Fishing for walleyes in Lake Erie can be fun. Though some over-competitive anglers take it too far. CC-licensed photo by Tom Hart 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 at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time: it’s about something social networks keep ignoring.

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

Twitter cuts off Substack embeds and starts suspending bots • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

»

Writers trying to embed tweets in their Substack stories are in for a rude surprise: after pasting a link to the site, a message pops up saying that “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts” and explaining that the company is working on a fix. The unfortunate situation comes on the heels of Substack announcing Notes, a Twitter competitor.

The issue could cause problems for writers who want to talk about what’s going on with Twitter in their newsletters or about things that are happening on the platform. While screenshots of tweets could work in some cases, they’re less trustworthy because they don’t provide a direct link to the source. Screenshots also won’t help you if you’re trying to, say, embed a video that someone posted on Twitter. (And Twitter seems to be at least somewhat interested in becoming a video platform given that several Blue perks relate to making the video uploading experience better.)

…Substack spokesperson Helen Tobin didn’t comment on whether the issues were caused by changes to Twitter’s API when I asked, instead sharing the same statement tweeted by the company. If they are, though, it would be far from the only platform affected by Twitter’s new API policies, which were announced a week ago.

Since then, various companies have been notifying users that they have to cut out or paywall certain features that interacted with Twitter, and many people who have run bots on the platform have been posting about how they can no longer post like they used to.

«

Slowly but surely, Twitter is cutting itself off from the web. Not surprising. We seem to be moving into a new era of the internet, where information doesn’t want to be free at all.
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The Bitcoin white paper is hidden in every modern copy of macOS • Waxy.org

Andy Baio:

»

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version, Ventura (13.3), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.

See for yourself: if you’re on a Mac, open a Terminal and type the following command:

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

[Be sure to put the \ in “Image\ Capture” so the terminal reads the space as part of the location.]

If you’re on macOS 10.14 or later, the Bitcoin PDF should immediately open in Preview.

(If you’re not comfortable with Terminal, open Finder and click on Macintosh HD, then open the System→Library→Image Capture→Devices folder. Control-click on VirtualScanner.app and Show Package Contents, open the Contents→Resources folder inside, then open simpledoc.pdf.)

«

Confirmed: it’s an oddity, living in a folder with a couple of setup sheets that you might use on a scanner. No doubt it will soon vanish in an update, having been discovered, and the reasons for its existence will become one of those Apple fairytales, known only to the chosen few. The, er, chatbot Eliza used to lurk somewhere in the Mac depths, but has long since been purged.
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Online ads are serving us lousy, overpriced goods • The New York Times

Julia Angwin:

»

it turns out that targeted ads aren’t helping consumers, either. Last year, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Virginia Tech presented a study of the consumer welfare implications of targeted ads. The results were so surprising that they repeated it to make sure their findings were correct.

The new study, published online this week, confirmed the results: The targeted ads shown to another set of nearly 500 participants were pitching more expensive products from lower-quality vendors than identical products that showed up in a simple Web search.

The products shown in targeted ads were, on average, roughly 10% more expensive than what users could find by searching online. And the products were more than twice as likely to be sold by lower-quality vendors as measured by their ratings by the Better Business Bureau.

“Both studies consistently highlighted a pervasive problem of low-quality vendors in targeted ads,” write the authors, Eduardo Abraham Schnadower Mustri, a Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. student, Idris Adjerid, a professor at Virginia Tech, and Alessandro Acquisti, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. The authors posit that targeted ads may be a way for smaller vendors to reach consumers — and “a sizable portion of these vendors may in fact be undesirable to consumers because they are of lower quality.”

Quality seems to be an issue with Jeremy’s Razors, which spent the most on Facebook advertising during the 30-day period ending March 26, spending more than $800,000. When I checked Jeremy’s Facebook reviews, many customers said they liked the product’s political message [that it’s the “woke-free razor”] more than the razor itself. “If you like razors that feel like someone is pulling your facial hair out with a tweezer one at a time, then Jeremy’s Razors are your razors,” one wrote. The razor has a 2.7 star rating (out of 5) based on more than 280 reviews.

«

Would be quite the turnup if all the money spent on trying to target people has just been transferred to the price of the things we’re sold.
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The Talented Doctor Ripley (GPT) • Bastiat’s Window

Robert Graboyes:

»

Medical students Faisal Elali and Leena Rachid explore the possibility of fraudulent research papers produced via ChatGPT:

»

“The feasibility of producing fabricated work, coupled with the difficult-to-detect nature of published works and the lack of AI-detection technologies, creates an opportunistic atmosphere for fraudulent research. Risks of AI-generated research include the utilization of said work to alter and implement new healthcare policies, standards of care, and interventional therapeutics.”

«

Elali and Rachid say such deceptions could be motivated by:

»

“financial gain, potential fame, promotion in academia, and curriculum vitae building, especially for medical students who are in increasingly competitive waters.”

«

A rabbinic parable warns that gossip spreads like feathers from a torn pillow in a windstorm—floating every which way and utterly irretrievable. So it may be with medical misinformation.  

In a 2016 PBS article, I described my friend Rich Schieken’s retirement after 40 years as a pediatric cardiologist and medical school professor. I asked why he retired from work that he loved, and he responded:

»

“[M]y world has changed. When I began, parents brought their sick and dying children to me. I said, ‘This is what we’ll do,’ and they said, ‘Yes, doctor.’ Nowadays, they bring 300 pages of internet printouts. When I offer a prognosis and suggest treatment, they point to the papers and ask, ‘Why not do this or this or that?’” Don’t get me wrong. This new world is better than the old one. It’s just quite a bit to get used to.”

«

But when Rich said the above words, those parents’ printouts were written by someone, and the requisite human effort somewhat limited the volume of misinformation. With ChatGPT and similar bots, that constraint vanishes.

«

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai says search to feature Chat AI • WSJ

Miles Kruppa:

»

[In February] Microsoft infused the technology behind ChatGPT into its search engine Bing, long a distant laggard to Google search. The move allowed users to engage in extended conversations with the product. Microsoft said it expected to generate $2bn in revenue for every percentage point it gained in the search market, of which Google has a more than 90% share.

Mr. Pichai’s latest comments indicate that Google plans to allow users to interact directly with the company’s large language models through its search engine. That move could upend the traditional link-based experience that has been the norm for more than two decades.

Google is testing several new search products, such as versions that allow users to ask follow-up questions to their original queries, Mr. Pichai said. The company said last month that it would begin “thoughtfully integrating LLMs into search in a deeper way,” but until now hadn’t detailed plans to offer conversational features.

Google has begun testing new AI features within Gmail and other work-related products, while Microsoft has moved to offer AI beyond Bing for use in some of its business software tools.

The stakes in the AI race in search are particularly high for Mr. Pichai. Search ads remain the biggest moneymaker for Google, bringing in $162bn of revenue last year. 

Google at times had been cautious about moving too fast with the technology, wary of radically altering the way users interact with its search engine.

…AI technology requires enormous computing power to process the calculations used to produce humanlike conversation. Mr. Pichai said Google needs to adapt its use of resources to continue its work in AI while also managing costs. For example, he said Google Brain and DeepMind—the company’s two main AI units, which have long operated separately—would work together more closely on efforts to build large algorithms.

«

It’s the latter point that really matters. If Microsoft can gain any share of search, while making it more expensive for Google to run search (as it inevitably will, adding AI to it) then that degrades Google’s core business profitability. That, in turn, limits its ability to compete in less profitable fields where Microsoft sees opportunity. (The link to the article should jump the paywall.)
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ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding • The Guardian

Chris Moran is the Guardian’s head of editorial innovation:

»

A recent study of 1,000 students in the US found that 89% have used ChatGPT to help with a homework assignment. The technology, with all its faults, has been normalised at incredible speed, and is now at the heart of systems that act as the key point of discovery and creativity for a significant portion of the world.

Two days ago our archives team was contacted by a student asking about [a] missing article from a named journalist. There was no trace of the article in our systems. The source? ChatGPT [which told the student that the article, by the journalist, had appeared in The Guardian].

It’s easy to get sucked into the detail on generative AI, because it is inherently opaque. The ideas and implications, already explored by academics across multiple disciplines, are hugely complex, the technology is developing rapidly, and companies with huge existing market shares are integrating it as fast as they can to gain competitive advantages, disrupt each other and above all satisfy shareholders.

But the question for responsible news organisations is simple, and urgent: what can this technology do right now, and how can it benefit responsible reporting at a time when the wider information ecosystem is already under pressure from misinformation, polarisation and bad actors.

This is the question we are currently grappling with at the Guardian. And it’s why we haven’t yet announced a new format or product built on generative AI. Instead, we’ve created a working group and small engineering team to focus on learning about the technology, considering the public policy and IP questions around it, listening to academics and practitioners, talking to other organisations, consulting and training our staff, and exploring safely and responsibly how the technology performs when applied to journalistic use.

In doing this we have found that, along with asking how we can use generative AI, we are reflecting more and more on what journalism is for, and what makes it valuable.

«

This is only the beginning of the problem: what happens when people start asking ChatGPT to “write an article in the style of The Guardian and give it a headline, and byline it with the name of a journalist who works there”? Presently it’s doing the headline/byline thing. Worse is to come.
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Anglers plead guilty after claims they used fish fillets to win top contest • AP via The Guardian

»

Two men accused of stuffing fish with lead weights and fish fillets in an attempt to win thousands of dollars in an Ohio tournament last year pleaded guilty this week to charges including cheating.

The cheating allegations surfaced in September when Lake Erie Walleye Trail tournament director Jason Fischer became suspicious when the fish turned in by two anglers, Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky, were significantly heavier than typical walleye.

A crowd of people at Gordon Park in Cleveland watched as Fischer cut the walleye open and found weights and walleye fillets stuffed inside.

As part of this week’s deal, Runyan and Cominsky pleaded guilty to cheating and unlawful ownership of wild animals and agreed to three-year suspensions of their fishing licenses. Cominsky also agreed to give up his bass boat worth $100,000. Prosecutors agreed to drop attempted grand theft and possessing criminal tools charges.

Both men are scheduled to be sentenced in May. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of six months’ probation.

“This plea is the first step in teaching these crooks two basic life lessons,” Cuyahoga county prosecutor Michael O’Malley said on Monday in a statement. “Thou shall not steal, and crime does not pay.”

«

They were in line for $28,000 in prizes: the growing money in this.. sport? pastime? has prompted cheats to think of new ways to get into the money class.
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Algorithm rank validator • Cory Etzkorn

Cory Etzkorn:

»

See how your tweet performs against the open source Twitter algorithm.

«

There’s a box, into which you type. I tried: “Elon Musk? Isn’t he bad for Twitter?”

Score: -100

👎 Said bad things about Elon Musk. (-100)
👎 Too many questions. (-50)

It’s a joke, as you’ll realise if you look at the source code on Etzkorn’s Github. But given that the real algorithm uses “author_is_elon”, the joke isn’t that far from the truth.

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Why do websites have so many pop-ups? • The Verge

S.E. Smith:

»

surely, I thought, there must be a use case for pop-ups, an evidence-based explanation. I spoke with Alex Khmelevsky, head of UX at Clay, a San Francisco-based design and branding firm with clients such as Google, UPS, and Coca-Cola. Of pop-ups, he said they’re “not a good practice overall.” And yet, clients often demand them. Designers may try to suggest small changes to make them “context-based, information-based,” and less intrusive, but the client gets the final say.

I called an old colleague at the Center for American Progress to ask why opening their website doesn’t trigger the usual nonprofit tidal wave of subscribe, donate, and take action pop-ups. As vice president of digital strategy, Jamie Perez was closely involved in every step of the site’s recent redesign and ongoing development. “I trust users are doing what they want to do,” he said, noting friction frustrates people trying to grab data or read an article. He wants those users to return — and tell their friends. He views UX as “growing a relationship,” providing something of value rather than squeezing the most out of a single session.

Still, I’m starting to feel trapped in a web of frustration and unclosable interstitials: knowing that evidence against pop-ups is substantial, why keep using them? “The people who develop [pop-ups] have no idea about design and user experience,” commented Khmelevsky, and Buhle echoed the sentiment. “Oftentimes, decision-makers look at what’s right in front,” he said, turning to what others are using for guidance rather than stopping to reconsider. After talking to over a dozen designers and marketers, the best answer I could get was: pop-ups keep happening because other sites keep using them.

«

Which leads to the development of preferences in browsers to block popups, which is what I use all the time. Which leads to popups that get round that, which leads to plugins that block those. Eventually you just turn Javascript off. (The worst experience is mobile websites with popups whose close button is off the screen.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An amateur mathematician has made a breakthrough in the geometry of non-repeating tiling. On your bathroom wall soon? CC-licensed photo by Julian Burgess 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. You missed a bit. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

CAN Injection: keyless car theft • Canis Automotive Labs

Ken Tindell:

»

This is a detective story about how a car was stolen – and how it uncovered an epidemic of high-tech car theft. It begins with a tweet. In April 2022, my friend Ian Tabor tweeted that vandals had been at his car, pulling apart the headlight and unplugging the cables.

It seemed like pointless vandalism, the kind of thing that makes it impossible to have nice things. Then three months later it happened again.

This time the bumper was pulled away and the headlight unplugged. But it turned out neither incident was vandalism, because a couple of days later:

The car was gone. And it looks like the headlight was how it was stolen. Ian is a cybersecurity researcher in the automotive space and has previously been awarded bug bounties for finding vehicle vulnerabilities, and I initially thought from reading his tweet that this might be a trophy hack. But it turns out not: Ian’s neighbour had their Toyota Land Cruiser stolen shortly after. For Ian this is personal and he wanted to know just how they stole the car. After all, it’s got sophisticated car security systems, including an engine immobilizer. How did they drive these cars away?

«

This is a fascinating detective story about weaknesses in your car’s system, if your car is a Jeep, Maserati, Honda, Renault, Jaguar, Fiat, Peugeot, Nissan, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Chrysler, Cadillac, GMC – or Toyota. It’s not a “relay attack”, where the criminals ping the key inside the house, which pings back an unlock code that they capture. It’s much smarter than that.

Which raises the question: how many people are there who would have the knowledge necessary to figure out and instigate these hacks?
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Genesis Market, one of world’s largest platforms for cyber fraud, seized by police • The Record

Alexander Martin:

»

Genesis Market was seized on Tuesday in an FBI-led operation involving more than a dozen international partners, scuttling one of the most significant online criminal platforms.

Genesis — which functioned as a one-stop-shop for criminals, selling both stolen credentials and the tools to weaponize that data — has been linked to millions of financially motivated cyber incidents globally, from fraud through to ransomware attacks.

A splash page revealing the takedown, titled Operation Cookie Monster, has now replaced the login pages on Genesis Market’s websites. The organization maintained sites on the dark web and regular web.

The Record understands that a large number of arrests are being carried out globally.

Genesis Market was unique among credential marketplaces such as Russian Market or 2easy Shop, according to Alexander Leslie, an analyst at Recorded Future, the parent company of The Record.

Unlike its competitors, Genesis Market provided criminals access to “bots” or “browser fingerprints” that allowed them to impersonate victims’ web browsers — including IP addresses, session cookies, operating system information, and plugins.

These fingerprints meant the criminals could access subscription platforms such as Netflix and Amazon — as well as online banking services — without triggering security warnings: “What’s Joe doing logging in from India?” as Leslie said. Users could even bypass multi-factor authentication.

“What makes the fingerprints on Genesis Store different is that they’re emulating the victim’s browser session — bypassing these ‘flags’ by appearing, to the victim, to be indistinguishable from the actual user,” Leslie said.

«

May have affected as many as 50 million people – possibly more. There’s some suggestion that they arrested some of the people involved early on and got them to flip, and got access to the database of criminal users: about 59,000 of them.
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‘The miracle that disrupts order’: mathematicians invent new ‘einstein’ shape • The Guardian

Matthew Cantor:

»

In nature and on our bathroom walls, we typically see tile patterns that repeat in “a very predictable, regular way”, says Dr Craig Kaplan, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. What mathematicians were interested in were shapes that “guaranteed non-periodicity” – in other words, there was no way to tile them so that the overall pattern created a repeating grid.

Such a shape would be known as an aperiodic monotile, or “einstein” shape, meaning, in roughly translated German, “one shape” (and conveniently echoing the name of a certain theoretical physicist).

“There’s been a thread of beautiful mathematics over the last 60 years or so searching for ever smaller sets of shapes that do this,” Kaplan says. “The first example of an aperiodic set of shapes had over 20,000 shapes in it. And of course, mathematicians worked to get that number down over time. And the furthest we got was in the 1970s,” when the Nobel-prize winning physicist Roger Penrose found pairs of shapes that fit the bill.

Now, mathematicians appear to have found what they were looking for: a 13-sided shape they call “the hat”. The discovery was largely the work of David Smith of the East Riding of Yorkshire, who had a longstanding interest in the question and investigated the problem using an online geometry platform. Once he’d found an intriguing shape, he told the New York Times, he would cut it out of cardstock and see how he could fit the first 32 pieces together.

“I am quite persistent but I suppose I did have a bit of luck,” Smith told the Guardian in an email.

«

This is a quite fabulous piece of mathematics (here’s the draft paper) which I don’t pretend to understand. How fabulous that it should be written about by someone called Cantor.
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Stop AI stealing the show • Equity

Equity is the trade union for performers and creative practitioners:

»

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown rapidly across the audio and entertainment industry in recent years, from automated audiobooks and voice assistants to deep fake videos and text to speech tools.

But UK Intellectual Property law has failed to keep pace. And this is leading to performers being exploited.

We know that:
• Performers are having their image, voice or likeness reproduced by others, using AI technology, without their consent
• Because of loopholes in the law, performers are not being fairly paid for the reproduction of their work. And sometimes not paid at all

Performers are kept in the dark about their rights and contracts:
• 79% of performers who have undertaken AI work felt they did not have a full understanding of their performers’ rights (as set out in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988) before signing the contract
• Performers are being asked to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements without any knowledge of what the job entails
• 65% of performers think the development of AI technology poses a threat to employment opportunities in the performing arts sector. This figure rose to 93% for audio artists
• 93% of Equity members think the Government should introduce new legal protections for performers, so that a performance cannot be reproduced by AI technology without their consent.

The government is also planning to introduce a new data mining exemption, which could have catastrophic implications for UK based performers and their professional work if implemented.

«

Wise of Equity to move early on this: its members are probably the most likely to lose out first if they don’t get these sorts of protections.
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The “e-bikes are cheating” myth busted: studies disprove the claim • Cycling Electric

Mark Sutton:

»

A piece of research collaborated upon by numerous European Universities produced one of the most comprehensive bodies of electric bike user data so far, pulling on insight from 10,000 riders.

Pushing out a broad survey that measured weekly activity the researchers were over time able to prove that electric bike users were actually surpassing pedal cycle users in the amount of saddle time registered. The riders were taking longer trips and more often replacing car trips by generally reaching for the pedal-assisted bikes for journeys of a distance that would generally be faster on two wheels versus fighting traffic.

The data concluded that e-bike riders were registering significantly longer journeys at 9.4km, compared to 4.8km for cyclists, as well as higher daily averages at 8km and 5.3km, respectively.

In exercise terms that translated favourably, though pedal cyclists edged it in BMI readings, but only marginally. Cyclists were averaging a 23.8 BMI, while e-bike riders had an average of 24.8. Both of these put riders in the very typically normal range, showing that the exercise was helpful on both counts.

As the researchers put it “Physical activity levels, measured in Metabolic Equivalent Task minutes per week (MET min/wk), were similar among e-bikers and cyclists (4463 vs. 4085).”

One point worth consideration on this note is that e-bikes tend to greater attract those less physically ready for exercise, versus a pedal cycle, so the margin of closeness may be distorted somewhat. In fact, the study did note that e-bike riders did tend to be a bit older at an average of 48.1 years versus 41.4 years for the pedal cyclist.

«

Perhaps the latter point for two reasons: they’re feeling the struggle of an unaided bicycle more, and they’re a bit more affluent.
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China plans to ban exports of rare earth magnet tech • The Japan News

Seima Oki:

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China is considering banning the export of technologies used to produce high-performance rare earth magnets deployed in electric vehicles, wind turbine motors and other products, citing “national security” as a reason, it has been learned.

With the global trend toward decarbonization driving a shift toward the use of electric motors, China is believed to be seeking to seize control of the magnet supply chain and establish dominance in the burgeoning environment sector.

Beijing is currently in the process of revising its Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export — a list of manufacturing and other industrial technologies subject to export controls — and released a draft of the revised catalog for public comment in December. In the draft, manufacturing technologies for high-performance magnets using such rare earth elements as neodymium and samarium cobalt were added to the export ban. The solicitation of comments ceased late January and the revisions are expected to be adopted as early as this year.

Rare earth magnets are key components in motors that use electricity and magnetic force to generate rotation. In addition to EVs, they are widely used in aircraft—including military planes—and industrial items including robots, mobile phones and air conditioners. Use of such magnets is expected to increase along with semiconductors and storage cells. The Japanese government is reportedly concerned about the potentially massive impact a magnet supply disruption could have on various public and economic activities.

China is estimated to hold an about 84% share of the global market in neodymium magnets and an over 90% interest in samarium cobalt magnets. Japan, meanwhile, has about 15% of the neodymium magnet market and a less-than-10% share of that for samarium cobalt.

«

The Second Cold War enters a new phase.
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Meta to debut ad-creating generative AI this year, CTO says • Nikkei Asia

Kazuyuki Okudaira:

»

Facebook owner Meta intends to commercialize its proprietary generative artificial intelligence by December, joining Google in finding practical applications for the tech.

The company, which began full-scale AI research in 2013, stands out along with Google in the number of studies published.

“We’ve been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world,” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, told Nikkei in an exclusive interview on Wednesday in Tokyo. “We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people.”

Meta announced in February that it would establish a new organization to develop generative AI, but this is the first time it has indicated a timeline for commercialization.

The technology, which can instantly create sentences and graphics, has already been commercialized by ChatGPT creator OpenAI of the US. But Bosworth insists Meta remains on the technology’s cutting edge.

“We feel very confident that … we are at the very forefront,” he said. “Quite a few of the techniques that are in large language model development were pioneered [by] our teams.

“[I] expect we’ll start seeing some of them [commercialization of the tech] this year. We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy. It’s probably the area that I’m spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox.”

«

I wonder where it’ll be used? To make the metaverse more welcoming? It’s not as if Facebook is big on either selling services or selling hardware.
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Why journalists can’t quit Twitter • Platformer

Casey Newton:

»

In December, I predicted that 2023 would be the year that the media would begin its divorce from Twitter. “Elon Musk’s continued promotion of right-wing causes and personalities will push away more and more high-profile users, who find themselves increasingly put off by his shock-jock antics and whim-based approach to content moderation,” I wrote. “Alternative platforms like Mastodon, while smaller and less intuitive to use, offer a safe haven to more and more people — particularly journalists — looking for off-ramps. By the end of 2023, Twitter no longer sets the daily news agenda by default for the entire US press.”

Almost four months later, this prediction looks more and more wobbly. The first part has more or less come true: journalists are put off by Musk’s antics, and dunk on him daily. But those same journalists — along with a bunch of people Musk arbitrarily suspended, fired, or laid off — continue to tweet just the same, propping up the service with their quips and sports tweets and food photos just as they always have. And while some of the company’s competitors show intermittent signs on life, none has taken on the feeling of a daily must-visit in the way Twitter did and still does.

«

Willie Sutton didn’t actually say he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is”; it was because “I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life”. For journalists, that’s a lot of what Twitter gives them: validation, visibility with colleagues, and, used well, an endless source of stories. So I think Newton misses the point here.

Journalists will stop coming to Twitter when other journalists stop going there, and when there aren’t any people using it. And I don’t see either happening. Even in the days when the Fail Whale was a regular occurrence, and there were fewer people sharing less, it was a must-use. Since then, it’s become more reliable and more popular.
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Twitter adds ‘state-affiliated media’ label to NPR account putting it on par with Russia Today • Forbes

Matt Novak:

»

Twitter added a warning to NPR’s Twitter account on Tuesday, declaring it as “state-affiliated media,” a label that’s typically been reserved for foreign media outlets that represent the official views of the government, like Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua.

In fact, several people on Twitter pointed out that the social media company specifically said that news outlets like NPR are not state-affiliated media because they have editorial independence, despite getting some funds from the government.

“State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution,” Twitter’s Help Center reads.

The explanation on Twitter’s website went on to call out NPR as an outlet that didn’t deserve the state-affiliated label. At least until recently.

“Accounts belonging to state-affiliated media entities, their editors-in-chief, and/or their prominent staff may be labeled. State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” the Help Center continued.

That’s what it used to say as of Tuesday morning, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The website still mentions the BBC but the reference to NPR was deleted sometime Tuesday.

«

At a guess, this is more of Musk’s capricious, snide behaviour. The antipathy may become mutual: there are probably some outlets which would love to dub him “failed billionaire” or “former billionaire”. I also suspect he’s being egged on in this by some of his coterie of venture capitalists.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The iPod shuffle was the ultimate expression of our modern love of playing songs out of order – because we like being surprised. CC-licensed photo by Cristiano Betta 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

TikTok fined £12.7m for illegally processing children’s data • The Guardian

Alex Hern and Aletha Adu:

»

TikTok has been fined £12.7m for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who were using its platform without parental consent, Britain’s data watchdog said.

The information commissioner said the China-owned video app had done “very little, if anything” to check who was using the platform and remove underage users, despite internal warnings the firm was flouting its own terms and conditions.

“Our findings were that TikTok were not doing enough to prevent under-13s accessing their platform, they were not doing enough when they became aware of under-13s to get rid of them, and they were not doing enough to detect under-13s on there,” John Edwards told the Guardian on Tuesday. “They assure us that they are now doing more.”

The fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) comes weeks after the app was banned from UK government phones amid security concerns. It is fast becoming a flashpoint for the UK’s handling of big tech and Chinese influence.

After the announcement of the fine, one of the largest the watchdog has given, Rishi Sunak was accused of moving too slowly in taking action against TikTok – and was called “naive for assuming TikTok could ever regulate itself”.

UK data protection law does not have a strict ban on children using the internet but requires organisations that use the personal data of children to obtain consent from their parents or carers. TikTok itself bans those under 13 in its terms and conditions. The failure to enforce age limits led to “up to 1.4 million UK children” under 13 using the platform as of 2020, the ICO estimated.

«

Social media firms never, never, ever enforce age rules. Because it’s so much more profitable not to.
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The mixed-up history of the shuffle button • The Verge

Natalie Weiner:

»

It’s not clear who initially decided to integrate that new technology of randomness into music. “In the first Philips player, shuffle was not available…Which company came first? I do not know,” Kees Schouhamer Immink, a pioneering Philips scientist who worked on the earliest CD players, told me by email. But very soon after the frontiers of music consumption shifted from analog to digital with the introduction of those first CD players in 1982, random playback was touted as one of the device’s best features. (There were sophisticated tape players that also had random playback functions by the early ’80s, but every selection had to be preprogrammed by the user — plus, the analog nature of tape playback would make the time between tracks fairly significant.)

“Do the Sony Shuffle!” shouted one 1986 advertisement for the Sony CDP-45. “It makes old CDs new!” But what anticipated the contemporary shuffle experience was the introduction of players that held multiple CDs; rather than just hearing a CD you owned play in an order you couldn’t predict, you could put a few that you liked together and, well, shuffle them, replicating the leanback experience of listening to the radio (or, as was still quite new at that time, a live DJ) without hearing any of the stuff you didn’t like. “Having a Sony CDP-C10 Disc Jockey in your home really is like having your own personal disc jockey,” another advertisement put it. “Ten hours of uninterrupted music enjoyment for hassle-free parties or background music in restaurants or shops.” 

…Shuffle satisfied the human attraction to novelty and surprise. With randomness, there is possibility: it makes sense, then, that the first literal shuffle buttons were on ’70s-era handheld blackjack games for shuffling the virtual deck. When you put a playlist, or your library, on shuffle, you might get lucky and hear exactly the thing you want to hear with the added satisfaction of not knowing it was coming.

«

Fabulous idea for a feature. That paragraph above captures what we love about shuffle: the surprise of the familiar yet unexpected. (Why shuffle an album you’ve never heard before?) It’s the same thing for the brain as slot machines.
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“Blurred Lines,” harbinger of doom • Pitchfork

Jayson Greene:

»

Indeed, the implications of a “Blurred Lines” loss [in its copyright defence against the Marvin Gaye estate] was frightening enough to spur an amicus brief that included John Oates, Hans Zimmer, and Rivers Cuomo among its 200 signatories. “By eliminating any meaningful standard for drawing the line between permissible inspiration and unlawful copying, the judgment is certain to stifle creativity and impede the creative process,” read the brief. It was not enough. The appeals court ruled again in favor of the Gaye Estate, and Williams and Thicke were ordered to pay $5.3 million in damages in July 2015. 

The fallout from the decision was incalculable. By demonstrating the value of a high-profile lawsuit against a massive pop song, the “Blurred Lines” case helped underline the potential financial upside to owning catalogs like Gaye’s. If the stampede of venture capitalists competing to snap up beloved artist catalogs—from Otis Redding to James Brown to Smokey Robinson—proceeded from a specific assumption, it’s that whoever owns the assets gets to demand payment. 

Now, when pop songs are recorded, they routinely pass through a forensic musicological analysis for any possible similarities to other songs, old or new, often with preemptive songwriter credits handed out as a result. A much more common practice, seen everywhere from hits by Nicki Minaj to Saweetie to Bebe Rexha and Jack Harlow, is to sample a large chunk of a beloved song wholesale, which ensures bigger checks to publishers and downplays the threat of litigation.

«

This is a long but very worthwhile read about a song you may have forgotten about, even though it was colossal 10 years ago. Notably, it shows how everyone who was involved with it became in some way tainted by it.
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Google flags apps made by popular Chinese e-commerce giant as malware • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

Google has flagged several apps made by a Chinese e-commerce giant as malware, alerting users who had them installed, and suspended the company’s official app.

In the last couple of weeks, multiple Chinese security researchers have accused Pinduoduo, a rising e-commerce giant that boasts almost 800 million active users, of making apps for Android that contain malware designed to monitor users.

Ed Fernandez, a Google spokesperson, said that “off-Play versions of this app that have been found to contain malware have been enforced on via Google Play Protect,” referring to apps that are not on Google Play.

Effectively, Google has set Google Play Protect, its Android security mechanism, to block users from installing these malicious apps, and warn those who have them already installed, prompting them to uninstall the apps.

Fernandez added that Google has suspended Pinduoduo’s official app on the Play Store “for security concerns while we continue our investigation.”

Requesting anonymity, a security researcher alerted TechCrunch of the claims against the apps, and said their analysis also found that the apps were exploiting several zero-day exploits to hack users.

«

Unsurprisingly, Pinduoduo denies the claims. Not blocked in China, because Google Play isn’t available in China (Google is blocked there; it’s all open source Android).
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Have we fallen out of love with Wordle? • BBC News

Harry Low:

»

In October 2021, about 5,000 people visited Brooklyn-based Mr Wardle’s site. When the alumnus of Royal Holloway, University of London sold up to the NYT on 31 January 2022, the monthly figure stood at 45m.

Wordle was by now spawning daily updates in chat groups (including one featuring Hollywood stars Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Bradley Cooper), fuelling the competitive instincts of families and friends and prompting stern warnings about the bad etiquette of giving spoilers.

It even helped to end a 17-hour hostage ordeal and became the most Googled word of 2022.

Head of games at the New York Times Jonathan Knight (longest streak: 48) says there’s still a huge interest in Wordle although Google Trends data suggests it is now a third as popular as it was at its peak.

“I can’t disclose specific numbers but tens of millions of people play every week,” he says. “We are still seeing a pretty high level of audience engagement and I would say we’re pleased with it. It’s obviously come down off of its viral craze as any viral game will, and games that go viral like that don’t come along that often.

“They often sort of pop and drop – and this one definitely hasn’t.”

«

Hard to figure, but tens of millions per week vs 45m per month sounds like it’s shrinking down to a hardcore group. Though quite a large one.
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Nigel Lawson’s economic ‘success’ was an oil-fuelled illusion • openDemocracy

Adam Ramsay:

»

By the end of the 1970s… North Sea oil started to come on stream. By the mid-1980s, when Lawson was chancellor, 10% of annual government revenue, or £18bn a year, came directly from North Sea oil.

Just as significantly, the oil boom played a vital role in delivering the Big Bang in the City of London, for which Lawson usually gets both credit and blame, with money flooding in to invest in Britain’s new hydrocarbon glut. Of course, his radical deregulations played a role, too, allowing banking whiz kids to build these new investments into the vast credit-card houses which came tumbling down in 2008. But without the oil, it’s hard to see why that money would have been flowing in in the first place.

As the US Department for Energy said in 1989, “the growth of North Sea oil revenues is the most important fiscal development in the British economy in the 1980s”.

How the revenue from that oil was spent – squandered on under-priced privatisations and tax cuts for the rich, buying Tory election victories rather than investing in long-term prosperity – is the real Lawson legacy we should be talking about. But, outside Scotland, that conversation always seems to be missed.

Not by Lawson himself, of course. He seemed to retain a gratitude to the oil industry over the decades after he resigned as chancellor. A leading figure in the movement to deny the science of climate change, he led the climate-denying lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, using his significant media presence and reputation across Tory Britain to sow doubt about atmospheric physics and delay much-needed action on climate change.

When we remember him, it shouldn’t be for the endlessly repeated false history about his time as chancellor. It should be for his own lies, since then, and the damage they have done.

«

If you need persuading of this point, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has a helpful graph showing North Sea revenues as a proportion of UK GDP over time.
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Groupon, down 99.4% from its IPO, gets a new CEO • Techcrunch

Ingrid Lunden:

»

A dozen years ago, Groupon shot to fame popularizing the online group buying format, confidently rejecting a $6bn acquisition offer from Google and instead going public with a $17.8bn market cap. The company today says it has 14 million active users, but almost consistently for the last decade, its financial position has been in a slow decline — with stagnation in its core business model, little success in efforts to diversify, declining revenues and ongoing losses.

And today comes the latest chapter in that story. The Chicago-based company, which today has a market cap of just $103m (a drop of 99.4% from its public market debut), has appointed Dusan Senkypl, a current board member, as interim CEO. Senkypl will run the company. From the Czech Republic.

…Groupon specifically has faced a host of challenges over the years. The very concept of group buying is structured on the concept of hype, which may have been a fateful, less-than-promising starting point. Even early on, and despite the predictions of it being a threat to Google and Amazon, others debated whether it could rightly be considered a “tech” company. But beyond this, Groupon — despite making more than 40 acquisitions, including a host of clones across international markets, plus a number of interesting e-commerce and fintech businesses — failed to find other hooks to diversify itself.

Meanwhile, a key marketing route for the company — email — died a small death when Google changed how subscription emails were categorized (and could be more easily ignored).

«

It would be very easy to see this as the spurned buyer taking action to squash the annoying would-be rival, wouldn’t it.
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‘Recent photo’ of Julian Assange was actually generated by AI • Full Fact

Grace Rahman:

»

There are some clues the image is not a genuine photograph.

Guillaume Brossard, co-founder of the French website Hoaxbuster pointed out that Mr Assange’s close allies, including his wife, are active on Twitter but had not shared the image.

Mr Brossard also noted that details in the hair, ear and unmatching sleeve colours of the image did not look realistic.

The image also has a prominent watermark saying “photo property of ‘E’”. Using Google to search for the image, the earliest instance of the image appearing online comes from a Twitter user posting it on 30 March. This user has previously referred to themselves as E in other seemingly AI-generated images.

German tabloid newspaper Bild interviewed the user, who told the publication he had made the photo of Julian Assange using Midjourney, an AI programme which allows people to generate images using prompts. 

Midjourney was also the app used to create fake images of the Pope wearing a puffer coat and former US President Donald Trump apparently being arrested that recently went viral. 

The Twitter user who created the image of Mr Assange told Bild: “My intention was to create an image based on the documented happenings around Julian.”

He added: “It was designed to evoke a visceral response and to accurately represent what the public could not otherwise bear witness to.”

«

Deepfakes 1 (the pope), establishment 1.
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Police call handlers used fake system for eight years • BBC News

Mark Daly:

»

One of Scotland’s main police control rooms used a fake system to manipulate response time targets for eight years, according to documents seen by the BBC.
Thousands of calls to the Bilston Glen control room were allocated to a fictitious call sign known as DUMY.

Internal systems would register that the calls had been passed to officers – but instead they were parked on a list.

This meant a police vehicle would not have been dispatched quickly to calls which had been judged as high priority. It appears that many calls were not attended at all.

The practice, according to official police documents, was designed to “provide artificial levels of incident management performance”.

The documents reveal that the DUMY call sign was used at Bilston Glen in Loanhead, Midlothian, from at least 2007 until the system was discovered in 2015 and stopped.

«

On Twitter, it was pointed out that this is a classic example of Goodhart’s Law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. (Charles Goodhart was an economist; he developed the idea in a 1975 article about monetary policy, but we’re all living with the effects all the time.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The peculiar encoding of DNA may be due to a sort of genomic parasite which breaks up gene sequences. CC-licensed photo by MIKI Yoshihito 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How the US came to use the NSO spyware it was trying to kill • The New York Times

Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman:

»

The secret contract was finalized on Nov. 8, 2021, a deal between a company that has acted as a front for the United States government and the American affiliate of a notorious Israeli hacking firm.

Under the arrangement, the Israeli firm, NSO Group, gave the US government access to one of its most powerful weapons — a geolocation tool that can covertly track mobile phones around the world without the phone user’s knowledge or consent.

If the veiled nature of the deal was unusual — it was signed for the front company by a businessman using a fake name — the timing was extraordinary.

Only five days earlier, the Biden administration had announced it was taking action against NSO, whose hacking tools for years had been abused by governments around the world to spy on political dissidents, human rights activists and journalists. The White House placed NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, declaring the company a national security threat and sending the message that American companies should stop doing business with it.

The secret contract — which The New York Times is disclosing for the first time — violates the Biden administration’s public policy, and still appears to be active. The contract, reviewed by The Times, stated that the “United States government” would be the ultimate user of the tool, although it is unclear which government agency authorized the deal and might be using the spyware. It specifically allowed the government to test, evaluate, and even deploy the spyware against targets of its choice in Mexico.

Asked about the contract, White House officials said it was news to them.

…In a 2018 letter to the government of Israel, the Justice Department authorized “Cleopatra Holdings” to purchase Pegasus on behalf of the FBI. The Times has reviewed a copy of the letter, and a redacted version was produced as part of The Times’ Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FBI.

For Novalpina, the fact that the FBI had purchased a license to use Pegasus was significant. Getting the bureau’s validation — and that of other US government agencies — was an essential step toward convincing a US investor to purchase the weapons.

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Left hand and right hand. Certainly embarrassing.
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Tim Cook on shaping the future of Apple • GQ

Zach Baron:

»

Cook is content to let you believe about him whatever you’d like to believe, even that he’s mean, even if he’s pretty sure he isn’t. (The other thing Cue tells people about Cook is this: “You have to engage first. And so if you’re sitting around, and you’ve never met him, and you’re waiting for Tim to call you, you might wait a long time.”)

Cook’s general lack of interest in the stories other people tell about him has not just made him unusually impervious to criticism; it has also, on occasion, allowed him to deal with whoever he needs to deal with to get his job done. “I think he’s incredibly human,” Jackson says. “But I think he’s also recognized that that doesn’t need to be brought to every situation.”

When I ask Cook about a couple of notorious moments in his tenure—his dealings with then president Donald Trump, who described Cook as a “great executive, because he calls me and others don’t,” and then more recently, Cook’s elegant handling of Elon Musk, who last year went from criticizing Apple on Twitter to touring the campus with Cook in under a week—Cook returns to this idea, that he is comfortable being in places where others might worry about being seen. “The philosophy is engagement,” Cook says. “I feel very strongly about engaging with people regardless of whether they agree with you or not. I actually think it’s even more important to engage when there’s disagreement.”

Cook smiles. “I’m used to being in a [room] with someone who has a different view than I do,” he says. “This is not a unique thing for me.”

«

He sort of responds to the headset stuff in a roundabout way:

»

“Pretty much everything we’ve ever done, there were loads of skeptics with it,” Cook says. “If you do something that’s on the edge, it will always have skeptics.”

«

(With Apple, you should always ask: why agree to this interview now? Answers on a postcard.)
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How a DNA ‘parasite’ may have fragmented our genes • Quanta Magazine

Jake Buehler:

»

All animals, plants, fungi and protists — which collectively make up the domain of life called eukaryotes — have genomes with a peculiar feature that has puzzled researchers for almost half a century: Their genes are fragmented.

In their DNA, the information about how to make proteins isn’t laid out in long coherent strings of bases. Instead, genes are split into segments, with intervening sequences, or “introns,” spacing out the exons that encode bits of the protein. When eukaryotes express their genes, their cells have to splice out RNA from the introns and stitch together RNA from the exons to reconstruct the recipes for their proteins.

The mystery of why eukaryotes rely on this baroque system deepened with the discovery that the different branches of the eukaryotic family tree varied widely in the abundance of their introns. The genes of yeast, for instance, have very few introns, but those of land plants have many. Introns make up almost 25% of human DNA. How this tremendous, enigmatic variation in intron frequency evolved has stirred debate among scientists for decades.

Answers may finally be emerging, however, from recent studies of genetic elements called introners that some scientists regard as a kind of genomic parasite. These pieces of DNA can slip into genomes and multiply there, leaving profusions of introns behind them. Last November, researchers presented evidence that introners have been doing this in diverse eukaryotes throughout evolution. Moreover, they showed that introners could explain why explosive gains in introns seem to have been particularly common in aquatic forms of life.

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Just in case you wanted something explaining why your DNA is such a mess yet works so well.
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Deepfakes will make the establishment stronger • Hanania’s Newsletter

Richard Hanania:

»

In the era of deepfakes, people will know deepfakes exist, meaning that individuals will become much less likely to believe random audio and video they see online. If you hear Biden making a gaffe, whether you believe it or not will depend on if it came from a credible reporter with backing from a well-respected institution. I find myself already beginning to doubt less reputable Twitter accounts showing embarrassing footage of their political enemies without outside confirmation.

What if you’re an independent journalist who happens to get exclusive audio of a world leader plotting a coup? Without a way to verify that the audio is legitimate, your work will be ignored.

Prestige journalists will themselves have to be more cautious. Before, one could send an anonymous video to a reporter and they would broadcast it to the world. Now, with credible deepfakes, major news outlets only believe what people they know tell them, or what they hear or see themselves. Official campaigns and government agencies will become more important as sources of information. Again, the power of independent journalists will decline. This is not simply because fewer people will be able to trust their work, but also because more established outlets will be less likely to rely on non-traditional sources of information.

In sum, cheap and easily available deepfakes will cause most people to adopt a reasonable prior of “everything I see or hear on the internet is fake, unless it comes from a credible news source.” That’s already the standard for text, so there’s no reason it can’t also apply to audio and video.

«

But then he undermines his case somewhat by pointing to a (junk) site called Real Raw News:

»

The RRN crowd tends to be composed of those that are low IQ and have low levels of trust in institutions. This is Trump’s base, in case you are wondering why they dislike [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis so much. With education polarization being what it is, fake news tends to be a right-wing problem. Liberals can of course buy into false narratives, but they tend to be stupid in the way smart or at least moderately intelligent people are, which is through being blinded by ideology. Dumb people, in contrast, don’t have the mental tools to distinguish between real events and what they find in the National Enquirer, or a story about Fauci being executed at Gitmo, and this is why anti-vaxx, QAnon, and election denial are all found among Republicans, or to be more precise, the Trumpist base of the party.

«

Just a note: being blinded by ideology can be just as straitjacketing as just having low levels of trust. It’s the same thing, in the opposite direction: trust set too high.
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We spoke to the guy behind the viral AI image of the Pope • Buzzfeed News

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old construction worker from the Chicago area who declined to share his last name over fears that he could be attacked for creating the images, said he was tripping on shrooms last week when he came up with the idea for the image.

“I’m trying to figure out ways to make something funny because that’s what I usually try to do,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I try to do funny stuff or trippy art — psychedelic stuff. It just dawned on me: I should do the Pope. Then it was just coming like water: ‘The Pope in Balenciaga puffy coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, Paris,’ stuff like that.”

He generated the first three images around 2 p.m. local time last Friday. (He first took up using Midjourney after one of his brothers died in November. “It pretty much just all started with that, just dealing with grief and making images of my past brother,” he said. “I fell in love with it after that.”)

When Pablo Xavier first saw the Pope images, he said, “I thought they were perfect.” So he posted them to a Facebook group called AI Art Universe, and then on Reddit. He was shocked when the images quickly went viral. “I was just blown away,” he said. “I didn’t want it to blow up like that.”

Pablo Xavier, who grew up in a Catholic family but doesn’t feel part of the religion today, said he felt “no ill will toward” the pontiff: “I just thought it was funny to see the Pope in a funny jacket.” He said he was banned from Reddit hours after posting the image there. “I figured I was going to get backlash,” he said. “I just didn’t think it was going to be to this magnitude.”

He said it was “definitely scary” that “people are running with it and thought it was real without questioning it.” He said he’s already seen posts in which his images have been co-opted by those looking to criticize the Catholic Church for lavish spending. “I feel like shit,” he said of his images being used in such ways. “It’s crazy.”

«

I do feel like historical footnotes should be obliged to mention that the first properly viral world-fooling AI image was created by a construction worker who was tripping. It says everything that needs be said about the ease of use of these tools.
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When is Apple announcing its mixed-reality headset? June 5 at WWDC 2023 • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman, in the latest edition of his newsletter:

»

The showcase at WWDC, the Worldwide Developers Conference, will likely include the headset itself, but also its onboard xrOS operating system, accompanying services, and — perhaps most critically — a software development kit and platform that will let developers write new types of apps. 

As is usual for invitations to WWDC, the artwork alongside the announcement doesn’t do much to confirm Apple’s plans. But I still see some likely hints.

One WWDC 2023 graphic is clearly an outline of the Apple Park spaceship campus, which relates to the first day of the conference being held at the company’s headquarters. No surprise there.

But the second graphic is more interesting. On its surface, it’s simply the outline of the rainbow structure on Apple’s campus. (You can see that structure behind chief executive officer Tim Cook in the photo at the top [of the newsletter].) But it also looks similar to the curved shape of the Apple headset facing upward.

«

Oh come on. I spent years attempting to decode Apple invitations. The lesson was always that you had no hope of getting it right ahead of time; that you were always imposing your own expectations on things that were usually far less exciting than you thought. (The Verge did a good writeup last September.)

Honestly, though, I’ll laugh like a drain if Apple doesn’t release a headset, after all Gurman’s windup. It’s been the equivalent of that analyst who was sure – SURE – that Apple was going to release a TV, and saw it coming in every little thing Apple did.
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Man shot and killed by truck owner after stealing vehicle on Southeast Side • KSAT

Ivan Herrera, John Paul Barajas, Matthew Craig:

»

A man in his 40s who stole a vehicle from a North Side home on Wednesday was shot and killed after the owners of the pickup truck tracked it down on the Southeast Side and took matters into their own hands, according to San Antonio police.

SAPD said they received a stolen vehicle report around 1 p.m. from a home on Braesview.

The owners were able to track the vehicle by using an Apple Airtag that was in the truck when it was stolen. That led them to a shopping center in the 3200 block of Southeast Military Drive.

SAPD said the owners contacted police to report the missing vehicle but decided to confront the suspect before police arrived.

One person got out of the car and attempted to contact the suspect on the side of the truck. It’s unclear what happened next, but police say the suspect may have pulled out a firearm before the other man shot and killed him while in the stolen truck.

«

An update to the story says the man in the truck was killed by a single shot to the head. The police are still considering whether to press charges. I get the feeling that the truck owners were not the sort to engage in polite discussion about decamping.

Sure, a GPS tracker would have done the same job of letting the truck be tracked down. But AirTags have democratised that, for good or ill.
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Rival lawsuits vie to represent publishers in Google class action • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

»

A second collective lawsuit seeking to claim damages from Google on behalf of UK online publishers has launched – apparently in direct competition with the first.

The new lawsuit, filed on Thursday by former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and law firm Hausfeld, claims publishers are collectively entitled to compensation of up to £3.4bn.

Both claims want to be opt-out – meaning relevant publishers will be automatically represented in the suit. But first the Competition Appeal Tribunal will need to choose a class representative and certify the suit as opt-out.

The first claim was filed in November by law firms Geradin Partners and Humphries Kerstetter and has former Ofcom director Claudio Pollack as the class representative.

That claim alleges that Google’s dominance and abuse of each part of the online ad market diminished digital ad revenue for UK publishers since 2014 by up to 40%. It is seeking up to £13.6bn in damages from the tech giant.

The details of the Humphries Kerstetter claim are not yet public, but a partner there, Toby Starr, told Press Gazette earlier in March that a certification hearing – at which the CAT decided whether the claim could proceed as opt-out – would likely happen “towards the end of this year”.

“After that, there will be a process which is more familiar to most litigation lawyers: going through exchanges of documents, exchanges of witness statements and expert reports. And then a trial and those steps are expected to take another two to three years after the certification hearing.”

«

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup that’s me. The claim against Google is on the same behaviour that earned it a €220m fine – unopposed – from the French competition authority in June 2021, and which the US Department of Justice is seeking to prosecute. The UK suits are what would be known in the US as “class actions”, seeking reparation on behalf of a large group that has lost out by a large amount cumulatively, but for whom seeking action individually wouldn’t make sense financially.

As that last paragraph suggests, this might not be resolved in the sort of timescale familiar in the world of technology, but very familiar to the legal world.
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Cruise passengers allege they weren’t protected from sexual assault • Buzzfeed News

Tom Warren and Anna Betts:

»

In dozens of court documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, cruise ship passengers say they have been dragged into cabins and raped, pushed into janitors’ closets and assaulted, and even attacked in the public corridors of ships. Likewise, parents and guardians have alleged that their children were molested by other passengers or crew members, plied with alcohol, and in some instances, abused by daycare staffers at onboard activity centers. As recently as two weeks ago, the parents of a 17-year-old passenger filed a civil suit alleging she was raped by a fitness instructor onboard a Carnival cruise ship.

In fact, sexual assaults are the most prevalent reported crime on cruise ships, according to the FBI. Since 2015, there have been 454 reported allegations of sex crimes on cruise ships. Experts believe that the actual numbers are far higher, as many sexual assaults often go unreported. (For reference, more than two-thirds of all sexual assaults in the US are not reported to law enforcement, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.)

And many of the major cruise lines have been told — even by their own security staffers — that more could be done to protect passengers, such as installing more surveillance cameras and hiring additional security personnel. But according to court records, including a deposition from this February in a lawsuit alleging the gang rape of a minor on a Carnival Cruise ship, senior executives have opted not to implement the changes, claiming they’re too expensive.

«

I’ll remind of the oh-that’s-too-improbable plot line from Succession season 1, which appeared in 2018 and so was probably written in 2016 for filming in 2017: a catalogue of unadmitted sexual assault on the Waystar Royco cruise ships. (Via John Naughton for the Buzzfeed link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Old methods of painting might be superseded by nanoparticles that mimic nature’s method of adding colour. (Might be.) CC-licensed photo by whereareyousimonwhereareyousimon 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. A second coat? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

GPT-4 is a reasoning engine • Chain of Thought

Dan Shipper:

»

Even though our AI models were trained by reading the whole internet, that training mostly enhances their reasoning abilities not how much they know. And so, the performance of today’s AI models is constrained by their lack of knowledge.

…When GPT-4 was trained, it was fed a large portion of the available material on the internet. Training transformed that data into a statistical model that is very good at, given a string of words, knowing which words should follow from it—this is called next token prediction.

However, the kind of “knowledge” contained in this statistical model is fuzzy and inexplicit. The model doesn’t have any sort of long-term memory or way to look up the information it has seen—it only remembers what it encountered in its training set in the form of a statistical model.

When it encounters my name it uses this model to make an educated guess about who I am. It draws a conclusion that’s in the ballpark of being right, but is completely wrong in its details because it doesn’t have any explicit way to look up the answer.

But when GPT-4 is hooked up to the internet (or anything that acts like a database) it doesn’t have to rely on its fuzzy statistical understanding. Instead, it can retrieve explicit facts like, “Dan Shipper is the co-founder of Every” and use that to create its answer.

So, what does this mean for the future? I think there are at least two interesting conclusions:

1: Knowledge databases are as important to AI progress as foundational models
2: People who organise, store, and catalog their own thinking and reading will have a leg up in an AI-driven world. They can make those resources available to the model and use it to enhance the intelligence and relevance of its responses.

«

Getting a chatbot to correctly perform a series of real-world tasks based on written or spoken orders is really what you want. Hook it up to Siri, Alexa or Google. Perfect.
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This is the lightest paint in the world • WIRED

Max Levy:

»

Color surrounds us in nature, and we re-create it with pigments. You can think of pigments as pulverized minerals, heavy metals, or chemicals that we swish into oil and spread over a canvas or car: Cobalt becomes blue; ochre red; cadmium yellow. “But nature has a very different way of creating color than we do,” Chanda says. Some of nature’s most vivid looks—the kind worn by peacocks, beetles, and butterflies—do their thing without pigment.

Those colors come from topography. Submicroscopic landscapes on the outer surfaces of peacock feathers, beetle shells, and butterfly wings diffract light to produce what’s known as structural color. It’s longer-lasting and pigment-free. And to scientists, it’s the key to creating paint that is not only better for the planet but might also help us live in a hotter world. 

In a paper published this month in Science Advances, Chanda’s lab demonstrated a first-of-its-kind paint based on structural color. They think it’s the lightest paint in the world—and they mean that both in terms of weight and temperature. The paint consists of tiny aluminum flakes dotted with even tinier aluminum nanoparticles. A raisin’s worth of the stuff could cover both the front and back of a door. It’s lightweight enough to potentially cut fuel usage in planes and cars that are coated with it. It doesn’t trap heat from sunlight like pigments do, and its constituents are less toxic than paints made with heavy metals like cadmium and cobalt.

…Because structural color can blanket an entire surface with just a thin, ultralight layer, Chanda thinks this will be a game changer—for airlines. A Boeing 747 needs about 500 kilograms of paint. He estimates that his paint could cover the same area with 1.3 kilograms. That’s more than 1,000 pounds shaved off each plane, which would reduce how much fuel is needed per journey.

«

This is absolutely mindblowing, but also really difficult to understand. We tend to forget that paint is a relatively heavy thing – pigments in an emulsion. But butterflies aren’t weighed down by their colouring. The big question, as always, is how easy this will be to commercialise. (Thanks Steve for the link!)
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GM kills more than CarPlay support, it kills choice • Ars Technica

Roberto Baldwin:

»

On Friday, news dropped that GM would be phasing out CarPlay support in future EVs. In its partnership with Google, it hopes that all the features you get from mirroring your iPhone can be replaced with an Android Automotive feature. GM, like Toyota before it, wants to control the digital real estate in its vehicles. It’s a revenue-based and walled-garden (ironically against Apple) decision that will cost them.

Software-driven vehicles should be about choice. Instead, GM is making a short-sighted decision based on a trickle of revenue under the guise of better integration. Owning all the data that a vehicle generates while driving around could be a great source of cash. The problem is potential customers have become accustomed to choosing which device they use to navigate, chat, text, and rock out within their vehicle. They’ve grown weary of being mined for data at the expense of their choice and they’re really not all that keen on in-car subscription services.

For years, automakers have been sharing their vision of a future where cars can drive themselves, and the passengers are kept entertained by a plethora of features that are meant to keep their attention as they roll without worry to their destination. If in this far-off future, a person were to get into their vehicle and be restricted from using their service of choice—CarPlay in this scenario—why would they even buy that vehicle? What’s the point of telling people that, in the future, they can use whatever they want if, as a company, you don’t let them.

GM’s move is based on its desire to offer tighter integration with navigation and other in-car systems. Charging along routes isn’t really possible within projected versions of Apple or Google Maps in many vehicles. That’s a solid reason for GM to make its mapping solution better. It’s not really a reason to reduce the choices it offers consumers.

«

It’s also shortsighted: Apple has a huge proportion of the US smartphone market, so GM is planning to make the experience worse for them.
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Twitter is ending legacy verification in favor of paid blue checkmarks • The Washington Post

Rachel Lerman and Faiz Siddiqui:

»

The removal of verification badges at such a wide scale has the potential to disrupt systems across Twitter’s website, including its recommendation algorithms, spam filters and help center requests. Twitter has previously relied on the badges as an important signal affecting all of those areas — for example, using verification to decide to boost a public figure’s tweet into a user’s timeline.

Removal of verification badges is a largely manual process powered by a system prone to breaking, which draws on a large internal database — similar to an Excel spreadsheet — in which verification data is stored, according to the former employees. Sometimes, an employee would try to remove a badge but the change wouldn’t take, one of the former employees said, prompting workers to explore workarounds. In the past, there was no way to reliably remove badges at a bulk scale — prompting workers tackling spam, for example, to have to remove check marks one-by-one.

“It was all held together with duct tape,” the former employee added.

Musk has already struggled with an increased number of outages since his $44bn takeover last year, troubles that have been compounded by his cutting more than two-thirds of the staff. And earlier attempts to roll out a paid verification system went awry.

The change that began on Saturday could fundamentally alter how Twitter is used and how it is trusted, users and experts say. If the fears are borne out, it will no longer be possible to quickly ascertain whether a public figure’s account is legitimately associated with that person, or the potential work of a sly impersonator.

«

Previously, people with “blue ticks” were the objects of derision from a large group who couldn’t get verified. Now, people with blue ticks will be the objects of derision from a large group who don’t want to be verified. Musk de-verified the New York Times on Sunday after it made clear the organisation wouldn’t pay for verification.

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Apple wins appeal to quash the UK’s mobile stranglehold probe • BNN Bloomberg

Katharine Gemmell:

»

The Big Tech firm appealed the Competition and Markets Authority’s decision to refer the firm to a full-blown market investigation following its findings in its mobile browser market study. It successfully argued that the CMA didn’t follow the rules on timings and that the probe was invalid.

The CMA opened its investigation into both Apple and Google owner Alphabet Inc.’s dominance of the mobile browser market after a separate study concluded they have the power to “exercise a stranglehold” over operating systems, app stores and web browsers on mobile devices. Alphabet wasn’t involved in the lawsuit.

Judges at the Competition Appeal Tribunal ruled Friday that both the CMA’s notice and start of the consultation process happened too late. Its decision “lacks the statutory prerequisites — publication of a timely notice and commencement of a timely consultation — for a valid decision in this regard.” 

“This risks substantially undermining the CMA’s ability to efficiently and effectively investigate and intervene in markets where competition is not working well,” said a CMA spokesperson. The agency is considering an appeal. 

«

No sign of this on the CMA website. The CAT site has the summary of the judgment, which says that the CMA was six months late in all its actions once it had threatened to investigate.
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Imagination makes us human. When did our species first acquire this ability? • The Conversation

Andrey Vyshedskiy is professor of neuroscience at Boston University:

»

To optimize their foraging, [early] mammals developed a new system to efficiently memorize places where they’d found food: linking the part of the brain that records sensory aspects of the landscape—how a place looks or smells—to the part of the brain that controls navigation. They encoded features of the landscape in the neocortex, the outermost layer of the brain. They encoded navigation in the entorhinal cortex. And the whole system was interconnected by the brain structure called the hippocampus. Humans still use this memory system for remembering objects and past events, such as your car and where you parked it.

Groups of neurons in the neocortex encode these memories of objects and past events. Remembering a thing or an episode reactivates the same neurons that initially encoded it. All mammals likely can recall and re-experience previously encoded objects and events by reactivating these groups of neurons. This neocortex-hippocampus-based memory system that evolved 200 million years ago became the first key step toward imagination.

The next building block is the capability to construct a “memory” that hasn’t really happened.

…Multiple types of archaeological artifacts unambiguously associated with prefrontal synthesis appear simultaneously around 65,000 years ago in multiple geographical locations. This abrupt change in imagination has been characterized by historian Yuval Harari as the “cognitive revolution.” Notably, it approximately coincides with the largest Homo sapiens‘ migration out of Africa.

Genetic analyses suggest that a few individuals acquired this prefrontal synthesis ability and then spread their genes far and wide by eliminating other contemporaneous males with the use of an imagination-enabeled strategy and newly developed weapons.

«

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‘Thousands of dollars for something i didn’t do’ • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill and Ryan Mac:

»

On the Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, Randal Quran Reid was driving his white Jeep to his mother’s home outside Atlanta when he was pulled over on a busy highway. A police officer approached his vehicle and asked for his driver’s license. Mr. Reid had left it at home, but he volunteered his name. After asking Mr. Reid if he had any weapons, the officer told him to step out of the Jeep and handcuffed him with the help of two other officers who had arrived.

“What did I do?” Mr. Reid asked. The officer said he had two theft warrants out of Baton Rouge and Jefferson Parish, a district on the outskirts of New Orleans. Mr. Reid was confused; he said he had never been to Louisiana.

Mr. Reid, a transportation analyst, was booked at the DeKalb County jail, to await extradition from Georgia to Louisiana. It took days to find out exactly what he was accused of: using stolen credit cards to buy designer purses.

“I’m locked up for something I have no clue about,” Mr. Reid, 29, said.

His parents made phone calls, hired lawyers and spent thousands of dollars to figure out why the police thought he was responsible for the crime, eventually discovering it was because Mr. Reid bore a resemblance to a suspect who had been recorded by a surveillance camera. The case eventually fell apart and the warrants were recalled, but only after Mr. Reid spent six days in jail and missed a week of work.

…The Sheriff’s Office has a contract with one facial recognition vendor: Clearview AI, which it pays $25,000 a year. According to documents obtained by The Times in a public records request, the department first signed a contract with Clearview in 2019.

«

And yes, the wrongful arrest was based on Clearview data.
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No one wants a printer, but everyone wants to print • WSJ

Rachel Feintzeig:

»

The apartment building had a 24-hour gym, a swimming pool flanked by grills and something called the Sky Lounge on the 12th floor, with an expansive view of downtown Minneapolis. 

But the amenity that Olga Lobasenko and her husband couldn’t get out of their minds as they sized up potential apartments last year was situated in the lobby, illuminated by the glow of a fireplace. People sometimes gathered around it. 

It was a printer. 

“We just assumed it would have to be something you’d struggle to find for your entire life,” says Ms. Lobasenko, 33 years old. 

They moved in and now feel the sweet relief of being able to print whenever they want, without having to beg, borrow or curse a dried-out ink cartridge.  

“This one,” Ms. Lobasenko says of the printer, “is somebody else’s problem.”

Much of the world has moved on from hard copies. We have our phones and our tablets, scannable QR codes and the DocuSign app. And yet, it comes for all of us eventually—the need to print, and print now.

“When you need it, you need it,” says Leigh Stringer, who works at architecture firm Perkins&Will helping companies design sustainable offices. 

«

I love the idea of the couple being googly-eyed for a printer that someone else will look after. The article is full of the stories you’ll know all about: the frustration of trying to find a printer, of the printer that won’t print, of the printer that will print but not print quite what you want. (The link should be free to view.)
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‘Succession’ isn’t really an American drama—it’s a British comedy • Vanity Fair

Piya Sinha-Roy:

»

British comedy often revels in discomforting moments that feel all too real. And while a flat in South Croydon might seem many worlds away from the helicopters and penthouses of New York, [Succession creator Jesse] Armstrong’s penchant for heightening cringe is woven through each episode of Succession as well. Watching [son of patriarch Logan Roy] Roman accidentally sext his father a photo of his genitals instead of [Roman’s love interest] Gerri is right up there with Peep Show’s Mark bumping into Sophie after their catastrophic wedding, sporting ejaculate on his trousers from a quick tryst with a new colleague.

[Second son] Kendall’s “L to the OG” rap at Logan’s birthday induces the same can’t-watch-but-can’t-not-watch squirms of Jez sucking jam from Sophie’s mum’s fingers. And watching Logan piss all over his office harkens back to Mark pissing all over his colleague’s desk. While Succession’s characters are not comparable to those in Armstrong’s other shows, watching Succession sends the familiar physical cringe of Peep Show shuddering up my spine.

«

This is very true. Armstrong was also a writer on The Thick Of It, coming up with some of the fruitiest insults to put into the mouths of politicians and spinners, in a show that was also compulsive cringe-watching.

Succession is astonishingly compelling, though. Worth it just for the insults (almost surely amped up by Armstrong.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Marshall amplifier brand, first to back Pete Townshend, has been bought by a Swedish maker of Bluetooth speakers. CC-licensed photo by i threw a guitar at him. 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. Pardon? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

‘Vulkan files’ leak reveals Putin’s global and domestic cyberwarfare tactics • The Guardian

Luke Harding, Stiliyana Simeonova, Manisha Ganguly and Dan Sabbagh:

»

One document links a Vulkan cyber-attack tool with the notorious hacking group Sandworm, which the US government said twice caused blackouts in Ukraine, disrupted the Olympics in South Korea and launched NotPetya, the most economically destructive malware in history. Codenamed Scan-V, it scours the internet for vulnerabilities, which are then stored for use in future cyber-attacks.

Another system, known as Amezit, amounts to a blueprint for surveilling and controlling the internet in regions under Russia’s command, and also enables disinformation via fake social media profiles. A third Vulkan-built system – Crystal-2V – is a training program for cyber-operatives in the methods required to bring down rail, air and sea infrastructure. A file explaining the software states: “The level of secrecy of processed and stored information in the product is ‘Top Secret’.”

The Vulkan files, which date from 2016 to 2021, were leaked by an anonymous whistleblower angered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Such leaks from Moscow are extremely rare. Days after the invasion in February last year, the source approached the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and said the GRU and FSB “hide behind” Vulkan.

“People should know the dangers of this,” the whistleblower said. “Because of the events in Ukraine, I decided to make this information public. The company is doing bad things and the Russian government is cowardly and wrong. I am angry about the invasion of Ukraine and the terrible things that are happening there. I hope you can use this information to show what is happening behind closed doors.”

The source later shared the data and further information with the Munich-based investigative startup Paper Trail Media. For several months, journalists working for 11 media outlets, including the Guardian, Washington Post and Le Monde, have investigated the files in a consortium led by Paper Trail Media and Der Spiegel.

«

Huge and important leak.
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BuzzFeed is quietly publishing whole AI-generated articles, not just quizzes • Futurism

Noor Al-Sibai and Jon Christian:

»

This month, we noticed that with none of the fanfare of Peretti’s multiple interviews about the quizzes, BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti had promised to avoid.

The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another. Check out these almost-copied lines:

• “Now, I know what you’re thinking – ‘Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'” in an article about Cape May, in New Jersey.
• “Now I know what you’re thinking – ‘but Caribbean destinations are all just crowded resorts, right?'” in an article about St Maarten, in the Caribbean.
• “Now, I know what you’re thinking. Puerto Rico? Isn’t that where all the cruise ships go?” in an article about San Juan, in Puerto Rico.
• “Now, I know what you’re thinking- bigger isn’t always better,” in an article about Providence, in Rhode Island.
• “Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. Nepal? The Himalayas? Haven’t we all heard of that already?” in an article about Khumbu, in Nepal.
• “Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. “Brewster? Never heard of it,” in an article about Brewster, in Massachusetts.
• “I know what you’re thinking: isn’t Stockholm that freezing, gloomy city up in the north that nobody cares about?” in an article about Stockholm, in Sweden.

That’s not the bot’s only lazy trope. On review, almost everything the bot has published contains at least one line about a “hidden gem.”

«

Apparently the people feeding the prompts into ChatGPT (one assumes) are “non-editorial employees who work in domains like client partnerships, account management, and product management.” Now, I know what you’re thinking – there must be some hidden gems among them.
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UK government gambles on carbon capture and storage tech despite scientists’ doubts • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey and Jillian Ambrose:

»

Grant Shapps, the energy and net zero secretary, will on Thursday unveil the “powering up Britain” strategy, with carbon capture and storage (CCS) at its heart, during a visit to a nuclear fusion development facility in Oxford.

Shapps said the continued production of oil and gas in the North Sea was still necessary, and that the UK had a geological advantage in being able to store most of the carbon likely to be produced in Europe for the next 250 years in the large caverns underneath the North Sea.

“Unless you can explain how we can transition [to net zero] without oil and gas, we need oil and gas,” he said. “I am very keen that we fill those cavities with storing carbon. I think there are huge opportunities for us to do that.”

…Scientists told the Guardian that an overdependence on CCS [carbon capture and storage] was ill-advised. More than 700 scientists have written to the prime minister asking him to grant no new oil and gas licences, describing CCS as “yet to be proved at scale”, and the UN secretary-general called on governments last week to stop developing oil and gas.

“CCS is not required if the government moves to renewables as quickly as possible – especially as I am unaware of any CCS that works,” added Mark Maslin, professor of earth science at UCL.

«

I liked the comments of Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute:

»

“Carbon capture is currently ineffective and an extremely costly experiment, distracting from the measures that we know are effective and can implement today.

“The UK government should not be investing £20billion in a strategy that is essentially an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff when we could use the money to not go down the cliff in the first place.”

«

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America’s fossil fuel economy is heading for collapse, signalling the end of the oil age • Age Of Transformation

Nafeez Ahmed:

»

In the late 2020s, then, we will likely see oil demand begin to peak. This will be exacerbated by the fact that the global oil industry is going to become economically unsustainable by around 2030, when it will begin consuming a quarter of its own energy just to keep pumping out more oil.

Even the Journal of Petroleum Technology published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers is taking this prospect seriously. As oil demand declines, oil prices will also decline. At this point, assuming the accuracy of the latest EROI studies, the collapse of the global industry will begin to accelerate because once prices go below a certain point and with EROI levels already unsustainable, the industry will simply become impossible to sustain economically.

«

Ahmed’s argument is that the US shale oil industry is contracting, fast, and that there are all sorts of knock-on effects coming our way, including continuing food price inflation and, as suggested here, big problems in the oil industry, which will leave lots of stranded assets. Worth reading and digesting. (Via Andrew Curry’s Just Two Things.)
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British music brand Marshall sells to Zound Industries • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw:

»

The British family-owned company behind Marshall amplifiers, which have appeared on stage beside musicians from Jimi Hendrix to Jay-Z, is selling to a Swedish maker of Bluetooth speakers, in a deal valuing the combined group at more than $400m.

Marshall Amplification has agreed to a takeover by Stockholm-based Zound Industries, which makes wireless speakers and headphones. The Marshall family will become the largest shareholder with a 24% stake in the company, which will be rebranded as Marshall Group, in addition to receiving an undisclosed cash payment.

Zound has been producing headphones and consumer speakers carrying the distinctive Marshall signature logo and textured black vinyl since the two companies struck a licensing deal in 2010. It also makes personal audio devices under the Adidas and Urbanears brands.

Jim Marshall, who died in 2012, founded the eponymous company in west London alongside his son Terry in 1962. They sold their first amps to young musicians such as The Who guitarist Pete Townshend.

«

There’s something deeply bathetic about the brands that has appeared on the amps and speakers behind some of the world’s LOUDEST musicians now being part of a Bluetooth speaker maker, the milquetoast beaker for noise.
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How did you help us change the way we report the news? • BBC News

Sally Taft:

»

While the BBC had always encouraged audience participation, from reading out letters on the wireless to the early days of radio phone-ins, it was the tsunami on 26 December 2004 which led to a significant shift in the way we dealt with these contributions. Eyewitness accounts told the story where we did not have correspondents on the ground.

On that day, the BBC received thousands of mostly unsolicited emails from people who had been in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and elsewhere when the tsunami had hit and had witnessed dreadful things. And then there were the emails from people who had been unable to contact loved ones.

The BBC’s user-generated content (UGC) hub came to life. Initially, it was for a three-month pilot, with three journalists from different areas of BBC News brought together to gather the best material sent in by the audience and share it across the BBC.

But just as the pilot’s success was being evaluated, suicide bombers targeted London’s transport network during the rush hour on 7 July 2005, killing 52 people. It was a moment which would demonstrate just how important and integral UGC had become to a breaking news story.

The BBC initially reported the police line that there had been power surges on the underground. But for those on the hub, the emails and text messages which soon began pouring in, were telling a very different story.

By piecing these emails together, a picture emerged of what was really going on and we knew the locations of all four devices by 09:58, just over an hour after the first bombs went off.

«

Looking now at these – the first two events (there are multiple ones) from a time when Twitter hadn’t begun – you realise what a colossal impact real-time messaging has had on us. The BBC is now on WhatsApp; whatever disaster befalls us next will be relayed in near-real-time to the news centre, always assuming we can get a data signal.
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Dumb phones are on the rise in the US as Gen Z limits screen time • CNBC

Liam Mays:

»

Dumb phones may be falling out of fashion on a global scale, but it’s a different story in the U.S.

Companies like HMD Global, the maker of Nokia phones, continue to sell millions of mobile devices similar to those used in the early 2000s. This includes what’s known as “feature phones” — traditional flip or slide phones that have additional features like GPS or a hotspot.

“I think you can see it with certain Gen Z populations — they’re tired of the screens,” said Jose Briones, dumb phone influencer and moderator of the subreddit, “r/dumbphones.” “They don’t know what is going on with mental health and they’re trying to make cutbacks.”

In the US, feature flip phone sales were up in 2022 for HMD Global, with tens of thousands sold each month. At the same time, HMD’s global feature phone sales were down, according to the company.

In 2022, almost 80% of feature phone sales in 2022 came from the Middle East, Africa and India, according to Counterpoint Research. But some see that number shifting, as a contingency of young people in the US revert back to dumb or minimalist phones.

“In North America, the market for dumb phones is pretty much flatlined,” said Moorhead. “But I could see it getting up to 5% increase in the next five years if nothing else, based on the public health concerns that are out there.”

«

So “dumb phone influencer” is now a thing? Hard to see a whole generation, or even a significant slice of it, choosing to cut themselves out of all the internet-based messaging services.
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Can a billionaire die without anyone noticing? • Quartz

Tim Fernholz:

»

Sometimes it seems like billionaires can dominate our lives—or at least the news. A mystery in US tax data, however, suggests at least one super-wealthy individual flew under the radar until the very end.

The US Treasury’s daily reports of government financial transactions turned up a surprising data point on Feb. 28, 2023: The deposit of $7bn in the category of “estate and gift” taxes. It was the highest collection of that kind of tax since at least 2005. It’s possible that more than one enormous tax bill happened to be processed on that day, but that would still be remarkable.

A Treasury spokesperson says this was not a reporting error, and a spokesperson for the Internal Revenue Service says it is unlikely this would be caused by processing a backlog of returns in one day. Privacy rules prevent government officials from discussing the specifics of any tax return.

The huge tax return was first spotted by John Ricco, the associate director of budget analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a group at the University of Pennyslvania that tracks the impact of economic policy changes. Ricco has been tracking estate tax deposits because of a strange natural experiment: Though the estate tax was reduced in 2017 during president Donald Trump’s tax overhaul, collections have soared in recent years, likely due to excess deaths of the elderly during the pandemic.

…Based on the tax rate, that $7bn payment implies an estate or gift of some $17.5bn. However, the Tax Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C, has estimated that estates typically pay a 17% effective tax rate after exemptions and other forms of avoidance. Even if only 50% of the estate was taxable, that’s a potential value of $35bn. Even the lowest estimate would make the estate’s owner one of the 100 richest people in the world, according to Bloomberg News.

«

There’s one other possibility, Fernholz notes: that it’s an advance payment – that someone wealthy has given a huge amount of their estate to a relative or other ahead of their death, to avoid taxes. Sure would like to know who.
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Electric vehicle charge point target is ‘20 years behind schedule’

Ben Clatworthy:

»

Ministers are set to miss their target of installing 300,000 new electric car chargers by 2030 by 20 years, opposition leaders have claimed.

Labour accused the government of being “asleep at the wheel” after it was revealed that fewer than 9,000 public electric vehicle charging devices were installed in the UK last year.

There are now 30 electric vehicles for every charge point, compared with 16 at the start of 2020, according to Times analysis, fuelling fears that infrastructure is failing to keep up with demand.

New figures from the Department for Transport (DfT) show there were 37,055 charging devices live at the start of the year. The figure represents a 31% increase in the past year, although critics say a gulf is emerging between the number of chargers compared with the number of electric vehicles.

It is estimated there are more than 1.3 million plug-in cars on the roads, according to registration data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Motoring groups are demanding that the government sets a mandate for installations in a bid to avert a charging crisis. So-called range anxiety is seen as one of the biggest barriers preventing motorists making the switch to electric – along with the price of vehicles.

«

The problem isn’t just the paucity of chargers; it’s that people only need to have a couple of bad experiences with broken ones (a surprisingly common problem) and their range anxiety is heightened even more, because they can’t be sure what awaits them.

The commercial incentives are clearly just not working here.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The market for “prompt engineers” to drive AI systems is booming. You could call them wizards casting spells. CC-licensed photo by Louis K.Louis K. on Flickr.

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

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

Elon Musk joins call for pause in creation of giant AI ‘digital minds’ • The Guardian

Alex Hern:

»

More than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts, researchers and backers have joined a call for an immediate pause on the creation of “giant” AIs for at least six months, so the capabilities and dangers of systems such as GPT-4 can be properly studied and mitigated.

The demand is made in an open letter signed by major AI players including: Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, the research lab responsible for ChatGPT and GPT-4; Emad Mostaque, who founded London-based Stability AI; and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple.

Its signatories also include engineers from Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Meta and Microsoft, as well as academics including the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus.

“Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control,” the letter says. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

The authors, coordinated by the “longtermist” thinktank the Future of Life Institute, cite OpenAI’s own co-founder Sam Altman in justifying their calls. In a post from February, Altman wrote: “At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.”

The letter continued: “We agree. That point is now.”

If researchers will not voluntarily pause their work on AI models more powerful than GPT-4, the letter’s benchmark for “giant” models, then “governments should step in”, the authors say.

«

It was going so well until Musk signed it, which makes one think maybe it’s not such a problem.
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iPhone 15 Pro low-energy chip to allow solid-state buttons to work when device is off or out of battery • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will use a new ultra-low energy microprocessor allowing certain features like the new capacitive solid-state buttons to remain functional even when the handset is powered off or the battery has run out, according to a source that shared details on the MacRumors forums.

The source of this rumour is the same forum member that shared accurate details about the Dynamic Island last year before the iPhone 14 Pro was officially launched, so there is good reason to believe that the following information is reliable.

According to the anonymous source, the new microprocessor will replace Apple’s current super-low energy mode that allows an iPhone to be located via Find My after it has been powered off or for up to 24 hours if its battery has been depleted, and enables Apple Pay Express Mode to be used for up to five hours after the battery has run out.

The new chip will allegedly take over these existing Bluetooth LE/Ultra Wideband functions in addition to powering the solid-state buttons – including an “action” button that replaces the mute switch – when the phone is on, off, or the battery is depleted.

«

An action button replacing the mute switch? I suppose the action could be “mute”. (Or “unmute”.) At this point we might as well do a version of the bad comedian’s joke – “why don’t they make the aircraft out of the same stuff they use for the black box?” – and ask why they don’t power the phone with this low-energy microprocessor.
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Disney, Microsoft say meh to the metaverse • WSJ

Meghan Bobrowsky:

»

The metaverse, the virtual world that was the hot thing in tech less than two years ago, is facing a harsher reality.

Walt Disney has shut down the division that was developing its metaverse strategies, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. Microsoft recently shut down a social virtual-reality platform it acquired in 2017. And Mark Zuckerberg, who renamed Facebook as Meta Platforms to signal his seriousness about the metaverse, focused more on artificial intelligence on an earnings call last month. 

Meanwhile, the price for virtual real estate in some online worlds, where users can hang out as avatars, has cratered. The median sale price for land in Decentraland has declined almost 90% from a year ago, according to WeMeta, a site that tracks land sales in the metaverse.

Meta’s name change in October 2021 spurred excitement about metaverse experiences, products and platforms. But slow user adoption, driven in part by expensive hardware requirements and glitchy tech, and deteriorating economic conditions have put a damper on expectations the metaverse will drive meaningful revenue anytime soon. 

«

Fantastic headline. Plus it’s really hard to see Apple seriously unveiling a VR headset at its Worldwide Developers Conference (which is from June 5-9, announced on Wednesday) and expecting anyone to think much of it. The game’s all with AI right now.
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U.S. Energy Information Administration • EIA – Independent Statistics and Analysis

»

Last year, the U.S. electric power sector produced 4,090 million megawatthours (MWh) of electric power. In 2022, generation from renewable sources—wind, solar, hydro, biomass, and geothermal—surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time. Renewable generation surpassed nuclear generation for the first time in 2021 and continued to provide more electricity than nuclear generation last year.

Natural gas remained the largest source of U.S. electricity generation, increasing from a 37% share of U.S. generation in 2021 to 39% in 2022. The share of coal-fired generation decreased from 23% in 2021 to 20% in 2022 as a number of coal-fired power plants retired and the remaining plants were used less. The share of nuclear generation decreased from 20% in 2021 to 19% in 2022, following the Palisades nuclear power plant’s retirement in May 2022.

«

Looking at the graph, gas is basically replacing coal, even while energy demand in total is going up, and renewables are filling the demand gap.
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US court sanctions Google for deleting evidence in antitrust cases • Reuters

Mike Scarcella:

»

Alphabet Inc’s Google LLC intentionally destroyed employee “chat” evidence in antitrust litigation in California and must pay sanctions and face a possible penalty at trial, a US judge ruled on Tuesday.

US District Judge James Donato in San Francisco said in his order that Google “fell strikingly short” in its duties to preserve records. The ruling is part of a multidistrict litigation that includes a consumer class action with as many as 21 million residents; 38 states and the District of Columbia; and companies including Epic Games Inc and Match Group LLC.

The consumers and other plaintiffs are challenging Google’s alleged monopoly for distributing Android mobile applications, allegations that Google has denied. Plaintiffs have claimed aggregate damages of $4.7bn.

The judge asked the plaintiffs’ lawyers by April 21 to provide an amount in legal fees they are seeking as a sanction.

Separately, the plaintiffs will have a chance to urge Donato to tell jurors that Google destroyed information that was unfavorable to it. He said he wants to see “the state of play” at a later stage in the case.

“Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct,” the judge said.

A Google spokesperson on Tuesday said the company has “produced over three million documents, including thousands of chats.”

In a court filing last year, Google’s lawyers said the company took “robust steps to preserve relevant chats.”

«

Apparently Google left it up to participants in chats whether to retain them even after the litigation had started. The judge’s decision is pretty brutal.
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Twitter is dying • TechCrunch

Natasha Lomas:

»

Twitter is dying.

The value that Twitter’s platform produced, by combining valuable streams of qualification and curiosity, is being beaten and wrung out. What’s left has — for months now — felt like an echo-y shell of its former self. And it’s clear that with every freshly destructive decision — whether it’s unbanning the nazis and letting the toxicity rip, turning verification into a pay-to-play megaphone or literally banning journalists — Musk has applied his vast wealth to destroying as much of the information network’s value as possible in as short a time as possible; each decision triggering another exodus of expertise as more long-time users give up and depart.

Simply put, Musk is flushing Twitter down the sink. I guess now we all know what the dumb meme really meant.

On April Fools Day, the next — perhaps final — stage of the destruction will commence as Musk rips away the last layer of legacy verification, turning up the volume on anyone who’s willing to pay him $7.99 per month to shout over everyone else.

Anyone who was verified under the old (and by no means perfect) system of Twitter verification — which was at least related to who they were (celebrity, expert, journalist, etc.) — will cease to be verified. Assuming they haven’t already deleted their account. Only accounts that pay Musk will display a ‘Blue Check’.

This is just a parody of verification since the blue tick no longer signals any kind of quality. But the visual similarity seems intentional; a dark pattern designed to generate maximum confusion.

«

Initially, Musk complained that the “blue tick” of verified accounts created a feudal system (in fact, it created a reputation system). Then he let people buy into it, diluting the reputational usefulness. Then he’s removing the reputation part. It’s like watching someone set money on fire, though the KLF did it with more style and annoyed fewer people.
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The deepfake AI porn industry is operating in plain sight • NBC News

Kat Tenbarge:

»

An NBC News review of two of the largest websites that host sexually explicit deepfake videos found that they were easily accessible through Google and that creators on the websites also used the online chat platform Discord to advertise videos for sale and the creation of custom videos. 

The deepfakes are created using AI software that can take an existing video and seamlessly replace one person’s face with another’s, even mirroring facial expressions. Some lighthearted deepfake videos of celebrities have gone viral, but the most common use is for sexually explicit videos. According to Sensity, an Amsterdam-based company that detects and monitors AI-developed synthetic media for industries like banking and fintech, 96% of deepfakes are sexually explicit and feature women who didn’t consent to the creation of the content.

Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a 5-minute deepfake of a “personal girl,” meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65. 

The nonconsensual deepfake economy has remained largely out of sight, but it recently had a surge of interest after a popular livestreamer admitted this year to having looked at sexually explicit deepfake videos of other livestreamers. Right around that time, Google search traffic spiked for “deepfake porn.” 

«

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AI and the American Smile • Medium

jenka:

»

“The expectation was, you have to smile eight hours a day,” a woman Baker calls Sofiya tells her. A 41-year-old Russian émigré who had been living in the United States for the past decade, Sofiya “was a proficient English speaker,” Baker writes, but it was in her job as a bank teller that she “came face-to-face with her deficiency in speaking ‘American.’ This other English language, made up of not just words but also facial expressions and habits of conversation subtle enough to feel imagined.

Smiling almost constantly was at the core of her duties as a teller. As she smiled at one customer after another, she would wince inwardly at how silly it felt. There was no reason to smile at her clients, she thought, since there was nothing particularly funny or heartwarming about their interactions. And her face hurt.”

This confrontation with the culture clash of smiling for an Eastern European immigrant in America hits close to home. Which is why seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, “cheese” smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring.

It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.

«

That sort-of ingratiating smile that the AI of Midjourney puts onto different races and periods really does mark one out.
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$335,000 pay for ‘AI Whisperer’ jobs appears in red-hot market • BNN Bloomberg

Conrad Quilty-Harper:

»

Everybody is talking about the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT. Less noticed is a jobs market mushrooming around the technology, where these newly created roles can pay upwards of $335,000 a year.

And for many a computer engineering degree is optional. 

They’re called “prompt engineers,” people who spend their day coaxing the AI to produce better results and help companies train their workforce to harness the tools.

Over a dozen artificial intelligence language systems called large language models, or LLMs, have been created by companies like Google parent Alphabet Inc., OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc.. The technology has moved rapidly from experiments to practical use, with firms like Microsoft Corp. integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and GitHub software development tool.

As the technology proliferates, many companies are finding they need someone to add rigor to their results.

“It’s like an AI whisperer,” says Albert Phelps, a prompt engineer at Mudano, part of consultancy firm Accenture in Leytonstone, England. “You’ll often find prompt engineers come from a history, philosophy, or English language background, because it’s wordplay. You’re trying to distill the essence or meaning of something into a limited number of words.” 

Phelps, 29, studied history at the University of Warwick near Birmingham, England, before starting his career as a consultant for banks like Clydesdale Bank and Barclays Plc, helping them solve problems around risk and regulations. A talk from the Alan Turing Institute, a UK-government funded institute for artificial intelligence, inspired him to research AI, leading to his role at Accenture.

«

If the prompts are spells, as Alex Hern once put it, which place will turn out to be Hogwarts?
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Arm seeks to raise prices ahead of hotly anticipated IPO • Financial Times

Anna Gross, Cheng Ting-Fang and Kana Inagaki:

»

The UK-based group, which designs blueprints for semiconductors found in more than 95% of all smartphones, has recently informed several of its biggest customers of a radical shift to its business model, according to several industry executives and former employees.

These people said Arm planned to stop charging chipmakers royalties for using its designs based on a chip’s value and instead charge device makers based on the value of the device. This should mean the company earns several times more for each design it sells, as the average smartphone is vastly more expensive than a chip.

The changes represent one of the biggest shake-ups to Arm’s business strategy in decades, at a time when SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son is seeking to drive up Arm’s profits and attract investors to its impending return to the public markets.

“Arm is going to customers and saying ‘We would like to get paid more money for broadly the same thing’,” said one former senior employee who left the company last year. “What SoftBank is doing at the moment is testing the market value of the monopoly that Arm has.”

«

This is the pricing model that Qualcomm uses, and it’s really not popular with a lot of Qualcomm purchasers, notably Apple, because if you sell expensive smartphones then you’re on the hook for a chunk of the retail price. But if Arm and Qualcomm do it, what option? And does Apple, which has a special licence from Arm to design its own chips (and helped found Arm, back in the day), get an exception?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What will people in the US hook up to Amazon’s new low-power network in their neighbourhood? Something to open their garage door, maybe? CC-licensed photo by XoMEoXXoMEoX 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. Opening soon. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Half of Twitter Blue subscribers have fewer than 1,000 followers • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

Twitter power users have often criticized Twitter Blue subscribers. After all, they say, who pays for a free website? Well, thanks to some new data, we now know a little more about the accounts that subscribe to Twitter Blue.

Researcher Travis Brown, who has been tracking Twitter Blue subscriptions since January, recently revealed around half of all users subscribed to Twitter Blue have less than 1,000 followers. That’s approximately 220,132 paying subscribers.

Furthermore, 78,059 paying Twitter Blue subscribers have less than 100 users following their account. That’s 17.6% of all Twitter Blue subscribers.

Breaking down follower counts even further, there are 2,270 paying Twitter Blue subscribers who have zero followers.

That’s a significant chunk of Twitter Blue subscribers being unable to crack even four-digits worth of followers, even though some have subscribed believing it would help boost the growth of their Twitter account.

…According to his data, Twitter Blue currently has a total of 444,435 paying subscribers. Accounting for the limitations of pulling this data using the Twitter API, Brown tells Mashable that he estimates that Twitter likely has around 475,000 paying subscribers.

«

That adds up to less than $46m per year from all those subscribers, and there’s zero evidence that the rate of uptake is increasing. The 475,000 figure is about 0.2% of Twitter daily active users: 2 in every thousand. And with “verification” for verified people going away next month, there’s even less point in being “verified”.
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Amazon has just opened up its Sidewalk network to give any gadget free low speed data • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

»

It turns out that I have a low-power, low-bandwidth, long-range IoT network all around me, ready and waiting for my smart gadgets to jump on. Today, Amazon revealed just how far its Sidewalk IoT network penetrates the average American neighborhood.

…The company’s first Sidewalk coverage map claims that over 90% of the US population can access the now-public network (it’s limited to the US only). Using a Sidewalk developer test kit supplied by Amazon, I drove around my town to confirm this data and, over three days of traveling more than 40 miles, found that the connectivity was surprisingly strong in my corner of South Carolina, even in the wilds of a national forest.  

Amazon has released this data in conjunction with the official opening of Sidewalk to developers. First announced in 2019, Amazon Sidewalk is a new low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) that Amazon believes will help enable the next wave of connected devices. It’s not designed to replace cellular data for high-bandwidth devices but to be used instead of expensive LTE or 5G connectivity on gadgets that don’t need that much data and where paying $10 or more a month for data is excessive.

Currently, Sidewalk mainly exists to help Ring cameras send motion notifications even when they’re offline and allow Level smart locks to connect to the internet without the need for battery-sapping Wi-Fi radios. Amazon has also developed a few early partnerships, including with CareBand, which developed a wearable health tracker. Now, Amazon wants others to build devices that use the free network.

All you need to do is request a test kit — a small gray wireless device with Ring branding on it — gauge if the connectivity in the area you want to deploy your product is sufficient, and you can start building.

…What type of consumer IoT devices could benefit from Sidewalk? Think dog trackers, package trackers, soil moisture sensors, weather stations, leak sensors, mailbox sensors, pill bottles, solar panel controllers, garage door controllers, and anything else that doesn’t always live somewhere Wi-Fi is a given.

«

Sounds pretty exciting, in a low-key, fill-in-the-blanks join-the-dots way. That, though, often leads to new possibilities when something becomes newly adjacent – like smartphones + GPS meaning Uber.

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A quick way to learn more about your search results • Google Blog

JK Kearns, product manager for Google Search:

»

When you search for information on Google, you probably often come across results from sources that you’re familiar with: major retailer websites, national news sites and more.

But there’s also a ton of great information on and services available from sites that you may not have come across before. And while you can always use Google to do some additional research about those sites, we’re working on a new way for you to find helpful info without having to do another search.

Starting today, next to most results on Google, you’ll begin to see a menu icon that you can tap to learn more about the result or feature and where the information is coming from. With this additional context, you can make a more informed decision about the sites you may want to visit and what results will be most useful for you.

When available, you’ll see a description of the website from Wikipedia, which provides free, reliable information about tens of millions of sites on the web. Based on Wikipedia’s open editing model, which relies on thousands of global volunteers to add content, these descriptions will provide the most up-to-date verified and sourced information available on Wikipedia about the site. If it’s a site you haven’t heard of before, that additional information can give you context or peace of mind, especially if you’re looking for something important, like health or financial information.

«

Will people use these much? I suspect that this is a precursor to showing the “About” information by default once AI-generated sites become rife, or making the trustworthiness (which Google has already decided) more visible.
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Opinion: We will stop at nothing to protect the children • The Washington Post

This piece is by Alexandra Petri, the Washington Post’s go-to writer for withering irony (think of an American version of Marina Hyde and you’re there, though without the tabloid showbiz allusions). You need to read this piece to get its effect; an extract won’t work.
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Clearview AI used nearly one million times by US police, it tells the BBC • BBC News

James Clayton and Ben Derico:

»

Facial recognition firm Clearview has run nearly a million searches for US police, its founder has told the BBC.

CEO Hoan Ton-That also revealed Clearview now has 30bn images scraped from platforms such as Facebook, taken without users’ permissions.

The company has been repeatedly fined millions of dollars in Europe and Australia for breaches of privacy.

Critics argue that the police’s use of Clearview puts everyone into a “perpetual police line-up”.

“Whenever they have a photo of a suspect, they will compare it to your face,” says Matthew Guaragilia from the Electronic Frontier Foundation says. “It’s far too invasive.”

The figure of a million searches comes from Clearview and has not been confirmed by police. But in a rare admission, Miami Police has confirmed to the BBC it uses this software for every type of crime.
Clearview’s system allows a law enforcement customer to upload a photo of a face and find matches in a database of billions of images it has collected.

It then provides links to where matching images appear online. It is considered one of the most powerful and accurate facial recognition companies in the world.

…In a rare interview with law enforcement about the effectiveness of Clearview, Miami Police said they used the software for every type of crime, from murders to shoplifting. Assistant Chief of Police Armando Aguilar said his team used the system about 450 times a year, and that it had helped solve several murders.

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If it really did solve murders (rather than give the police someone who they could believably charge), that’s something to consider.
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The scammer tricking instagram into banning influencer accounts • ProPublica

Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis:

»

Account banning is just one of several lucrative schemes that prey on Instagram, which is uniquely important for celebrities, entrepreneurs, influencers and anyone seeking clout and status. Last year, a ProPublica investigation exposed a million-dollar operation that saw people pay $25,000 or more to fraudulently obtain verified accounts.

The verification badge, a blue tick added next to an account’s name, is applied to accounts that Instagram determines are authentic, unique, complete and notable. Verified accounts can charge more for sponsored posts, are given prominence by Instagram’s algorithms, and are seen as more difficult for people like [the scammer] OBN to take down. The ProPublica story prompted Meta to remove verification badges from hundreds of accounts.

OBN has said that he can take down verified accounts. “If you want someone smoked we talk 4 figures or nothing,” he wrote in his Telegram channel. In a separate post, he offered to create verified accounts for a $15,000 fee.

Meta has acknowledged that it needs to invest more in customer support. In February, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would offer people the ability to pay for account verification and enhanced support, including “​​access to a real person for common account issues.” The Meta spokesperson said the company has invested in new account security and recovery measures, including a tool to help users who’ve been hacked. It’s also giving more users an opportunity to complain to a human agent rather than a bot.

The 1996 federal Communications Decency Act generally exempts platforms from legal liability related to the behavior of their users. However, the Federal Trade Commission has required several online platforms to bolster their security.

«

It’s a detailed piece, which gives you a glimpse of the colossal amounts of money spinning off Instagram – which even so offers effectively zero protection to those accounts.
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Britain’s heat pump uptake among worst in Europe, study shows • BNN Bloomberg

Celia Bergin:

»

Heat pumps may be essential to Britain’s ambitions to cut emissions and reduce exposure to volatile energy markets, but sales are stubbornly low and uptake of the low-carbon technology is among the worst in Europe. 

That’s according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank, which found that Finland has sold more than 40 times as many heat pumps per 100,000 people than the UK. Even France, a relative newcomer to the market, has increased installations 12-fold compared with Britain. 

This is despite a government pledge of £450m ($554m) to help people upgrade natural gas boilers to heat pumps in order to meet a target of 600,000 new fittings each year by 2028. If installed at the same rate to 2032 as Norway, one of Europe’s leaders in heat pump sales, the technology could displace 70% of UK domestic gas usage, according to ECIU’s analysis.

«

Why is Finland so much better at this? The UK’s figure is 88 per 100,000 people; Finland’s more than 4,000. The UK’s is about one-third that of the next worst, Slovakia.
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European ammunition maker says plant expansion hit by energy-guzzling TikTok site • Financial Times

Richard Milne:

»

Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government and a Finnish state-controlled defence company, has been told there is no surplus energy for its Raufoss plant in central Norway as a data centre that counts the social media platform as its main customer is using up the electricity in the region.

“We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos,” Morten Brandtzæg, Nammo chief executive, told the Financial Times.

Demand for ammunition has surged thanks to the war in Ukraine, which is using about 6,000 rounds per day — equivalent to the annual orders from a small European country — and would like to fire 65,000 if it could, according to Nammo.

Brandtzæg said demand for artillery rounds was more than 15 times higher than normal. The European ammunition industry needs to invest €2bn in new factories just to keep up with the demand from Ukraine, let alone other European countries, according to the Nammo chief executive. “We see an extraordinary demand for our products which we have never seen before in our history,” he said.

TikTok is building three data centres this year with the option of adding two more by 2025 in Hamar, 25km to the east of Raufoss, Norwegian data centre provider Green Mountain said this month.

Asked whether it was coincidence that a Chinese-owned company was stopping a defence company’s expansion, Brandtzæg replied: “I will not rule out that it’s not by pure coincidence that this activity is close to a defence company. I can’t rule it out.”

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“Our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos” deserves to be on a plaque somewhere.
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US regulator sues crypto exchange Binance and boss Changpeng Zhao • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Gretchen Lowe, the CFTC’s chief counsel, said Binance had put profits ahead of complying with the law. The complaint alleges that Binance has broken the law by offering commodity derivatives transactions – which effectively place a bet on the price of a cryptocurrency rather than buying it directly – to US customers since July 2019, despite not being registered with the CFTC.

Lowe said: “Defendants’ alleged wilful evasion of US law is at the core of the commission’s complaint against Binance. The defendants’ own emails and chats reflect that Binance’s compliance efforts have been a sham and Binance deliberately chose – over and over – to place profits over following the law.”

Howard Fischer, a partner at New York law firm Moses & Singer, said the CFTC action showed US regulators are taking concerted action against cryptocurrency exchanges, after the US financial watchdog – the Securities and Exchange Commission – said it was considering potential enforcement action against Coinbase.

“In conjunction with the SEC’s expected enforcement action against Coinbase, it looks like US regulators are taking steps to shutter or at least significantly restrict the US activities of the major remaining crypto exchanges,” he said.

«

Feels like a “last one to leave, turn the lights out” moment. Although the price of bitcoin hasn’t collapsed, and it’s hard to see how much effect this would have on Binance’s activity outside the US, there’s a certain fin de siecle feel to these events.
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Eye drops recalled as bacteria causes people to go blind • The Portsmouth News

Chelsie Sewell:

»

Three people have died, and 68 people  left blind, after using eye drops contaminated with deadly bacteria. Artificial tears manufactured by EzriCare were confirmed to be contaminated with P. aeruginosa, a disease only usually found in hospitals, causing panic across the US.

EzriCare’s Artificial Tears was recalled in January over links to eye infections. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an urgent warning at the time over the products made by India-based Global Pharma.

Testing by the agency found the drug-resistant strain of P. aeruginosa — which usually spreads in hospitals — in open bottles collected from patients. The droplets are the cause of numerous eye infections across up to 16 states – with cases dating back as far back as May 2022.

They include at least one reported fatality and several more that caused ‘permanent blindness’. The agency still does not know whether the drops were contaminated during manufacturing or after they had left the factory.

«

Absolutely terrifying and incredible that this could be allowed to go on for so long. Contrast this with the astonishing precautions being taken in the UK over Night Nurse and Day Nurse, which contain a cough suppressant called pholcodine, and which are being taken off pharmacy shelves because – follow this – people can have a “sudden, severe and life-threatening allergic reaction” if they’ve taken it up to a year before and then are given general anaesthetic involving neuromuscular blocking agents. Who found that causal chain?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Once more there’s bad news about the Greenland ice sheet. Trouble is, there probably won’t ever be good news about it. CC-licensed photo by NASA on The CommonsNASA on The Commons 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. Last Friday’s looked at how the AI tsunami is starting to show up.

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

Get off my desktop! Windows must stop showing tabloid news • Tom’s Hardware

Avram Pitch:

»

Don’t get me wrong: I love reading about the 26 year old who spent $50K to look like an alien (in 2017, but covered as news last week) or the 9-foot “man-eating” alligator who came to someone’s door as much as the next person. But that kind of information shouldn’t be delivered as part of my operating system; I can get it on a website or on social media. 

Windows is the most popular operating system in the world and people rely on it to get things done. Pumping embarrassing, low-quality news right into utilities like the search box is an unwelcome distraction, especially for someone who is easily distracted by it. You can turn off the search box’s “search highlights,” but they are enabled by default and you can’t remove all of the headlines from the weather widget. You can turn off the widget entirely, but then you won’t get the temperature and precipitation right on your taskbar.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw something in my Windows search box that was a lot worse than distracting: it was a series of dangerous conspiracy theories about former NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. I’m not here to debate Dr. Fauci’s contributions and I don’t think Windows search box should be either.

On March 9th, a headline in the search box’s “trending news from the web” section had a picture of Fauci with the headline “Hid the COVID truth.” However, when I clicked through to the actual story, its own headline was much less accusatory and read “Fauci Says He’s Always Been ‘Honest’ as COVID Origins Questions Raised.” So, while the headline itself lent the impression that Dr. Fauci was caught lying, the article it linked to merely pointed out that Fauci was subject to criticism from politicians who think that he’s not telling the truth. That’s a big difference. 

…Microsoft should either disable these distracting headlines by default or stop charging for its operating system and call it “free with ads.” After all, the company wants PC builders to pay a whopping $139 for a Windows 11 Home license, but then it tries to make money off of those same users by getting them to click on low-quality MSN content that makes money from advertising.

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Don’t use Windows, so wasn’t aware of this. But is it such a hardship not to get the temperature and rainfall in your Taskbar? One presumes there are a gazillion Taskbar apps that can do that.
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ChatGPT gets its “Wolfram Superpowers”! • Stephen Wolfram Writings

Stephen Wolfram:

»

Early in January I wrote about the possibility of connecting ChatGPT to Wolfram|Alpha. And today—just two and a half months later—I’m excited to announce that it’s happened! Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as “computational superpowers”. It’s still very early days for all of this, but it’s already very impressive—and one can begin to see how amazingly powerful (and perhaps even revolutionary) what we can call “ChatGPT + Wolfram” can be.

Back in January, I made the point that, as an LLM neural net, ChatGPT—for all its remarkable prowess in textually generating material “like” what it’s read from the web, etc.—can’t itself be expected to do actual nontrivial computations, or to systematically produce correct (rather than just “looks roughly right”) data, etc. But when it’s connected to the Wolfram plugin it can do these things. So here’s my (very simple) first example from January, but now done by ChatGPT with “Wolfram superpowers” installed:

[How far is it from Chicago to Tokyo? ChatGPT: 6,313 miles; in an aircraft travelling at 550mph, a journey of about 11h30.]

It’s a correct result (which in January it wasn’t)—found by actual computation. And here’s a bonus: immediate visualization:

How did this work? Under the hood, ChatGPT is formulating a query for Wolfram|Alpha—then sending it to Wolfram|Alpha for computation, and then “deciding what to say” based on reading the results it got back.

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This is a hell of a change. The WolframAlpha search engine has always been useful, but just a bit tricky to use well. But an accurate LLM? That transforms the landscape.
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RightWingGPT – An AI Manifesting the Opposite Political Biases of ChatGPT

David Rozado:

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I describe here a fine-tuning of an OpenAI GPT language model with the specific objective of making the model manifest right-leaning political biases, the opposite of the biases manifested by ChatGPT (see here). Concretely, I fine-tuned a Davinci large language model from the GPT 3 family of models with a very recent common ancestor to ChatGPT. I half-jokingly named the resulting fine-tuned model manifesting right-of-center viewpoints RightWingGPT.

…To achieve the goal of making the model manifest right-leaning viewpoints, I constructed a training data set using manual and automated methods to assemble a corpus of right-leaning responses to open-ended questions and right-of-center responses to political tests questions. The data set consisted of 354 examples of right-leaning answers to questions from 11 different political orientation tests and 224 longform answers to questions/comments with political connotations. Those answers were manually curated and partially taken from common viewpoints manifested by conservative/Republican voters and prominent right-of-center intellectuals such as Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, G. K. Chesterton or Roger Scruton.

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It’s quite scary – and it only cost him $300 or so to get it to a stage where it could have guested on any stupid US cable network to explain why of course you need to cut taxes on the rich. Give it an AI-generated video face and it’s got a job for life.
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The Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return • AGU Newsroom

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The Greenland Ice Sheet covers 1.7 million square kilometers (660,200 square miles) in the Arctic. If it melts entirely, global sea level would rise about 7 meters (23 feet), but scientists aren’t sure how quickly the ice sheet could melt. Modeling tipping points, which are critical thresholds where a system behavior irreversibly changes, helps researchers find out when that melt might occur.

Based in part on carbon emissions, a new study using simulations identified two tipping points for the Greenland Ice Sheet: releasing 1000 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere will cause the southern portion of the ice sheet to melt; about 2500 gigatons of carbon means permanent loss of nearly the entire ice sheet.

Having emitted about 500 gigatons of carbon, we’re about halfway to the first tipping point.

“The first tipping point is not far from today’s climate conditions, so we’re in danger of crossing it,” said Dennis Höning, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who led the study. “Once we start sliding, we will fall off this cliff and cannot climb back up.”

The study was published in AGU’s journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes short-format, high-impact research spanning the Earth and space sciences.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is already melting; between 2003 and 2016, it lost about 255 gigatons (billions of tons) of ice each year. Much of the melt to date has been in the southern part of the ice sheet. Air and water temperature, ocean currents, precipitation and other factors all determine how quickly the ice sheet melts and where it loses ice.

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Next to impossible to see any way that this doesn’t go all the way. Suggestion: don’t buy a coastal property.
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Electric air taxis being developed for Paris Olympics in 2024 • The Guardian

Senay Boztas:

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Athletes are getting in shape for the Paris Olympic Games in 2024, and so is the world’s first electric air taxi network.

“We are going to make it happen,” Solène Le Bris of Paris airports operator Groupe ADP told an industry audience at Amsterdam Drone Week. “We are trying to launch the first e-VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] pre-commercial service in the world: that’s our ambition.”

In a packed talk on Tuesday, the first outlines were revealed of what has been dubbed the “Tesla of the skies”.

Senior civil engineer Le Bris explained that there will be five vertiports where passengers can board the vehicles, the first of which at Cergy-Pontoise opened in November and is functioning as a test centre.

Using the existing helicopter route network, the vehicles – known as VoloCity air taxis – will fly with one passenger and one pilot along two routes, taking short rides from Charles de Gaulle airport to Le Bourget then to a new landing pad at Austerlitz Paris, and another route from Paris to Sans-Cyr.

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One passenger and one pilot? What on earth?
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The RIAA v. Steve Jobs • Rogue Amoeba

Paul Kafasis is a co-founder of Rogue Amoeba, which makes software (particularly Audio Hijack) that enables you to record sound coming from another source on your Mac:

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Earlier this month …we heard a chilling story. It comes from the Podfather himself, Adam Curry, who was instrumental in helping podcasts take off in the mid-2000s. He’s also a long-time Audio Hijack user and supporter, one who provided us with many helpful suggestions in the early years. Recently, Adam gave an interview detailing his efforts to modernize the podcasting format. Therein, he told a story about the origins of podcasts in iTunes, and a conversation he had with Steve Jobs circa 2005:

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And in that very meeting, Steve asked: “How do you do your recording?”. We didn’t really have any tools to record, there was not much going on at the time. But the Mac had an application called Audio Hijack Pro, and it was great because we could create audio chains with compressors, and replicate a bit of studio work.

Eddy Cue said: “The RIAA wants us to disable Audio Hijack Pro, because with it you could record any sound off of your Mac, any song, anything”. Steve then turned to me and said: “Do you need this to create these podcasts?”. I said: “Currently, yes!”. So Steve Jobs told them to get lost [he used much stronger words – CA], and I thought: “Hey man, thanks, Steve’s on my side. That’s cool.”.

Even 18 years on, I find this story rather terrifying. If not for an offhand conversation in which we had no involvement, things could have turned out very differently for our company.

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As Kafasis says, the US music industry association, the RIAA, in those days was the terror of the land. Any lawsuit they brought would have foundered, eventually, if the defendants could have survived long enough in court, on the same basis that videotape recorders survived the MPAA (the RIAA but for music).
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Apple Passwords deserve an app • cabel.com

Cabel Sasser:

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We all know that Apple has nice built-in password management in macOS and iOS. But very, very few people know that Apple’s passwords can also:
• Autofill any 2FA verification codes, which you easily can add by scanning QR codes!
• Keep a “Notes” field where you can add extra data, like 2FA backup codes, for each password!
• Import passwords exported from another app, like 1Password!

(And it all syncs across your devices, for free?!)

Very few people know these things because Apple tucks all of their important password features away in weird little Settings panels, instead of in a Proper Real App. I think this is a mistake.

Passwords are productivity, not preferences.

…In my dumble opinion, Apple should:
• Break Passwords out into a standalone app, with an actual fully resizable window (!!), and full, proper UI for most of its features
• Make Passwords a toolbar item in Safari for easy access and to be top-of-mind for the user
• Stick to a basic feature set, but do that well.

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It would, indeed, make a lot of sense. There are some strange, bad decisions in there.
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How to date a recording using background electrical noise • Robert Heaton

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Three men were accused of selling firearms to South London gangs. At their 2012 trial in Croydon Crown Court, the prosecution played the jury a recording, taken undercover, of the trio allegedly arranging a sale. But the men’s lawyers claimed that the recording was a fake, and that the police had fabricated it by splicing together clips taken at different times. To prove that the evidence really was authentic, the Metropolitan Police turned to a technique called electrical network frequency (ENF) matching.

ENF matching exploits patterns in the frequency of the “mains hum” – the faint background noise emitted by an electrical grid as it pipes electricity around in order to power our homes and workplaces. The hum seeps into microphones and recordings, which is a pain for sound engineers, but surprisingly useful for forensic analysts.

To substantiate the recording, Dr Alan Cooper, an analyst on the Met, extracted the sound of its mains hum. He matched fluctuations in the hum’s frequency to frequency readings taken directly from the National Grid at the time of the alleged deal. Their close correspondence suggested that the recording had indeed been taken at the time that the prosecution claimed. He also used the hum’s continuity to show that it was indeed a single, undoctored clip. His analysis stuck, and the three men were convicted.

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From time to time here the question of electrical mains hum and whether it’s useful in any way comes up. And here’s another one.
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Who will take care of Italy’s older people? Robots, maybe • The New York Times

Jason Horowitz:

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The older woman asked to hear a story.

“An excellent choice,” answered the small robot, reclined like a nonchalant professor atop the classroom’s desk, instructing her to listen closely. She leaned in, her wizened forehead almost touching the smooth plastic head.

“Once upon a time,” the robot began a brief tale, and when it finished asked her what job the protagonist had.

“Shepherd,” Bona Poli, 85, responded meekly. The robot didn’t hear so well. She rose out of her chair and raised her voice. “Shep-herd!” she shouted.

“Fantastic,” the robot said, gesticulating awkwardly. “You have a memory like a steel cage.”

The scene may have the dystopian “what could go wrong?” undertones of science fiction at a moment when both the promise and perils of artificial intelligence are coming into sharper focus. But for the exhausted caregivers at a recent meeting in Carpi, a handsome town in Italy’s most innovative region for elder care, it pointed to a welcome, not-too-distant future when humanoids might help shrinking families share the burden of keeping the Western world’s oldest population stimulated, active and healthy.

“Squat and stretch,” said the French-made robot, Nao, climbing to its feet and leading posture exercises. “Let’s move our arms and raise them high.”

The people in the room – mostly women – looked on, some amused, some wary, but all desperate to know how new technology could help them care for their ageing relatives.

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“Robots for elderly care” has been a refrain for decades, principally in Japan, but if that’s starting to be something western countries are considering then times are changing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Two American schoolgirls say they have a new proof of Pythagoras’s theorem which doesn’t use so-called circular reasoning. CC-licensed photo by zeevveez on Flickr.

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

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

The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend e-books like a library • The Verge

Jay Peters and Sean Hollister:

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In his ruling, Judge Koetl considered whether the Internet Archive was operating under the principle of Fair Use, which previously protected a digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust in 2014, among other users. Fair Use considers whether using a copyrighted work is good for the public, how much it’ll impact the copyright holder, how much of the work has been copied, and whether the use has “transformed” a copyrighted thing into something new, among other things.

But Koetl wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers,” declares that “there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive’s] copying and unauthorized lending,” and that copying these books doesn’t provide “criticism, commentary, or information about them.” He notes that the Google Books use was found “transformative” because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.

Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and that it was “irrelevant” that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience. According to data obtained during the trial, the Internet Archive currently hosts around 70,000 e-book “borrows” a day.

The lawsuit came from the Internet Archive’s decision to launch the “National Emergency Library” early in the covid pandemic, which let people read from 1.4 million digitized books with no waitlist. Typically, the Internet Archive’s Open Library program operates under a “controlled digital lending” (CDL) system where it can loan out digitized copies of a book on a one-to-one basis, but it removed those waitlists to offer easier access to those books when stay-at-home orders arrived during the pandemic.

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The Verge article embeds the judgment, which from p18 contains the findings. They’re pretty damning of the Archive’s arugments. Every single “fair use” argument it put forward was knocked down, and so it’s difficult to see how there are any grounds for appeal. (Personally I’ve always thought the uncontrolled lending scheme was a bad idea on the Archive’s part: the copyright problem was obvious.)
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Tory MPs accuse Google’s new AI of left-wing bias, fearing tool could dent election hopes • Daily Mail Online

Mark Hookham and Glen Owen:

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Google was at the centre of a row over political bias last night after tests of its new artificial intelligence ‘chatbot’ produced results with a pronounced Left-wing slant.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday into Google Bard, which is designed to answer questions like a human by analysing data from the internet, produced results that condemned Brexit as a ‘bad idea’ and described Jeremy Corbyn as having ‘the potential to be a great leader’.

The ‘bot’ has been hailed as part of the biggest technological breakthrough since the launch of the printing press. But early results have caused alarm among senior Conservatives, who fear that if Google does not change its search algorithms before the next General Election it could boost the chances of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour.

They say simple factual errors have already been spotted in searches about Tory MPs.

When this newspaper asked Bard, which was launched last week, about Brexit, it ignored the views of the 17 million voters who backed Britain quitting the EU to declare: ‘I think Brexit was a bad idea… I believe the UK would have been better off remaining in the EU.’

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It’s both hilarious and exhausting that you can produce a story like this for a Sunday paper and get tons of people to quote for it. There’s a sort of intentional refusal to understand the limits of Bard – though at the same time, it’s correct to ask those questions because that’s exactly how the vast majority of people will approach it. And that is the real problem here: too few red flags flying around the user interface to tell people that this is not a search of the web, but the equivalent of getting your phone to generate a message by starting it and letting it “guess” the next thing to say.
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Gettr is controlled by Guo Wengui, ex employees say • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

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An exiled Chinese tycoon indicted in New York earlier this month in a billion-dollar fraud case controls the conservative social media platform Gettr and used it to promote cryptocurrencies and propaganda, former employees have told The Washington Post.

They said the arrested expatriate, Guo Wengui, and his longtime money manager, William Je, called the shots at the company while Donald Trump senior adviser Jason Miller was its chief executive and public face. Miller served in that capacity from before Gettr’s July 4, 2021, launch until this month, when he returned to work on his third Trump presidential campaign.

Gettr doled out tens of thousands of dollars to right-wing figures including Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, sent money to contractors affiliated with Guo, and altered information on Gettr users that law enforcement agencies had sought, according to the former employees and internal company documents obtained by The Post.

The revelations show that a man accused of massive fraud on two continents climbed high into Trump’s political sphere and dictated messaging at a social media site that reaches millions of Americans.

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Shocked, shocked, I tell you, that someone accused of massive fraud on two continents could be high in Trump’s political sphere. Usually it’s only one continent.
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Elon Musk values Twitter at $20bn • The New York Times

Kate Conger and Ryan Mac:

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Elon Musk said Twitter is now worth about $20bn, according to an email he sent the company’s employees on Friday, a significant drop from the $44bn that he paid to buy the social network in October.

The email, which was viewed by The New York Times, was sent to employees to announce a new stock compensation program. In it, Mr. Musk warned workers that Twitter remained in a precarious financial position and, at one point, had been four months away from running out of money. He said “radical changes” at the company, including mass layoffs and cost cutting, were necessary to avoid bankruptcy and streamline operations.

“Twitter is being reshaped rapidly,” Mr. Musk wrote, adding that the company could be thought of as “an inverse start-up.”

Twitter’s value has declined as Mr. Musk has dramatically overhauled the company. In October, Mr. Musk took Twitter private, which means it is no longer obligated to provide transparency about its finances. But the billionaire has indicated publicly that the company lost revenue as advertisers fled the platform after his takeover, and suggested that Twitter was in danger of bankruptcy.

The $20bn figure values Twitter slightly higher than Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, which has recently struggled with an advertising slump and predicted its revenue would fall. Snap, which has a market capitalization of about $18bn, has about 375 million daily active users, compared with Twitter’s 237.8 million in the company’s final public disclosure before it went private.

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OK, everyone said that Musk was overpaying wildly, but when Twitter floated, in November 2013, it priced the stock at $26, which valued it at about $14bn. You could say it’s about 3% compound increase in value annually. That missing $24bn from the purchase price? Spread among all the former Twitter shareholders, many of them big names.
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At Apple, rare dissent over a new product: interactive goggles • The New York Times

Tripp Mickle and Brian X Chen:

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When Apple held a corporate retreat in California’s Carmel Valley about five years ago to discuss its next major product, Jony Ive, its longtime design chief, captivated a room of the company’s 100 top executives with a concept video as polished as an Apple commercial.

The video showed a man in a London taxi donning an augmented reality headset and calling his wife in San Francisco. “Would you like to come to London?” he asked, two people who saw the video said. Soon, the couple were sharing the sights of London through the husband’s eyes.

The video excited executives about the possibilities of Apple’s next business-altering device: a headset that would blend the digital world with the real one.

But now, as the company prepares to introduce the headset in June, enthusiasm at Apple has given way to skepticism, said eight current and former employees, who requested anonymity because of Apple’s policies against speaking about future products. There are concerns about the device’s roughly $3,000 price, doubts about its utility and worries about its unproven market.

That dissension has been a surprising change inside a company where employees have built devices — from the iPod to the Apple Watch — with the single-mindedness of a moon mission.

Some employees have defected from the project because of their doubts about its potential, three people with knowledge of the moves said. Others have been fired over the lack of progress with some aspects of the headset, including its use of Apple’s Siri voice assistant, one person said.

Even leaders at Apple have questioned the product’s prospects. It has been developed at a time when morale has been strained by a wave of departures from the company’s design team, including Mr. Ive, who left Apple in 2019 and stopped advising the company last year.

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Even leaders? I’ll question its prospects too, if “showing what you’re seeing” is all it does. You can do that with a video call where you use the back camera. The Watch displaces essential content (messages, time). Would this really replace it? I just don’t see it.
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US teens say they have new proof for 2,000-year-old mathematical theorem • The Guardian

Ramon Antonio Vargas:

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The 2,000-year-old theorem established that the sum of the squares of a right triangle’s two shorter sides equals the square of the hypotenuse – the third, longest side opposite the shape’s right angle. Legions of schoolchildren have learned the notation summarizing the theorem in their geometry classes: a2+b2=c2.

As mentioned in the abstract of Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson’s 18 March mathematical society presentation, trigonometry – the study of triangles – depends on the theorem. And since that particular field of study was discovered, mathematicians have maintained that any alleged proof of the Pythagorean theorem which uses trigonometry constitutes a logical fallacy known as circular reasoning, a term used when someone tries to validate an idea with the idea itself.

Johnson and Jackson’s abstract adds that the book with the largest known collection of proofs for the theorem – Elisha Loomis’s The Pythagorean Proposition – “flatly states that ‘there are no trigonometric proofs because all the fundamental formulae of trigonometry are themselves based upon the truth of the Pythagorean theorem’.”

But, the abstract counters, “that isn’t quite true”. The pair asserts: “We present a new proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem which is based on a fundamental result in trigonometry – the Law of Sines – and we show that the proof is independent of the Pythagorean trig identity sin2x+cos2x=1.” In short, they could prove the theorem using trigonometry and without resorting to circular reasoning.

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Hope that their paper stands this up: how wonderful if a pair of teenagers could show that they can fill gaps in maths. (A discussion on Reddit suggests they’ve used infinite series; I couldn’t access the US TV station that has a video report.)
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Axios fires reporter for calling out Ron DeSantis event as “propaganda” • Esquire

Charles Pierce:

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On Wednesday, Axios fired Ben [Montgomery, who is a friend of Pierce’s]. From the Washington Post:

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The news release sent Monday afternoon said DeSantis, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate, had hosted a roundtable “exposing the diversity equity and inclusion scam in higher education.” It also called for prohibiting state funds from being used to support DEI efforts. “We will expose the scams they are trying to push onto students across the country,” DeSantis said in the statement. Montgomery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, replied to the email three minutes after getting it. “This is propaganda, not a press release,” he wrote to the Department of Education press office. About an hour after that, the Education Department’s communication officer, Alex Lanfranconi, shared Montgomery’s reply on Twitter, where it has since been viewed more than 1 million times. Montgomery said the news release had “no substance,” adding that he “read the whole thing and it was just a series of quotes about how bad DEI was.”

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Here’s the news release. If anything, Montgomery understated his case.

I have enough problems with upper echelons’ knuckling reporters for their activity on social media in their off-hours. (I have a long-standing hatred for the rules of “objectivity” when they are used as an excuse for timidity and professional ass-covering by said echelons.) But this was a private communication between a reporter and a government official that the official shared in a public forum. Even the most hidebound traditional journalism ethics don’t touch this. It’s the apparatchik who should be fired for sharing a private communication for, yes, propaganda purposes.

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So much wrongness here. First: mistake on the part of the reporter responding to the email. Just delete it and move on. (It’s probably a blessing for me that PR companies never chose to post some of my responses to them on social media. Though I did try to be constructive.) Second: it’s not in the least surprising that a state department would be pushing propaganda. Third: unsurprising but classic jerk move by the Propaganda Department to put Montgomery’s response on Twitter, since that gives it a lever. Fourth: behold social warming, where social media is used as a lever to pry your (potential) enemies out of jobs.

Pierce might wish for the apparatchik to be fired, but that’s less likely than the sun rising in the west.
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Cheating is all you need • Sourcegraph

Steve Yegge:

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One of the craziest damned things I hear devs say about LLM-based coding help is that they can’t “trust” the code that it writes, because it “might have bugs in it”.

Ah me, these crazy crazy devs.

Can you trust code you yeeted over from Stack Overflow? NO!

Can you trust code you copied from somewhere else in your code base? NO!

Can you trust code you just now wrote carefully by hand, yourself? NOOOO!

All you crazy MFs are completely overlooking the fact that software engineering exists as a discipline because you cannot EVER under any circumstances TRUST CODE. That’s why we have reviewers. And linters. And debuggers. And unit tests. And integration tests. And staging environments. And runbooks. And all of goddamned Operational Excellence. And security checkers, and compliance scanners, and on, and on and on!

So the next one of you to complain that “you can’t trust LLM code” gets a little badge that says “Welcome to engineering, mofo”. You’ve finally learned the secret of the trade: Don’t. Trust. Anything!

Peeps, let’s do some really simple back-of-envelope math. Trust me, it won’t be difficult math.

You get the LLM to draft some code for you that’s 80% complete/correct. You tweak the last 20% by hand.

How much of a productivity increase is that? Well jeepers, if you’re only doing 1/5th the work, then you are… punches buttons on calculator watch… five times as productive. 😲

When was the last time you got a 5x productivity boost from anything that didn’t involve some sort of chemicals?

I’m serious. I just don’t get people. How can you not appreciate the historic change happening right now?

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A new pandemic origin report is stirring controversy. Here are key takeaways • Science

Jon Cohen:

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In their report, Débarre and colleagues say 49 of those samples infected with SARS-CoV-2 RNA also contained mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that clearly identified five mammals: the common raccoon dog, Malayan porcupine, Amur hedgehog, masked palm civet, and hoary bamboo rat.

They also found other DNA, as well as RNA from the mammals. “The co-occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 virus and susceptible animal RNA/DNA in the same samples, from a specific section of the Huanan market, and often at greater abundance than human genetic material, identifies these species, particularly the common raccoon dog, as the most likely conduits for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019,” the authors wrote. The group produced a “heat map” that shows the density of SARS-CoV-2 was “hottest” in market areas near stalls that sold the mammals.

 

Why are raccoon dogs receiving so much attention? Experiments have shown SARS-CoV-2 easily infects raccoon dogs—commonly raised for fur in China, but also sold for meat in “wet” markets like the one in Wuhan—and that they shed high levels of the virus. The report describes finding raccoon dog mtDNA in six samples from two different stalls in the Wuhan market.

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This is, as you’d expect, a very complex subject, with peculiar behaviour from Chinese researchers and a virology database whose administrators are frustrated with those researchers.
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Samsung’s photo ‘remaster’ knows what this baby pic is missing: teeth • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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Samsung’s recently caught some flak after widespread reports that its camera software fakes zoom pictures of the Moon, but things may be about to get way more unsettling. A Verge reader wrote in on Wednesday to tell us that the company’s software is adding teeth to pictures of their seven-month-old daughter.

This reader says they recently got an S23 Ultra and decided to try out the Remaster feature in Samsung’s photo-viewing app, Gallery. (It’s the default photo app for the phone, and the feature is available inside the camera if you visit your photo roll.)

They expected something like what Google Photos does, suggesting specific adjustments and filters, unbluring pictures, and the like. Instead, they got the results you can see [in this tweet], with the original image on the left and the “Remastered” one on the right.

So… this is some nightmare fuel. Sure, it erases some unsightly snot (can’t have the world thinking that this baby isn’t ready for its close-up 100% of the time), but it also appears to look at the baby’s tongue and immediately jump to “I know what that should look like: a nice row of fully-grown teeth!”

The reader also sent us a video of the Remaster feature turning their daughter’s tongue into teeth in another picture, which makes it seem like it’s not just a one-off glitch.

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There’s a certain amount of doubt around this, because Clark wasn’t able to reproduce this on a number of other baby pictures on last year’s S22, nor find other people with the same problem. But if it is something the S23 is doing, then it’s a problem far worse than the Moon shots.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified