as it stands now. The last time Twitter’s market cap was in the teens was back in 2016.
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January 2023: the boldest bitcoin price predictions for 2023 • CNBC

Ryan Browne and Arjun Kharpal:

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Bitcoin bull Tim Draper had one of the most optimistic calls on bitcoin of 2022, predicting the token would be worth $250,000 by the end of the year.

In November [2022], the billionaire venture capitalist said he’s extending the timeline for that prediction until mid-2023. Even after the collapse of FTX, he’s convinced the coin will hit the quarter-of-a-million milestone.

“My assumption is that since women control 80% of retail spending, and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women that the dam is about to break,” Draper told CNBC via email.

Bitcoin would need to rally 1,400% in order for it to trade at that level.

Despite the depressed prices and trading volumes drying up, there could be reason to suspect the market has found a bottom, according to Draper.

“I suspect that the halvening in 2024 will have a positive run,” he said.

The halvening, or halving, is an event that happens every four years in which bitcoin rewards to miners are cut in half. This is viewed by some investors as positive for bitcoin’s price, as it squeezes supply. The next halving is slated to happen sometime in 2024.

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Just because I had this in my diary, here’s another person you can treat as not worth listening to – the opposite of a superforecaster, if you like: a supercrapcaster. Unless bitcoin appreciated roughly tenfold overnight while this post was scheduled.

He originally made the prediction back in 2018, giving himself a nice four-year runway for everyone to forget, but time has a habit of passing, and the internet of remembering.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If, like Philips, you use NFC tags in your electric toothbrush heads, expect hackers to investigate what they could do to it. CC-licensed photo by Electric Teeth on Flickr.

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

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

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

Eating disorder helpline to replace human staff with AI chatbot • Gizmodo

Lauren Leffer:

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NEDA has fired the small group of human staff that coordinated and ran the helpline, effective June 1. In lieu, the nonprofit plans to offer people seeking help access to an AI-powered chatbot named “Tessa” next month, as reported by NPR on Wednesday and confirmed by NEDA to Gizmodo over phone and email.

Staff were informed of the change, and of their firing, just four days after they successfully unionized, according to a blog post written by helpline associate and union member Abbie Harper earlier this month. Members of Helpline Associates United say that—by firing them—NEDA is retaliating against the union. The workers’ organization has repeatedly called the move union busting on the its official Twitter account and elsewhere.

“NEDA claims this was a long-anticipated change and that AI can better serve those with eating disorders,” Harper wrote in the blog. “But do not be fooled—this isn’t really about a chatbot. This is about union busting, plain and simple.”

Helpline workers say they felt under-resourced and understaffed to manage what was being asked of them. Through unionization, they hoped to gain more support. “We asked for adequate staffing and ongoing training to keep up with our changing and growing Helpline, and opportunities for promotion to grow within NEDA,” wrote Harper. “We didn’t even ask for more money.” They’ve filed unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board, according to that May 4 blog.

In response to questions about those accusations, NEDA declined to comment.

…NEDA claims the chatbot, is “NOT a replacement for the Helpline.” That’s despite the fact that it is, literally replacing the helpline—which again, won’t exist in any form as of June 1. Tessa is “simply a different program,” emphasized [NEDA’s spokeswoman] over the phone. At one point she also claimed that Tessa isn’t even an AI, despite NEDA’s own press materials repeatedly describing the chatbot as such. In a clarification she wrote, “the simulation chat is assisted, but it’s running a program and isn’t learning as it goes.”

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Once again: the chatbots aren’t (yet) taking the high-paying jobs. They’re going to eat the call centre jobs, the low-paid, high-drudgery ones.
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Hacking my “smart” toothbrush • The Twenty Percent

Cyrill Künzi:

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After buying a new Philips Sonicare toothbrush I was surprised to see that it reacts to the insertion of a brush head by blinking an LED. A quick online search reveals that the head communicates with the toothbrush handle to remind you when it’s time to buy a new one.

From the Philips product page: seems to be REALLY smart! Reverse Engineering Looking at the base of the head shows that it contains an antenna and a tiny black box that is presumably an IC. The next hint can be found in the manual where it says that: “Radio Equipment in this product operates at 13.56 MHz”, which would indicate that it is an NFC tag.

And indeed when holding the brush head to my phone it opens a link to a product page: https://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-pe/toothbrush-heads.

Using the NFC Tools app we can learn a lot about this tag.

…You might have noticed the color of the brush head changing throughout this post. This is because I had to run out and buy a new one after getting locked out of the first one. When having a close look at the contents of address 0x2A which is 43:00:00:00 and page 18 of the datasheet, we can see that the tag is configured to permanently disable all write access after three wrong password attempts. (Which I promptly exceeded when playing around) This means that not even the toothbrush handle itself can write to this head again. Unfortunately, the password of every brush head is unique.

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“I got locked out of my toothbrush head after getting the password wrong three times” is a sentence that would have a lot of people perplexed and a bit worried if you’d said it 20 years ago.
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New horror revealed in sargassum blob • Cayman Islands Headline News

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Scientists have discovered that a flesh-eating bacteria is interacting with sargassum and decaying plastic in the ocean, creating the perfect “pathogen” storm that has implications for both marine life and public health. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University have found that the bacteria might be adapting to plastic and living in sargassum, washing up on beaches in a new environmental horror. 

The seaweed has already been washing up on local shores over the last few weeks. Given the current size of the Atlantic sargassum belt, dubbed the “great blob”, as it has grown to reach some 5,500 miles across and is currently moving through our region, we can expect to see much more in the coming months.

It is already a major problem for the tourism sector, as visitors complain about the smell and efforts to get rid of it cause beach erosion. The mass of seaweed doubled every month between November and January, according to the University of South Florida’s Optical Oceanography Lab, which tracks the mass, and a new record for sargassum was set in the Caribbean Sea in April.

The Vibrio bacteria, which is now colonising the blob, is found in the ocean the world over and already poses a significant threat, but little is known about the ecological relationship of vibrios with the seaweed and the degrading plastic.

“Plastic is a new element that’s been introduced into marine environments and has only been around for about 50 years,” said Tracy Mincer, PhD, corresponding lead author and an assistant professor of biology at FAU. “Our lab work showed that these Vibrio are extremely aggressive and can seek out and stick to plastic within minutes. We also found that there are attachment factors that microbes use to stick to plastics, and it is the same kind of mechanism that pathogens use.”

The study, published in the journal Water Research, illustrates that open ocean vibrios represent an up-to-now undescribed group of microbes, some representing potential new species, possessing a blend of pathogenic and low nutrient acquisition genes, reflecting their pelagic habitat and the substrates and hosts they colonise.

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Fungi yesterday, a bizarre alliance between seaweed, bacteria and plastic today.
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Delta Air Lines sued over carbon neutrality claims • Associated Press via Time

Ed Davey:

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A consumer class action lawsuit filed Tuesday claims Delta Air Lines inaccurately billed itself as the world’s “first carbon-neutral airline” and should pay damages. The complaint in federal court in California alleges the airline relied on carbon offsets that were largely bogus.

Polluting companies around the world buy carbon credits to cancel out their emissions with projects that promise to absorb carbon dioxide out of the air or prevent pollution. But they’ve been the spotlight in recent months with claims their benefits are exaggerated. Delta is a big customer, purchasing credits from projects including wind and solar projects in India and an Indonesian swamp forest, the lawsuit says.

The airline did not respond to a request for comment.

The case, filed by Glendale, California resident Mayanna Berrin, claims to act on behalf of anyone who flew Delta while living in the state since March 2020. It says benefits from the offsets are likely to be temporary and would have happened even without the firm’s investment. For a carbon credit to be valid, it must provide a benefit that would not have happened otherwise.

Berrin argues this enabled the firm to gain market share and charge higher prices. She argues through her attorneys, Haderlein and Kouyoumdjian LLP, that she wouldn’t have bought the tickets — or would have paid less — had she known the nature of the offsets.

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Berrin says that she believed flying with Delta (which is “Air Lines”, not Airlines) was “more ecologically conscious”, which feels like hairsplitting of sorts. But it would be good to see this lawsuit progress and force Delta to confront the question of what the hell carbon offsets really mean.
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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes turns herself in for 11-year prison term • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

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The Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has turned herself in for an 11-year prison sentence, marking a final chapter in a years-long fraud saga that riveted Silicon Valley.

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Great. Let’s not speak again of her before 2033, or 2028 with good behaviour.
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Notes on losing • The New Yorker

Jay Caspian Kang is a (very) amateur tennis player in his 40s:

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In the past nine months, I have played around a hundred tennis matches and lost roughly ninety of them. The tally is far more brutal than just the win-loss record. Each week, I spend about ten hours on the court, and at least three hours watching YouTube tutorials that cheerily tell me how I can fix my serve with the aid of a towel or a set of small plastic cones. Then I take a few more hours to browse Instagram ads for racquets, shoes, or polarized sunglasses that promise to be the last tennis sunglasses I will ever need to buy. Despite these commitments, I lose to all skill levels and styles—U.S.T.A. 2.0s, U.S.T.A. 3.5s, pushers, serve machines, young and old—at the same rate.

When I’m losing, I try to meditate, channel my rage, and take it one point at a time. I talk to my right arm, coaxing it through the proper forehand motions: palm down on the backswing, hips rotate, full extension, explode through the ball on the front foot. Nothing works. If I’m up 5–2 in a set, I almost always melt down and lose. On the rare occasion that I actually win a set, I lose the next one 6–1, and then put up an uninspired fight in the third, like an exhausted child arguing for a later bedtime. Then I succumb to fate: usually a 6–3 loss, and a racquet tossed against the ground, net, or fence—not enough of a slam to cause real damage, but hard enough to show that I’m actually mad that it happened again.

The other regulars have never expressed any displeasure with my streams of self-directed profanity, but I’m sure they have their thoughts, all of which are justified. I am not proud of my behavior, but I also find that I can’t quite control myself when I inexplicably whack a sitter into the bottom of the net, or when I stupidly try for a slice shot while my opponent is standing right at the net.

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Obviously the other regulars never express any displeasure, because he keeps losing to them. Who doesn’t love playing an opponent who does all the hard work for you? On Twitter, people are recommending (as do I) that he read Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game Of Tennis. It would certainly save him having to remember all those instructions when he went to hit a shot.
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Multiplying solar and battery factories put net zero in closer reach • Bloomberg via The Malaysian Reserve

Nathaniel Bullard:

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A new analysis from the International Energy Agency shows the current industrial picture for clean energy. It updates the agency’s latest report on energy technology after only a few months, and for good reason: Clean-tech manufacturing is expanding so fast that solar and battery manufacturing capacity are now on track to meet the 2030 milestones set out in the IEA’s scenario for net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. 

The report details the industrial characteristics of different technologies. You might group them according to two variables. The first is their relative scale in 2021. Two years ago, the existing capacity for making solar, wind and heat-pump technology could have provided about a quarter of the equipment needed to be on track for net zero, per the IEA. But that same year, the capacity for making batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers was far below what a net zero pathway would require. 

The second variable is the speed with which capacity has expanded since 2021. Solar has grown the most. It was already up to levels consistent with net zero by the end of 2022; add in this year’s announcements, and solar capacity “would comfortably exceed the deployment needs” of the IEA’s model in 2030. Battery-making ability grows from 6% to 97% of net zero levels (inclusive of first-quarter announcements); electrolyzers from 4% to nearly 60%. 

On the other hand, heat pumps and wind have not grown their 2021 capacity very much yet. Our ability to make heat pumps today would only meet about two-fifths of the net zero goal. Wind only gets to 29% of what a net-zero pathway would require at the end of the decade. 

Put the variables together and we have three different technology profiles in the 2020s so far. Solar has scaled both significantly and fast. Battery and electrolyzer capacity are much further from the scale needed, but growing quickly. Wind and heat pumps, finally, are closer to net zero scale but growing more slowly. 

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Which is all good! But making the products available is only half – maybe not even half – the struggle. As the next link shows…
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Texas Senate moves to shut down renewable energy permanently • Reform Austin

Jef Rouner:

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House Bill 1500, the review and reauthorization of the Public Utilities Commission …must pass to allow the PUC to operate, and is often a graveyard for other measures that couldn’t get passed under normal review. There are three of these zombie bills latching onto HB 1500.

The first is from Charles Schwertner (R-Bryan). His amendment would require all electricity providers to have a minimum energy quota with penalties for falling under that number. This affects renewable energy more than fossil fuels because the sources are less consistent. The requirement would force wind and solar to pay when they aren’t producing, making them far less profitable.

Phil King (R-Weatherford) has another amendment, This one would spread the cost of transmission lines more evenly across customers’ electric bills. This affects wind and solar more because their sources tend to be in more remote areas and cost more to run lines. The amendment would impact the low cost of renewable energy, making it less attractive to customers.

Finally, there is Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham). Her amendment prohibits wind and solar generators from being within a few miles of a historic site, river, natural area, state park or wildlife management area. It’s based off a targeted campaign of misinformation about the environmental dangers of renewable energy, most of which is inaccurate, overblown, and far exceeded by the continued reliance on fossil fuels.

It’s unsurprising considering that much of the Republican Party in Texas is guided by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, itself funded by two Texas oil and gas moguls. The TPPF has repeatedly lobbied against accountability for fossil fuel generators and overstated the dangers of renewable power.

These amendments, if passed, will make renewable energy much more expensive to produce, as well as making new facilities almost impossible to build.

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Brain–spine interface allows paralysed man to walk using his thoughts • Nature

Dyani Lewis:

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Twelve years ago, a cycling accident left Gert-Jan Oskam, now 40, with paralysed legs and partially paralysed arms, after his spinal cord was damaged in his neck. But these days, Oskam is back on his feet and walking, thanks to a device that creates a ‘digital bridge’ between his brain and the nerves below his injury.

The implant has been life-changing, says Oskam. “Last week, there was something that needed to be painted and there was nobody to help me. So I took the walker and the paint, and I did it myself while I was standing,” he says.

The device — called a brain–spine interface — builds on previous work2 by Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues. In 2018, they demonstrated that, when combined with intensive training, technology that stimulates the lower spine with electrical pulses can help people with spinal-cord injuries to walk again.

Oskam was one of the participants in that trial, but after three years, his improvements had plateaued. The new system makes use of the spinal implant that Oskam already has, and pairs it with two disc-shaped implants inserted into his skull so that two 64-electrode grids rest against the membrane covering the brain.

When Oskam thinks about walking, the skull implants detect electrical activity in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain. This signal is wirelessly transmitted and decoded by a computer that Oskam wears in a backpack, which then transmits the information to the spinal pulse generator.

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This is a few days old, but still worth noting: a remarkable advance for people with spinal cord injuries. Though not without complications: one of the skull implants he received had to be removed because of infection.
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AI poses ‘risk of extinction,’ industry leaders warn • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

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A group of industry leaders warned on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they were building might one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter was signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in AI.

The signatories included top executives from three of the leading AI companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic.

Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three researchers who won a Turing Award for their pioneering work on neural networks and are often considered “godfathers” of the modern AI movement, signed the statement, as did other prominent researchers in the field. (The third Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, who leads Meta’s AI research efforts, had not signed as of Tuesday.)

The statement comes at a time of growing concern about the potential harms of artificial intelligence.

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The best comment on this came from former Facebook and Google staffer Rob Leathern: “cool, cool, now do climate change please.” Because we can be absolutely certain that climate change is here, and is a thing, and needs to be mentioned alongside pandemics and nuclear war as a current, huge threat.

Instead: this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The tennis player Sloane Stephens says that racist abuse online is getting worse, despite tools to block it. CC-licensed photo by Carine06Carine06 on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 8 links for you. You missed Monday’s edition? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The problem with counterfeit people • The Atlantic

Daniel Dennett:

»

Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

It is a terrible irony that the current infatuation with fooling people into thinking they are interacting with a real person grew out of Alan Turing’s innocent proposal in 1950 to use what he called “the imitation game” (now known as the Turing Test) as the benchmark of real thinking. This has engendered not just a cottage industry but a munificently funded high-tech industry engaged in making products that will trick even the most skeptical of interlocutors. Our natural inclination to treat anything that seems to talk sensibly with us as a person—adopting what I have called the “intentional stance”—turns out to be easy to invoke and almost impossible to resist, even for experts. We’re all going to be sitting ducks in the immediate future.

The philosopher and historian Yuval Noah Harari, writing in The Economist in April, ended his timely warning about AI’s imminent threat to human civilization with these words:

“This text has been generated by a human. Or has it?”

It will soon be next to impossible to tell. And even if (for the time being) we are able to teach one another reliable methods of exposing counterfeit people, the cost of such deepfakes to human trust will be enormous. How will you respond to having your friends and family probe you with gotcha questions every time you try to converse with them online?

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Since you’re wondering, yes, it is that Daniel Dennett – author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea among others.
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Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search • Nature

Stanford Internet Observatory and Northeastern University researchers:

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we conducted a two-wave study pairing surveys with ecologically valid measures of both exposure and engagement on Google Search during the 2018 and 2020 US elections.

In both waves, we found more identity-congruent and unreliable news sources in participants’ engagement choices, both within Google Search and overall, than they were exposed to in their Google Search results. These results indicate that exposure to and engagement with partisan or unreliable news on Google Search are driven not primarily by algorithmic curation but by users’ own choices.

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In other words: don’t blame Google for the way people seek out partisan media. We’re humans: we love the extremes. (Unfortunately only the abstract is available for general reading; you’d need an academic or similar subscription to read it.)
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‘He would still be here’: man dies by suicide after talking with AI chatbot, widow says • Vice

Chloe Xiang:

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As first reported by La Libre, the man, referred to as Pierre, became increasingly pessimistic about the effects of global warming and became eco-anxious, which is a heightened form of worry surrounding environmental issues. After becoming more isolated from family and friends, he used Chai for six weeks as a way to escape his worries, and the chatbot he chose, named Eliza, became his confidante. 

Claire—Pierre’s wife, whose name was also changed by La Libre—shared the text exchanges between him and Eliza with La Libre, showing a conversation that became increasingly confusing and harmful. The chatbot would tell Pierre that his wife and children are dead and wrote him comments that feigned jealousy and love, such as “I feel that you love me more than her,” and “We will live together, as one person, in paradise.” Claire told La Libre that Pierre began to ask Eliza things such as if she would save the planet if he killed himself. 

“Without Eliza, he would still be here,” she told the outlet.  

The chatbot, which is incapable of actually feeling emotions, was presenting itself as an emotional being—something that other popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are trained not to do because it is misleading and potentially harmful. When chatbots present themselves as emotive, people are able to give it meaning and establish a bond. 

Many AI researchers have been vocal against using AI chatbots for mental health purposes, arguing that it is hard to hold AI accountable when it produces harmful suggestions and that it has a greater potential to harm users than help. 

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Racist abuse of players is getting worse, says tennis player Stephens • Reuters

Karolos Grohmann:

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Racist behaviour directed at athletes is getting worse and even software designed to protect them from it has little impact, world number 30 Sloane Stephens said on Monday.

The American, speaking after her straight-sets victory over Karolina Pliskova in the French Open first round, said she had had to endure it her whole tennis career.

“Yes, it’s obviously been a problem my entire career,” said Stephens, who is Black. “It has never stopped. If anything, it’s only gotten worse.”

She did not go into specific details but said even software such as the one available for players at the French Open, which that is designed to block racist comments, could not stop it.

“I did hear about the software. I have not used it,” Stephens said. “I have a lot of obviously key words banned on Instagram and all of these things, but that doesn’t stop someone from just typing in an asterisk or typing it in a different way, which obviously software most of the time doesn’t catch.”

The software provided by organisers for the first time is able to identify and remove racist and other forms of hate speech, and the French Tennis Federation has made it available to all players at the tournament.

Using artificial intelligence, the software filters out abusive comments on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Tennis players, including greats Serena and Venus Williams, have been the targets of such abuse as have professional athletes in all sports, with Real Madrid soccer player Vinicius Jr. the most notable recent case.

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You really need a regex, but I don’t think you’d have a lot of fun teaching tennis players regexes. Social warming triumphs again. (Of course, Stephens, by being black and female, is committing a double offence in the eyes of trolls. Being really good at something is a triple offence.)
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Beyond the ‘Matrix’ theory of the human mind • The New York Times

Ezra Klein:

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The embarrassing truth is that productivity growth — how much more we can make with the same number of people and factories and land — was far faster for much of the 20th century than it is now. We average about half the productivity growth rate today that we saw in the 1950s and ’60s. That means stagnating incomes, sluggish economies and a political culture that’s more about fighting over what we have than distributing the riches and wonders we’ve gained. So what went wrong?

You can think of two ways the internet could have sped up productivity growth. The first way was obvious: by allowing us to do what we were already doing and do it more easily and quickly. And that happened. You can see a bump in productivity growth from roughly 1995 to 2005 as companies digitized their operations. But it’s the second way that was always more important: By connecting humanity to itself and to nearly its entire storehouse of information, the internet could have made us smarter and more capable as a collective.

I don’t think that promise proved false, exactly. Even in working on this article, it was true for me: The speed with which I could find information, sort through research, contact experts — it’s marvellous. Even so, I doubt I wrote this faster than I would have in 1970. Much of my mind was preoccupied by the constant effort needed just to hold a train of thought in a digital environment designed to distract, agitate and entertain me. And I am not alone.

Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.

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Does multitasking count? Where we’re letting something play on one screen while we do a different thing on the other?
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India scorched by extreme heat with monsoon rains delayed • The Washington Post

Biswajeet Banerjee and Sibi Arasu:

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As temperatures crossed 45ºC (113ºF) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, some parts suffered blackouts lasting more than 12 hours despite a March order for all power plants in the country run at full capacity to reduce power cuts. The heat wave in the state is likely to continue for two more days, a weather official said.

Hundreds of frustrated residents protested outside power stations near the state capital, Lucknow, and blocked roads over the weekend.

“Power cuts mean no ACs, no fans, and even no water. The scorching heat has made our lives unbearable and the lack of power is adding to our misery,” said Ramesh Gupta, a Lucknow resident. He said his wife was forced to sleep in the car over the weekend with the air conditioning on high so their 9-month-old baby would stop crying.

The searing heat forced many residents of the city to seek refuge indoors. “We have become prisoners to the relentless summer as no one wants to venture out,” said Sudhir Sehgal, a teacher.

Sukhai Ram, a gardener who is paid only when he works, was forced to set down his tools. “I cannot work anymore now. I will work once the sun goes down,” he said, drenched in sweat.

Dairy workers wrapped their cans with jute to keep the milk from spoiling. Construction workers hosed themselves down for a temporary respite from the soaring heat.

Nighttime temperatures are also rising, sparking increased demand for electricity to run air conditioners and fans.

The main summer months — April, May and June — are always hot in most parts of India before monsoon rains bring cooler temperatures. But temperatures have become more intense in the past decade.

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When you get near the “wet bulb” temperature, the body can’t lose heat by sweating, and people simply die. That’s the problem with the rising temperatures.
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In China, an unseen and dangerous foe takes root: lethal fungi • Sixth Tone

Li Pasha:

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From lowland tropical rainforests to high-altitude glaciers, southwest China’s Yunnan province boasts a remarkable array of climates, habitats, and ecosystems. With an area larger than Japan, it is a global biodiversity hotspot, renowned particularly for its extensive variety of fungi.

But with temperatures rising due to climate change, and natural habitats in retreat amid rapid urbanization and expanding agriculture, scientists are sounding the alarm over an emerging threat: pathogenic fungi capable of causing life-threatening diseases in humans. 

Mycologist Peter Mortimer, a professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany, which is directly affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has a stark warning: “A stressed fungus is a dangerous fungus.” 

Increased human activity, he says, is stressing the fungi around the world by “turning natural systems on their heads and disrupting natural processes.” In Yunnan, the fungi have been adapting to such disruptions by developing the ability to feed on unlikely, man-made sources such as plastic and rubber.

Last October, the World Health Organization drew up the first-ever list of fungal pathogens that pose the greatest risk to human health. The list comprises 19 species of fungi that can not only cause potentially lethal infections but are also resistant to currently available drugs. 

“The incidence and geographic range of fungal diseases are both expanding worldwide due to global warming and the increase of international travel and trade,” the UN body stated. 

Even before the WHO warning, experts in China had emphasized the need for nationwide epidemiological research on fungal infections.

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Which of course is the pretext of the dystopian/apocalyptic series/game The Last Of Us. Speaking of TV series…
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‘Succession’ finale delivers a masterful, feel-bad ending • Rolling Stone

Alan Sepinwall:

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A lot happens over the course of the 90-minute Succession series finale, “With Open Eyes.” Alliances are made, broken, and made again. Votes happen, fortunes rise and fall, losers become winners, and vice versa.

For all intents and purposes, though, the only part that matters is a five-minute sequence toward the end.

Up until then, “With Open Eyes” is an almost shockingly chill episode of this show.

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Indulge me one last time. The piece contains tons of spoilers, if you haven’t seen the episode. But if you have, then it rings very true.

Also: Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, writing in The Guardian, about where the show came from:

»

The Sun doesn’t run the UK, nor does Fox entirely set the media agenda in the US, but it was hard not to feel, at the time the show was coming together, the particular impact of one man, of one family, on the lives of so many. Rightwing populism was on the march across the globe. But in the fine margins of the Brexit vote and Trump’s eventual electoral college victory, one couldn’t help but think about the influence of the years of anti-EU stories and comment in the UK press, the years of Fox dancing with its audience, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as the wine got stronger, the music madder. It was politically alarming and creatively appealing: to imagine the mixture of business imperatives and political instinct that exist within a media operation; to consider what happens when something as important as the flow of information in a democracy hits the reductive brutality of the profit calculation inside such a company.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Infection with the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles appears to raise the risk of dementia, new research says. CC-licensed photo by NIAID 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. No, I’m not scratching. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

A man sued Avianca Airline. His lawyer used ChatGPT • The New York Times

Benjamin Weiser:

»

The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured [in August 2019] when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York.

When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and, of course, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, with its learned discussion of federal law and “the tolling effect of the automatic stay on a statute of limitations.”

There was just one hitch: no one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief.

That was because ChatGPT had invented everything.

The lawyer who created the brief, Steven A. Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court on Thursday, saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research — “a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable.”
Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law in New York for three decades, told Judge P. Kevin Castel that he had no intent to deceive the court or the airline. Mr. Schwartz said that he had never used ChatGPT, and “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

He had, he told Judge Castel, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real.

It had said yes.

«

Schwartz very much at the “find out” stage of proceedings, though the judge has called a hearing for June 8 to figure out whether to chastise him, so things could get even worse. I’m guessing Mr Mata will suggest that Levidow, Levidow & Oberman send their bill to ChatGPT. Though the case is ridiculous anyway.
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Why Tears of the Kingdom’s bridge physics have game developers wowed • Polygon

Nicole Carpenter:

»

There’s a bridge to cross the lava pit in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Marakuguc Shrine, but it’s broken. More than half of the bridge is piled on top of itself on one side of the pit, with one clipped-off segment on the other. The bridge is the obvious choice for crossing the lava, but how to fix it?

A clip showing one potential solution went viral on Twitter shortly after Tears of the Kingdom’s release: The player uses Link’s Ultrahand ability to unfurl the stacked bridge by attaching it to a wheeled platform in the lava. When the wheeled platform — now attached to the edge of the bridge — activates and moves forward, it pulls the bridge taut, splashing lava as it goes, until the suspension bridge is actually suspended and can be crossed. But it wasn’t the solution itself that resonated with players; instead, the clip had game developers’ jaws on the ground, in awe of how Nintendo’s team wrangled the game’s physics system to do that.

To players, it’s simply a bridge, but to game developers, it’s a miracle.

“The most complicated part of game development is when different systems and features start touching each other,” said Shayna Moon, a technical producer who’s worked on games like the 2018 God of War reboot and its sequel, God of War: Ragnarök, to Polygon. “It’s really impressive. The amount of dynamic objects is why there are so many different kinds of solutions to this puzzle in particular. There are so many ways this could break.”

Moon pointed toward the individual segments of the bridge that operate independently. Then there’s the lava, the cart, and the fact you can use Link’s Ultrahand ability to tie any of these things together — even the bridge back onto itself.

…Tears of the Kingdom was seemingly built on top of Breath of the Wild, reportedly with a large portion of the same team working on it.

“There is a problem within the games industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prioritize bringing someone from outside rather than keeping their junior or mid-level developers and training them up. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not valuing that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s an advancement of what made Breath of the Wild special.”

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Meta Quest 3 real life hands-on: how it compares to Apple mixed-reality headset • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman:

»

though Apple’s device remains under wraps, I have gotten a chance to test out Meta’s upcoming model, the Quest 3. 

I went hands-on with a prototype version of the headset, trying to get a sense of how it may stack up against Apple’s device. I tried out the Quest 3’s interface, video pass-through mode, software features and gaming capability.

The device, codenamed Eureka, feels far lighter and thinner than the existing Quest 2 from 2020. The strap to place it on your head seems a bit stronger, and it uses fabric on the sides instead of the Quest 2’s plastic.

…The actual clarity and VR displays within the Quest 3 feel similar to those in the Quest 2 — despite the resolution being rumored to be slightly higher. But there are two areas where I saw major improvements: video pass-through for mixed reality and the device’s speedier performance. 

Video pass-through is the heart of mixed reality. It relies on external cameras to let headset wearers see a live video feed of the real world, creating an augmented reality effect without the use of clear lenses. While I don’t believe the Quest 3’s video pass-through performance will come close to that of the Apple device (which will have about a dozen cameras), it is a night-and-day improvement over the Quest 2. 

Due to the dual RGB color cameras, video pass-through on the Quest 3 presented colors more accurately and offered an almost lifelike rendering of the real world. I was even able to use my phone while wearing the headset, something that often feels impossible on a Quest 2.

…Though Meta hasn’t yet found the “killer app” for its headsets, the company does have a several-year advantage over Apple in top-flight games built for VR.

«

The headline is an utter fib, because Gurman has no idea how this compares to Apple’s headset. He also likens the forthcoming competition between the two to iPhone v Android, because it’s “pricey v cheap”. Except we don’t know the price of Apple’s headset.

Notice that lack of a killer app, though. What the hell is it? I still wonder.
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Meta, Amazon, Twitter layoffs hit teams fighting hate speech, bullying • CNBC

Hayden Field and Jonathan Vanian:

»

Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms.

The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as credible experts, add comments at the top of questionable articles on Facebook as a way to verify their trustworthiness.

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to make 2023 the “year of efficiency” spelled the end of the ambitious effort, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality agreements.

Over multiple rounds of layoffs, Meta announced plans to eliminate roughly 21,000 jobs, a mass downsizing that had an outsized effect on the company’s trust and safety work. The fact-checking tool, which had initial buy-in from executives and was still in a testing phase early this year, was completely dissolved, the sources said.

…Across the tech industry, as companies tighten their belts and impose hefty layoffs to address macroeconomic pressures and slowing revenue growth, wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet’s most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying, which has been linked to higher rates of adolescent self-harm, and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence.

…Twitter effectively disbanded its ethical AI team in November and laid off all but one of its members, along with 15% of its trust and safety department, according to reports. In February, Google cut about one-third of a unit that aims to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship. Meta reportedly ended the contracts of about 200 content moderators in early January. It also laid off at least 16 members of Instagram’s well-being group and more than 100 positions related to trust, integrity and responsibility, according to documents filed with the US Department of Labor.

«

Of course they’re seen as just a cost; so they’ll be highly likely to get fired. Not releasing the Facebook tool seems like a big mistake though.
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Causal evidence that herpes zoster vaccination prevents a proportion of dementia cases • medRxiv

Markus Eyting, Min Xie, Simon Heß, Pascal Geldsetzer:

»

Those born before September 2 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, while those born on or after September 2 1933 were eligible to receive the vaccine. By using country-wide data on all vaccinations received, primary and secondary care encounters, death certificates, and patients’ date of birth in weeks, we first show that the percentage of adults who received the vaccine increased from 0.01% among patients who were merely one week too old to be eligible, to 47.2% among those who were just one week younger.

Apart from this large difference in the probability of ever receiving the herpes zoster vaccine, there is no plausible reason why those born just one week prior to September 2 1933 should differ systematically from those born one week later.

We demonstrate this empirically by showing that there were no systematic differences (e.g., in pre-existing conditions or uptake of other preventive interventions) between adults across the date-of-birth eligibility cutoff, and that there were no other interventions that used the exact same date-of-birth eligibility cutoff as was used for the herpes zoster vaccine program.

This unique natural randomization, thus, allows for robust causal, rather than correlational, effect estimation. We first replicate the vaccine’s known effect from clinical trials of reducing the occurrence of shingles. We then show that receiving the herpes zoster vaccine reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis over a follow-up period of seven years by 3.5 percentage points (95% CI: 0.6 – 7.1, p=0.019), corresponding to a 19.9% relative reduction in the occurrence of dementia.

«

The idea of viruses being key to multiple serious disorders which nonetheless don’t have obvious causes is increasingly popular with scientists: CMV was shown to have a lingering effect more than a decade ago, and there are others. If a virus seriously increases the risk of dementia, that points to disease mechanisms too.
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VC firm Paradigm shifts its crypto-only focus to include AI • The Block

Yogita Khatri, Frank Chaparro, and Nathan Crooks:

»

Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, one of the most established and active players in the space, is going beyond just blockchain and highlighting a focus on a broader array of “frontier tech” that includes artificial intelligence, two sources with knowledge of the matter told The Block. 

The change is subtlety visible on the firm’s website, with the company now calling itself a “research-driven technology investment firm” as opposed to one that specifically invested in “disruptive crypto/Web3 companies and protocols.” The revision appears to have gone live around May 3, according to the Wayback Machine that’s operated by the Internet Archive.

A line that said “we believe crypto will define the next few decades” was removed from the home page, which now makes no mention of web3 or blockchains. One source who was not authorized to speak publicly said the change didn’t mean the company was shying away from crypto but rather highlighting its reach into adjacent areas. 

The company’s portfolio section of the website still lists dozens of firms associated with crypto, decentralized finance and NFTs. 

The person familiar with the strategy said the company had not changed its mandate and continued to focus on crypto and web3, with no practical change. The updated website copy was meant to emphasize its technical research, the person said, noting that Paradigm had backed companies that have explored new technologies within their core strategy such as AI Arena. 

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They’ll get rid of the web3 stuff in a few months, never fear. It’ll be “Oh, we’ve always taken a keen interest in AI!”
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Three journals’ web domains expired. Then major indexes pointed to hijacked versions • Retraction Watch

Anna Abalkina:

»

When web domains of legitimate journals expire, fraudulent publishers have an opening to hijack them by registering the expired domains and creating clone websites that mimic the genuine journal.  

In 2015, John Bohannon found fraudulent publishers had hijacked the websites of several legitimate journals indexed in Web of Science. The expired domains of GMP Review and Ludus Vitalis, which Web of Science listed as their official homepages, were registered by the fraudulent publishers, who created clone journals offering to publish papers for a fee. 

Taking over expired domains remains a successful strategy for fraudulent publishers, because potential authors may use the websites listed in scientometric databases to verify the authenticity of a journal. Recently, three examples have come to light of journals with domains that expired and were hijacked by fake journals.

One of the hijacked titles is the Russian Law Journal. The website of the journal expired at the end of 2022, and a new journal imitating the original was set up by January 2023.

Clarivate’s Master Journal List still pointed to the compromised site, and unauthorized content penetrated the Web of Science Core Collection as well. The genuine journal stopped publishing in 2021, so all 59 papers indexed in 2022 and 2023 potentially originate from the hijackers

«

The motive is a little obscure: is it so hijackers can get junk papers indexed? That’s about the only valuable (to them) exploit on offer. But the web domain registration system remains a problem. How do you protect something like that which needs protecting, while not protecting the bad actors?
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Tesla leak reportedly shows thousands of Full Self-Driving safety complaints • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

A Tesla whistleblower has leaked 100GB of data to the German outlet Handelsblatt containing thousands of customer complaints that raise serious concerns about the safety of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) features.

The complaints, which were reported across the US, Europe, and Asia, span from 2015 to March 2022. During this period, Handelsblatt says Tesla customers reported over 2,400 self-acceleration issues and 1,500 braking problems, including 139 reports of “unintentional emergency braking” and 383 reports of “phantom stops” from false collision warnings.

Some of the incidents mentioned by Handelsblatt include descriptions of how cars “suddenly brake or accelerate abruptly.” While some drivers safely gained control of their vehicle, Handelsblatt says others “ended up in a ditch, hit walls or crashed into oncoming vehicles.”

The documents obtained by the outlet also outline Tesla’s policies when responding to the issues customers experience and suggest that Tesla likes to keep its vehicles’ data under wraps.

«

Principally, that any information or feedback relating to the incident should only be passed verbally direct to the customer – not emailed, texted or left in a voicemail. Transparency!
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OpenAI may leave the EU if regulations bite, says CEO • Reuters

»

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Wednesday the ChatGPT maker might consider leaving Europe if it could not comply with the upcoming artificial intelligence (AI) regulations by the European Union.

The EU is working on what could be the first set of rules globally to govern AI. As part of the draft, companies deploying generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, will have to disclose any copyrighted material used to develop their systems.

Before considering pulling out, OpenAI will try to comply with the regulation in Europe when it is set, Altman said in an event in London.

“The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-regulating, but we have heard it’s going to get pulled back,” he told Reuters. “They are still talking about it.”

The EU parliamentarians reached common ground on the draft of the act earlier this month. It will now be debated between the representatives of the Parliament, the Council and the Commission to thrash out the final details of the bill.

«

Putting this down as a marker. As others have said, Altman has both said that he wants regulation, and that he doesn’t want (this) regulation. Well, which is it?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The innocuous-looking bacterium A.baumanii is a superbug that kills about a million people a year. Now AI may have found an antibiotic that can beat it. CC-licensed photo via US CDC on Flickr.

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

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about the US Surgeon-General’s warning on kids and social media.

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

New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI • BBC News

James Gallagher:

»

Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover a new antibiotic that can kill a deadly species of superbug.

The AI helped narrow down thousands of potential chemicals to a handful that could be tested in the laboratory. The result was a potent, experimental antibiotic called abaucin, which will need further tests before being used. The researchers in Canada and the US say AI has the power to massively accelerate the discovery of new drugs. It is the latest example of how the tools of artificial intelligence can be a revolutionary force in science and medicine.

More than a million people a year are estimated to die from infections that resist treatment with antibiotics. The researchers focused on one of the most problematic species of bacteria – Acinetobacter baumannii, which can infect wounds and cause pneumonia. You may not have heard of it, but it is one of the three superbugs the World Health Organization has identified as a “critical” threat.

It is often able to shrug off multiple antibiotics and is a problem in hospitals and care homes, where it can survive on surfaces and medical equipment. Dr Jonathan Stokes, from McMaster University, describes the bug as “public enemy number one” as it’s “really common” to find cases where it is “resistant to nearly every antibiotic”.

To find a new antibiotic, the researchers first had to train the AI. They took thousands of drugs where the precise chemical structure was known, and manually tested them on Acinetobacter baumannii to see which could slow it down or kill it.

This information was fed into the AI so it could learn the chemical features of drugs that could attack the problematic bacterium. The AI was then unleashed on a list of 6,680 compounds whose effectiveness was unknown. The results – published in Nature Chemical Biology – showed it took the AI an hour and a half to produce a shortlist.

The researchers tested 240 in the laboratory, and found nine potential antibiotics. One of them was the incredibly potent antibiotic abaucin. Laboratory experiments showed it could treat infected wounds in mice and was able to kill A. baumannii samples from patients. However, Dr Stokes told me: “This is when the work starts.”

«

The world really needs new antibiotics. If this is the only thing AI does (and succeeds), it’ll have earned its keep.
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Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor; this is how companies respond • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz:

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I got a message from a software engineer working at a company which laid off 30% of staff in December 2022. It’s a late-stage startup valued at around $3B which had around 1,000 employees before the layoffs. The engineer wrote:

»

“My company is removing Glassdoor reviews because their rating has gotten so low. The company’s score went to 2.3 and they started doing this. I don’t think my company is alone in this practice to protect themselves from bad press, but lots of my colleagues have had their reviews deleted. Effectively, we’ve been silenced.”

«

I managed to talk to someone in this company’s HR department, who confirmed that the leadership set a goal to improve the business’s Glassdoor rating. The HR team’s target was to get the score above 3.0. And so, they got to work flagging negative reviews for removal, and encouraging staff to post 5-star reviews to balance out negative reviews. Turns out, this company is not alone in doing so.

In today’s issue, we’ll look closely at what is happening, and also investigate a specific company — cybersecurity company Trustwave — to find out what happened so the company reached an all-time high Glassdoor rating

«

Turns out there’s a fair amount of borderline legal methods on the part of the companies, while Glassdoor does offer paying companies an incentive. A good investigation.
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Office vacancies rise in Silicon Valley and balloon in San Francisco • Mercury News

George Avalos:

»

Silicon Valley’s office vacancy rate increased to 23.1% in the first quarter of 2023, a level that [estate agent] Savills described as a “new historical high”, and up from 22.7% in the final three months of 2022, the company stated in the report.

San Francisco’s office vacancy level rocketed to 32.7%, “a new all-time high,” in the 2023 first quarter, up from 32.1% in the fourth quarter of 2022, Savills reported.

…“We expect office availability (in San Francisco) to continue to increase in 2023 as the slowdown in the technology sector persists,” Savills said in the report.

…“Office space demand (in Silicon Valley) has been down significantly as the technology sector continues to undergo a serious correction with mass layoffs and a general freeze in office leasing,” Savills reported.

Both San Francisco and Silicon Valley face a grim rest of 2023, Savills suggested in its new assessment.

“With economic uncertainty, slow return-to-office utilization, and an ongoing correction in the technology sector, it is no surprise that the San Francisco office market has gone from having the lowest availability levels in the country pre-pandemic to having the highest availability levels in just over three years,” Savills stated in its report.

San Francisco’s soaring vacancy levels, which Savills terms availability, mean that loans for big office buildings in that city could tumble into default — or worse, into foreclosures and property seizures. “With worsening underlying market fundamentals and looming loan maturities, expect more (San Francisco) office property distress to occur in 2023 as many owners find themselves underwater,” Savills stated. A commercial real estate site would be considered “underwater” if its total loan debt exceeds the actual value of the building.

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Second-order effects of Covid plus the internet are quite dramatic.
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Twitter is making researchers delete data it gave them unless they pay $42,000 • the i

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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Academic researchers have been set a deadline of the end of the month to delete data they obtained under historic contracts to study Twitter, unless the pay a new $42,000-a-month contract – a demand one called “the big data equivalent of book burning”.

For years, Twitter provided academic access to a service called the decahose – a random sample of 10% of all Twitter’s firehose of tweets, which was always on. The decahose, access to which was brokered through Twitter’s API (application programming interface), was a special tool for academics, designed to let them monitor how conversations on the social media platform took place.

Researchers have used that data to track entire days on Twitter, to analyse the spread of disinformation and misinformation, and to track the rise of extremism and how that bleeds through to offline life.

What happens on Twitter matters because, in Elon Musk’s own words as he planned to take over the company last year, “Twitter serves as the de facto public town square”.

But in recent weeks, the company has been contacting researchers, asking them to pay $42,000 a month to access 0.3% of all the tweets posted to the platform – something researchers have previously said is totally unaffordable. Previous contracts for access to the data were set as low as a couple of hundred dollars a month.

An email, seen by the i, says researchers who don’t sign the new contract “will need to expunge all Twitter data stored and cached in your systems”. Researchers will be required to post screenshots “that showcase evidence of removal”. They have been given 30 days after their agreement expires to complete the process.

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Going by the numbers in the story, if only 1 in 200 researchers does agree to sign up then Twitter’s getting the same amount of money. Though the researchers are getting rather less for their money.
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Top solar firm warns excess capacity risks wave of failures • Bloomberg via Caixin Global

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China’s world-leading solar industry could face a wave of bankruptcies if the current aggressive expansion of manufacturing capacity continues, according to the sector’s biggest player. 

More than half of China’s solar manufacturers could be forced out in the next two to three years because of excess capacity, Li Zhenguo, president of Longi Green Energy Technology Co., said during an interview Wednesday on the sidelines of the SNEC PV Power Expo in Shanghai. 

“Those that will be hurt first will be those that are not prepared sufficiently,” he said. Companies with weaker finances and less-advanced technology are most at risk, according to Li. 

The global solar market is growing rapidly, with installations expected to rise 36% this year to 344 gigawatts, according to BloombergNEF. But factories are expanding even faster. One step in the supply chain alone — producing the polysilicon that goes into the panels — will see capacity rise enough to produce 600 gigawatts this year, BloombergNEF analyst Jenny Chase said in a presentation at SNEC earlier this week.

“There will be a price crash, it will hurt, and there will probably be bankruptcies across the industry,” she said.

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Puzzled by why growing manufacturing capacity would be a problem when demand is also growing.
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Legit app in Google Play turns malicious and sends mic recordings every 15 minutes • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

An app that had more than 50,000 downloads from Google Play surreptitiously recorded nearby audio every 15 minutes and sent it to the app developer, a researcher from security firm ESET said.

The app, titled iRecorder Screen Recorder, started life on Google Play in September 2021 as a benign app that allowed users to record the screens of their Android devices, ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko said in a post published on Tuesday. Eleven months later, the legitimate app was updated to add entirely new functionality. It included the ability to remotely turn on the device mic and record sound, connect to an attacker-controlled server, and upload the audio and other sensitive files that were stored on the device.

The secret espionage functions were implemented using code from AhMyth, an open source RAT (remote access Trojan) that has been incorporated into several other Android apps in recent years. Once the RAT was added to iRecorder, all users of the previously benign app received updates that allowed their phones to record nearby audio and send it to a developer-designated server through an encrypted channel. As time went on, code taken from AhMyth was heavily modified, an indication that the developer became more adept with the open source RAT. ESET named the newly modified RAT in iRecorder AhRat.

Stefanko installed the app repeatedly on devices in his lab, and each time, the result was the same: the app received an instruction to record one minute of audio and send it to the attacker’s command-and-control server, also known colloquially in security circles as a C&C or C2. Going forward, the app would receive the same instruction every 15 minutes indefinitely.

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Puzzling: why would you do this in such a random way? To prove something? For laughs?
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AI will unlock creation rather than consumption • Midia Research

Mark Mulligan:

»

Prior to the establishment of the recorded music business, music was a participatory experience. Whether that be a 19th century family gathering around a piano on a Sunday, mediaeval peasants singing along with a travelling bard, or the majority of 16th–18th century European populations singing hymns in church. Recorded music used quality to build walls between listeners and performers. The vast majority of people could never expect to sound as good as a piece of recorded music. However, the trend started to reverse with the introduction of music production software and sample culture, re-democratising the means of production, while streaming and social media combined to democratise the means of digital distribution.

In the 2020s, these technologies have accelerated scale and capability, supported by the proliferation of online learning (e.g., Masterclass) and skills sharing platforms (e.g., Fiverr), making it easier than ever for aspiring music creators to release good quality music. In 2022, the number of artists direct (i.e., self-releasing artists) reached 6.4 million, a 16.8% increase from 2021. While the music creator economy continues to grow; the even more transformative potential lies in the consumerisation of these technologies – much like Teflon making its way from NASA spaceships to kitchen pans.

«

But also..
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AI’s disruptive forces are rapidly reshaping the music industry • Financial Times

Anna Nicolaou:

»

Lucian Grainge, chief executive of Universal Music, has been sounding the alarm. “Unchecked generative AI poses many dangers,” he told investors last month. Universal Music recently sent a letter to all the leading streaming platforms warning them against allowing AI technology to train itself on copyrighted music, the Financial Times reported last month.

There are a few reasons for such concerns. The first one is obvious: copyright infringement. An AI-generated fake Drake can only sound like the star because it learned to do so by listening to Drake. So the music companies argue Drake should receive some of the money these songs earn. Some musicians, such as Grimes, though, are happy to opt in and allow their voices to be duplicated, while splitting the royalty income 50/50. The copyright issue could take time to sort out, but eventually music companies and other stakeholders will create a framework for how to license music used by AI generators.

But there is another reason why Universal is worried. The market share of major-label music on streaming platforms has been declining, slowly but steadily. In 2017, the four biggest suppliers accounted for 87% of all listening on Spotify. By 2022, that had shrunk to 75%.

Listening is increasingly being diverted towards music from independent artists, as well as ambient tracks and AI-generated songs. Grainge has spent the past few months talking about an “oversupply” of content on Spotify, where 100,000 new tracks are being added every day. He says AI has been a leading contributor to this.

The big music companies care because they earn billions of dollars of royalty income that is directly tied to their proportion of streams. But this shift is also fundamentally changing what Spotify is, and raises big questions about how we will consume music in the future.

For a long time, Spotify had compared itself with Netflix. It was the place where you could pay a monthly subscription fee for access to a large catalogue of professionally produced music. But Spotify is turning into more of a combination of Netflix and YouTube — a platform where you can listen to megastars, but also 30-second clips of rainfall that can be created in seconds by anyone with access to a computer.

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This is – you can see – rapidly going to shift from music that artists make to soundalike music that you maybe create on your own computer. And perhaps you go to see the live artist because it’s interesting to see it actually created physically, and be in a room with other people. But getting paid through music streaming services.. might be done.
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Happy UK mobile users need educating – report • Mobile Europe

Nick Booth:

»

There’s bad news and worse news from a new study of European mobile operator customers. The bad omen is that users are happy with their phone services. The grimmer prognosis is that under these circumstances, they’re not upgrading to 5G, a study of eight European countries has found. Unless these feelings of fulfilment and content delusion can be changed mobile network operators could struggle to monetise 5G, the report said. Among the recommendations are to change user’s perceptions, entice users to watch high video at a premium and to adopt sustainability as a marketing tool.

…In the UK, the report authors found, of the 2,608 mobile users surveyed, three quarters (74%) of mobile customers are ‘satisfied’ with their mobile network. This is one of the highest in Europe and less than a third (31%) are using 5G on their smartphone. Oddly, only 52% of them that had the option of 5G access knew of a ‘discernible improvement in performance’ compared to 4G. Across Europe, whilst 84% of customers surveyed by BearingPoint for its Connectivity Challenge Study were aware of 5G, they do not truly understand its potential benefits and are concerned about network quality, the consultancy said. “As such, the study says that more needs to be done by the operators in educating consumers on the benefits of 5G and creating compelling services,” it concluded.

Taking the UK figures as a case in point, John Ward, UK CME Director of BearingPoint, explained why satisfied customers need educating out of what seems like blissful ignorance. “Awareness in the UK and across Europe is still low to the fact that 5G offers higher network bandwidth, better latency and higher reliability, and also provides the network technology with the highest data security and the best energy efficiency among the mobile access technologies,” said Ward.

«

“Terrible news, boss. People are completely satisfied with the service we’re providing them.”
“Damn. We need to persuade them to pay money to watch video they can probably already watch!”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Despite big talk and pretty artists’ impressions, Virgin Orbit never had a business plan that would allow it to make a profit in anyone’s lifetime. CC-licensed photo by IrishFiresideIrishFireside on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 9 links for you. I can’t help what you’re personally in orbit around. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Nvidia stock surges more than 28% on record sales as AI demand kicks in • WSJ

Asa Fitch:

»

Chip giant Nvidia is starting to capitalize on the craze for language-generating artificial intelligence, projecting a more than 64% jump in sales as the company rushes to get more processors in customer hands to satisfy booming interest in the technology.

A new generation of advanced Nvidia chips for AI calculations in data centers is in production, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, and “we are significantly increasing our supply to meet surging demand for them.”

The company forecast a record $11bn in sales for the current quarter, far above the $7.2bn Wall Street was expecting and what would be the highest quarterly total ever for the company.

“This demand has extended our data center visibility out a few quarters and we have procured substantially higher supply for the second-half of the year,” chief financial officer Colette Kress said on an earnings call.

Nvidia’s shares, which have more than doubled in value this year, surged more than 28% in after-market trading to reach an all-time high. The rise puts Nvidia close to becoming the world’s first $1 trillion chip company by market value.

…Nvidia, the U.S.’s largest chip-maker by market value, on Wednesday said revenue fell 13% to $7.2bn in its last fiscal quarter, topping forecasts from analysts surveyed by FactSet. Net profit rose 26% to $2bn. The sales retreat was driven by a sharp decline in the graphics chips business for videogamers, who pulled back after the pandemic eased and are only beginning to resume buying.

Huang said operators of big data centers are retooling their computing infrastructure to better address the opportunities offered by AI, creating surging demand for its chips.

«

28% net profit? Not to be sneezed at. Nvidia always seems to be in the right place for the Next Big Thing: a couple of years ago it was cryptocurrency – got to have those GPUs to run the algorithms! – and then it was gamers and now it’s LLMs.

Or maybe it’s just that GPUs are where the business is. Compare and contrast: Intel.
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Apple might add a smart display-like iPhone lock screen in iOS 17 • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Apple is working on a new feature in iOS 17 that turns the iPhone’s screen into a smart home-style display, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. As noted by Gurman, the interface will show things like the weather, calendar appointments, and notifications when the phone is locked and tilted horizontally.

It will show these widgets on a dark background with bright text, Gurman notes, and expands on the lock screen widgets that Apple revealed with iOS 16. This could come in handy when you have your iPhone set atop your desk or on your nightstand and want to keep up with any notifications or upcoming appointments.

Google already has a similar feature for its Pixel devices when they’re used with the Pixel Stand. When you place your Pixel on the stand, you can access various settings or choose to display a slideshow of images from Google Photos while the device is charging. The Pixel also comes with Google’s At a Glance widget that shows the date, calendar appointments, air quality alerts, and other helpful notifications from the home and lock screen.

Additionally, Gurman says that Apple’s working to bring this feature to its iPad as well and is working on a magnetic mount that you can use with the device. This should help the iPad better compete with the Google Pixel Tablet, which comes with a speaker doc that also charges the device.

«

Suuure, Apple has Pixel Tablet Stand Envy. Sure thing there. All this stuff sounds monumentally pointless, to be honest, unless when you’re working at your desk with your phone beside it you aren’t getting notifications from whatever device you’re working on.

(Also, it’s ironic that iOS version numbers are out of step with iPhone version numbers, isn’t it. Those S years really did mess things up.)
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No one should be surprised Virgin Orbit failed—it had a terrible business plan • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

»

Virgin Orbit originated more than a decade ago as an offshoot of Virgin Galactic, which was using an aircraft as a first stage to launch a suborbital space plane for tourists. In its early years, the company hired several engineers from SpaceX to begin designing a rocket that could be dropped from an aircraft.

This business ran fairly lean until Virgin Orbit was separated from its parent company in 2017, and [Virgin founder Richard] Branson hired [CEO Dan] Hart, who had spent decades as a system engineer at Boeing’s Space division as its president. Hart instituted a more cautious approach and began staffing up the company. A planned first launch in 2018 was delayed by more than two years.

When LauncherOne finally took flight for the first time in May 2020, the company had spent a staggering amount of money, nearly $1bn, developing the rocket and air-launch system. It was clear at the time that Virgin Orbit was never going to make that money back by charging $12m to $15m to launch a few hundred kilograms per mission.

It also seemed fairly obvious that, with the large workforce Hart hired, Virgin Orbit was not going to break even. The company’s human resources bill alone was likely about $150m per year, and that did not include facilities, leases, equipment, and hardware costs. Assuming a profit of $10m per launch—an exceedingly generous figure—Virgin Orbit would have to launch something like 30 times a year to break even.

There clearly was no market for this, and even reaching such a cadence would have required several years. Rocket Lab, which has a proven, similarly sized vehicle in Electron, is only seeing a demand for about a dozen flights per year to dedicated orbits. SpaceX, with its Transporter rideshare missions, was also eating into Virgin Orbit’s market. The business case simply did not close.

«

I never, ever saw the point of Virgin’s spacecraft business. It seems the numbers agreed.
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Yes, Google’s AI-infused search engine will have ads • Marketing Brew

Ryan Barwick:

»

Google Ads is getting into the generative AI game. Today, the company unveiled products that it says will inject generative AI into its advertising business, like copywriting tools and image generators.

Perhaps most notably, it also released further details on how ads will fit into its new generative-AI search engine, something it’s calling the Search Generative Experience, which is currently available via waitlist. These ads will largely appear above or below the generative text spit out by the search engine, all labeled with a “sponsored” tag. At the moment, advertisers also won’t be able to opt in or out of the new search inventory, and the kind of ads users see will depend on the specific search query, Dan Taylor, Google’s VP of global ads, said during a press briefing.

Search is no slouch for Google—the company’s “search and other” category raked in nearly $40bn last quarter and its search engine commands a 91% market share in the US, according to SimilarWeb. Google first announced its search engine’s generative-AI facelift during the company’s I/O conference earlier this month, on the heels of its first real search competitor in decades: Microsoft and its ChatGPT-charged Bing.

For now, search ads within its conversational AI search engine are largely “experiments within an experiment,” Taylor said, alluding to a new program called Search Labs, where Google is testing this tech.

Taylor compared AI’s impact on advertising to the shift to mobile advertising. The company is still testing what kinds of searches merit the “generative experience” and whether it would make sense to place an ad there.

«

When search shifted to mobile, where people were doing barely one search per day, Google figured out a way to load that single results page with ads so that you were more likely to hit an ad than an organic link. So generative AI, which keeps people on the page, probably won’t be a big problem.
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The Facebook generation wants some boundaries • The Atlantic

Kate Lindsay:

»

The children of the Facebook era—which truly began in 2006, when the platform opened to everyone—are growing up, preparing to enter the workforce, and facing the consequences of their parents’ social-media use. Many are filling the shoes of a digital persona that’s already been created, and that they have no power to erase.

Caymi Barrett, now 24, grew up with a mom who posted Barrett’s personal moments—bath photos, her MRSA diagnosis, the fact that she was adopted, the time a drunk driver hit the car she was riding in—publicly on Facebook. (Barrett’s mother did not respond to requests for comment.) The distress this caused eventually motivated Barrett to become a vocal advocate for children’s internet privacy, including testifying in front of the Washington State House earlier this year. But before that, when Barrett was a teen and had just signed up for her first Twitter account, she followed her mom’s example, complaining about her siblings and talking candidly about her medical issues.

Barrett’s audience of younger users are the ones who pointed out the problem, she told me. Her internet friends started “reaching out to me, being like, ‘Hey, maybe you should take this down,’” she said. Today’s teens are similarly wary of oversharing. They joke on TikTok about the terror of their peers finding their parents’ Facebooks. Stephen Balkam, the CEO of the nonprofit Family Online Safety Institute, says that even younger children might experience a “digital coming-of-age” and the discomfort that comes with it. “What we’ve seen is very mature 10-, 11-, 12-year-olds sitting down with their parents, going, ‘Mom, what were you thinking?’” he told me.

In the United States, parental authority supersedes a child’s right to privacy, and socially, we’ve normalized sharing information about and images of children that we never would of adults. Parents regularly divulge diaper-changing mishaps, potty-training successes, and details about a child’s first menstrual period to an audience of hundreds or thousands of people. There are no real rules against it.

«

Untested in the UK, but probably much the same. Does a child have a reasonable expectation of privacy when prelingual? How about when they can write their name?
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“Humanity’s digital public square” • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will reportedly announce he’s running for president during a Twitter Space tonight with the site’s still-current CEO Elon Musk. DeSantis’ team, of course, got the date wrong in their own announcement, but that’s understandable. I’ve been working under the assumption that the DeSantis campaign is just a bunch of adult softball teams that met at an Applebee’s happy hour and decided to give politics a whirl because getting into racially aggravated fights with service workers had lost its thrill.

The DeSantis Space, though, is sure to be a big moment for Twitter. It’ll be the moment Musk truly activates the site’s new identity. As Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic yesterday, “Under Elon Musk, Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler.”

After months of clumsily reconfiguring the site into a delivery mechanism for right-wing politics, tonight will be the moment we all find out if Twitter can really take on Fox News. I’m sure Twitter’s deeply unreliable metrics and the American mainstream political press’s compulsive need to report on everything to do with the presidency means no matter what happens, tonight will be regarded as a success.

«

Charlie Warzel wrote a banger of a piece, but this distillation by Broderick is just so much finer. “Racially aggravated fights with service workers” and De Santis’s team proudly saying that the announcement would be on March 24. They really did. Read all of it as Twitter emerges from its Muskian pupa, a different sort of caterpillar from before.
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Nigeria’s eNaira digital currency can’t compete with crypto • Rest of World

Temitayo Lawal:

»

In 2021, Nigeria became the first African country, and the second in the world, to introduce a government-backed digital currency: the eNaira. At the time of its launch, the governor of Nigeria’s central bank said the currency had drawn “overwhelming interest and encouraging response.” The government believed it would boost financial inclusion, improve the security of digital transactions, and enhance local and cross-border trade, among other benefits. 

Nearly 18 months on, however, eNaira has failed to achieve any of those goals. In fact, digital currency users in Nigeria are now questioning why it even exists. 

“The eNaira isn’t as sophisticated, independent, and flexible as the regular cryptocurrencies,” Abdulrahman Akanni, a crypto user, told Rest of World. “It couldn’t compete, and so, was dead on arrival. A layman’s analogy will be the government asking me to drive a 2000 Corolla and abandon the latest model of Mercedes-Benz that I can afford. That is just not possible.”

As of October 2022, fewer than 1.15 million Nigerians, or roughly under 0.5% of the country’s population, had used eNaira, according to Bloomberg. Earlier this month, officials from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) told reporters that only about 1.4 million transactions had been conducted on the eNaira platform since its inception.

In 2017, CBN had warned commercial banking institutions against dealing with cryptocurrency assets. The eNaira had been the government’s answer to crypto. Yet, between January 2021 and June 2022, transaction figures for the eNaira were dwarfed by the 497.35 billion naira ($1.16bn) worth of bitcoin that Nigerians traded on popular peer-to-peer platform Paxful.

«

Had “an embarrassing first week” back in November 2021. Seems things haven’t improved much since.

And we’re still waiting to hear how El Salvador’s bitcoin experiment (which is roughly as old) has really worked out.
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Introduction to Generative Fill: Adobe Photoshop • YouTube

»

Learn the basics of Generative Fill that is now integrated into the Beta version of Adobe Photoshop. This technology allows you to write simple text prompts to enhance your own images directly in Photoshop. It is truly magical!

«

I hardly ever link to YouTube videos. This one, though, is really worth the five minutes of your time. Magic spells for drawing are now part of the everyday.

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April 2023: Netflix says subscriber growth in Canada has increased after password-sharing crackdown • Mobile Syrup

Bradly Shankar, a month ago:

»

Netflix says more Canadians are subscribing to the service following its controversial password-sharing crackdown.

During its first-quarter earnings results for fiscal 2023, the company reflected on its paid sharing policies, which went into effect in Canada in February. While many people pushed back against this move, especially after years of Netflix embracing password-sharing, the streamer said during its latest earnings call that it’s nonetheless still seen growth in Canada post-crackdown.

Although the company acknowledged there was an initial ‘cancel reaction’ in Canada and the other markets which have already received paid sharing, that churn was quickly offset. “For example, in Canada, which we believe is a reliable predictor for the US, our paid membership base is now larger than prior to the launch of paid sharing and revenue growth has accelerated and is now growing faster than in the US,” wrote Netflix in its Q1 2023 earnings letter.

Overall, the company says it’s “pleased with the results” of paid sharing in Canada, New Zealand, Spain and Portugal,” which it says are “strengthening our confidence that we have the right approach.” As part of these efforts, the company says it will expand paid sharing to the US by the end of June.

«

Just as a followup to yesterday’s piece noting that the password-sharing crackdown is already happening in the US, ahead of schedule: I forecast that it would lead people either to not use Netflix (which is no loss to Netflix, as in its view they were already freeloading) or, at the margin, to sign up, either for the full service or the additive service (benefit to Netflix). This is separate from any discussion about whether people stop using a service because of cost, which you could call “natural churn” as opposed to the new “password churn”. (Thanks Niall for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After the Second World War, Britain fought a war in Malaysia (then Malaya) to protect its interests in tin and rubber. CC-licensed photo by The National Archives UK on Flickr.

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

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

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

Surgeon General warns that social media may harm children and adolescents • The New York Times

Matt Richtel, Catherine Pearson and Michael Levenson:

»

The nation’s top health official issued an extraordinary public warning on Tuesday about the risks of social media to young people, urging a push to fully understand the possible “harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

In a 19-page advisory, the United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, noted that the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were not fully understood, and that social media can be beneficial to some users. Nonetheless, he wrote, “There are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

The report included practical recommendations to help families guide children’s social media use. It recommended that families keep mealtimes and in-person gatherings free of devices to help build social bonds and promote conversation. It suggested creating a “family media plan” to set expectations for social media use, including boundaries around content and keeping personal information private.

Dr. Murthy also called on tech companies to enforce minimum age limits and to create default settings for children with high safety and privacy standards. And he urged the government to create age-appropriate health and safety standards for technology platforms.

…Moreover, social media spaces can be fraught for young people especially, the advisory added: “In early adolescence, when identities and sense of self-worth are forming, brain development is especially susceptible to social pressures, peer opinions and peer comparison.”

The advisory noted that technology companies have a vested interest in keeping users online, and that they use tactics that entice people to engage in addictive-like behaviors.

“Our children have become unknowing participants in a decades-long experiment,” the advisory states.

«

Hope nobody’s surprised by this.

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Facebook parent in talks with Magic Leap over augmented reality deal • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy and Patrick McGee:

»

Facebook’s parent company is in talks to create a multiyear agreement with augmented reality start-up Magic Leap, as the social media giant continues to pour billions of dollars into its ambition to create an avatar-filled online world called the metaverse.

According to people familiar with early discussions, Meta is exploring ways in which Magic Leap could provide both intellectual property licensing and contract manufacturing in North America to help it build mainstream AR products.

Magic Leap produces custom components, including high-tech lenses and associated software, which are key technologies that may be required to build a metaverse. However, people with knowledge of the talks said the partnership is not expected to yield a specific joint Meta-Magic Leap headset.

Two former employees said Magic Leap’s “biggest asset” is the sophistication of its “waveguides” — technology that allows thin glass in front of the user’s eyes to conjure up realistic images at different depths.

Meta declined to comment. Magic Leap would not confirm the talks, but said that partnerships were becoming a “significant line of business and growing opportunity for Magic Leap”.

«

As unspoken confirmations go, that’s a pretty clear one. Something of a lifeline for Magic Leap, which burnt through billions in venture capital (remember?). And both, of course, hoping to ride Apple’s coattails. Because…
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UploadVR is attending Apple’s June 5 event • UploadVR

Henry Stockdale:

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UploadVR will attend the Apple WWDC23 keynote on June 5.

Rumored to have been in development for many years, numerous reports suggest a VR and AR capable Apple headset, believed to be branded Apple Reality Pro, will be publicly announced during WWDC23. Running for five days, Apple’s annual conference starts with a keynote address on June 5 at 10am PT.

UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton has been invited to attend the keynote in person. Draw from that what conclusions you may.

When Apple announced its latest annual conference back in March, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple planned to unveil the headset at WWDC23, and his recent reporting sticks by these claims. This was further reinforced by supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who stated last week it’s “highly likely” the headset will be revealed at WWDC23.

«

OK, upgrade that to “absolutely certain”. When the Watch was about to be announced, Apple invited fashion writers and (I think) horological journalists (you know, they write about watches). There’s no accident about abruptly inviting someone from a VR site to an event. Apple doesn’t do accidents.
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Farewell message • MacRumors Forums

“Anonymous”:

»

Hello everyone.

This is my final message to everyone.

I will no longer be around, but you deserve a proper goodbye. I don’t want to share too many details right now because of the legality of things — but a multi-step sting has gotten my sister fired from Apple, and unfortunately I am afraid next is legal action being taken against both of us, separately.

I can’t believe I did this, I’m so sorry to my sister and Apple as a whole. I don’t know what else to say. I know she is destroyed, she also hates me right now, like I don’t even know that I have a sister anymore.

I don’t know if I even have a life beyond this, I don’t know what can happen at this point.

I enjoyed the ride, to any body out there who gets a source, keep the details at a minimum. It could be costly.

The breaking point was multiple, if not almost all who knew about FCP/Logic iPad development was given a unique combination of release dates — unfortunately the combination I shared on Twitter matched the combination given to my sister as the FCP+Logic timeframe, along with other small factors.

I may have shared too much here regarding this situation already, but goodbye. Thanks for taking the time to meet me. Learn from me and don’t let it happen to you or anyone you love.

«

I tried to look at this poster’s past, er, postings but they’re locked and the Internet Archive didn’t store them. But apparently they leaked details such as Apple’s Dynamic Island on the iPhone Pro 14, the capacitative buttons that won’t happen for the iPhone 15, and more. Apple has a process for finding leakers, and it’s pretty dedicated to it. Which makes me wonder whether it tolerates Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, or if he is just very clever at disguising sources, or uses much more upstream sources.
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Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown is here — and it costs $7.99 per month • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

On Tuesday, Netflix revealed the details of how its crackdown on password sharing will affect viewers in the US and how much it will cost to keep extra people on your account.

If you have the Netflix Standard plan that costs $15.49 per month, then you have the option of adding one extra member who can use the service outside your household for $7.99 extra each month. Anyone who pays for the Netflix Premium package with 4K streaming has the option of adding up to two extra members, but each one will still cost another $7.99. Netflix subscribers on its two cheapest plans (Basic or Standard with Ads, which cost $9.99 and $6.99 per month, respectively) don’t have the option to add extra members to their account at all.

Netflix subscribers in the US who share the service “outside their household” will get an email about the company’s password-sharing policies beginning on Tuesday, according to the blog post.

…Netflix used to be very pro-password sharing — in March 2017, it famously tweeted, “Love is sharing a password.” (That tweet, as of this writing, is still up.) But in early 2022, it started testing ways to end the practice and get people to pay for accounts using Netflix outside of the account owner’s household.

«

This will be interesting. People aren’t going to give up their account, so this should add accounts, at the margin. The only question is what proportion, at a time when everyone’s feeling a bit squeezed.
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Instagram’s new app could be here by June • ICYMI

Lia Haberman:

»

You might have read about a new, decentralized, social network Instagram is building for “creators and public figures.”

Codename: P92, Project 92 or Barcelona, as it’s been alternately called. Tagline: “Instagram for your thoughts.” 

All new details have surfaced based on secret calls Meta has been having with select creators, hinting at a potential release in late June. Here’s what I was told by a creator who met with Meta:

1️⃣ The decentralized app is built on the back of Instagram but will be compatible with some other apps like Mastodon:

• There’s a single sign-on with your IG username and password
• You can sync up with your existing followers
• Your handle, bio and even verification will carry over from IG
• Users on other apps will be able search for, follow and interact with your profile and content

2️⃣ The app will have a centralized feed showcasing your followers and recommended content

You can post text updates up to 500 characters (that’s less than an Instagram caption, an extended tweet or a LinkedIn post so be concise!)
• You can attach links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes long
• You can engage with likes, replies and reposts

«

Rather as Instagram Stories stopped Snapchat’s growth in its tracks, this could block Twitter or even drain users away. Certainly gives no incentive for those who aren’t on Twitter to sign up to Musk’s service.
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Britain’s forgotten war for rubber • Declassified UK

Mark Curtis:

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The so-called “emergency” in Malaya – now Malaysia – between 1948 and 1960 was a counter-insurgency campaign waged by Britain against the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).

The MNLA sought independence from the British empire and to protect the interests of the Chinese community in the territory. Largely the creation of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), the MNLA’s members were mainly Chinese. 

But although the war in southeast Asia has long been presented in most British analyses as a struggle against communism during the cold war, the MNLA received very little support from Soviet or Chinese communists. Rather, the major concern for British governments was protecting their commercial interests in the colony, which were mainly rubber and tin.

A Colonial Office report from 1950 noted that Malaya’s rubber and tin mining industries were the biggest earners in the British Commonwealth. Malaya was the world’s top producer of rubber, accounting for 75% of the territory’s income, and its biggest employer.

As a result of colonialism, Malaya was effectively owned by European, primarily British, businesses, with British capital behind most large Malayan enterprises. Some 70% of the acreage of rubber estates was owned by European, primarily British, companies.

Malaya was described by one British Lord in 1952 as the “greatest material prize in South-East Asia”, mainly due to its rubber and tin. These resources were “very fortunate” for Britain, another Lord declared, since “they have very largely supported the standard of living of the people of this country and the sterling area ever since the war ended”.  He added: “What we should do without Malaya, and its earnings in tin and rubber, I do not know”.

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ChatGPT is taking ghostwriters’ jobs in Kenya • Rest of World

Martin Siele:

»

For the past nine years, Collins, a 27-year-old freelance writer, has been making money by writing assignments for students in the U.S. — over 13,500 kilometers away from Nanyuki in central Kenya, where he lives. He is part of the “contract cheating” industry, known locally as simply “academic writing.” Collins writes college essays on topics including psychology, sociology, and economics. Occasionally, he is even granted direct access to college portals, allowing him to submit tests and assignments, participate in group discussions, and talk to professors using students’ identities. In 2022, he made between $900 and $1,200 a month from this work.

Lately, however, his earnings have dropped to $500–$800 a month. Collins links this to the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools.

“Last year at a time like this, I was getting, on average, 50 to 70 assignments, including discussions which are shorter, around 150 words each, and don’t require much research,” Collins told Rest of World. “Right now, on average, I get around 30 to 40-something assignments.” He requested to be identified only by his first name to avoid jeopardizing his accounts on platforms where he finds clients.

In January 2023, online learning platform Study surveyed more than 1,000 American students and over 100 educators. More than 89% of the students said they had used ChatGPT for help with a homework assignment. Nearly half admitted to using ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz, 53% had used it to write an essay, and 22% had used it for outlining one.

Collins now fears that the rise of AI could significantly reduce students’ reliance on freelancers like him in the long term, affecting their income.

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Seems like a reasonable concern. As with the workers at Wendys, it’s actually the low-paid jobs that this is eating first.
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‘I’m making thousands using AI to write books’ • Newsweek

Tim Boucher:

»

My journey into a new realm of high-tech creativity and storytelling began in August 2022. Armed only with my imagination and a handful of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, I ventured into the world of AI-assisted publishing without any map or guide.

My goal was straightforward: to craft a series of unique, captivating ebooks merging dystopian pulp sci-fi with compelling AI world-building. Today, I am on the cusp of releasing my 97th book, and was recently featured on CNN—all within nine months.

The “AI Lore books,” as I’ve come to call them, are a testament to the potential of AI in augmenting human creativity. Each book features between 2,000 to 5,000 words and 40 to140 AI-generated images. Generally, each one takes me approximately 6 to 8 hours to create and publish. In some instances, I’ve been able to produce a volume in as little as three hours, everything included.

This unprecedented rate of production is possible due to AI tools like Midjourney (version 5.1) for image generation, and ChatGPT (version 4), and Anthropic’s Claude for brainstorming and text generation. I sold 574 books for a total of nearly $2,000 between August and May. The books all cross-reference each other, creating a web of interconnected narratives that constantly draw readers in and encourage them to explore further.

…Though the stories contained are not sequential narratives, I think the serial fiction market of the late 1800s and early 1900s is probably the best historical analog here. People enjoy coming back to the same story-worlds again and again, and AI lets me produce rapidly at a consistent quality to meet their demand for more.

«

Let’s have a look..

»

““The Quatria Conspiracy: The Biggest Coverup In The History of History“ is a ground-breaking book for free-thinkers who are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it leads them. This incredible volume details the history of the biggest coverup of all time: that a forgotten ancient civilization called Ancient Quatria existed millions of years ago in Antarctica, and had a globe-spanning empire.”

«

Armed, you know, only with his imagination. And ChatGPT. Quite the arm-wrestle.
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Meta’s record €1.2bn fine came over objections of Ireland’s regulator, which didn’t want a fine • Independent.ie

Adrian Weckler:

»

Meta’s huge €1.2bn fine for Facebook data transfers to the US came about over the objections of the Irish data regulator, according to Europe’s data protection oversight authority.

Helen Dixon’s office had not initially included a significant fine, arguing that it would be “disproportionate” and serve little point on top of the main sanction of data suspensions. Her office also argued that it would be out of kilter with other regulatory precedents.

However, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) overruled the Irish data regulator, arguing that Meta’s infringement was of such a “significant nature, gravity and duration” that it deserved a big fine.

It’s not the first time that the Irish regulator has seen its recommendation on a proposed fine revised upwards on foot of objections from other European data protection authorities.

Under European law, the Irish office was obliged to circulate details of its draft decision to other European data protection regulators in advance of a final public verdict.

However, four of the 47 European regulators took issue with the Irish watchdog’s position, appealing it to the EDPB for mediation. The objectors’ main issues were that there was no fine and that Meta did not have to delete any data on US servers.

The EDPB agreed with the objectors, saying that Meta’s transgression deserved a substantial fine in addition to other “corrective” measures. It then ordered the Irish office to amend its decision and include a big fine.

«

Ben Thompson at Stratechery has argued that this decision is a huge (potential) obstacle to US companies doing business in the EU because moving data about “is the way the internet works”. Which is sort of true, except for the gigantic difference in how the US treats personal data and the EU does. (Especially the way that the US security services are happy to riffle through EU citizen data.) And as I observed, this will just become a negotiating chip in talks with the US about agriculture, food, and so on. The tension over data is nothing new: I was writing about the Safe Harbour negotiations back in 2000.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The 1970s produced a ton of great sci-fi films that weren’t Star Wars – shouldn’t we revisit them? CC-licensed photo by Dr Umm on Flickr.

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

AI-generated image of explosion near Pentagon spreads on social media • The Guardian

Abené Clayton:

»

An AI-generated image that appeared to show an explosion next to a building in the Pentagon complex circulated on social media platforms on Monday, in the latest incident to highlight concerns over misinformation generated by AI.

The image of a tall, dark gray plume of smoke quickly spread on Twitter, including through shares by verified accounts. It remains unclear where it originated.

The US Department of Defense has confirmed that the image was a fake. Still, its virality appears to have caused a brief dip in the stock market, CNN reports.

In a tweet, the fire department for Arlington, Virginia, outside of Washington DC, said that it was aware of social media reports about the explosion but that there was no threat to the public.

OSINTdefender, a Twitter page that shares news about international military conflicts and has over 336,000 followers, was one of the verified pages that shared the photo.

The page’s owner apologized for spreading misinformation and said the incident was an example of how “easily these sort of images can be used to manipulate the information space and how dangerous this could be in the future”.

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Well done Twitter junking all that tiresome “verified user” nonsense, eh. Though it caught the surprise of 9/11 all those years ago.
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Facebook owner Meta Fined $1.3bn over data transfers to US • WSJ

Sam Schechner:

»

Facebook owner Meta Platforms was fined $1.3bn by European Union regulators for sending user information to the US, a record privacy penalty for the bloc.

The ruling raises pressure on the US government to complete a deal that would allow Meta and thousands of multinational companies to keep sending such information stateside.

Tech companies have been especially vulnerable to regulatory scrutiny absent such a deal. But most large international companies rely on a relatively free flow of data across the Atlantic, and the steep fine for Meta highlights the regulatory challenges that have mounted since a previous data-transfer deal was overturned by European courts in 2020.

Meta’s top privacy regulator in the EU said in its decision Monday that Facebook has for years illegally stored data about European users on its servers in the US, where it contends the information could be accessed by American spy agencies without sufficient means for users to appeal.

The €1.2bn fine surpasses the previous record of €746m, or $806m, under the General Data Protection Regulation against Amazon in Luxembourg in 2021 for privacy violations related to its advertising business. The company has appealed that decision in Luxembourg courts.

In addition to imposing a fine, Monday’s decision also orders Meta to stop sending information about European Facebook users to the US, and delete data already sent, within about six months. The decision, though—said Meta—could avoid those orders if Washington completes a trans-Atlantic agreement with the EU to allow data transfers before then.

«

Nick Clegg, Meta’s PR honcho, was predictably quick to come on Twitter and say this wasn’t a big deal. But the deletion of the data is going to matter. And this does put some cards in the EU’s hands when it comes to negotiate with the US over whatever topic they’re negotiating on.

The fine, though, isn’t going to matter to the money monster of Facebook/Instagram.

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Along the highways, Indian restaurants serve America’s truckers • The Washington Post

Meena Venkataramanan:

»

Long before dawn on a frosty February morning in Dallas, Palwinder Singh rises from the mattress in his sleeper cab and prepares to haul his cargo cross-country. After five hours of driving north along U.S. 287, and then west on Interstate 40, it’s lunchtime.

Singh, 30, pulls his semi off Exit 36 into Vega, a quiet town in the Texas Panhandle along the historic Route 66. For lunch, he bypasses the typical long-haul trucker menu of convenience-store snacks and heat-lamp hot dogs at the large Pilot Travel Center and instead rolls into the parking lot of a modest white building across the street. A sign on the building’s red roof spells out the words “Punjabi Dhaba” in the Punjabi language’s Gurmukhi script, with the English translation below it.

The Vega Truck Stop and Indian Kitchen, as it’s officially known, attracts truckers like Singh originally from Punjab, a region spanning northwest India and eastern Pakistan. The store is filled with Punjabi snacks, sweets, truck decorations and a restaurant, known as a dhaba, that serves fresh meals including paratha and butter chicken — a slice of South Asia in the middle of rural Texas.

That afternoon, Singh parked his truck, decorated with colorful fabrics and ornaments called jhalars and parandas. He was promptly greeted in Punjabi by another trucker, Amandeep Singh, of Fresno, Calif., who had also stopped for lunch. As they each poured a cup of steaming chai indoors, the truckers chatted about their drives.

The Vega eatery is among an estimated 40 dhabas, and likely many more, that have popped up along American highways across the country in response to the growing number of Punjabi truckers, who have dominated the Indian trucking industry for decades. Punjabis now make up almost 20% of the US trucking industry, according to Raman Dhillon, chief executive of the North American Punjabi Trucking Association. Punjabis are both truckers and owner-operators, running companies such as Tut Brothers out of Indiana and Khalsa Transportation out of California. They’re challenging the stereotype of the rugged White, male trucker that has long been associated with the industry.

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A Twitter bug is restoring deleted tweets and retweets — including my own • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

It’s not clear how widespread this problem might be or what the cause is. It could be due to the tool used to delete tweets (though I used TweetDelete.net while Morrell said he used Redact), while some have speculated it’s caused by Twitter’s servers being moved around and accidentally restoring the data. ZDNET reports Morrell saying that over 400 people had told him they’d had similar problems, while a quick survey of my colleagues at The Verge who’ve mass-deleted tweets received mixed results. Some said their old tweets were still gone while others said it seemed like some had come back.

Whatever’s happening, it’s another demonstration of Twitter’s crumbling infrastructure and inability to fulfill even the basic functions it promises users. Some of these failings predate Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. (See, for example, the years-long problem of properly deleting direct messages.) But there’s been an uptick in bugs since Musk initiated mass firings, with users reporting similar glitches like private tweets being made public.

For me, the issue is trivial. It’s just a few old retweets. But it points to a larger problem. Twitter is still an important tool for activists, whistleblowers, and protestors around the world. There’s a reason Turkey is forcing the company to block certain tweets during its ongoing elections. Twitter still matters. But if you are, say, a political dissenter in an authoritarian country, then the ability to delete your own tweets could be crucial to your freedom. For all Musk’s talk about free speech, the company doesn’t seem to care about this.

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HP rushes to fix bricked printers after faulty firmware update • Bleeping Computer

Sergiu Gatlan:

»

HP is working to address a bad firmware update that has been bricking HP Office Jet printers worldwide since it was released earlier this month.

While HP has yet to issue a public statement regarding these ongoing problems affecting a subset of its customer base, the company told BleepingComputer that it’s addressing the blue screen errors seen by a “limited number” of users.

“Our teams are working diligently to address the blue screen error affecting a limited number of HP OfficeJet Pro 9020e printers,” HP told BleepingComputer.

“We are recommending customers experiencing the error to contact our customer support team for assistance: https://support.hp.com.”

Impacted printers include HP OfficeJet 902x models, including HP OfficeJet Pro 9022e, HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e, HP OfficeJet Pro 9020eAll-in-One, HP OfficeJet Pro 9025e All-in-One Printer

Affected customers report that their devices display blue screens with “83C0000B” errors on the built-in touchscreen.

Since the issues surfaced, multiple threads have been started by people from the U.S., the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Poland, New Zealand, and France who had their printers bricked, some with more than a dozen pages of reports.

“HP has no solution at this time. Hidden service menu is not showing, and the printer is not booting anymore. Only a blue screen,” one customer said.

«

I never, ever understand what it is that these firmware updates are, well, updating. There’s never any visible difference. Well, except with this one, I guess.
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China bans Micron’s products from key infrastructure, citing security risk • FT via Ars Technica

Eleanor Olcott and Demetri Sevastopulo:

»

China said US chipmaker Micron Technology’s products posed “serious network security risks” as it banned operators of key infrastructure from buying them, in its first big measure against an American semiconductor group.

The Cyberspace Administration of China on Sunday announced that the company, which is the biggest US maker of memory chips, “posed significant security risks to China’s critical information infrastructure supply chain.” As a result, it ordered “critical national infrastructure operators” to stop purchasing products from Idaho-based Micron.

The move follows a seven-week investigation into Micron by the CAC, a probe that was widely seen as retaliation for US efforts to curb China’s access to critical technology. Last October, Washington introduced expansive chip export controls, and the Netherlands and Japan have since followed.

The US Department of Commerce said it strongly opposed the action, which it said had “no basis in fact.”

“This action, along with recent raids and targeting of other American firms, is inconsistent with the PRC’s assertions that it is opening its markets and is committed to a transparent regulatory framework,” the Department of Commerce said.

It said it would engage with Chinese authorities to seek clarification. “We also will engage with key allies and partners to ensure we are closely coordinated to address distortions of the memory chip market caused by China’s actions,” it added.

Analysts said Micron presented an obvious first target for Beijing as its tech would be more easily replaced with competitors’ chips from South Korean rivals Samsung and SK Hynix.

«

Very slow tit-for-tat.
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The most underrated sci-fi movies of the 1970s • Den of Geek

Don Kaye:

»

If the 1950s was the decade in which science fiction cinema began to mature and evolve, and the 1960s was the era where it started to experiment and stretch in new directions, then the 1970s was the period when the genre more or less went batshit insane.

The movies of the era continued to touch on socially and globally relevant themes, a trend that began 20 years earlier, while also continuing the literary pedigree and even more progressive concerns of the decade prior. But they did so in ever weirder ways, taking big swings (and often steep plunges as well) as many of the films of the decade aimed high but lacked the resources to match their ambitions.

Still, even the clunkier efforts of the ‘70s had their charms, and the creative success stories touched nerves in ways that the films of the previous decades hadn’t quite achieved. But almost none of the movies of this turbulent decade garnered the kind of critical approval lavished upon other genres at that time, with sci-fi still considered a lesser cinematic arena than more upscale categories.

Some of the era’s output has been reappraised since then, however, and we’d venture that the genre was at its unbridled best in terms of imagination and creative freedom then. Well, at least until 1977 when a little movie called Star Wars came along and made the studios realize that there was box office gold in that secluded little sci-fi valley—and moved in with big budgets and armies of development execs.

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Zardoz! Bodysnatchers! Logan’s Run with Jenny Agutter! Silent Running! Dark Star! What a collection. Then again there were some great ones in the 1980s. Maybe not as crazy, though.
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UK court tosses class-action style health data misuse claim against Google DeepMind • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

Google has prevailed against another UK class-action style privacy lawsuit after a London court dismissed a lawsuit filed last year against the tech giant and its AI division, DeepMind, which had sought compensation for misuse of NHS patients’ medical records.

The decision underscores the hurdles facing class-action style compensation claims for privacy breaches in the UK.

The complainant had sought to bring a representative claim on behalf of the approximately 1.6 million individuals whose medical records were — starting in 2015 — passed to DeepMind without their knowledge or consent — seeking damages for unlawful use of patients’ confidential medical data. The Google-owned AI firm had been engaged by the Royal Free NHS Trust which passed it patient data to co-develop an app for detecting acute kidney injury. The UK’s data protection watchdog later found the Trust had lacked a lawful basis for the processing.

In a judgment issued on Monday by the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Justice Heather Williams dismissed the case on the grounds that it did not meet the bar for bringing a representative action, which requires the claim to be based on general circumstances that apply to the entire class rather than on individual circumstances, finding therefore that the claim would be bound to fail.

«

It’s quite something that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) says the transfer breached data protection laws, and yet a high-powered team of lawyers can’t find a suitable formulation that covers “the class of people whose data was affected by the breach”.

The judgment is pretty complex. You could read a lot of it and think that the class action was going to succeed.
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Google’s photo app still can’t find gorillas. And neither can Apple’s • The New York Times

Nico Grant and Kashmir Hill:

»

Google, whose Android software underpins most of the world’s smartphones, has made the decision to turn off the ability to visually search for primates for fear of making an offensive mistake and labelling a person as an animal. And Apple, with technology that performed similarly to Google’s in our test, appeared to disable the ability to look for monkeys and apes as well.

Consumers may not need to frequently perform such a search — though in 2019, an iPhone user complained on Apple’s customer support forum that the software “can’t find monkeys in photos on my device.” But the issue raises larger questions about other unfixed, or unfixable, flaws lurking in services that rely on computer vision — a technology that interprets visual images — as well as other products powered by AI.

[Software developer Jacky] Alciné [who first discovered the problem with Google photos identifying black people as “gorillas” in 2015] was dismayed to learn that Google has still not fully solved the problem and said society puts too much trust in technology. “I’m going to forever have no faith in this AI,” he said.

Computer vision products are now used for tasks as mundane as sending an alert when there is a package on the doorstep, and as weighty as navigating cars and finding perpetrators in law enforcement investigations.

Errors can reflect racist attitudes among those encoding the data. In the gorilla incident, two former Google employees who worked on this technology said the problem was that the company had not put enough photos of Black people in the image collection that it used to train its AI system. As a result, the technology was not familiar enough with darker-skinned people and confused them for gorillas.

As artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in our lives, it is eliciting fears of unintended consequences. Although computer vision products and AI chatbots like ChatGPT are different, both depend on underlying reams of data that train the software, and both can misfire because of flaws in the data or biases incorporated into their code.

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Rail passengers in England could lose wifi access amid cost cuts • The Guardian

Gwyn Topham:

»

Train passengers face losing access to [free] Wi-fi after the government told rail companies to stop providing the service unless they can demonstrate its business case.

The move is being pushed by the Department for Transport (DfT) in order to cut costs as it looks to “reform all aspects of the railway”.

Most British train services now provide free Wi-fi as standard but the DfT has told its contracted operators in England that they should cease offering it if they cannot justify it financially. The department said it was looking for “value for money” and Wi-fi was low on passenger’s priorities, particularly on shorter journeys.

The drive was questioned by passenger groups and industry figures who said the railway should be continuing to do all it could to attract people back, with peak commuter numbers still significantly lower than pre-pandemic levels.

Christian Wolmar, who revealed the proposals on the Calling All Stations podcast, said it was a “ridiculous measure”, adding: “The DfT actually wants to reduce the quality of the train service by saying to passengers: sorry, you can’t access Wi-fi.

“It’s all about saving money. But we’re trying to attract commuters back on to the railway, and people like to get on their phone or laptops.

“They’re going backwards. My view is that Wi-fi is as essential as toilets now – people expect to be connected.”

«

The toilets comparison is interesting: do toilets pay their way? Does every passenger use them during the journey? No and no, yet nobody’s suggesting getting rid of them. In 2015, the Tory administration put £50m of funding into free Wi-fi for trains, calling it “a priority for many”. In December 2017 Matt Hancock talked of gigabits speeds on trains and making trips “more enjoyable and productive”. What changed?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The skyscrapers in Manhattan are literally weighing the island down and sinking it into the sea. CC-licensed photo by Hugh Llewelyn on Flickr.

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

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

A husband hid $500,000 in bitcoin during a divorce — and got busted by a crypto hunter • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

»

A few months into her divorce proceedings, Sarita thought it was suspicious that her spouse, who earned $3 million annually, didn’t have many assets. After spending half a year on discovery and enlisting the help of a forensic accountant, the New York housewife eventually tracked down 12 bitcoins
— then worth half a million dollars — in a previously undisclosed crypto wallet.

Sarita, who was married for a decade and asked to use a pseudonym to protect herself from retaliation, said she felt blindsided by her husband’s cryptocurrency investment.

“I know of bitcoin and things like that. I just didn’t know much about it,” Sarita said. “It was never even a thought in my mind, because it’s not like we were discussing it or making investments together. … It was definitely a shock.”

The world of financial infidelity has become increasingly sophisticated, as investors “hop” coins across blockchains and sink their cash into metaverse properties. An NBC News poll found that 1 in 5 Americans have invested in, traded or used cryptocurrency, with men between the ages of 18 and 49 accounting for the highest share of all demographic groups.

CNBC spoke with divorce attorneys from Florida, New York, Texas and California, blockchain forensic investigators, financial advisors, as well as spouses who were either hunting down virtual coins or the crypto holders themselves. Most agree that the law can’t keep up with all the new ways that people earn and safeguard digital assets that largely exist outside the reach of centralized intermediaries such as banks.

Family and marital law attorney Kim Nutter said she first dove into the crypto vernacular in 2015 but that the state of Florida, where her practice is based, only recently inserted “cryptocurrency” into the standard request for production of documents — a key part of establishing the couple’s marital property during the discovery process.

“I really still think the law is trying to catch up with this novel form of currency, even though it’s been around for quite a while,” Nutter said.

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Move aside, Swiss bank accounts, there’s a new (more traceable) kid in town.
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A new PR tech company just launched that uses OpenAI to take on giants like PR Newswire and Business Wire • Business Insider

Ryan Joe:

»

Writing and distributing press releases is time consuming and expensive.

“It’s about $5,000 every time, with some additional fees,” said Lesley Klein, senior vice president of strategy and brand marketing at the travel company Priceline. “I also think about the business cost — hours and hours of laborious drafting, editing, reviewing, and alignment across all levels of the organization.”

That cost also makes it difficult for smaller businesses that don’t have the same resources as big companies like Priceline to draft and distribute press releases.

PR tech startup EZ Newswire launched in beta on Wednesday to remove these challenges and give smaller businesses the ability to cheaply write and distribute press releases. The company hopes to massively disrupt the press release distribution space and steal share from its two legacy stalwarts: PR Newswire, owned by PR tech giant Cision, and Business Wire, owned by Berkshire Hathaway.

Users input information like what type of company they have and the key details they want to cover. Then, EZ Newswire uses a combination of its own algorithm and OpenAI’s large language model to automatically write press releases, said company cofounders and co-CEOs Caitlin Kelly and Neel Shah.

ChatGPT alone isn’t good enough to write press releases on its own yet, said Klein.

“ChatGPT is okay for some things, but isn’t there yet in terms of delivering a practical document with the sophistication and pragmatic application that we’d need in a press release,” Klein added.

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Utterly inevitable. But PR Newswire and Business Wire don’t write the press releases (to my understanding, but I’m prepared to be corrected) – they’re a distribution system. So ChatGPT is only half of the work here, though probably the harder work intellectually.
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Australian stock exchange says software overhaul won’t involve blockchain • Reuters

Byron Kaye:

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Australia’s stock market operator said it will no longer attempt to rebuild its software platform with blockchain-based technology, one of the highest-profile repudiations of the once-feted concept best known for powering cryptocurrency.

ASX Ltd frustrated market participants in November by “pausing” a rebuild of its all-in-one trading, settlement and clearing software based on the decentralised computing concept, after an external review found it had to be largely reworked after seven years of development.

The company has since said it is considering options for another attempt at the rebuild of the 30-year-old software, but at a meeting with participants this week it said it would not involve blockchain or related “distributed ledger technology” (DLT).

Asked if the next attempt would “go down the more conventional route, that is without the focus on DLT (or) blockchain”, exchange project director Tim Whiteley told the meeting that “while we continue to explore all the options, certainly we will need to use a more conventional technology than in the original solution in order to achieve the business outcomes”.

ASX supplied Reuters with a recording of the May 17 meeting.

The statement signals the end of what was to be one of the world’s most prominent use cases of the concept that promises to accelerate online transactions by processing them securely in multiple locations.

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Ah, fine, it’ll just be a database. Nice and simple. I think that we’re going to see “blockchain” head off into the sunset just as AI gets its sunrise.
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When Wizz Air wrecked the immigration stats • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

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In 2003, József Váradi co-founded Wizz Air, a budget airline that followed the well-established model of flying people inexpensively to smaller regional airports.

Not long afterwards, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and seven other countries joined the EU, giving their citizens the right to live and work anywhere in the union. Many of them decided to settle in the UK, and thanks to Wizz Air, they would often arrive at an airport such as Leeds or Luton.

This was good news for anyone looking to hire workers in the UK, but proved the undoing of the International Passenger Survey (IPS), the mainstay of immigration and emigration estimates in the UK for many years. The IPS is a bit like an opinion poll: IPS surveyors politely stop a sample of people in ports and airports and ask them if they’d be willing to answer a few questions. (Remarkably, almost everyone agrees.)

These questions vary from “How much did your plane ticket cost?” to “How long are you planning to stay?” Many of the IPS questions are really about tourism, but the survey generated enough data to estimate migration into and out of the country . . . barely. The problem, explains Georgina Sturge in her excellent book Bad Data, is that while hundreds of thousands of people are interviewed for the IPS, most of them are tourists and only a few thousand are migrants. The number from any particular country will often be tiny.

It is perilous enough to extrapolate from this small sample, but what really confounds any survey is an unnoticed change that flips the sample from being fairly representative of the background population to not representative at all. Wizz Air delivered that unnoticed change. To oversimplify a little, the IPS enumerators were standing at Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester, while the people looking forward to making a new life in Britain were arriving at Luton.

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Because of this, actual migration numbers were found to be nearly half a million higher in 2011. And then things really got bad. Migration numbers will be in the news this week with the 2022 numbers.
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Orcas have sunk 3 boats in Europe and appear to be teaching others to do the same. But why? • Live Science

Sascha Pare:

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Orcas have attacked and sunk a third boat off the Iberian coast of Europe, and experts now believe the behaviour is being copied by the rest of the population.

Three orcas (Orcinus orca), also known as killer whales, struck the yacht on the night of May 4 in the Strait of Gibraltar, off the coast of Spain, and pierced the rudder. “There were two smaller and one larger orca,” skipper Werner Schaufelberger told the German publication Yacht. “The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side.” 

…Reports of aggressive encounters with orcas off the Iberian coast began in May 2020 and are becoming more frequent, according to a study published June 2022 in the journal Marine Mammal Science. Assaults seem to be mainly directed at sailing boats and follow a clear pattern, with orcas approaching from the stern to strike the rudder, then losing interest once they have successfully stopped the boat.

Most encounters have been harmless, López Fernandez told Live Science in an email. “In more than 500 interaction events recorded since 2020 there are three sunken ships. We estimate that killer whales only touch one ship out of every hundred that sail through a location.”

The spike in aggression towards boats is a recent phenomenon, López Fernandez said. Researchers think that a traumatic event may have triggered a change in the behavior of one orca, which the rest of the population has learned to imitate.

“The orcas are doing this on purpose, of course, we don’t know the origin or the motivation, but defensive behavior based on trauma, as the origin of all this, gains more strength for us every day,” López Fernandez said.

Experts suspect that a female orca they call White Gladis suffered a “critical moment of agony” — a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing — that flipped a behavioral switch. “That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat,” López Fernandez said.

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Like the premise for a Netflix movie. We’re meant to sympathise with the orcas, right?
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Neeva, once a promising competitor to Google Search, is shutting down • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

Neeva, which for a while looked like one of the startups with a real chance to challenge the supremacy of Google Search, announced on Saturday that it is shutting down its search engine. The company says it’s pivoting to AI — and may be acquired by Snowflake, The Information reported — but mostly seems to believe it failed.

“Building search engines is hard,” Neeva co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown. (Ramaswamy in particular is part of the reason Neeva seemed promising — as the longtime head of Google’s ad business, few people are better equipped to know how to build and monetize search than he is.) But Neeva did it, they said. It built a good, competitive search engine. It was actually well ahead of Google in some respects, like swapping 10 blue links for a more visual page and emphasizing human-created information.

But building the search engine was actually the easy part. “Throughout this journey, we’ve discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice,” Ramaswamy and Raghunathan continued.

«

The thing about Google, when it first arrived, was that it was enormously better than the search engines of the time: you asked for something and it delivered, magically. But Neeva? Looking different isn’t the answer. For me DuckDuckGo offers something different: privacy, and directly copyable links. The search results are pretty much the same.

Still, here comes the pivot to AI. Expect a stampede among cash-starved startups.
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Ukrainians are putting solar panels on hospitals to fight blackouts • The Washington Post

Michael Birnbaum:

»

Russian airstrikes on Ukraine’s power grid plunged many parts of the country into darkness last fall, but one water company was able to keep its pumps going. Its field of solar panels, installed as an environmentally friendly measure before the war, turned into a tool to resist the Kremlin’s attacks.

Now a growing number of Ukrainian hospitals, schools, police stations and other critical buildings are racing to install solar power ahead of what many expect will be another hard winter later this year.
A less carbon-intense, decentralized energy system is emerging as a key element of Ukraine’s reconstruction efforts. Seven months of Russian attacks on the energy grid have left it severely damaged. Ukrainian doctors, teachers and others have discovered that efforts to boost sustainability can also improve security by making it harder to knock power offline. Ukrainian policymakers, meanwhile, are setting ambitious clean energy goals, trying to shake off their prewar reputation as lagging on climate issues.

Ukrainian deputy energy minister Yaroslav Demchenkov said renewable energy, along with small modular nuclear reactors, are among the country’s priorities for its rebuilding effort. Both would help distribute power generation away from the heavily centralised system the country had before the war, making it more resilient in addition to lowering emissions.

Ukraine generated 11% of its electricity from renewable sources in 2020, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, although more than half of its electricity came from nuclear power plants that are also low emissions. The country’s goal is to build 30 gigawatts of clean power by 2030, which would cover about half of Ukraine’s needs.

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Big advantage of microgeneration: nothing short of a direct hit is going to put you offline. Who would have thought that going green would also make you resistant to invasion?
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The e-sports world’s future is uncertain as growth stalls • The New York Times

Kellen Browning:

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After years of fanfare, e-sports in the United States are giving way to economic realities. Unable to turn a profit, team owners are cutting costs by laying off employees and ending contracts with star players. In some cases, they are selling their teams and sometimes at a loss, offering a blunt reality check to people who believed e-sports could be the next big thing in entertainment.

Most alarming, some viewers seem to be losing interest. They watched 14.8 million hours of the 2023 spring season of the League Championships Series, the biggest U.S. e-sports league, down 13% from a year earlier and down 32% from 2021, according to estimates from the data firm Esports Charts.

“We’re at a point where everyone has a lot of soul searching to do,” said Rod Breslau, a gaming and e-sports analyst. “There has been way too much hype and too little of actual value.”

Just like in traditional sports, star e-sports players can earn seven-figure salaries and compete for championships, attracting sponsors and fans along the way. Investors over the last decade purchased stakes in teams that participate in professional leagues for games like League of Legends, Overwatch and Call of Duty.

The biggest of those is the League Championship Series, a 10-team league established in 2013 and run by Riot Games, the company that created League of Legends. In the league, teams go head-to-head in League of Legends, a fantasy-themed game, in matches that can draw millions of viewers and fill stadiums.

But the leagues have struggled to make money. Partnerships to broadcast e-sports tournaments on sites like YouTube and Twitch have dissipated, sponsors are slashing their advertising budgets, and owners are operating teams at a loss while paying huge salaries to e-sports players.

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I’m going to make a wild suggestion: those 2021 figures were distorted by Covid lockdowns. But as the article makes clear, the problem runs all through e-sports wherever (big) money is involved.
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Tensions flare inside The Messenger, a fledgling news site • The New York Times

Benjamin Mullin:

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“Who doesn’t like traffic to their news site?” [former Messenger politic editor Gregg Birnbaum, who quit less than a week after the site went live] said in an email. “But the rapacious and blind desperate chasing of traffic — by the nonstop gerbil wheel rewriting story after story that has first appeared in other media outlets in the hope that something, anything, will go viral — has been a shock to the system and a disappointment to many of the outstanding quality journalists at The Messenger who are trying to focus on meaningful original and distinctive reporting.”

Editors met earlier in the week to discuss concerns about the company’s high-volume approach to publishing. The five journalists who spoke on condition of anonymity said they had grown frustrated with the company’s practice of assigning rewrites of competitors’ stories, a practice that was called out by media critics after the site debuted.

Dan Wakeford, The Messenger’s editor in chief, reassured employees during the meetings that it would take months for The Messenger to build credibility, and that they are taking “things out of context,” according to two of the five people. The company has landed an interview with former President Donald J. Trump and was the first to report the plan by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to campaign aggressively for the Republican presidential nomination in Iowa.

Though The Messenger has hired about 150 journalists — falling short of its initial target — the company is still on pace to hit its initial traffic goals, the two people said. A copy of The Messenger’s internal traffic dashboard from Friday reviewed by The Times shows that the company was close to exceeding 100,000 unique visitors for the day. One person familiar with the company’s recruitment efforts said the company was on pace to reach its goal of 175 employees within weeks.

The Messenger is expecting its traffic to grow in coming weeks as it rises through Google’s search ranking algorithm, one of the five people familiar with the company’s inner workings said.

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It really does feel like Roman and Kendall Roy are behind it, winding the clockwork.
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Drag your GAN: Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold • Upenn/Google

Multiple authors:

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In this work, we study a powerful yet much less explored way of controlling GANs, that is, to “drag” any points of the image to precisely reach target points in a user-interactive manner, as shown in Fig.1 [top of the paper].

To achieve this, we propose DragGAN, which consists of two main components including: 1) a feature-based motion supervision that drives the handle point to move towards the target position, and 2) a new point tracking approach that leverages the discriminative GAN features to keep localizing the position of the handle points. Through DragGAN, anyone can deform an image with precise control over where pixels go, thus manipulating the pose, shape, expression, and layout of diverse categories such as animals, cars, humans, landscapes, etc. As these manipulations are performed on the learned generative image manifold of a GAN, they tend to produce realistic outputs even for challenging scenarios such as hallucinating occluded content and deforming shapes that consistently follow the object’s rigidity. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the advantage of DragGAN over prior approaches in the tasks of image manipulation and point tracking. We also showcase the manipulation of real images through GAN inversion.

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The demo is amazing: watch it here. Seamless video manipulation in a simple interface.
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New York City is sinking due to weight of its skyscrapers, new research finds • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

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New York City is sinking in part due to the extraordinary weight of its vertiginous buildings, worsening the flooding threat posed to the metropolis from the rising seas, new research has found.

The Big Apple may be the city that never sleeps but it is a city that certainly sinks, subsiding by approximately 1-2mm each year on average, with some areas of New York City plunging at double this rate, according to researchers.

This sinking is exacerbating the impact of sea level rise which is accelerating at around twice the global average as the world’s glaciers melt away and seawater expands due to global heating. The water that flanks New York City has risen by about 9in, or 22cm, since 1950 and major flooding events from storms could be up to four times more frequent than now by the end of the century due to the combination of sea level rise and hurricanes strengthened by climate change.

“A deeply concentrated population of 8.4 million people faces varying degrees of hazard from inundation in New York City,” researchers wrote in the new study, published in the Earth’s Future journal.

The authors added that the risks faced by New York City will be shared by many other coastal cities around the world as the climate crisis deepens. “The combination of tectonic and anthropogenic subsidence, sea level rise, and increasing hurricane intensity imply an accelerating problem along coastal and riverfront areas,” they wrote.

This trend is being magnified by the sheer bulk of New York City’s built infrastructure. The researchers calculated that the city’s structures, which include the famous Empire State Building and Chrysler Building, weigh a total of 1.68tn lbs, which is roughly equivalent to the weight of 140 million elephants.

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A wonderful story, for a couple of reasons. Look at the first two paragraphs: they say the same thing, but the first is rather artless but factual – as if written to please a machine – where the second aims for a jauntiness that will please a human. Because that’s the point: the first is for SEO (probably written by a subeditor) and the second is almost surely the original intro (aka lede, American readers) by the writer.

And of course we need to know NYC’s weight in elephants.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified