Does the answer to Britain’s lagging productivity lie in Legoland? Tim Harford went to find out. CC-licensed photo by Brooks Duncan on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Veiled. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Inside British newsrooms on the day Queen Elizabeth II died: secret codes, chaos and black ties • British GQ

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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[On Thursday just after midday] A folded-up piece of paper was passed along both [Parliamentary] front benches, and the country knew something was up by the looks on the faces of those who read the note. “It was fucking weird because as soon as the note went round everyone kind of knew and was going: ‘She’s dead,’ right,” says one Whitehall correspondent for a national newspaper. (Like all those quoted in this story, they were given anonymity in order to speak freely.) “Then it’s been waiting and knowing without knowing, writing other stuff under the pretence it’s not all going to be scrapped.”

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The correspondent was told by editors to write on the major political stories of the day – an unfunded promise to limit energy bills, the settling in of a new prime minister and the creation of her government – that they knew would never be read.

Thirteen minutes after the note came the tweet. “Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision,” wrote Buckingham Palace. “The Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral.”

“When the statement dropped about her health it was obvious, and suddenly no MPs would talk,” the Whitehall correspondent says. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs stopped responding to messages.

Across at what was once known as Fleet Street, time stopped.

Unlike the April 2021 death of the Duke of Edinburgh, which was announced out of the blue, says one BBC journalist, the announcement that the Queen was “comfortable” but doctors were “concerned” was a coded message: get ready. “She obviously didn’t look well on Tuesday with Truss,” says the BBC journalist. “No idea it was imminent though. They gave us a six-hour run up with the ‘comfortable’ announcement, which is preferable to just dropping on wires like they did with the Duke of Edinburgh.”

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Excellent piece. A good friend of mine, who isn’t a journalist, texted me when the note was passed in Parliament to say “I think the queen has just died”. So it wasn’t exactly un-obvious to the alert observer.
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As Russians retreat, Putin is criticized by hawks who trumpeted his war • The New York Times

Anton Troianovski:

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Even as Moscow celebrated, [the pro-Russian blogger] wrote, the Russian Army was fighting without enough night vision goggles, flak jackets, first-aid kits or drones. A few hundred miles away, Ukrainian forces retook the Russian military stronghold of Izium, continuing their rapid advance across the northeast and igniting a dramatic new phase in the war.

The outrage from Russian hawks on Saturday showed that even as Mr. Putin had succeeded in eliminating just about all of the liberal and pro-democracy opposition in Russia’s domestic politics, he still faced the risk of discontent from the conservative end of the political spectrum. For the moment, there was little indication that these hawks would turn on Mr. Putin as a result of Ukraine’s seemingly successful counteroffensive; but analysts said that their increasing readiness to criticize the military leadership publicly pointed to simmering discontent within the Russian elite.

“Most of these people are in shock and did not think that this could happen,” Dmitri Kuznets, who analyzes the war for the Russian-language news outlet Meduza, said in a phone interview. “Most of them are, I think, genuinely angry.”

The Kremlin, as usual, tried to minimize the setbacks. The defence ministry described the retreat as a decision “to regroup” its troops, even though the ministry said a day earlier that it was moving to reinforce its defensive positions in the region.

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One wonders if this is one of those “gradually and then suddenly” situations.
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Russian army collapses, and revolution near-certain as Russia loses war; when/where harder to predict • Real Context News

Brian E. Frydenborg:

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Russia’s self-defeating stupidity truly knows no bounds. A great way to help its imperial project work would be to invest in seriously training the Luhansk and Donetsk rebels well, equipping them well, and treating them and the people it was occupying well. This did not happen; indeed, the Russians instead are conscripting many people there against their will, are barely giving them any good equipment or training. Almost like they are insulting the very people they claim to be liberating, they are giving some of them World War II-era, or even tsarist [1800s]-era , rifles and are cruelly using these people as “cannon fodder” to feel out enemy positions, including against artillery. Instead of winning people over to their cause or maintaining levels of support where Russia already had relatively high levels of support before February 24, the Russians are steadily alienating the very people at the center of their propaganda and their claims to being the good guys in this conflict. If the goal is to make these places part of Russia over the long run, mistreating the people you are going to “liberate” is only going to sow the seeds of your own failure.

In this case, it even doubtful that many of the original tens of thousands of Donetsk and Luhansk separatist militia troops allied with Russia are left standing, and it is certain that the replacement conscripts from there would not be terribly good or motivated fighters, especially given how they have been treated by Russia (indeed, it seems plenty are resisting conscription or are deserting). Their morale was already low and Russia was earlier having problems getting them to fight. Add to that the fact that some of the best Russian troops in the east were redeployed to the south, and the quality-level of Russian and separatist troops in the east right now is probably the lowest of any sector of fighting.

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Ukraine’s armed forces have made multiple breakthroughs over the past week, which has caught everyone – including observers – by surprise. If the well-equipped Ukrainian armed forces advance on a rag-tag bunch of separatists abandoned by the Russians, things will be ugly.
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Books are physically changing because of inflation • The Economist

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The industry is currently experiencing another period of shortage, and war is once again a cause (along with the pandemic). In the past 12 months the cost of paper used by British book publishers has risen by 70%. Supplies are erratic as well as expensive: paper mills have taken to switching off on days when electricity is too pricey. The card used in hardback covers has at times been all but unobtainable. The entire trade is in trouble.

Not every author is affected: a new thriller by Robert Galbraith, better known as J.K. Rowling, is a 1,024-page whopper—and this week reached the top of the bestseller lists in Britain. But other books are having to change a bit. Pick up a new release in a bookshop and if it is from a smaller publisher (for they are more affected by price rises) you may find yourself holding a product that, as wartime books did, bears the mark of its time.

Blow on its pages and they might lift and fall differently: cheaper, lighter paper is being used in some books. Peer closely at its print and you might notice that the letters jostle more closely together: some cost-conscious publishers are starting to shrink the white space between characters. The text might run closer to the edges of pages, too: the margins of publishing are shrinking, in every sense.

Changes of this sort can cause anguish to publishers. A book is not merely words on a page, says Ivan O’Brien, head of The O’Brien Press in Ireland, but should appeal “to every single sense”. The pleasure of a book that feels right in the hand—not too light or too heavy; pages creamy; fonts beetle-black—is something that publishers strive to preserve.

…at the heart of the publishing industry lies an unsayable truth: most people can’t write and most books are very bad. Readers who struggle with a volume often assume that the fault is theirs. Reviewers, who read many more books, know it is not. George Orwell, who worked as a reviewer, considered that fewer than one book in ten was worth reviewing, and that the most honest reaction to most was: “God, what tripe!”

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Not a whisper that the internet is having any effect, or could be a solution – because, indeed, physical books are still the medium that people look for.
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Runway teases AI-powered text-to-video editing using written prompts • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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artificial intelligence company Runway teased a new feature of its AI-powered web-based video editor that can edit video from written descriptions, often called “prompts.” A promotional video appears to show very early steps toward commercial video editing or generation, echoing the hype over recent text-to-image synthesis models like Stable Diffusion but with some optimistic framing to cover up current limitations.

Runway’s “Text to Video” demonstration reel shows a text input box that allows editing commands such as “import city street” (suggesting the video clip already existed) or “make it look more cinematic” (applying an effect). It depicts someone typing “remove object” and selecting a streetlight with a drawing tool that then disappears (from our testing, Runway can already perform a similar effect using its “inpainting” tool, with mixed results).

The promotional video also showcases what looks like still-image text-to-image generation similar to Stable Diffusion (note that the video does not depict any of these generated scenes in motion) and demonstrates text overlay, character masking (using its “Green Screen” feature, also already present in Runway), and more.

Video generation promises aside, what seems most novel about Runway’s Text to Video announcement is the text-based command interface. Whether video editors will want to work with natural language prompts in the future remains to be seen, but the demonstration shows that people in the video production industry are actively working toward a future in which synthesizing or editing video is as easy as writing a command.

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Text prompts for text; text prompts for pictures; text prompts for video. Anything left?
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China oil demand may shrink first time since 2002 as COVID-19 curbs bite • Reuters via The Globe and Mail

Muyu Xu:

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Oil demand in China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, could contract for the first time in two decades this year as Beijing’s zero-COVID policy keeps people at home during upcoming holidays and reduces fuel consumption.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese who typically hit the roads and domestic flights during the Mid-Autumn Festival – falling on Sept. 10 this year – and early October’s Golden Week holidays are expected to stay home to avoid being ensnared by sudden lockdowns to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Lockdowns in key cities such as financial hub Shanghai already hurt China’s oil demand in the second quarter while recovery for the rest of the year is expected to be slow as China sticks to its zero-COVID policy. This could cap intake of the world’s top crude oil importer and dent global oil prices.

China’s demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel could fall by 380,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 8.09m bpd in 2022, which would be the first contraction since 2002, said Sun Jianan, an analyst from Energy Aspects, calling it a “watershed moment.”

In comparison, demand rose 450,000 bpd, or 5.6%, in 2021.

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So.. actually it would still be higher than 2020. So often in economics a “contraction” is more like a continuation of the status quo.
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UK energy bills inflated by failure to implement EU power cables deal • Financial Times

Gill Plimmer:

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Britain has seven interconnectors — high-voltage power cables that connect the country to Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway — which provided almost 9% of the UK’s electricity last year.

These cables, which are owned by private companies, including National Grid, lie along the seabed and are used to export surplus electricity when supplies are plentiful and import it when they are scarce.

The UK had been part of the EU’s Internal Energy Market regime, which created a single price, automatically balancing the needs between countries using computer algorithms to match bids and offers.

But since leaving the EU single market in January 2021, the UK has moved to a backup system that involves running daily auctions. Traders — which may be part of large suppliers such as SSE, E.On or EDF, or independent commodity and power businesses — are being required to purchase or sell energy separately in each geographical market, adding to the complexity and cost of the system.

According to Baringa’s analysis of wholesale market prices, the loss of the integrated market added as much as £250m to wholesale electricity costs in 2021 and is expected to add up to £440m by the end of this year. This adds roughly 0.7% to the overall wholesale electricity cost, according to the consultancy.

Duncan Sinclair, partner at Baringa, said: “A side effect of Brexit is a temporary step backwards in the way electricity flows between us and our neighbours. The system is now less efficient — leading to higher costs — at a time when concerns around rising costs and energy security are paramount.”

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OK, it’s not a gigantic cost. But small inefficiencies add up: someone has to run the auction system, someone has to make sure it doesn’t go horribly wrong, effort has to be diverted into it. Still seeking those Brexit benefits. Still piling up the drawbacks.
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How criminals are using jammers, deauthers to disrupt Wi-Fi security cameras • WXYZ

Kiara Hay:

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A new warning is being issued for anyone who uses wireless security cameras like [Amazon’s] “Ring” to protect their home.

A Detroit woman said her Ring camera didn’t capture the moment her car was stolen from the front of her house, and one local expert said it’s because crooks are becoming more tech-savvy.

Earlier this month, the woman said her car was stolen from her driveway, and when she went to review her Ring camera footage, she realized hours were missing.

Chris Burns, the owner of Techie Gurus, said security cameras that use Wi-Fi to record are more about convenience than security. That’s because Wi-Fi can easily be disrupted, preventing the camera from capturing who is around your home, and criminals are catching on.

“If you’re relying on wireless as a security thing, you’re looking at it wrong,” Burns said. “Wireless signals are easy to jam or block.”

Those crooks can use this like a Wi-Fi jamming device, or a deauther, which can be the size of an Apple Watch.

A deauther will overwhelm a Wi-Fi system, forcing the Wi-Fi camera to stop recording if you stand close enough. The accessory only costs about $10-$50. A jammer on the other hand will cost anywhere between $150 to $1,000.

They’re also highly illegal, so jammers are more difficult to find, but a powerful jammer can prevent an entire street from recording on Wi-FI security cameras with the switch of a button.

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Worthwhile investment of course if you’re looking to steal a car worth multiple thousands. The countermeasure: plug the camera into Ethernet. Which rather takes the “ease of setup” bit away.
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How can the UK improve its productivity? I went to Legoland to find out • Tim Harford

Tim Harford:

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Productivity is one of those things that you can’t have too much of, like competent politicians or pleasant weather, and which the UK lacks more than most. Output per hour has been lacklustre in many countries since the financial crisis, but the UK has stagnated more than its peers. So how can the UK improve its productivity? I didn’t expect to find the answers at Legoland, but I did hope that it would help me to ask better questions.

First, where are the bottlenecks? For Legoland, the key constraint is the capacity of the rides. If (hypothetically) 20,000 people buy tickets to spend the day at the park, but Legoland’s attractions can only deliver 10,000 rides an hour, then one way or another visitors will have to wait two hours between each ride. That isn’t likely to prove sustainable.

The most obvious way to improve capacity is to invest in new attractions. Legoland does this, but Helen Bull, the boss of the Legoland Windsor resort, told me that there is a cycle of investment in the resort: a year or two of high investment will be followed by years with lower capital spending. As Legoland opened its fancy new Sky Lion ride last year, this implies that we may be waiting for a while before the next big attraction is built.

Could British businesses invest more? The Bank of England certainly thinks so; in 2017, it found that UK businesses persistently aimed for (and achieved) a nominal return on capital investment of 12%, despite the fact that the cost of debt fell after the financial crisis from around 6% to 3%. When a business can borrow at 3% to earn 12%, one has to wonder what is stopping it from borrowing and investing a little more.

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I enjoy Harford’s little aside digs (competent politicians). And the British productivity puzzle is one that remains endlessly puzzling.
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Paying for YouTube makes sense. But Facebook? • The Washington Post

Parmy Olson, analysing proposals by Facebook to charge for something:

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Facebook has meanwhile been throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, and very little does. In just the last few months it has closed down a gaming division, a live shopping tool and a neighborhood feature to compete with Nextdoor Holdings Inc. It is also scaling back a newsletter platform. 

Twitter’s data-licensing business is a decent diversification effort, bringing about 11% of revenue, or $570m, last year, but its reliance on user data makes it not that much different from the ad model.

YouTube has managed to shift away from ads far more successfully, in large part because they are among the most annoying on the internet. The four-second or longer ad countdown at the start of many popular videos can feel like an eternity. Its commercials noticeably take up our time and not just space on our screens. Trawl through some tweets about YouTube Premium and many are about how refreshing it is to use the website without being forced to watch ads for toothpaste or web-design companies. “I got YouTube Premium (no ads) and I can confidently say I’m *never* going back,” one user said recently.

…In the Verge report, Facebook said it would keep ads for future subscribers. That sounds crazy considering how well the opposite has worked for YouTube, but Facebook has become a victim of its own success in advertising. Its vast data-collection practices mean that its ads are so well targeted and personalized, so well camouflaged in newsfeeds, that many of its users probably wouldn’t mind having to continue scrolling past them.

That points to a looming problem. Social media firms like Facebook, which derives 97.5% of its revenue from ads, reached lofty valuations because of the seemingly unstoppable growth of digital advertising. But that growth will decelerate in the next few years, to roughly 7% in 2026 from almost 16% this year, according to a recent forecast from eMarketer Inc., a market-research firm. So wedded are Facebook and Snap to the ad model that they have little choice but to diversify. 

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Ads are a problem? Such a strange situation we find ourselves in.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New iPhones sold in the US won’t have a SIM card tray; they’ll use eSIMs. Which is fine, but what if you travel abroad and want local service and there’s no eSIM offering? 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.

A selection of 10 links for you. Edged in black. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hateful tweets multiply in extreme temperatures, US analysis finds • The Guardian

Arthur Neslen:

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Hateful tweets multiply dramatically as temperatures become more extreme, an analysis of 4bn geo-located tweets in the US has found.

Scientists logged rises of up to 22% in racist, misogynist and homophobic tweets when temperatures rose above 42ºC, and increases of up to 12% when the mercury fell below -3ºC, according to a study by The Lancet Planetary Health.

Annika Stechemesser, its lead author and a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said: “We found that both the absolute number and the share of hate tweets rise outside a climate comfort zone. People tend to show a more aggressive online behaviour when it’s either too cold or too hot outside.”

The research used machine-learning algorithms to identify around 75 million English-phrased hate tweets – around 2% of the sample – in 773 US cities between 2014 and 2020.

These volumes of hate speech were then logged and statistically evaluated against variations in local temperatures by the PIK team.

They found that the lowest number of abusive messages occurred when temperatures were between 15-18ºC but when thermometers fell below 12ºC or rose above 21ºC, hate tweets began to rise – most dramatically at climatic extremes.

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Hang on, this isn’t how social warming is meant to work. Surprising if people are able to do anything useful with temperatures above 42ºC – though maybe it’s fuming at the electricity company failing to supply power. (Thanks Adrian M for the link.)
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The new Apple Watch and iPhone 14 are perfectly designed for the apocalypse • Buzzfeed News

Katie Notopoulos:

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Usually, Apple product launches paint a rosy portrait of what the life of an aspirational Apple Man looks like: taking photos of your beautiful friends, biking along a trail with a view of the Pacific Ocean, sharing photos of your beautiful children.

But something was very different this time, something sort of, uh, unsettling. Instead of suggesting a gleaming world where everything is only getting better, instead, today we saw Apple’s vision of a future where everything is literally trying to murder us, and death lurks around every ring-closing outdoor jog. And frankly, it’s turning me into an iPrepper.

The event opened with a video montage of people describing moments where the Apple Watch’s ability to call 911 without a phone nearby had saved their lives: a small airplane crash, someone falling through ice, and — horrifically — a sanitation worker who accidentally fell into the back of a trash compactor truck (congrats on a new nightmare you had never thought about!).

…Although the [Ultra] watch seems like it’s a fun device for a weekend hobbyist, it’s just as practical for survival in a post-climate-apocalypse. Droughts, tsunamis, avalanches, blackouts, outrunning roving gangs of cannibalistic bandits…this is the Apple Watch Ultra’s time to shine.

…there’s something eerie about the most exciting feature of the latest iPhone being “it might help if you’re about to die of exposure while lost in the woods.” We’re used to new tech products hinting at dystopia in more sci-fi ways: surveillance in our homes, algorithms running our lives, companies dry-humping our personal data. This hints at Old Testament dystopia: floods and plagues and wandering alone through the desert for 40 days.

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Tim Cook should have just signed off with “let’s be careful out there“. (I guess it fits with the narrative that Apple Is Doomed. Because We’re ALL Doomed.)
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TikTok’s secret to explosive growth? ‘Billions and billions of dollars’ says Snap CEO Evan Spiegel • Forbes

Alexandra Levine:

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“The reason why this has been so challenging for companies to respond to in the United States, but also around the world, is the scale of TikTok’s investment,” said Spiegel of Snap, which recently laid off some 20% of its own workforce [speaking at Code Conference in Los Angeles].

“What nobody had anticipated in the United States was the level of investment that ByteDance made into the US market, and of course in Europe, because it was just something that was unimaginable — no startup could afford to invest billions and billions and billions of dollars in user acquisition like that around the world,” Spiegel said Wednesday night. “It was a totally different strategy than any technology company had expected before because it wasn’t an innovation-led strategy; it was really about subsidizing large-scale user acquisition.”

That large user base is what has enabled TikTok’s recommendation algorithm to become so strong, Spiegel added. “TikTok got this great lead early on by really aggressively expanding, spending a huge amount of money to do that, so that people can train the algorithm and ultimately end up with a much more personalized feed that’s harder to get on a new service,” he explained.

Spiegel said Snap will compete with TikTok by continuing to focus on connections with family and friends, rather than strangers — an approach that he said has been core to Snap’s success. (TikTok opens to the “For You” page, which shows videos from users you may not follow that have been recommended by the app’s algorithm.)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai also pointed to TikTok as one of his company’s newest, biggest rivals — particularly with regards to YouTube. He said in a Code interview Tuesday that “competition in tech is hyper-intense,” and that some of that heat, like from TikTok, has come seemingly out of nowhere.

Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is leading tech antitrust legislation targeting the power of Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, warned that TikTok, too, could soon be part of that mix. “There could well be legislation on TikTok,” the Minnesota senator told Swisher on Tuesday. She said that while that could be legislation related to national security, her antitrust bill would also crack down on TikTok if the company’s U.S. arm were to reach the size of the American tech giants. “If TikTok reached the gatekeeper status… then they would also be included.”

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A startup able to spend billions and billions of dollars on user acquisition? Unimaginable.
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Apple removes SIM card tray on all iPhone 14 models in US • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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Apple today announced that all iPhone 14 models sold in the U.S. do not have a built-in SIM card tray and instead rely entirely on eSIM technology.

Tech specs on Apple’s website confirm the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max are not compatible with physical SIM cards and instead have dual eSIM support, allowing for multiple cellular plans to be activated on a single device.

An eSIM is a digital SIM that allows users to activate a cellular plan without having to use a physical nano-SIM card. eSIM availability is rapidly expanding, but the technology is still not available in all countries, which explains why iPhone 14 models will remain available with a SIM card tray outside of the US for now.

Apple’s website has a list of carriers that support eSIM technology around the world. In the U.S., this includes AT&T, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon, Xfinity Mobile, Boost Mobile, H2O Wireless, Straight Talk, C Spire, and some others.

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Only one in the UK (EE, owned by BT), though others are expected to follow. In theory, more secure because it can’t just be lifted out, plus you can have multiple eSIMs in a single phone – so you might have one for different countries that you’re travelling to.

Raises the question: what will American iPhone 14 users who go to a different country and want to use a local network that doesn’t offer an eSIM do?
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Apple to appeal Brazil sales ban of iPhone without charger • Reuters

Peter Frontini:

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Apple Inc (AAPL.O)said on Tuesday it will appeal a Brazilian order banning it from selling iPhones without a battery charger, pushing back on claims that the company provides an incomplete product to consumers.

The Justice Ministry fined Apple 12.275 million reais ($2.38m) and ordered the company to cancel sales of the iPhone 12 and newer models, in addition to suspending the sale of any iPhone model that does not come with a charger.

In the order, published on Tuesday in the country’s official gazette, the ministry argued that the iPhone was lacking a essential component in a “deliberate discriminatory practice against consumers.”

The authorities rejected Apple’s argument that the practice had the purpose of reducing carbon emissions, saying there is no evidence that selling the smartphone without a charger offers environmental protections.

Apple said it would continue to work with Brazilian consumer protection agency Senacon in order to “resolve their concerns,” while saying it would appeal the decision.

“We have already won several court rulings in Brazil on this matter and we are confident that our customers are aware of the various options for charging and connecting their devices,” Apple said.

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Apple charged with not charging COME ON HEADLINE WRITERS
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Hands-on with the Apple Watch Ultra and AirPods Pro • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

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We had an opportunity to hold and photograph all three Watch models briefly at the Steve Jobs Theater. While there wasn’t an opportunity to try out the major new features, even an eyes-on experience with the Ultra reveals it’s a new kind of Apple Watch.

It’s not the first rugged smartwatch on the market, of course, and depending on your needs, it may not even be the best. But it’s the first foray into that world from a company that has otherwise dominated the smartwatch market for years.

The Ultra is noticeably bulkier than its siblings—we’d even go so far as to say it has a whole new aesthetic. The screen rises loudly out of the titanium case rather than folding smoothly into the sides like in other models. And the large, new action button is hard to miss.

The SE looks slightly different from its predecessor, but it’s subtle. The Series 8, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from the Series 7 at a glance.

AirPods Pro: We also enjoyed a quick demo of the new AirPods Pro. Apple promised improved noise canceling, and we happened to have the previous generation with us for comparison. The show floor was loud, and though we can’t exactly claim it felt like it was twice as good, as Apple claimed during the event, it was a noticeable difference.

On the other hand, we didn’t test one of the other big new features: the ability to scan your head and ear with the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera to improve spatial audio. That will have to wait for a later review.

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Sounds as though the Ultra will be favoured by people who want to announce to the world that they do Rugged Activities In A Gritty Way. (Look, I’m not saying I won’t buy one at some point. Though it does look pretty gigantic.) The AirPods Pro had a couple of neat additions – in particular the fact they’ll charge from an Apple Watch magnetic charger. That’s neat.
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Inside Keffals’ battle to bring down Kiwi Farms • Vice

David Gilbert:

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[Clara] Sorrenti found out that someone inspired by the thread on Kiwi Farms had posted a picture of themselves standing outside [Sorrenti’s friend in Belfast, fellow Twitch streamer Ellen] Murray’s apartment while holding a threatening message. Moments later the police arrived, and told her that someone had reported a shooting at the apartment. No one had been shot, but it was another “swatting” attempt employed to harass and unnerve harassment targets, or even provoke a dangerous encounter with armed police.

The incidents last week were the culmination of a six-month long campaign by users of Kiwi Farms, a transphobic far-right forum that has long been home to some of the more vile hate speech on the internet. Users of the forum have engaged in doxing campaigns, death threats, harassment, and against people around the world like members of the LGBTQ community, women, and other groups.

Sorrenti has led a vocal campaign to deplatform the forum, and the threats have only intensified. Sitting in a hotel in Belfast two days later after the most recent swatting event, Sorrenti is still shaken. She’s worried about the target on her back, and worried that her campaign to bring down Kiwi Farms might fail.

“If I don’t win this campaign, the rest of my life is going to be hell,” Sorrenti said. “I’ve made myself a significantly larger target for them now, and if the groundswell of support goes away, there’s not a lot I can do about it.”

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The incredible levels of harassment – far worse than any MP has suffered, for example – show that Cloudflare’s insistence that it’s just neutral has to be judged in context. When you’re enabling a site which extremism researchers have warned journalists against covering, because it would make the site more popular and thus more dangerous for those targeted, you’re defending the wrong people.

And note what sort of people the Kiwifarms denizens targeted. If you wanted a definition of “toxic masculinity”, its users would fit perfectly.

Plus: Sorrenti has shown astonishing levels of bravery. Though for her, what was the alternative?
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Liz Truss set to dilute online safety bill over free-speech concerns • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas, Jim Pickard and Cristina Criddle:

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The groundbreaking draft legislation is being watched closely by regulators around the world and has been vigorously opposed by tech companies that could end up facing huge fines if they breach the new law.

Truss confirmed on Wednesday that she would dilute the plans when the delayed bill returns to the House of Commons in the current parliamentary session.

“What I want to make sure is we protect the under-18s from harm, but we also make sure free speech is allowed, so there may be some tweaks required,” she said.

Officials have been working to change the definition of what is deemed “legal but harmful” under the proposed legislation, the Financial Times has learnt, in order to give greater scope to say online what would be acceptable in person even if someone deems it offensive.

Former Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch, who is now international trade secretary, over the summer attacked the bill as “legislating for hurt feelings”, while senior backbencher David Davis has said that there was the risk of the “biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history”, given rules on social media companies to restrict such “legal but harmful” content.

One official said the outcome of these changes would be to make it a simpler bill aimed more at keeping children safe on the internet, rather than limiting what adults can legally say and do online.

Truss told a Tory leadership campaign event this summer that “where it’s about adults being able to speak freely, they absolutely should be, and it should be the same online as offline”.

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Nadine Dorries, the outgoing culture secretary, insisted in her resignation letter that “when I arrived in the department, the Online Safety Bill had been kicked into the long grass”. Despite her best efforts, it looks like it’s going to get kicked about some more yet.
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Spreading the disease and selling the cure • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs, writing back in January 2015:

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Damon McCoy, an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason University, said the number of these DDoS-for-hire services has skyrocketed over the past two years. Nearly all of these services allow customers to pay for attacks using PayPal or Google Wallet, even though doing so violates the terms of service spelled out by those payment networks.

“The main reason they are becoming an increasing problem is that they are profitable,” McCoy said. “They are also easy to setup using leaked code for other booters, increasing demand from gamers and other customers, decreasing cost of attack infrastructure that can be amplified using common DDoS attacks. Also, it is relatively low-risk to operate a booter service when using rented attack servers instead of botnets.”

The booter services are proliferating thanks mainly to free services offered by CloudFlare, a content distribution network that offers gratis DDoS protection for virtually all of the booter services currently online. That includes the Lizardstresser, the attack service launched by the same Lizard Squad (a.k.a. Loser Squad) criminals whose assaults knocked the Microsoft Xbox and Sony Playstation networks offline on Christmas Day 2014.

The sad truth is that most booter services probably would not be able to remain in business without CloudFlare’s free service. That’s because outside of CloudFlare, real DDoS protection services are expensive, and just about the only thing booter service customers enjoy attacking more than Minecraft and online gaming sites are, well, other booter services.

The Web site crimeflare•com [now defunct – CA], which tracks abusive sites that hide behind CloudFlare, has cataloged more than 200 DDoS-for-hire sites using CloudFlare. For its part, CloudFlare’s owners have rather vehemently resisted the notion of blocking booter services from using the company’s services, saying that doing so would lead CloudFlare down a “slippery slope of censorship.”

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I’m starting to get the feeling that Cloudflare’s free tier is not actually helping the situation, though its debating tactics haven’t changed in the past seven years. (Thanks Tony F for the link.)
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No, I am not a pole dancer • The Guardian

Gina Davies:

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I know we’ve only just met, but I feel it’s important to get through to you before I see that knowing glint in your eye as I introduce myself – I AM NOT A POLE DANCER.

Some people would dream about being mistaken for a famous person – think Chanelle from Big Brother pinning her future on emulating Posh Spice.

But what if you shared the name with a fictional character and were stereotyped by whatever the author saw fit to write about said character?

If you Googled me, chances are you would come across pages of book reviews: “Gina Davies, 26-year-old pole dancer who becomes a prime suspect in a murderous plot after spending the night with an attractive stranger.” It’s not exactly what I’d like my mother to come across, never mind my boss.

But thanks to Richard Flanagan – best selling author of The Unknown Terrorist, in which my name so strongly features – visitors to my web page prefer to believe this information rather than trawl through to find the real me.

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This was back in August 2007, which only goes to show that the problem of “what the internet casually thinks it knows about me” hasn’t really changed between then and now; only the messenger. Then it was Google, now it is (or can be) GPT-3, as we saw yesterday.

(She’s now Gina Clarke. Let’s hope that generates better hits.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How do thieves break into locked gym lockers and then into security-protected phones and apps? London women want to know. CC-licensed photo by lee on Flickr.

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

A selection of 8 links for you. Not phoney. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I ran the worlds largest DDoS-for-Hire empire and CloudFlare helped • Rasbora

“Rasbora”:

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As the infrastructure provider for over 20% of all www traffic traversing the internet today, CloudFlare is in a position to enforce its beliefs on a global scale. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, lots of nefarious websites try to take advantage of the services CloudFlare offers and are rightfully kicked off. The problems arise in a small category of websites that blur the line. Is it okay to revoke access to a website promoting hate speech and violence? Who interprets what qualifies as hate speech? Should a single forum post in a sea of thousands disqualify an entire website? Who makes the decision on how these criteria are defined?

CloudFlare’s answers to these questions has historically been: nothing. They have repeated again and again that because they are an internet utility they remain neutral on these topics and leave it up to the hosting providers to answer these questions. However CloudFlare is not a neutral utility, they are a publicly traded company and have shareholders to report to, can any fire department in the world say the same?

As a young cyber miscreant I operated dozens of booter (“DDoS-for-Hire”) services throughout my teenage years, and every single one of them used CloudFlare to protect my websites from rival DDoS attacks. Without CloudFlare’s “neutral” security service offerings I couldn’t have facilitated millions of DDoS attacks. It’s hard to stress just how instrumental CloudFlare is in the success of a booter services operation, booters that didn’t have protection from CloudFlare would not remain online very long.

It looks like not much has changed throughout the years. Just like I took advantage of CloudFlare’s services many years ago, the first result on google for the search term “booter” is doing the same thing today. As long as CloudFlare doesn’t intervene in the operation of these websites, they are “avoiding” an abuse of power. Isn’t that convenient?

…CloudFlare is responsible for keeping booter websites online and operating, the very same websites who’s sole purpose is to fuel CloudFlare’s very own business model, selling DDoS protection. Dear reader please take a moment to reflect upon the last sentence.

CloudFlare is a fire department that prides itself on putting out fires at any house regardless of the individual that lives there, what they forget to mention is they are actively lighting these fires and making money by putting them out!

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Apple Watch Ultra is everything I wanted the Series 8 to be • Techradarvai msn.com

Loyd Coombes:

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Being able to enter a low power mode in watchOS 9 is a great start, but the Apple Watch Ultra does offer a much larger battery, boosted from a meagre 18 hours to a hefty-in-comparison 36. Given that much smaller (and admittedly less powerful) fitness trackers like the Huawei Band 7 offers a two-week battery life, the Apple Watch Ultra’s 36 hours at least feels closer to catching up, and can be extended to 60 hours. 

Given the significant price jump from the Series 8 to the Apple Watch Ultra, you can likely expect to keep carrying your charging puck with you for the foreseeable.

Another big new addition is a second button, the Action button that’s programmable on the Apple Watch Ultra. Does the Apple Watch Series 8 need one? Probably not, but being able to make the existing side button more useful would be a result. the Action button is also designed for athletes to use on the fly, to pause or switch between workout modes.

At present, the Apple Watch side button opens the ‘dock’ which shows recent apps, but if you’re anything like me, you have the complications you use regularly on your watch face and flick through on the screen. That negates the need for a side button unless it was user-customizable. We’d love to be able to instantly pause music with it, or open a new note, or, well, anything.

So, while the new Series 8 looks great, it’d be fair to say that the Apple Watch Ultra is poised to take the limelight for a little longer.

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If the Ultra is big, that’s not going to be a problem for the (mostly) men who’ll want it. The inclusion of a dive computer (for calculating how quickly to go on scura dive) is quite an extra. Though all the extras look like quite an extra.
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Why Britain is broken • POLITICO

James Snell is a senior adviser on Special Initiatives at the New Lines Institute:

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the energy crisis is just part of Britain’s brokenness, which Liz Truss — the winner of the Conservative leadership contest — will face. Dysfunction, incompetence and poor planning are pervasive — from the National Health Service to restrictions on building to the country’s airports and courts. 

Here, one can wait forever to see a doctor. The number of patients who have waited more than a year for treatment has grown by 13 times, according to the British Medical Association,  and the consequence isn’t just prolonged suffering but untimely deaths. And a nation in poor health has a smaller and shrinking workforce, which is also present in British government statistics.

As with other basic government services, dentistry is in a state of slow collapse also, with dentists not taking on any new patients, including children. 

Meanwhile, current local authorities are unable to meet the responsibilities of municipal government. According to James Kirkup, director of the Social Market Foundation think tank, over 90% of crimes aren’t being solved, and financial fraud is rampant and unstoppable. If someone drains your bank account, it’s not necessarily worth your while to call the police, he said.  

The breakdown of Britain’s largest aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales — which was meant to set off for a four-month tour of North America last week — seems fitting and symbolic. 

Kirkup argues, “The structural shortfall in public services arises from an awkward truth of British politics: we want to pay American taxes and expect European services.” But politics is broken too, and the hard choices that need to be made simply aren’t. Politics is now less the “art of the possible,” and more an extended game of fantasy role-play for those in power — and even for those in opposition who seek to replace them.

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Shutterstock has reverse engineered Google’s watermark-removal algorithm • The Next Web

Mix:

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Only a week after Google released a paper detailing how its researchers built an algorithm that automatically removes watermarks from stock photos, Shutterstock has already put together an antidote.

Taking a cue from the internet giant’s tips on how to strengthen watermarks, the popular stock photo distributor managed to reverse engineer Google’s software in order to stop copyright thieves from editing out watermarks and using their images for free.

To pull this off, its engineers built a smart watermark technology that counteracts the algorithm by deliberately inserting minor inconsistencies in the watermark patterns. The solution purportedly uses machine learning to continuously confuse Google’s software.

“The challenge was protecting images without degrading the image quality,” said Shutterstock CTO Martin Brodbeck. “Changing the opacity and location of a watermark does not make it more secure, however changing the geometry does.”

The solution came not without a little help from the source itself.

“Google published a white paper [PDF] outlining a way of using computer vision technology to eradicate watermarks from stock image collections on a large-scale,” Brodbeck added. “Shutterstock was notified before the paper was published and quickly began working to address the areas highlighted.”

Thanks to this collaboration between the two companies, Shutterstock’s new technology introduced several variables to its watermarks structures to make it difficult for programs to identify recurring patterns.

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A weird sort of arms race where one side helps you to stay up with it.
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How is a thief taking thousands from London gym-goers? • BBC News

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A serial thief is targeting London gym-goers and emptying their bank accounts, a BBC Radio 4 investigation has found.

Journalist Shari Vahl from the You and Yours programme has spoken to a number of women with near-identical experiences – all of which included the loss of many thousands of pounds. Vahl shared her findings with the Met Police, which had previously closed a number of individual investigations, to show the cases could be linked. Now the force will reopen the inquiry.

The similarities in each of the cases appear striking – female victims who have put their belongings in a locker in a popular chain of gyms, only to return and discover their phones and cards have been taken. A number of high-value purchases have been made, at the same shops. The thief also treats themselves to a fast-food meal.
One victim, Alina, had her items stolen from a Virgin gym in Finchley Road last month. The thief spent about £10,000 in Harrods, and the Covent Garden Apple store. They tried to spend another £10,000 after Alina had blocked her cards. They used her money for food and taxis and withdrew cash from ATMs and changed the access to her accounts.

…Phones, of course, can be made inaccessible with the use of passwords and face or fingerprint unlocking. And bank cards can be stopped. But the thief has a method which circumnavigates those basic safety protocols.

Once they have the phone and the card, they register the card on the relevant bank’s app on their own phone or computer. Since it is the first time that card will have been used on the new device, a one-off security passcode is demanded.

That verification passcode is sent by the bank to the stolen phone. The code flashes up on the locked screen of the stolen phone, leaving the thief to tap it into their own device. Once accepted, they have control of the bank account. They can transfer money or buy goods, or change access to the account.

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One of the women this happened to complained about her bank’s indifference on Twitter; people on Twitter insisted she must have left her phone unlocked, or used a PIN that was her birthday, or written it down (none true). In fact it’s much simpler than that. Changing the default SIM PIN (and turning the phone off when you go to one of these places!) solves a lot of these problems.
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This startup is setting a DALL-E 2-like AI free, consequences be damned • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers earlier in August, profiling the then-little-known Stability AI, maker of Stable Diffusion:

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Already, testers in Stability AI’s Discord server are using Stable Diffusion to generate a range of content disallowed by other image generation services, including images of the war in Ukraine, nude women, an imagined Chinese invasion of Taiwan and controversial depictions of religious figures like the Prophet Muhammad. Doubtless, some of these images are against Stability AI’s own terms, but the company is currently relying on the community to flag violations. Many bear the telltale signs of an algorithmic creation, like disproportionate limbs and an incongruous mix of art styles. But others are passable on first glance. And the tech will continue to improve, presumably.

[CEO Emad] Mostaque acknowledged that the tools could be used by bad actors to create “really nasty stuff,” and CompVis says that the public release of the benchmark Stable Diffusion model will “incorporate ethical considerations.” But Mostaque argues that — by making the tools freely available — it allows the community to develop countermeasures.

“We hope to be the catalyst to coordinate global open source AI, both independent and academic, to build vital infrastructure, models and tools to maximize our collective potential,” Mostaque said. “This is amazing technology that can transform humanity for the better and should be open infrastructure for all.”

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All fun and games until someone sues over an eye.
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What does GPT-3 “know” about me? • MIT Technology Review

Melissa Heikkilä:

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It’s not an idle question. I’ve been paranoid about posting anything about my personal life publicly since a bruising experience about a decade ago. My images and personal information were splashed across an online forum, then dissected and ridiculed by people who didn’t like a column I’d written for a Finnish newspaper. 

Up to that point, like many people, I’d carelessly littered the internet with my data: personal blog posts, embarrassing photo albums from nights out, posts about my location, relationship status, and political preferences, out in the open for anyone to see. Even now, I’m still a relatively public figure, since I’m a journalist with essentially my entire professional portfolio just one online search away. 

OpenAI has provided limited access to its famous large language model, GPT-3, and Meta lets people play around with its model OPT-175B though a publicly available chatbot called BlenderBot 3. 

I decided to try out both models, starting by asking GPT-3: Who is Melissa Heikkilä? 

The response: “Melissa Heikkilä is a Finnish journalist and author who has written about the Finnish economy and politics.”

When I read this, I froze. Heikkilä was the 18th most common surname in my native Finland in 2022, but I’m one of the only journalists writing in English with that name. It shouldn’t surprise me that the model associated it with journalism. Large language models scrape vast amounts of data from the internet, including news articles and social media posts, and names of journalists and authors appear very often. 

And yet, it was jarring to be faced with something that was actually correct. What else does it know??

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And now read on…
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How Minecraft’s NFT ban gutted a crypto empire • Rest of World

Neirin Gray Desai:

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After interest in Axie Infinity collapsed, following a plummeting in-game economy and a $620m hack, many players moved to other play-to-earn games, including Critterz. 

Critterz hoped to address one of the primary criticisms Axie Infinity faced: that players were motivated much more by profit than by a desire to play the game itself, as the game alone simply wasn’t compelling enough. “We just had an idea, what if you can make an existing game play-to-earn?” Emerson Hsieh, a co-founder of Critterz, told Rest of World. “Minecraft is an established game that we know people want to play.” 

For a while, it worked. Some Critterz players told Rest of World that, at one point, they were earning more than $100 a day playing the game. At its peak, it had around 2,000 daily players, some of whom enlisted other players to help build their in-game empires for a cut of the crypto they earned. One U.S. player, who goes by “Big Chief,” described how his team, composed largely of young people in the Philippines, gathered building materials for him. He then paid professional Minecraft builders around $10,000 in crypto to turn those materials into a lavish casino.

“I have a lot of kids that play for me, and they play because they want to make extra money in a country that’s really just locking them down,” he said.

But, as with Axie Infinity, once the game became more popular, the value of its crypto token began to drop. Worth 85 cents at its peak in January, it had decreased to around 3 cents by May. But the depreciation was gradual, and many players continued playing and building.

Then, on July 20, 2022, in a post on the Minecraft website, developer Mojang Studios dropped a bombshell: Minecraft would not support integrations with NFTs.

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At which point they were royally stuffed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What can you hide in a pair of socks? What about controls for a chess computer, so you can cheat? CC-licensed photo by star athena 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. Unpaired. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The chips are down: Putin scrambles for high-tech parts as his arsenal goes up in smoke • POLITICO

Zoya Sheftalovich and Laurens Cerulus:

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Kyiv is acutely aware that the outcome of the war is likely to hinge on whether Russia finds a way to regain access to high-tech chips, and is out to ensure it doesn’t get them. In order to flag the danger, Ukraine is sending out international warnings that the Kremlin has drawn up shopping lists of semiconductors, transformers, connectors, casings, transistors, insulators and other components, most made by companies in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., Taiwan and Japan, among others, which it needs to fuel its war effort.

The message is clear: Don’t let the Russians get their hands on this gadgetry.

POLITICO has seen one of the Russian lists, which is divided into three priority categories, from the most critical components to the least. It even includes the price per item that Moscow expects to pay, down to the last kopeck. While POLITICO could not independently verify the provenance of the list, two experts in military supply chains confirmed it was in line with other research findings about Russia’s military equipment and needs.

At first glance, Russia shouldn’t be able to acquire the most sensitive tech on the lists. With only very basic domestic technology, the Kremlin has relied on key players in the US, the EU and Japan for semiconductors as suppliers over the past years and these should be out of grasp thanks to sanctions. The difficulty would emerge in whether an intermediary country such as China were to buy technologies, then sell them on to Moscow. In extreme cases, Russians appear to be clawing chips out of household appliances like fridges.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal stressed the war had come to an inflection point where the technological edge was proving decisive. “According to our information, Russians have already spent almost half … of their weaponry arsenal,” he told POLITICO.

He added that Ukraine estimated that Russia was down to just “four dozen” hypersonic missiles. “These are the ones that have precision and accuracy due to the microchips that they have. But because of sanctions imposed on Russia, the deliveries of this high-tech microchip equipment … have stopped and they have no way of replenishing these stocks.”

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As an ex-Uber executive heads to trial, the security community reels • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill and Kellen Browning:

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it came as a shock to many in the community when [Joe] Sullivan was fired by Uber in 2017 [from his job as chief of computer security], accused of mishandling a security incident the year before. Despite the scandal, Mr. Sullivan got a new job as chief of security at Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company.

But the investigation into the incident at Uber continued, and in 2020, the same prosecutor’s office where Mr. Sullivan had worked decades earlier charged him with two felonies, in what is believed to be the first time a company executive has faced potential criminal liability for an alleged data breach. Mr. Sullivan has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

…Chief information security officers, or CISOs, are responsible for ensuring that their companies’ data remains safe from hackers and fraudsters, a high-stakes job that has become increasingly tricky.
In the past year or so alone, T-Mobile, Planned Parenthood and the NFT marketplace OpenSea have been hacked. Perfect security is impossible, and now CISOs are wondering what happens if — or rather when — they fail. If Mr. Sullivan is convicted, they worry the outcome could set a precedent for who is at fault for a data breach. Could they be left holding the bag?

Mr. Sullivan learned that hackers had secured access to the personal data of about 600,000 Uber drivers and some personal information associated with 57 million riders and drivers. He’s accused of directing them to the company’s bug bounty program, handing out $100,000 in bitcoin and getting them to sign NDAs.

Ms. Guttmann, who is now an adviser to venture capital firms and startups, said Mr. Sullivan’s case had made her think more about the problem of ransomware, when hackers encrypt a company’s files and demand payment, usually in cryptocurrency, to release them. A 2021 survey indicated that many companies pay the ransom.

“Six years from now, will all of them be prosecuted?” she asked.

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4.2 gigabytes, or: how to draw anything – ⌨️🤷🏻‍♂️📷

Andy Baio, concluding a demonstration of how to use the Stable Diffusion package to generate an AI illustration:

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4.2 gigabytes.

That’s the size of the model that has made this recent explosion possible.

4.2 gigabytes of floating points that somehow encode so much of what we know.

Yes, I’m waxing poetic here. No, I am not heralding the arrival of AGI, or our AI overlords. I am simply admiring the beauty of it, while it is fresh and new.

Because it won’t be fresh and new for long. This thing I’m feeling is not much different from how I felt using email for the first time – “Grandma got my message already? In Florida? In seconds?” It was the nearest thing to magic my child-self had ever seen. Now email is the most boring and mundane part of my day.

There is already much talk about practical uses. Malicious uses. Downplaying. Up playing. Biases. Monetization. Democratization – which is really just monetization with a more marketable name.

I’m not trying to get into any of that here. I’m just thinking about those 4.2 gigabytes. How small it seems, in today’s terms. Such a little bundle that holds so much.

How many images, both real photos and fictional art, were crammed through the auto-encoder, that narrower and narrower funnel of information, until some sort of meaning was distilled from them? How many times must a model be taught to de-noise an image until it understands what makes a tiger different from a leopard? I guess now we know.

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And there’s a generation growing up for whom this will be the most natural thing in the world. This coming term’s university entrants never knew a world without Facebook or Instagram, for example.
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A website is a street corner • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick on the doubletalk around KiwiFarms:

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In another blog post from last week, [Cloudflare CEO Matthew] Prince said that Cloudflare’s security services, many of which are free and are used by an estimated 20% of the entire internet, should be thought of as a utility. “Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy,” Prince wrote.

Which is a good line. I’m sure people who are old enough to remember when telephones weren’t computers love it. But I’m not really sure it works here. Telephones are not publishing platforms, nor are they searchable public records. Comparing a message board that has around nine million visitors a month to someone saying something racist on the telephone is, actually, nuts.

…Websites are not similar to telephones. They are not even similar to books or magazines. They are street corners, they are billboards, they are parks, they are shopping malls, they are spaces where people congregate. Just because you cannot see the (hopefully) tens of thousands of other people reading this blog post right now doesn’t mean they’re not there. And that is doubly true for a user-generated content platform. And regardless of the right to free speech and the right to assemble guaranteed in America, if the crowd you bring together in a physical space starts to threaten people, even if they’re doing it in the periphery of your audience, the private security company you hired as crowd control no longer has to support you. To me, it’s honestly just that simple.

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I always enjoy how Broderick cuts through the junk and fluff. His Garbage Day email is essential reading.
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Latest US chip curbs deliver setback to China’s AI ambitions • WSJ

Liza Lin and Dan Strumpf:

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US restrictions on sales of Nvidia Corp.’s high-end processors to China throw a wrench in Beijing’s ambitions to lead in artificial intelligence, as Chinese officials accused the US of monopolising advanced technologies.

The curbs cut off China’s biggest tech companies from some of the world’s most advanced chips. Nvidia’s affected customers include Alibaba Group, the internet giant that operates China’s largest cloud service business, and Tencent, the gaming and social media behemoth. Both sell cloud services powered by Nvidia chips that are capable of crunching huge amounts of data for advanced applications from autonomous factories to video processing.

“This is a big step by the US because it is targeting high performance processors that are mainly used for commercial applications,” said Handel Jones, chief executive of consulting firm International Business Strategies Inc.

Nvidia, the world’s largest chip maker by market value, said Wednesday that new US rules barring the sale without a license of the advanced chips to Chinese customers would cost it $400m in sales. It said it may have to transition some of its operations out of China.

Nvidia shares fell more than 11% midday Thursday. Other chip makers also retreated. Shares in Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which said it was also affected by the license requirement though didn’t expect a material impact, were down more than 6%.

The US Commerce Department, which handles export restrictions, has declined to comment on changes to its policy but said the action was aimed at preventing China from acquiring American technology to advance its military.

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The US is clearly very, very worried about China getting sufficiently advanced chipmaking capability that it doesn’t need TSMC. As Ben Thompson points out in Stratechery, once that happens then China can attack, invade or blockade Taiwan with impunity. Then things get very concerning, because it puts China ahead of the rest of the world. That’s what the US is looking to forestall.
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Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes • Incoherency

James Stanley:

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I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called “Sockfish” because it’s a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.

The feet are ideal for this sort of thing, because they’re the only part of your body that has any sensible degree of dexterity while still being invisible to casual observers.

There is prior art for phones taped to legs and some sort of TV remote control (?) and lots of cases of just going to the toilet and looking at chess positions on phones, but I think Sockfish may be the first hands-free method that does not require third-party assistance.

Each shoe insert has two force-sensing resistors and one vibration motor. The force-sensing resistors are used as buttons to allow me to input my opponent’s moves. The vibration motors are used for haptic feedback of accepted button presses, and to communicate the engine’s moves to me so that I can play them on the board.

On Tuesday evening I finally had a chance to deploy Sockfish in a real game against an unsuspecting opponent! Owen is quite a bit better at chess than I am. I talked him into playing a game with time control of 15 minutes per side, which is longer than the blitz & bullet that we normally play, but necessary to give me enough time to type the moves with my feet.

Owen was very confused about why it took me 20 seconds of intense concentration to decide on my very first move. He eventually surmised that I must have “revised” and was concentrating hard to make sure I remembered the theory. In actual fact I was concentrating very hard to make sure I understood Sockfish’s outputs correctly and gave my inputs correctly! I found that I concentrated much harder operating Sockfish than I do when I’m playing chess the hard way. Maybe I’d play better if I concentrated harder.

It was all going well until we reached a position where Sockfish was telling me to make an illegal move.

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It’s quite weird (and clearly, difficult) but the fact that someone could cheat like this in a tournament is something to think about.
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The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science • Nature

Holly Else and Richard Van Noorden:

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When Laura Fisher noticed striking similarities between research papers submitted to RSC Advances, she grew suspicious. None of the papers had authors or institutions in common, but their charts and titles looked alarmingly similar, says Fisher, the executive editor at the journal. “I was determined to try to get to the bottom of what was going on.”

A year later, in January 2021, Fisher retracted 68 papers from the journal, and editors at two other Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) titles retracted one each over similar suspicions; 15 are still under investigation. Fisher had found what seemed to be the products of paper mills: companies that churn out fake scientific manuscripts to order. All the papers came from authors at Chinese hospitals. The journals’ publisher, the RSC in London, announced in a statement that it had been the victim of what it believed to be “the systemic production of falsified research”.

What was surprising about this was not the paper-mill activity itself: research-integrity sleuths have repeatedly warned that some scientists buy papers from third-party firms to help their careers. Rather, it was extraordinary that a publisher had publicly announced something that journals generally keep quiet about. “We believe that it is a paper mill, so we want to be open and transparent,” Fisher says.

The RSC wasn’t alone, its statement added: “We are one of a number of publishers to have been affected by such activity.” Since last January, journals have retracted at least 370 papers that have been publicly linked to paper mills, an analysis by Nature has found, and many more retractions are expected to follow.

«

China, Iran and Russia are fingered in this. Medical journals particularly, because getting published there is necessary for promotion, but physicians might not have the time to research or write the paper.
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The quantum computing bubble • Financial Times

Nikita Gourianov is a physicist at Oxford university who works with computational quantum physics:

»

Billions of dollars have poured into the [quantum computing] field in recent years, culminating with the public market debuts of prominent quantum computing companies like IonQ, Rigetti and D-Wave through 2021’s favourite frothy market phenomenon, special purpose acquisition vehicles (Spacs).

These three jointly still have a market capitalisation of $3bn, but combined expected sales of about $32mn this year (and about $150mn of net losses), according to Refinitiv.

The reality is that none of these companies — or any other quantum computing firm, for that matter — are actually earning any real money. The little revenue they generate mostly comes from consulting missions aimed at teaching other companies about “how quantum computers will help their business”, as opposed to genuinely harnessing any advantages that quantum computers have over classical computers.

The simple reason for this is that despite years of effort nobody has yet come close to building a quantum machine that is actually capable of solving practical problems. The current devices are so error-prone that any information one tries to process with them will almost instantly degenerate into noise. The problem only grows worse if the computer is scaled up (ie, the number of “qubits” increased).

A convincing strategy for overcoming these errors has not yet been demonstrated, making it unclear as to when — if ever — it will become possible to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Yet according to the evangelists, we are apparently in the middle of a Quantum Moore’s Law (aka “Rose’s Law”, after D-Wave founder Geordie Rose) analogous to the microchip revolution of the 1970s — 2010s.

Another fundamental issue is that it is unclear what commercially-useful problems can even be solved with quantum computers — if any.

«

Sure, you can try using them to factor large numbers (aka breaking cryptography), but, he points out, “the commonly forgotten caveat here is that there are many alternative cryptographic schemes that are not vulnerable to quantum computers.”

I’ve been following quantum computing for about 30 years. Like fusion, it’s one of those “big promise, little product” things.
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The Endless Drum Beating • KiwiFarms

Null (who operates KiwiFarms), writing on 5 September:

»

DDoS Mitigation: DDoS-Guard will drop us dropped us while I was writing this post. This meme about Russia being a free country is a joke. The US is a free country, but with no stewards to protect it. Without the US, there is no second best. I did not expect Cloudflare to crumple so quickly and I don’t have a Plan C for DDoS mitigation.

Resource Allocation: I own IP addresses. Our IP allocation is from APNIC. APNIC is one of the 5 private companies which allocate Internet resources around the world. APNIC happens to be based out of Australia, which recently passed draconian censorship laws. There is an effort to get our RIR to revoke our allocation. This would be unprecedented in the history of the Internet, and considering China is in APNIC’s region, an absolutely horrific standard which will echo throughout the upcoming decades. There is a non-zero chance of this happening.

Hosting: We have one host and I am looking at two more. It is likely that the host will give up too. The two hosts confident they can handle the Kiwi Farms are probably wrong. DDoS-Guard was confident they could handle the Kiwi Farms and said “bring it on” for less than 24 hours.

This is an organized attack. There is a coalition of criminals trying to frame the forum for their behavior. These criminals provide opportunities for professional victims to amplify their message. Journalists canonize the crimes as the behavior of the forum itself, which becomes the effective truth for the general public.

«

Just rummaging around here for the world’s tiniest violin – seems to have slipped down between the cushions. You run a forum that doxes and encourages harassment, and whose denizens have an absolute sense of self-righteousness about what they’re doing, and when the consequences come home you’re surprised?

He ends with “I do not see a situation where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate. It will either become a fractured shell of itself, like 8chan, or jump between hosts and domain names like [Nazi site] Daily Stormer.”

I’d call that a win for civilisation and society. (It’s also been removed from the Internet Archive.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The superconducting magnets at CERN use about a quarter of its peak of 200MW of power use – and might get turned off due to Russia’s war with Ukraine. CC-licensed photo by Ryan Bodenstein 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. In a whirl. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Europe’s energy crunch squeezes world’s largest particle collider • WSJ

Matthew Dalton:

»

Europe’s energy crisis is threatening to slow experiments into the fundamental forces of nature.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is drafting plans to shut down some of its particle accelerators at periods of peak demand, said Serge Claudet, chair of the center’s energy management panel. CERN is also considering how it could idle the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest accelerator, if necessary, Mr. Claudet said.

“Our concern is really grid stability, because we do all we can to prevent a blackout in our region,” Mr. Claudet said.

…CERN sits on a sprawling complex that straddles the French-Swiss border and is one of France’s largest electricity consumers. At peak operation, it consumes nearly 200 megawatts of power, a third as much as the nearby city of Geneva.

…CERN is in discussions with its electricity supplier, state-controlled French power giant EDF SA, to receive a day’s warning that the center would need to consume less electricity, Mr. Claudet said. CERN would give priority to shutting down other accelerators besides the LHC, lowering the center’s electricity consumption by as much as 25%.

…Shutting down the LHC would save another 25%, with a catch: The collider relies on superconducting magnets cooled to -456 degrees Fahrenheit to bend the particle beam, requiring a significant amount of power even when the beam is turned off. Allowing the magnets to warm up could set back experiments at the LHC for weeks.

“It’s a voluntary action,” Mr. Claudet said. “You don’t want to break your toy.”

«

Except it’s not a toy. Quite how useful what it finds out, and what we will learn from it, is unknown; but if it never finds anything out because it isn’t running, we definitely can’t learn from it. The energy war has many casualties.
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Second web-hosting provider drops harassment site Kiwi Farms • Associated Press via The Independent

»

Web-hosting provider DDoS-Guard said Monday that it had stopped providing its services to Kiwi Farms, becoming the second provider in two days to abandon the stalking and harassment site and leaving it inaccessible on the public internet.

DDoS-Guard said it doesn’t have to decide whether sites violate laws, and it normally only restricts access to a site in cases such as receiving a court order to do so. The company said it acted this time, however, after receiving “multiple” complaints.

“Having analyzed the content of the site, we decided on the termination of DDoS protection services” for a version of the Kiwi Farms site with a Russian .ru domain name, the company said. The .ru site had been running intermittently after Cloudfare cut off services.

Kiwi Farms was previously cut off from services by Cloudfare. Both firms acted after Canadian transgender Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti launched an online campaign against the site.

Cloudfare CEO Matthew Prince said he was troubled by the decision, but that escalating targeted threats on the site created an “immediate threat to human life” that his company had never seen.

The site was created and operated by Joshua Conner Moon, 29, and became a forum for harassment of social media figures, especially transgender people, feminists and people of color.

«

So now it’s off the internet… isn’t it? Is this chapter of the internet finally over?

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This House Does Not Exist (by @levelsio)

You know the routine by now: AI-generated houses that look like the real thing, but aren’t. The ones I looked at seemed to mostly lean to minimalist angularity (in one case including a swimming pool in the living room).
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Thousands of Xcel customers locked out of thermostats during ‘energy emergency’ • Denver7 News

Jaclyn Allen:

»

During the dog days of summer, it’s important to keep your home cool. But when thousands of Xcel customers in Colorado tried adjusting their thermostats Tuesday, they learned they had no control over the temperatures in their own homes.

Temperatures climbed into the 90s Tuesday, which is why Tony Talarico tried to crank up the air conditioning in his partner’s Arvada home. “I mean, it was 90 [32ºC] out, and it was right during the peak period,” Talarico said. “It was hot.” That’s when he saw a message on the thermostat stating the temperature was locked due to an “energy emergency.”

“Normally, when we see a message like that, we’re able to override it,” Talarico said. “In this case, we weren’t. So, our thermostat was locked in at 78 or 79.” On social media, dozens of Xcel customers complained of similar experiences — some reporting home temperatures as high as 88º [31ºC].

Xcel confirmed to Denver7 that 22,000 customers who had signed up for the Colorado AC Rewards program were locked out of their smart thermostats for hours on Tuesday. “It’s a voluntary program. Let’s remember that this is something that customers choose to be a part of based on the incentives,” said Emmett Romine, vice president of customer solutions and innovation at Xcel.

Customers receive a $100 credit for enrolling in the program and $25 annually, but Romine said customers also agree to give up some control to save energy and money and make the system more reliable. “So, it helps everybody for people to participate in these programs. It is a bit uncomfortable for a short period of time, but it’s very, very helpful,” said Romine.

This is the first time in the program’s six year span that customers could not override their smart thermostats, Romine said. He said the “energy emergency” was due to an unexpected outage in Pueblo combined with hot weather and heavy air conditioner usage.

But Talarico said he had no idea that he could be locked out of the thermostat. While he has solar panels and a smart thermostat to save energy, he says he did not sign up to have this much control taken away.

«

This does seem to come out of the same place as complaints about the outcome of voting for the Leopards Eating Your Face party. OK, so you get the money, but they get to do the thing they said they might do? How unfair is that?
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Apple Watch Pro: an increasingly niche product • 9to5Mac.com

Chance Miller:

»

Over the last several days, we’ve seen a barrage of new details leak on Apple’s rumored Apple Watch Pro. The Apple Watch Pro will be officially unveiled during Apple’s “Far out” event on Wednesday, alongside the iPhone 14 lineup.

These new leaks, including our first look at the new design, show that Apple is sparing no expense on the Apple Watch Pro. With some exceptions, however, it’s becoming clear that the Apple Watch Pro isn’t for most people.

Earlier today, CAD images of the Apple Watch Pro leaked to give us our best look yet at the new design. These renders appear to have emerged from Apple’s supply chain, and they were also corroborated by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

There are several important things that we can glean from these images ahead of seeing the official design on Wednesday.

First and foremost, the Apple Watch Pro is going to be big. Like, really big. We knew it would feature a larger 47mm casing and 1.99-inch screen, but these renders put those numbers into perspective. They also show another way the Apple Watch Pro will one even bigger.

On the right-hand side, the Apple Watch Pro appears to feature a bulge that houses a new Digital Crown as well as a side button similar to existing Apple Watch model. We’ll likely learn more about the reasoning for this design change on Wednesday, but the way the button and crown are now raised out of the edge has a significant impact on the size and appearance of the watch.

For context, most of the people in the so-called “watch industry” say that the existing Apple Watch Series 7 models are already pushing it in terms of size. This is particularly true of the 45mm model, which features a 1.77in screen.

«

Other watches – not smartwatches, though certainly Garmin watches – are hardly shrinking violets. The real question is how long the battery life will be, and how long is actually enough for whatever the target market is. (Also: “increasingly niche” is an odd phrase to use about a product that hasn’t actually launched yet.)
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Instagram owner Meta fined €405m over handling of teens’ data • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Instagram owner Meta has been fined €405m (£349m) by the Irish data watchdog for letting teenagers set up accounts that publicly displayed their phone numbers and email addresses.

The Data Protection Commission confirmed the penalty after a two-year investigation into potential breaches of the European Union’s general data protection regulation (GDPR).

Instagram had allowed users aged between 13 and 17 to operate business accounts on the platform, which showed the users’ phone numbers and email addresses. The DPC also found the platform had operated a user registration system whereby the accounts of 13-to-17-year-old users were set to “public” by default.

The DPC regulates Meta – which is also the owner of Facebook and WhatsApp – on behalf of the entire EU because the company’s European headquarters are in Ireland.

The penalty is the highest imposed on Meta by the watchdog, after a €225m fine imposed in September 2021 for “severe” and “serious” infringements of GDPR at WhatsApp and a €17m fine in March this year.

The fine is the second largest under GDPR, behind the €746m levied on Amazon in July 2021.

A DPC spokesperson said: “We adopted our final decision last Friday and it does contain a fine of €405m. Full details of the decision will be published next week.”

Caroline Carruthers, a UK data consultancy owner, said Instagram had not thought through its privacy responsibilities when letting teenagers set up business accounts and had shown an “obvious lack of care” in users’ privacy settings.

«

Is it a sort of indifference in setting up the software to handle this, or such complicated systems that they just can’t do two things correctly at once? Account creation seems like the most basic thing to police correctly.
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Saudi citizens are using an app to rat out activists • Business Insider

Peter Guest:

»

For “Real,” a Saudi Arabian women’s-rights activist, anonymity is all that keeps her safe. Under that alias, she uses Twitter to advocate for victims of domestic violence in the kingdom, sending their stories trending in the country and overseas. Her work is fraught with risk.

“Every day we wake up to hear news, somebody has been arrested, or somebody has been taken,” Real told Insider, using a voice modulator to disguise her voice. “Today I’m here with you, sharing my story. Tomorrow I might be caught.”

Real, like other activists, is on edge after the price of speaking out online in Saudi Arabia was made clear this August. The academic Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was accused of “using the internet to tear Saudi Arabia’s social fabric” and sentenced to 45 years in prison. On August 16, Salma el-Shabab, a Ph.D. student, was sentenced to 34 years in jail for a handful of tweets in support of activists and members of the kingdom’s political opposition in exile.

El-Shabab was reported to the authorities via Kollona Amn, a mobile app available to download from the Apple App store and the Google Play store, which empowers ordinary citizens to snitch on their compatriots.

The Saudi regime has often encouraged citizens to inform on one another, but Kollona Amn, launched by the Saudi interior ministry in 2017, has made it possible to report comments critical of the regime or behavior deemed offensive by the conservative theocracy with a few clicks. Legal-rights activists say that over the past few years, they’ve witnessed a dramatic rise in court cases that reference the app, as the country’s current leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan — widely known by his acronym MBS — expands the use of technology to surveil, intimidate, and control its citizens at home and abroad.

«

East Germany would have loved this technology. The models of dictatorship remain the same; only the tools change.
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Liz Truss’ (net) zero sum game • POLITICO

Karl Mathiesen, Esther Webber and Noah Keate:

»

[Newly appointed Tory leader, not quite yet PM, Liz] Truss has indicated her desire to embrace home-grown supplies of all energy sources — except perhaps solar, which is currently nine times cheaper than gas, having plummeted in cost over the past decade to become, alongside wind, the cheapest form of power. Her proposals include ending a U.K.-wide moratorium on fracking — albeit with requirements for local community buy-in — which party insiders suggest could be one of her early moves in No. 10.

Outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson sent a shot across the bows of his would-be successor last week, warning fracking was “not going to be the panacea that some people suggest.”

According to reporting from the Times, Truss also wants to issue new licensing rounds for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. That prospect was immediately slammed by Greenpeace U.K.’s chief scientist Doug Parr as a “gift to the fossil fuel giants already making billions from this crisis.” 

These new licenses will be of limited assistance to the U.K.’s broader energy needs, however. The additional supply from new projects would take years to hit the market and be “relatively small in comparison to the overall level of energy demand,” said Josh Buckland, a former energy policy adviser to recent Conservative governments in No. 10 Downing Street, the Treasury and the business department.

“The biggest driver of the current energy challenge is obviously the availability of gas, and the price of gas,” he said. “So really, the key medium term question for the government is: how do you reduce your reliance on gas?”

«

How indeed. As the story points out later, a lot of rightwing wingnuts are pushing Truss to disown net zero, blaming it (incredibly) for the rise in energy bills. Turning climate action into a culture war issue is deeply stupid, and weird.
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An environmentalist gets lunch • Works in Progress

Hannah Ritchie:

»

My charts [for Our World In Data, where Ritchie works] might be plastered across posters about the environment, but I’ll never be a poster girl for environmental action.

Watching me make a meal looks like an environmental travesty. I almost exclusively use the microwave. I don’t take time to savour the process: a meal that takes longer than ten minutes is one that’s not worth having. It nearly always comes from a packet. My avocados are shipped over from Mexico, and bananas transported from Angola. It’s rare that my food is produced locally. Or if it is, I don’t check the label enough to notice.

This is the opposite of what seems sustainable. The image we have in our head of the ‘environmentally-friendly meal’ is one that’s sourced from the local market; produced on an organic farm without nasty chemicals; and brought home in a paper bag, not a plastic wrapper. Forget the processed junk: it’s meat and vegetables, as fresh as they come. We set aside time to cook them properly, in the oven. 

I know that my way of eating is low-carbon. I’ve spent years poring over the data. Microwaves are the most efficient way to cook. Local food is often no better than food shipped from continents away. Organic food often has a higher carbon footprint. And packaging is a tiny fraction of a food’s environmental footprint, and often lengthens its shelf-life.

Yet it still feels wrong. I know I’m doing the right thing for the environment, but there’s still a part of me that feels like a traitor. I can see the confusion on peoples’ faces when they hear about some of my decisions. I feel embarrassed that people might think that I’m being a ‘bad’ environmentalist.

This problem stems from the fact that what is ‘good’ for the environment often doesn’t line up with our intuitions. Ask people about what behaviours are most effective in reducing their carbon footprint, and they talk about recycling; replacing old lightbulbs; and eating local. They often miss the things that really do help. Surveys have shown this disconnect over and over.

«

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How Russia relies on old tech in weapons aimed at Ukraine • The New York Times

John Ismay:

»

The weapons are top of the line in the Russian arsenal. But they contained fairly low-tech components, analysts who examined them said, including a unique but basic satellite navigation system that was also found in other captured munitions.

Those findings are detailed in a new report issued Saturday by Conflict Armament Research, an independent group based in Britain that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars around the world. The research team examined the Russian matériel in July at the invitation of the Ukrainian government.

The report undercuts Moscow’s narrative of having a domestically rebuilt military that again rivals that of its Western adversaries.

But it also shows that the weapons Russia is using to destroy Ukrainian towns and cities are often powered by Western innovation, despite sanctions imposed against Russia after it invaded Crimea in 2014. Those restrictions were intended to stop the shipment of high-tech items that could help Russia’s military abilities.

“We saw that Russia reuses the same electronic components across multiple weapons, including their newest cruise missiles and attack helicopters, and we didn’t expect to see that,” said Damien Spleeters, an investigator for the group who contributed to the report. “Russian guided weapons are full of non-Russian technology and components, and most of the computer chips we documented were made by Western countries after 2014.”

«

Which does make it easier to target the (western) manufacturers and restrict the supply. But this is all going to take a long time to work through the system. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Rampion offshore wind farm got through planning, but antiquated laws mean many more don’t – and we all lose from that. CC-licensed photo by Mark 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. Justifying the subscription. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Mudge report shows how Twitter’s lack of resources shaped trouble • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Joseph Menn and Cat Zakrzewski:

»

While [“Mudge”, proper name Peter] Zatko’s allegations of Twitter’s security failures, first reported last month by The Post and CNN, have received widespread attention, the audit on misinformation has gone largely unreported. Yet it underscores a fundamental conundrum for the 16-year-old social media service: in spite of its role hosting the opinions of some the world’s most important political leaders, business executives and journalists, Twitter has been unable to build safeguards commensurate with the platform’s outsized societal influence. It has never generated the level of profit needed to do so, and its leadership never demonstrated the will.

Twitter’s early executives famously referred to the platform as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” Though that ethos has been tempered over the years, as the company contended with threats from Russian operatives and the relentless boundary-pushing tweets from former president Donald J. Trump, Twitter’s first-ever ban of any kind of misinformation didn’t take place until 2020 — when it prohibited deep fakes and falsehoods related to Covid-19.

Former employees have said that privacy, security, and user safety from harmful content were long seen as afterthoughts for the company’s leadership. Then-CEO Jack Dorsey even questioned his most senior deputies’ decision to permanently suspend Trump’s account after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, calling silencing the president a mistake.

The audit report by the Alethea Group, a company that fights disinformation threats, confirms that sense, depicting a company overwhelmed by well-orchestrated disinformation campaigns and short on engineering tools and human firepower while facing threats on par with vastly better-financed Google and Facebook.

«

The haphazard nature of Twitter is always apparent from time to time as some calamity or other overwhelms it. From the outside, one sees what seems like a well-funded company with a swishy San Francisco office (I’ve visited it a couple of times). In reality, there are fires all over the place, and a shortage of extinguishers. Social warming runs riot.
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The Air Force just survived a reply all email apocalypse • Gizmodo

Lucas Ropek:

»

According to images of the email thread shared by the tipster, a “replyallcalypse” happened when a low-level clerical employee at Ramstein Air Force base in Germany sent out a query about a computer issue at the base, subject line “Logo appearing on our screern [sic].” She wrote, “Please help us !!!” about an ugly and outdated logo that would not quit the screens at Ramstein. She called it “this horrible green statement.”

Unfortunately, she accidentally added the “AF-All” address, which appears to have forwarded the query to droves of Air Force personnel stationed at different bases.

The recipients of the email thread were not pleased. One person, a Lt. Colonel Matthew S. Judd, of Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio, replied bluntly:

»

Elizabeth,

Good Morning, I’m sorry to hear about your computer issue, I really have no idea what your issue is or have a good solution to the problem, but here’s a shot anyway:

Unplug device, head for the second story, open window and throw it out the window, should get rid of the green screen. I hope this helps.

«

Others skipped the snark and went straight for anger and confusion. One person, replied:

»

Mrs. Pritchard. I’m not sure why you put me on this string but I’d appreciate it if those who are involved in your issue would reply to you land [sic] not “all”.

«

Yet another person, Lt. Colonel John Fesler, who is based in Washington DC, merely offered the following: “PLEASE stop using ‘Reply All’,” he wrote, which seems to imply that this sort of thing has happened before.

Others from bases in Texas, Florida, and New York all chimed in with annoyance and confusion. Gizmodo reached out to them about their feelings regarding their overloaded inboxes, but did not hear back.

«

Happens to us all at some point.
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Cloudflare drops KiwiFarms • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn and Taylor Lorenz:

»

Reversing course under growing public pressure, major tech security company Cloudflare announced Saturday that it will stop protecting the Kiwi Farms website, best known as a place for stalkers to organize hacks, online campaigns and real-world harassment.

Cloudfare chief executive Matthew Prince, who this past week published a lengthy blog post justifying the company’s services defending Kiwi Farms, told The Washington Post he changed his mind not because of the pressure but a surge in credible violent threats stemming from the site.

“As Kiwi Farms has felt more threatened, they have reacted by being more threatening,” Prince said. “We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up.”

Prince said contributors to the forum were posting home addresses of those seen as enemies and calling for them to be shot.

Kiwi Farms launched in 2013 and quickly grew into a popular internet forum for online harassment campaigns. At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum consider their goal to drive their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets.

«

This really didn’t look tenable for a public company such as Cloudflare (although KiwiFarms may be able to find someone prepared to save it from DDOS attacks, as Cloudflare does). The post-justification that the content was getting “more threatening” doesn’t quite gel with the fact that KiwiFarms denizens had already driven a number of people to kill themselves through repeated harassment. (KiwiFarms has now moved to Russian servers.)

And: is there any difference between social media platforms deciding to remove users who incite violence or harassment, and hosting or DDOS-preventing providers ceasing to support sites whose users incite violence or harassment? You can decide now, or read the next item and decide.
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Libs of TikTok Twitter account blamed for threats on children’s hospitals • The Washington Post

Taylor Lorenz, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Peter Jamison:

»

Children’s hospitals across the US are facing growing threats of violence, driven by an online anti-LGBTQ campaign attacking the facilities for providing care to transgender kids and teens.

Twitter has left up the account inspiring the attacks, despite its employees voicing concerns in internal Slack channels that it’s “only a matter of time” before the posts lead to someone getting killed.

The campaign is led by Libs of TikTok, a Twitter account with more than 1.3 million followers run by a former Brooklyn real estate agent named Chaya Raichik, whose posts are frequently cited by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and other right-wing media figures.

After gaining a large Twitter following in the spring as she baselessly accused LGBTQ teachers of being paedophiles and “groomers,” Raichik began criticizing children’s health facilities earlier this summer, targeting a hospital in Omaha in June and another in Pittsburgh in August. The attacks resulted in a flood of online harassment and phoned-in threats at both hospitals.

Next came threats against children’s hospitals in Boston and Washington, D.C., after Raichik posted tweets targeting them.

Reached by Twitter direct messaging on Thursday, Raichik didn’t respond to a question about whether she felt responsible for the threats to the hospitals. “We 100 % condemn any acts/threats of violence,” she wrote.

Twitter declined to comment, but people familiar with internal discussions say Twitter executives face internal pressure from some employees to respond more aggressively to the account.

«

Raichik will condemn the violence, but don’t actually discourage it. That’s the difference. The question of to what extent the platform is responsible for and should shut down users who do this is crucial now.
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Britain’s failure to build is throttling its economy • The Economist

»

Building in Britain is never easy, often difficult and sometimes impossible. The country has become a vetocracy, in which many people and agencies have the power to stymie any given development. The Town and Country Planning Act, passed in 1947, in effect nationalised the right to build. Decisions about whether to approve new projects are made by politicians who rely on the votes of nimbys (“Not in my back yard”), notes (“Not over there, either”) and bananas (“Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything”).

Green belts, which were designed to stop suburban sprawl, have achieved precisely that. These enormous no-build zones enjoy Pyongyangesque levels of support among voters, who picture them as rural idylls rather than the mish-mash of motorways, petrol stations, scrubland and golf courses that they are in reality. Strict environmental laws protect many creatures, especially cute ones like bats. Judges strike down government decisions if they are based on a botched process because Britain respects the rule of law.

In isolation, each part of the planning system may seem unobjectionable. But the whole thing is a disaster. Britain’s failure to build enough is most pronounced when it comes to housing. England has 434 homes per 1,000 people, whereas France has 590. Its most dynamic cities can barely expand outwards, and are frequently prevented from shooting skywards as well.

But the problems extend well beyond housing. Britain has not built a reservoir since 1991 or finished a new nuclear-power station since 1995. hs2, a high-speed railway, is the first new line connecting large British cities since the 19th century. Even modest projects, such as widening the a66 road across northern England, take over a decade. The result is frustration and slower economic growth.

A truly bold government could transform the planning system. A proper land-value tax would weaken the perverse incentives to keep city centres underdeveloped and encourage landlords to build or sell up. Scrapping or shrinking the green belt is a no-brainer.

«

Hard agree. The planning system is ridiculous and hidebound, and is one of the reasons why Britain lags other countries. Rip it up.
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Actors worry that AI is taking centre stage • Financial Times

Sarah O’Connor:

»

A survey this year by Equity, the UK union for actors and other performing arts workers, found that 65% of members thought AI posed a threat to employment opportunities in the sector, rising to 93% of audio artists. This wasn’t just an amorphous fear about the future: more than a third of members had seen job listings for work involving AI and almost a fifth had undertaken some of this work.

A range of AI start-ups are developing tools for use in film and audio, from making actors look and sound younger to creating AI voices that can be used for marketing campaigns, consumer assistants or even audiobook narration. Audio is such a popular medium now that companies need lots of it, but human actors are expensive and nowhere near as flexible as an AI voice, which can be made to say anything at the push of a button. These companies typically hire actors to provide hours’ worth of audio which can then be turned into a voice-for-hire.

VocaliD, for example, offers a range of voices such as “Malik” (“warm, soothing, urban”) “Terri” (“educated, optimistic, sophisticated’‘) and “AI Very British Voice” (“trustworthy, warm, calm”.) Sonantic, another AI company which was just acquired by Spotify, creates voices that can laugh, shout or cry. Its voices are often used by video game companies in the production process so they can play around with different scripts.

They’re not as good as humans, but they don’t need to be. Industry experts say no one is going to use AI to narrate the audiobook of a bestselling novel, but there is still a market to be tapped in the vast number of lower-profile books that are published or self-published every year. Audiobook.ai, for example, says it can create an audiobook in 10 minutes with 146 voices to choose from in 43 languages.

«

“Not as good as humans, but don’t need to be” is a phrase that I think we’re going to hear a great deal in the coming years. (Via Wendy G.)
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The Liz Truss manifesto • POLITICO

Noah Keate:

»

Liz Truss has not published her plan for government, but this is the closest thing to it.

Over nearly eight long weeks of hustings, interviews, articles and debates, the two contenders for the Tory leadership have made their respective cases for why they should succeed Boris Johnson as U.K. prime minister. Among all the campaign jibes and blue-on-blue attacks have been scores of pledges and promises for how to deal with the urgent problems facing the country.

The result of the contest won’t be known for sure until September 5, but with Foreign Secretary Truss the runaway favorite, POLITICO has compiled every policy commitment she has made during over 40 hours of hustings, as well as countless interviews and articles on the campaign trail. It is in effect the 149 separate policy pledges that make up the Truss manifesto.

«

I suspect she’s going to have to break many of these “pledges”, which will be a relief to many. Sticking to ideas (abolishing the monarchy, going against Brexit) has never been Truss’s style. And those to whom she made the pledges – the Conservative members – won’t remember them in any specific way anyway. Still, good to have them here so we can refer back at some future date and laugh quietly. Or weep.

But: you can watch this clip of comedian Joe Lycett utterly blowing up the political chatshow format after Laura Kuenssberg had interviewed Truss.
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How shady ships use GPS to evade international law • The New York Times

Anatoly Kurnamaev:

»

The scrappy oil tanker waited to load fuel at a dilapidated jetty projecting from a giant Venezuelan refinery on a December morning. A string of abandoned ships listed in the surrounding turquoise Caribbean waters, a testament to the country’s decay after years of economic hardships and US sanctions.

Yet, on computer screens, the ship — called Reliable — appeared nearly 300 nautical miles away, drifting innocuously off the coast of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. According to Reliable’s satellite location transmissions, the ship had not been to Venezuela in at least a decade.

Shipping data researchers have identified hundreds of cases like Reliable, where a ship has transmitted fake location coordinates in order to carry out murky and even illegal business operations and circumvent international laws and sanctions.

The digital mirage — enabled by a spreading technology — could transform how goods are moved around the world, with profound implications for the enforcement of international law, organized crime and global trade.

Tampering this way with satellite location trackers carried by large ships is illegal under international law, and until recently, most fleets are believed to have largely followed the rules.

But over the past year, Windward, a large maritime data company that provides research to the United Nations, has uncovered more than 500 cases of ships manipulating their satellite navigation systems to hide their locations. The vessels carry out the deception by adopting a technology that until recently was confined to the world’s most advanced navies. The technology, in essence, replicates the effect of a VPN cellphone app, making a ship appear to be in one place, while physically being elsewhere.

Its use has included Chinese fishing fleets hiding operations in protected waters off South America, tankers concealing stops in Iranian oil ports, and container ships obfuscating journeys in the Middle East. A US intelligence official, who discussed confidential government assessments on the condition of anonymity, said the deception tactic had already been used for weapons and drug smuggling.

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Google Maps vs. Apple Maps: which navigation app is best? • Tom’s Guide

Tom Pritchard, with an in-depth look comparing the two services:

»

Google’s practice of data collection is key to making Google Maps a superior service to Apple Maps. Or that’s one way of looking at it. Since Apple Maps is run with a focus on user privacy, Apple can’t utilize data to make improvements. So Google can offer real time updates showing how busy a store or train might be, that’s always going to be well out of Apple’s reach.

But at the same time using Google Maps means knowing everything you do, and everything you search for, is being collected and analyzed for Google’s own benefit. When it comes to GPS and your actual location, that’s going to be too much for the more privacy-conscious.

Discovering new places is easy on Google Maps, but only just. Apple just needs to offer a full list of categories, rather than just giving you what it thinks is the most relevant. Similarly Google Street View is more widespread, but it also had a 12-year head start that puts Apple’s Look Around at a clear disadvantage. Apple Maps does offer a cleaner design and simpler interface, which is much more appealing than Google Maps’ relatively cluttered approach.

Most of these comparisons are arbitrary in the long run. Google Maps may well have won more categories than Apple Maps, but numbers don’t tell us everything. The most important thing to consider is the actual navigation, and it turns out there isn’t really a wrong answer here.

«

Apple Maps has improved so much. Worthy of special note: if you plan a cycling journey, it tells you how hilly it may be. Still lags around the edges compared to Google Maps, but the forthcoming addition of waypoints in iOS 16 is great, and Look Around (Apple’s version of Street View) is great.. where it’s available.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Floppy disks are still mandatory for some processes in Japan’s government – a fact that is going to change, finally. CC-licensed photo by frankieleonfrankieleon 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. Of limited capacity. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Tech tool offers police ‘mass surveillance on a budget’ • AP News

Garance Burke and Jason Dearen:

»

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.

Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.

Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used.

The company was developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials under former President George W. Bush. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. That information is then sold to companies like Fog.

“It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.

…Because of the secrecy surrounding Fog, however, there are scant details about its use and most law enforcement agencies won’t discuss it, raising concerns among privacy advocates that it violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

«

This is using advertising IDs – which in theory means that Apple’s ATT will stop it. More on Fog at the EFF’s site.
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Twitter unveils an Edit button, finally • The New York Times

Kate Conger:

»

On Thursday, after countless pleas from many of its more than 237 million users, some people will start being able to click a button on the social media service to edit a tweet after they have posted it. It has been only about 15 years, nine months and 22 days since they started asking for that ability.

Since Twitter was unveiled in 2006, the basics of using it have been simple and constant: You wrote a tweet, you posted it — and then you dealt with the consequences. There were no take-backs on the timeline.

That makes the edit button perhaps the biggest shift at the social media service since 2017, when Twitter increased the character limit for messages to 280 characters from 140.

Twitter’s commitment to first drafts made it a destination for online brawls and hot takes. But people have often regretted their choice of words, or noticed a misspelling just after posting a tweet.

As Twitter grew from a niche service to a global platform, more users began demanding a way to edit their posts. They complained. They begged. They raged. Some made typos in their tweets asking for an edit button to correct their typos.

Even Elon Musk, the billionaire who has been locked in a battle over whether to stick with a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, has seemed to favor an edit button.

Twitter didn’t budge.

The company argued that there was something noble in leaving mistakes on display. A nefarious user could change a tweet after it had already been shared widely, swapping a benign message for a misleading one. Someone who had retweeted a statement might miss the update, inadvertently broadcasting a tweet that the person no longer agreed with.

But more recently, Twitter began reconsidering an edit button as it tried to expand its service by attracting people who might be more careful with their words.

«

All sorts of questions about the implementation (which is only for Twitter Blue subscribers) – is each edit a new tweet (so the edit trail is like a thread)? Why isn’t the fact of the edit more prominent? How easy is it to read back through the edits?

And can I get an Edit button for my life? That’s the logical next step, I think.
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With NAFO, the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, Ukraine turns the trolls on Russia • The Washington Post

Adam Taylor:

»

More than six months in, the war in Ukraine has become a little surreal. This past weekend, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry shared a doctored photograph of a Shiba Inu dog wearing a military uniform, apparently gushing over the site of a missile launch.
“Today we want to give a shout-out to a unique entity,” the tweet read, before pointing to an unusually named group — the North Atlantic Fellas Organization.

If you are the sort of person who gets your news from, say, a newspaper website, you may have little idea what NAFO is. But if you’re the sort of person who has spent the last six months scouring Twitter for news about the war in Ukraine, signing up for obscure Telegram accounts and reading accounts of the latest Ukrainian strikes on Russia on blogs devoted to open-source intelligence (OSINT) … well, it’s quite likely you’re already a fella yourself.

For the former, let’s explain. Over recent months, Ukraine-sympathetic internet users have come together to support Kyiv’s war effort. The Shiba Inu is a distinctive dog breed from Japan, which for over a decade, has been a recurrent motif in internet culture. You may recognize it as a “doge,” beloved of Elon Musk and millions of other internet users.

Vice’s Motherboard dates the use of Shiba Inu as a “fella” fighting the war in Ukraine to May, when an artist named Kama began creating custom images of the “fellas” for those who donated money to the Georgian Legion — a volunteer military unit in Ukraine that took on board many foreigners. “Out of boredom, I started making other Fellas and imprinting them on random images from Ukraine,” Kama told Motherboard earlier this summer.

The movement went on to have a landmark moment in June, when Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov got into an argument with a “fella” over threats to civilians. Ulyanov, Russia’s ambassador to international organizations in Vienna and a vocal advocate for Russia’s position on social media, made the mistake of responding to a NAFO member.

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I mean.. OK? Won’t change the direction of a single bullet, a single bomb, and yet some folk feel it’s worth doing. Better than not supporting Ukraine, I suppose.
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How one-time passcodes became a corporate liability • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

In mid-June 2022, a flood of SMS phishing messages began targeting employees at commercial staffing firms that provide customer support and outsourcing to thousands of companies. The missives asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Those who submitted credentials were then prompted to provide the one-time password needed for multi-factor authentication.

The phishers behind this scheme used newly-registered domains that often included the name of the target company, and sent text messages urging employees to click on links to these domains to view information about a pending change in their work schedule.

The phishing sites leveraged a Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website. But because of the way the bot was configured, it was possible for security researchers to capture the information being sent by victims to the public Telegram server.

This data trove was first reported by security researchers at Singapore-based Group-IB, which dubbed the campaign “0ktapus” for the attackers targeting organizations using identity management tools from Okta.com.

“This case is of interest because despite using low-skill methods it was able to compromise a large number of well-known organizations,” Group-IB wrote. “Furthermore, once the attackers compromised an organization they were quickly able to pivot and launch subsequent supply chain attacks, indicating that the attack was planned carefully in advance.”

It’s not clear how many of these phishing text messages were sent out, but the Telegram bot data reviewed by KrebsOnSecurity shows they generated nearly 10,000 replies over approximately two months of sporadic SMS phishing attacks targeting more than a hundred companies.

«

Yubikeys and/or on-phone authentication apps. How hard is it to tell people about this? Perhaps if there are thousands of them it’s a question of scale. (Thanks tbw for the link.)
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When kids yell “poop” at Alexa, these people profit • Buzzfeed News

Katie Notopoulos:

»

There are many topics that my 5-year-old and I don’t see eye to eye on: how many popsicles per day is reasonable or the virtues of sleeping past 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday. But there is one area where we are in philosophical lockstep: “Poop” is a funny word. So when my son commanded our Amazon Echo Dot, “Alexa…play poopy diaper,” I shot him a faux-stern look that indicated this isn’t appropriate, but I’ll allow it.

And when Alexa replied, “OK, playing ‘Poopy Diaper’ from Spotify,” I was intrigued. When the voice robot creation of one of the richest men on the planet started playing a thumping techno banger with a soaring chorus of a woman vocalist signing, “I’ve got a poopy diaper, a poopy diaper, that’s me,” I descended into hyperventilating eye-watering laughter.

As it turns out, there are quite a few songs that will fill Alexa requests for the whole gamut of things a kindergartener might dream up: poop, diapers, dog poop, stinky butt, farts.

It’s not surprising that there are songs about the most basic of human functions — what is the point of art if not to unite us through shared feeling? But connecting these songs with their ideal audience (children who can’t yet spell) took a technological leap: voice-enabled smart speakers like Alexa. Several of the songs’ creators told BuzzFeed News that their biggest source of revenue by a landslide is Amazon Music — the default music player for Alexa. When it comes to these novelty artists, the evidence is clear: The word “poop” translates to streaming gold.

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There is really no end to peoples’ ingenuity. Millions of streams, tens of thousands of dollars in streaming revenue!
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Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

»

Japan’s digital minister Taro Kono has pledged to rip up laws that require floppy disks and CD-ROMs to be used when sending data to the nation’s government.

The news emerged on Tuesday at Japan’s 5th Digital Society Concept Conference, where a strategy for future digital government services was outlined. Japan appears set to go down the well-worn road of issuing a national ID – called MyNumber in this instance – to its people so that they can access various government services.

But because such services by their nature involve uploading data to government agencies, the minister initiated a review of laws governing that process of submitting information. That effort found more than 1,900 regulations that stipulate how data can be shared with government – and many require the use of floppy disks or CD-ROMs. Newfangled techniques such as uploading info via the internet are not described, so are technically not permitted.

Kono pledged to rewrite those regulations, ASAP, so that Japan’s digital plan can proceed unhindered.

He’s not the first to try give Japan a dose of digital transformation. In 2021 former prime minister Yoshihide Suga promised to reduce reliance on the use of seals and fax machines. But Suga’s time in the top job was short and his digital agenda was not delivered.

«

This is terrible news for the floppy disk manufacturers in the world (which I suspect are all Japanese).
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Mississippi crisis highlights climate threat to drinking water nationwide • The New York Times

Christopher Flavelle, Rick Rojas, Jim Tankersley and Jack Healy:

»

In cities like Jackson [in the state of Mississippi], those problems [of ageing infrastructure] are further compounded by demographic and economic changes. A shrinking population means the costs of maintenance are spread across fewer ratepayers, increasing the pressure on officials to delay upgrades. And those residents who remain may have lower incomes, making it even harder to raise rates, Dr. Stillwell said.

Then, on top of all that, comes climate change, bringing more intense storms — weather catastrophes on a scale that drinking water infrastructure, along with every other part of a city’s infrastructure, was never designed to cope with, even if those water systems had been properly maintained.

In eastern Kentucky, 5,000 customers are still being asked to boil their water a month after flash floods tore through their towns. While water connections have been almost fully restored, about 80 customers still do not have water turned back on.

One of those houses in the community of River Caney belongs to Justina Salyers’s parents, whose living room and kitchen were gutted when floodwaters swamped their first floor. Her parents and their neighbors are using 275-gallon portable tanks to store water, and some are even trying to revive moldering old wells that have sat untouched for decades.

“They can’t flush the toilets. They can’t bathe. They’re working in dirt and mud, and they have no water,” Ms. Salyers said.

In the 90-person city of Buckhorn, Ky., Mayor Thomas Burns Jr. is among the residents still under a boil-water advisory, but he said people are just glad to have the taps back on. He said the floods did an estimated $1 million in damage to the water systems — far more than Buckhorn could shoulder without state or federal help.

“We’ve ignored our infrastructure,” he said. “It’s scary. We take this thing about fresh water for granted.”

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I recreated famous album covers with DALL-E • Lucy Talks Data

»

With the newly acquired access I set out to scratch my own itch.
I wanted to know whether DALL-E would be able to recreate famous album covers.

Before we dive into the results, I’ll list the albums that I sought to recreate:

• The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico
• Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon
• Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
• Nirvana – Nevermind
• The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers (inside sleeve cover)
• The Beatles – Abbey Road

«

Quite an insight into the difficulty of finding just the right text prompt to generate a specific picture. But very often when you’re working with Dall-E you aren’t aiming to recreate, you’re aiming to create, so this is a slightly unusual approach.
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Wind farm contract delay diverts £1bn in savings from consumers • The Times

Emily Gosden:

»

Consumers could miss out on more than a billion pounds of energy bill savings from the world’s biggest offshore wind farm after its owner delayed a contract to provide cheap power from the project.

The Hornsea Two wind farm, capable of supplying 1.4 million homes, is fully operational, Orsted said yesterday. The Danish energy group said that the project 55 miles off the coast of Yorkshire would “provide low-cost, clean energy for millions of homes”.

However, households will not see any benefit from its promised low-cost power until April next year and will not get the full benefit until April 2024 because of Orsted’s decision to delay the contract.

Orsted said the delay was so that it could guarantee its revenues further into the future and that it would not benefit financially from high prices in the meantime because of its hedging arrangements. However, traders or other companies potentially could profit.

The company won its contract from the government in 2017 to provide power from the farm to households and businesses for 15 years at what was then a record low price, today worth £73.71 per megawatt-hour. Under the contract, when wholesale prices are higher than this, Orsted would pay the difference back to consumers. This would entail big savings at present wholesale power prices, which have increased to more than £400/MWh.

The contract was due to begin for the first phase of the project in April this year and for the remaining two phases in April next year. However, Orsted opted last summer to delay all the contract start dates by a year.

…Orsted does not know who bought its power. Experts say it is possible it was bought by big business consumers locking in cheap prices or by suppliers offering cheap fixed-price deals; it also may have been bought by traders or other energy companies that could now sell it on to consumers at much higher prices.

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Seems that the government was sloppy in not having a more enforceable contract? The implication is that Orsted was sneaky or unfaithful. But business is business.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The men and women are using different types of tennis balls at the US Open – which has displeased some of the women. CC-licensed photo by Brandon LokeBrandon Loke 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. Fuzzier and fuzzier. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

An AI-generated artwork won first place at a state fair fine arts competition, and artists are pissed • Vice

Matthew Gault:

»

A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. “I won first place,” a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. 

Sincarnate’s name is Jason Allen, who is president of Colorado-based tabletop gaming company Incarnate Games. According to the state fair’s website, he won in the digital art category with a work called “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.

But Allen did not paint “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs. 

…“We’re watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes,” a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. “If creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?”

…According to Allen, his input was instrumental to the shaping of the award winning painting. “I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created 100s of images using it, and after many weeks of fine tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas after unshackling with Gigapixel AI,” he wrote in a post before the winners were announced.

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Things are moving faster and faster. In future state fairs, how will the judges know? Will they ask? If someone lies to win, have they won? Will there be separate categories? So many questions.
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DALL·E: Introducing Outpainting

»

Today we’re introducing Outpainting, a new feature which helps users extend their creativity by continuing an image beyond its original borders — adding visual elements in the same style, or taking a story in new directions — simply by using a natural language description.

DALL·E’s Edit feature already enables changes within a generated or uploaded image — a capability known as Inpainting. Now, with Outpainting, users can extend the original image, creating large-scale images in any aspect ratio. Outpainting takes into account the image’s existing visual elements — including shadows, reflections, and textures — to maintain the context of the original image.

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Here’s what that can look like. Itchy yet?

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Inside a million-dollar Instagram verification scheme • ProPublica

Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis:

»

Since at least 2021, at least hundreds of people — including jewellers, crypto entrepreneurs, OnlyFans models and reality show TV stars — were clients of a scheme to get improperly verified as musicians on Instagram, according to the investigation’s findings and information from Meta.

In response to information provided by ProPublica and the findings of its own investigation, Meta has so far removed fraudulently applied verification badges from more than 300 Instagram profiles, and continues to review accounts. That includes the accounts of Mike Vazquez and Lexie Salameh, two stars of the MTV reality show “Siesta Key.” Rather than get verified for their TV work, they were falsely branded online as musicians in order to receive verification. They lost their badges approximately two weeks ago and did not respond to requests for comment.

[Suspended plastic surgeon, but to Instagram “DJ Dr 6ix” Martin] Jugenburg did not respond to a phone message left at his Toronto practice or to emails detailing evidence that he had paid for his Instagram verification. He has told media outlets he intends to vigorously defend himself against the class-action suit.

The scheme, which likely generated millions in revenue for its operators, illustrates how easily major social, search and music platforms can be exploited to create fake personas with real-world consequences, such as monetizing a verified account. It also underscores how Instagram’s growth and cachet combines with poor customer support and lax oversight to create a thriving black market in verification services and account takedowns for hire.

«

Poor customer support? Of course, you’re talking about a billion users (or a billion accounts, it’s not a lot of difference). Imagine, for a moment, how many people you need to hire in order to provide good customer support, and have good oversight of scams like this. Remember, the network’s complexity (and thus the amount of customer support required) grows geometrically as the number using it grows arithmetically. Problems spiral.
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Twitter Circle is now available to everyone • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Twitter Circle, a feature that lets you limit your tweets to a smaller audience, is now available to everyone. The platform first started testing the feature among “select people” in May ahead of a wider rollout.

Twitter Circle is a lot like Instagram’s “close friends” feature, which lets you share your posts with a smaller group of people. On Twitter, you can add up to 150 people to your Circle, whether they follow you or not. When you want to send out a tweet that you might not want the entire Twitterverse to see, you can choose to share it with your Circle instead.

You’ll see the option to share to your Circle when you open the tweet composer. Choose the dropdown menu at the top of the composer, and then hit Circle. You can choose who you want in your Circle by hitting the Edit button that appears next to the option. Users won’t receive a notification when you add or remove them from your Circle. But those included in your Circle will see a highlighted badge that reads, “Only people in @[username]’s Twitter Circle can see this tweet” beneath posts sent to your Circle.

«

This is yet another one of those features that absolutely nobody has been asking for, though it’s nice to copy Instagram I suppose? Though this was first tried by Google with Google+ Circles, which was an absolute pain to use and quickly led to a sort of Circle exhaustion: trying to decide which Circles your various friends and contacts should belong in was tedious and, one soon realised, largely pointless.
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The growing evidence that Covid-19 is leaving people sicker • Financial Times

Sarah Neville:

»

When Dr David Strain encountered a 64-year-old patient on his ward round, the British geriatrician had a bleak epiphany.

Less than six months earlier he had treated the man for Covid-19. Now, his deterioration was painful to witness. “He came in with a stroke and really bad delirium, a precursor of dementia,” Strain says. “I saw the patient, recognised him [and] recognised the fact that his brain had dramatically aged.”

By unsettling coincidence, the same day Strain, who is based at the University of Exeter in England’s west country, had read a newly published study which identified significant brain shrinkage in a cohort of about 400 people aged between 51 and 81 who had recovered from coronavirus.

The encounter crystallised Strain’s belief that Covid generated a kind of epidemiological aftershock by leaving people susceptible to a huge range of other conditions, threatening global health systems already struggling with insufficient resources and ageing populations. “It made me realise that this is something that we’re going to be facing in a really big way in the near future,” he says.

As he started to see a rise in certain conditions in the first year of the pandemic, Strain assumed it was the result of people being unable or unwilling to access healthcare. Only as the pandemic entered its second year did he begin to suspect that Covid itself could be increasing vulnerability to other serious illnesses.

He now sees it as an inversion of the huge drop in respiratory illness doctors saw from the 1980s onwards, when millions either stopped or reduced smoking. “The level of damage that’s been done to population health [during Covid], it would be as if everybody suddenly decided to take up smoking in one go,” Strain says.

«

Perhaps you’d stopped thinking about Covid, but like rust, it never sleeps. (Thanks G for the link.)
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US Open tennis balls: Iga Swiatek among female players criticising ‘horrible’ balls • BBC Sport

»

The US Open is the only major where men and women use different balls and, in the build-up to this year’s tournament, a number of players have echoed [women’s world No.1 Iga] Swiatek’s comments.

…The women use Wilson US Open “regular duty” balls in New York, while the men use Wilson US Open “extra duty” balls. The “regular duty” balls are thinner and lighter than the “extra duty” ones. Wilson states that the regular balls are likely to fluff up more, meaning they play faster but are “less durable” than the extra duty.

Wilson also says that the regular duty balls are developed for softer surfaces, like clay or indoor courts, compared to the extra duty ones, which are for hard courts and “abrasive” surfaces.

Swiatek explained that the lighter balls can contribute to more unforced errors which, in turn, can make matches more unappealing to watch.

“Especially after three games of really hard playing, they are getting more and more light,” she said at the Cincinnati Open last week. “At the end, you can’t even serve at 170kmh [105mph] because you know it’s going to fly like crazy. They are pretty bad. Right now we play powerful, and we kind of can’t loosen up our hands with these balls. We make more mistakes, for sure, so I don’t think that’s really nice to watch visually.”

The US Tennis Association said “a number of factors” are considered in deciding which balls to use. “The USTA works closely with the WTA [Women’s Tennis Association] and [men’s] ATP Tour, their player councils and our brand partner on an annual basis to determine what type of balls they recommend,” a USTA spokesperson said. “The USTA will continue to follow the recommendations of the tours and their player councils to determine which balls are utilised during the US Open.”

«

Wilson says the “regular duty” balls “use a thinner felt woven more tightly around the core to resist this fluffing. These balls play faster, but are less durable than Extra Duty.. [which] have a thicker felt woven a bit looser around the core to withstand shearing. That means that the felt on these balls is less likely to fluff up as they are played.”

Fluffier balls = slower, take more spin. But: lighter balls = fly more, harder to control. It’s a very strange balance, given that women tend to have longer rallies, so the balls get fluffier: meaning they go from uncontrollable to slow. Why have different balls in the first place, though, given nowhere else does? (Of course it’s technology, why do you ask?)
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Ukraine tricks Russia into wasting bombs to destroy decoy ‘artillery’ • The Washington Post

John Hudson:

»

Ukraine may be outgunned, but in the latest sign it is not yet outfoxed, a fleet of decoys resembling advanced US rocket systems has tricked Russian forces into wasting expensive long-range cruise missiles on dummy targets, according to interviews with senior US and Ukrainian officials and photographs of the replicas reviewed by The Washington Post.

The Ukrainian decoys are made out of wood but can be indistinguishable from an artillery battery through the lens of Russian drones, which transmit their locations to naval cruise-missile carriers in the Black Sea.
“When the UAVs see the battery, it’s like a VIP target,” said a senior Ukrainian official, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, encountering long-range artillery replicas.

After a few weeks in the field, the decoys drew at least 10 Kalibr cruise missiles, an initial success that led Ukraine to expand the production of the replicas for broader use, said the senior Ukrainian official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters.

The use of rocket system decoys, which has not been reported previously, is one of many asymmetrical tactics Ukraine’s armed forces have adopted to fight back against a bigger and better-equipped invading enemy. In recent weeks, Kyiv’s operatives have blown up rail and electricity lines in occupied Russian territory, detonated explosives inside Russian arms depots and assassinated suspected collaborators.

«

Remarkable if true; you’d really want to see the before and after of one of these fakes, though there might not be much left after. If Russian drones are really unable to detect the difference (don’t they use heat-seeking systems? Are the fakes hot somehow?), it doesn’t say a lot about the quality of their weapons systems.
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UK: court permits service of process by NFT • Lexology

Haim Ravia and Dotan Hammer:

»

In an unprecedented decision, a High Court in England permitted the service of process of pleadings through a non-fungible token (NFT), to the digital wallets of the unnamed defendants.

The permission was granted as part of an application for interim relief filed by a British citizen allegedly conned by an American online trading website. The plaintiff transferred $2.1 million worth of Cryptocurrency to the website’s digital wallet. When the transfer was completed, he discovered that his access to the website was blocked. Since the identities of the website’s operators are unknown, the plaintiff asked to serve his court complaint via the blockchain. The court affirmed his request, holding that it meets the requirements under English law.

«

From the judge’s remarks, it looks as though Binance, a crypto exchange, is going to get caught up in this case (if it goes any further) because it was a go-between in the super-fraudulent transaction. Dropping an NFT (receipt) into a wallet as a means of identifying someone uniquely is rather neat, though.
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Hornsea 2: North Sea wind farm claims title of world’s largest • BBC News

Jonah Fisher:

»

Over the last decade the size of wind farms and turbines have both increased, helping to bring down the cost of the electricity they generate.

“The last time I checked it was roughly £450 per megawatt hour to buy electricity generated by gas,” says Simon Evans from Carbon Brief, a website that follows renewable energy issues. “That’s about 9 times more expensive than the current cost to build new renewable capacity.”

In the UK government’s latest auction round in July, 11 gigawatts of renewable energy was commissioned which is enough to power about 12m homes. As part of its Net Zero targets the government has committed to de-carbonising electricity generation by 2035, with offshore wind playing a crucial role.

The current worldwide energy crisis, triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has intensified the search for alternatives to gas fired power stations. There are no quick solutions.

Offshore wind projects take about five years from planning consent to full operation, and there are those who say that the scale of the current energy crisis means that building wind farms onshore needs to be looked at again.

“Onshore wind has traditionally been the cheapest form of energy and you can get that up and running in about a year,” Melanie Onn of Renewable UK told BBC News.

“We’re not doing that at the moment because the planning process allows for a single person to object to an onshore wind farm and that closes the whole thing down, so we really need the government to take action and put our country’s energy needs first.”

«

“Allows for a single person to object” *screaming intensifies*
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you live in France, make sure to declare your pool (which attracts extra tax). AI plus satellite photos will spot it. CC-licensed photo by Alex Ford 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. Seasonal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Twitter’s child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor • The Verge

Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton:

»

In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.

Had the project been approved, Twitter would have risked a massive backlash from advertisers, who generate the vast majority of the company’s revenues. But the service could have generated more than enough to compensate for losses. OnlyFans, the most popular by far of the adult creator sites, is projecting $2.5bn in revenue this year — about half of Twitter’s 2021 revenue — and is already a profitable company.

Some executives thought Twitter could easily begin capturing a share of that money since the service is already the primary marketing channel for most OnlyFans creators. And so resources were pushed to a new project called ACM: Adult Content Monetization.

Before the final go-ahead to launch, though, Twitter convened 84 employees to form what it called a “Red Team.” The goal was “to pressure-test the decision to allow adult creators to monetise on the platform, by specifically focusing on what it would look like for Twitter to do this safely and responsibly,” according to documents obtained by The Verge and interviews with current and former Twitter employees.

What the Red Team discovered derailed the project: Twitter could not safely allow adult creators to sell subscriptions because the company was not — and still is not — effectively policing harmful sexual content on the platform.

“Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale,” the Red Team concluded in April 2022. The company also lacked tools to verify that creators and consumers of adult content were of legal age, the team found.

«

Elon Musk’s legal team will be scrambling to get this into their latest missive complaining about the timing and content of their trial to avoid paying $44bn. To users of Twitter, this will sound very unsurprising: sure, it’s run really badly. But objectively, it’s appalling. That’s what matters.
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French tax officials use AI to spot 20,000 undeclared pools • The Guardian

Kim Willsher:

»

French tax authorities using AI software have found thousands of undeclared private swimming pools, landing the owners with bills totalling about €10m.

The system, developed by Google and Capgemini, can identify pools on aerial images and cross-checks them with land registry databases. Launched as an experiment a year ago in nine French departments, it has uncovered 20,356 pools, the tax office said on Monday, and will be extended across the country.

Modifications to property, including adding swimming pools, must be declared to the tax office within 90 days of completion. As property taxes are based on the rental value of the property, improvements mean an increase in taxes. A typical pool of 30 sq metres would be taxed at about an extra €200 a year.

The tax office – or le fisc, as it is known – says it is now looking at using the system to spot undeclared annexes, extensions and verandas including permanent pergolas.

“We are particularly targeting house extensions like verandas, but we have to be sure that the software can find buildings with a large footprint and not the dog kennel or the children’s playhouse,” Antoine Magnant, the deputy director general of public finances, told Le Parisien newspaper.

However, the tax authorities’ technical team say they are not yet able to establish whether a rectangular shape on an aerial image is an extension or a tent, terrace or even tarpaulin placed on the ground.

In April it was claimed that the Google-Capgemini software had a 30% margin of error. Not only was it mistaking solar panels for swimming pools, but it was failing to pick up taxable extensions hidden under trees or in the shadows of a property. Tests are being carried out to perfect the technology.

«

Expected next year: movable grass cover for pools; people who will make your pool non-rectangular; dark tiles for the bottom of the pool so it doesn’t show up as light blue.
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Stable Diffusion is a really big deal • Simon Willison’s Weblog

Simon Willison:

»

If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on with Stable Diffusion, you really should be.

Stable Diffusion is a new “text-to-image diffusion model” that was released to the public by Stability.ai six days ago, on August 22nd.

It’s similar to models like Open AI’s DALL-E, but with one crucial difference: they released the whole thing. You can try it out online at beta.dreamstudio.ai (currently for free). Type in a text prompt and the model will generate an image. You can download and run the model on your own computer (if you have a powerful enough graphics card).

You can use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes, under the terms of the Creative ML OpenRAIL-M license—which lists some usage restrictions that include avoiding using it to break applicable laws, generate false information, discriminate against individuals or provide medical advice.

…I’m finding the ethics of all of this extremely difficult.

Stable Diffusion has been trained on millions of copyrighted images scraped from the web. The Stable Diffusion v1 Model Card has the full details, but the short version is that it uses LAION-5B (5.85 billion image-text pairs) and its laion-aesthetics v2 5+ subset (which I think is ~600M pairs filtered for aesthetics). These images were scraped from the web.

I’m not qualified to speak to the legality of this. I’m personally more concerned with the morality.

The final model is I believe around 4.2GB of data—a binary blob of floating point numbers. The fact that it can compress such an enormous quantity of visual information into such a small space is itself a fascinating detail. As such, each image in the training set contributes only a tiny amount of information—a few tweaks to some numeric weights spread across the entire network.

But… the people who created these images did not give their consent.

«

This is going to be the ticklish question. Will future content say “no AI was used in the creation of this image/video”?
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Cloudflare pressured to drop Kiwi Farms after latest doxing effort • Daily Dot

Claire Goforth:

»

Users of Kiwi Farms are currently terrorizing Twitch streamer and transgender rights activist Clara Sorrenti. Sorrenti, who goes by Keffals online, recently fled her home after being “swatted.” A person impersonating Sorrenti reportedly sent local lawmakers a mass shooting threat, leading police to arrest Sorrenti. She was released without charges.

Then she was reportedly doxed again by Kiwi Farms users who analyzed the bedsheets at her hotel to determine her location.

The content on Kiwi Farms is notoriously transphobic. In March, one of the site’s users took aim at Sorrenti based on the belief that she played a role in getting another Twitch streamer booted from that platform for transphobia. The comment thread they started now spans more than 1,200 pages and thousands of comments

Now Sorrenti is in hiding. She’s also campaigning to convince Cloudflare to stop hosting Kiwi Farms, which has become a haven for far-right doxing and trolling efforts. The push is gaining steam online.

Kiwi Farms has played a central role in some of the internet’s worst moments. The Christchurch mass shooting videos were hosted there. When a police officer emailed the site’s founder for information about the shooter, he reportedly responded by posting the email without redacting the officer’s address.

Antifa obsessive Andy Ngo has also joined in the fray, defending the site and claiming it merely posts about leftist extremists.

Ngo, who’s been repeatedly accused of coordinating with far-right extremists, responded to Sorrenti’s efforts by misleading about Kiwi Farms. “The internet forum site features threads of photos and information about Antifa militants & other far-left extremists,” Ngo tweeted.

Sorrenti replied that Kiwi Farms’ users are also currently attempting to dox the police chief of London, Ontario, where she lives.

«

Analysing the bedsheets. Another person was located because they mentioned their snow boots had fallen apart. If it weren’t so hate-driven, it would be admirable. But anything Ngo backs is, you can be sure, in the wrong. Deplatforming takes away the platform – nothing more, but certainly nothing less.
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Snap plans to lay off 20% of employees • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

Snap is planning to lay off approximately 20% of its more than 6,400 employees, according to people familiar with the matter.

The layoffs, which Snap has been planning for the past several weeks, will begin on Wednesday and hit some departments harder than others, the people said. For example, the team working on ways for developers to build mini apps and games inside Snapchat will be severely impacted. Zenly, the social mapping app Snap bought in 2017 and has since run separately, will also see deep cuts.

Another team that will see layoffs is Snap’s hardware division, which is responsible for its AR Spectacles glasses and the Pixy camera drone that was recently canceled after being on sale for just a few months. The company’s ad sales organization is also being restructured.

Russ Caditz-Peck, a Snap spokesperson, declined to comment.

Though the scale of the layoffs is significant, it shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise: Snap’s stock price has lost nearly 80% of its value since the beginning of this year, and the company said in May that it would slow hiring and look for ways to cut costs. It then delivered dismal earnings for the second quarter and said it wouldn’t forecast results for the third quarter.

Like its other tech peers, Snap hired aggressively during the pandemic. It entered March of 2020 with roughly 3,427 full-time employees and ended last quarter with 6,446, a 38% increase from the same time last year. And in May of 2021, the company made its largest acquisition ever by buying WaveOptics, the supplier of the AR displays used in its latest Spectacles, for more than $500m.

«

Think I can see where they may have gone wrong.
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‘Insane’ prices will make people abandon gas, says Wintershall Dea CEO • Reuters via Yahoo Finance

Nora Buli:

»

Wholesale gas prices have scaled “insane” levels that will ultimately hurt demand, although the lack of Russian gas means Europe’s supply will be tight for several years, the chief executive of German oil firm Wintershall Dea said on Tuesday.

The benchmark European gas contract has risen by more than 300% in a year and on Friday touched a record high of 343.08 euros per megawatt hour (MWh).

On Tuesday it fell to 259 euros/MWh, as Europe almost reached its target of filling gas stores to 80% as a security policy ahead of the peak demand winter months, but prices remain well above normal levels.

“The prices we are having currently are insane. That is nothing even a gas producer is looking for because in the end, we are going to massively destroy demand for our product,” Mario Mehren told reporters on the sidelines of an energy conference.

“Whoever has a chance to walk away from gas is walking away from gas and we don’t know if they’re coming back.”

High prices have already cut fertiliser production in Europe and many other big users of gas are seeking ways to reduce consumption.

Mehren said the best way to stabilise prices was to show there is sufficient supply not just this winter, but also for the next winters.

«

Continues to be astonishing that the most effective climate warrior the planet has ever seen is someone who rules a country with colossal fossil fuel reserves. However, I don’t think there’s much chance of Vladimir Putin winning the Nobel Peace Price.
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Lord of the pings: how I turned off my phone notifications, and got my life back • The Guardian

Georgina Lawton:

»

The reasons for turning off your notifications are numerous: better focus and concentration, being more present, better sleep, feeling in control of your life. When people who are still at the mercy of pings, rings and push notifications ask me how it all works, I paraphrase my ex: “You just check your phone as and when you need to.” My friends look horrified. But in this era of constantly breaking news, keeping them on seems like self-flagellation. Allowing yourself to become panicked by yet another depressing political update as it unfolds, or the news that your ex has had a baby, is like having an extra voice in your ear saying: “You’re worthless, no one loves you – and you’re doomed!” I actually like to schedule in some time for self-loathing around 7pm on Sunday instead of having it forced upon me ad hoc by my phone, thanks very much.

If you’re too scared to switch everything off from your phone’s main settings, you can try apps that limit time on certain apps, or just switch off notifications individually and ease yourself in gently. It can happen in stages. First you can try your big social media ones: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Chances are you won’t actually miss the empty feeling that comes from browsing the lives of others and hearing awful news 24/7.

Then if you’re feeling braver, go for your email notifications. Friends who work as business managers, editors and lawyers tell me that there’s no way they could do that for fear of missing out on an important message and jeopardising their whole career. “I could be deemed negligent and get sacked,” the lawyer said, before admitting that his work phone never goes off and that he has notifications on both his personal and work phones. But are we ever paid enough to be on call 24/7? (Actually, the lawyer probably is). Surely, setting aside a slot in your day to respond to work messages is more time-efficient than frantically picking up your phone every time it goes off and distracting yourself from other urgent tasks?

«

Fabulous headline. An Apple Watch is a pricey way of doing much the same thing: you can pick and choose which notifications you get. Or just turn on Do Not Disturb.
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SmartDry’s useful laundry sensor to be cloud-bricked next month • Ars Technica

Kevin Purdy:

»

SmartDry was a smart home product that did something useful: tell you when your clothes in your dryer were actually dry.

A small pack mounted inside nearly any dryer drum could prevent clothes from shrinking, save you energy costs (at least $60 per year, the marketing claimed), and even warn you about clogged vents causing high heat—or, much worse, gas buildup. A second-generation version could even turn off your gas dryer automatically. Reviewers greatly preferred it to their own dryers’ unpredictable dryness sensors.

The problem is that SmartDry alerted you to dry clothing by connecting to your home’s Wi-Fi; the device sent a message to parent company Connected Life’s servers and then relayed that message to your smartphone. But Connected Life Labs is closing, discontinuing SmartDry, and shutting down its servers on September 30. After that, “cloud services will cease operations and the product apps will no longer be supported.”

In other words, SmartDry will become a tiny brick inside your dryer unless you’re willing to procure a little ESP32 development board, load some code onto it, plug it in near your dryer, and set up your own alerts in your Home Assistant server. If you had a first-generation SmartDry, this would actually be a slight improvement, as those devices used Espressif ESP32 chips with a forever vulnerability.

«

Depends a bit on your tumble dryer – Overspill Central’s has its own sensor (and captures the water!), but there are lots of ageing tumble dryers in the US, where this might be useful. Well, not any more.
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How time became the scarcest commodity in UK energy • Financial Times

Helen Thomas:

»

a social tariff that cuts say 30% from bills, would tackle usage. But [the Resolution Foundation’s] idea of targeting households where no one earns over £40,000 hits a database problem, essentially requiring HMRC’s systems to connect with other bits of government. That’s not impossible but it requires time: broadly, we should have started months ago.

The same is true elsewhere. In fairness, the energy department is trying to fast-track elements of complex, long-term market reform, such as unlinking domestic power prices and gas prices.

The government reportedly wants to shift generating companies on old-style renewables obligation contracts, which in effect pay wholesale gas prices for renewable power, on to cheaper 15-year fixed price deals. These contracts account for about 18GW of wind power alone, or a quarter of UK generating capacity. “If you have a block of cheap low carbon power, you could sell that directly at a cheap fixed rate to vulnerable consumers,” said Adam Bell, a policy adviser at consultancy Stonehaven and former government energy strategist.

This year could and should have been spent improving the UK’s paltry home insulation rate from 200,000 a year back towards the 2m the market routinely managed before 2013. That was an obvious, no-regret choice six months ago. Instead, the government is currently relying on common sense and hardship to get people to reduce gas usage by 8% simply by adjusting their boiler settings to run more efficiently.

The scale of the problem means there are no great options for protecting households, especially because the support needed is essentially open-ended. The risks are a bigger, broader, more expensive scheme than really necessary, or an inadequate stop-gap that leaves many out in the cold. Either way, we are also trying to buy back time that has been squandered.

«

There have been so many ways to catch up, but an utterly useless government failed to do so again and again. Now everyone, including the government (but ultimately the taxpayer) pays the price.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s a simple way to tell if a picture of an Apple product is an official one, but you may not have noticed it before. CC-licensed photo by ajay_sureshajay_suresh 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. Are you OOO if you WFH? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Greenland ice sheet melt set to trigger nearly a foot in sea level rise – The Washington Post

Chris Mooney:

»

Human-driven climate change has set in motion massive ice losses in Greenland that couldn’t be halted even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, according to a new study published Monday.

The findings in Nature Climate Change project that it is now inevitable that 3.3% of the Greenland ice sheet will melt — equal to 110 trillion tons of ice, the researchers said. That will trigger nearly a foot [30cm] of global sea-level rise.

The predictions are more dire than other forecasts, though they use different assumptions. While the study did not specify a time frame for the melting and sea-level rise, the authors suggested much of it can play out between now and the year 2100.

“The point is, we need to plan for that ice as if it weren’t on the ice sheet in the near future, within a century or so,” William Colgan, a study co-author who studies the ice sheet from its surface with his colleagues at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, said in a video interview.

“Every study has bigger numbers than the last. It’s always faster than forecast,” Colgan said.

One reason that new research appears worse than other findings may just be that it is simpler. It tries to calculate how much ice Greenland must lose as it recalibrates to a warmer climate. In contrast, sophisticated computer simulations of how the ice sheet will behave under future scenarios for global emissions have produced less alarming predictions.

A one-foot rise in global sea levels would have severe consequences. If the sea level along the US coasts rose by an average of 10 to 12 inches by 2050, a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found, the most destructive floods would take place five times as often, and moderate floods would become 10 times as frequent.

«

And yet the likely next British Prime Minister isn’t that keen on green energy and thinks we should do more fracking. Sometimes you wonder where they get their information.
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The End of the Age of Abundance (and the Beginning of the Age of Scarcity) • Eudaimonia and Co

umair haque:

»

What does once-in-a-millennium flooding in Pakistan have to do with you, the rich Westerner? Am I asking you to shed a tear for some poor drowned kids? You should. But mine isn’t (just) a moral point. Flooding in Pakistan has everything to do with you, because you might not know it, but many of your clothes and textiles are made there.

Just like those jeans I was perusing at Weekday, Pakistan’s a major, major global textile exporter. Why is that? Because it has fields upon fields of cotton, and cheap labour to boot. It’s a perfect recipe for becoming a global center for everything from cotton to “cashmere,” aka…Kashmir.

But now things are changing. This once-in-a-millennium flood — this monster monsoon — is likely to hit every year, maybe every two or three, if the country’s lucky, because of levels of global warming so rapid they’re shattering every worst forecast. And as it does, guess what? All those cotton fields and textile mills and cheap labour — they’re in serious trouble. The extreme weather will cause crop failures, whether it’s the unsurvivable heat or the flooding, the cheap labour will have to migrate, and the mills will have to shutter, at least many of them.

And the price of all that stuff that you didn’t even know was made in Pakistan — because, well, who really looks at a label? It’s going to skyrocket. That effect of course is already what’s behind much of the global inflationary wave rocking the world.

«

Haque is never what you’d call a ray of sunshine, but the question one should always ask is: what if he’s right? About everything?
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Why are all Apple products photographed at 9:41 a.m.? An Apple insider reveals the answer • Inc.com

Minda Zetlin:

»

I hadn’t noticed it myself. Maybe you hadn’t either. But every single Apple product in every promotional photo is set to 9:41 a.m. MacBook, iPad, iPhone, it really doesn’t matter. With one big exception (which we’ll get to), for every Apple product in the world, it was exactly 9:41 a.m. at the time of its photo shoot.

Random coincidence? Obviously not. But why 9:41? Turns out it was a carefully made choice. Also, it wasn’t the original choice. Earlier on, Apple products were apparently photographed with a time of 9:42 a.m.

What is this craziness? Australian iOS developer Jon Manning wanted to know too. And he happened to be at the first iPad launch, where he saw Scott Forstall, then senior vice president of iOS software at Apple and leader of the original iPhone and iPad software development team. Manning had noticed that early products had been set to 9:42 in their photos, but that changed to 9:41. Brimming with curiosity, he asked Forstall what was going on.

The answer had to do with Steve Jobs and his very carefully crafted product launch presentations, Forstall explained. “We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation,” he said. “When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience’s watches. But we know we won’t hit 40 minutes exactly.”

Preferring to be early rather than late, the team literally gave themselves an extra couple of minutes and set the devices to 9:42 a.m. in product photos. But as Jobs practiced his presentation, it seemed he would unveil the first iPhone at 9:41 a.m. and so the image of the phone was set for 9:41. And it worked like a charm. When Jobs introduced the original iPhone at MacWorld 2007, the first image of the phone with its screen turned on appeared on the giant screen behind him with the time set to 9:41 a.m. at 9:41 a.m.

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Sure you can figure out what the exception is, but: what time do you think that is set to?
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Apple AR glasses: a next big thing candidate • Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassée:

»

At least two cameras are needed, one to capture the outside world, and another to track your eye movements so the AR engine knows how to render the image that it lays on top of reality. Add to that the cycles needed to deal with messages and other communication traffic, and one thing is sure: Apple’s AR Glasses will require substantial computing power. And all of this power must be packed into a small form factor that includes a battery that won’t be too heavy — or too hot — to wear for hours at a time.

As a point of reference, an iPhone 13 weighs between 5 and 6.1 ounces (141 to 174 grams) and does substantially less than a pair of Apple Glasses would need to do. The bottom line, as I perceive it, is that Apple Glasses would require a substantial jump in the economy of hardware complexity, computing power, and battery consumption. Johny Srouji’s team, to whom we owe Apple Silicon breakthroughs, is familiar with the struggle to produce more computing power with fewer watts, but Glasses takes the battle to a new level.

Then there are the software obstacles. A veteran engineer reminds me of the latency challenge. Movies feel natural because they provide fresh images every 40 milliseconds (24 images/second). The AR engine would need to update your “screen” every 40 milliseconds so that when you turn your head, the scene doesn’t fracture. And it needs to juggle more tasks than our phones or desktops, all in apparent real time, no pauses, no “beachball”.

…The first iPhone, shipped late June 2007, didn’t offer cut and paste, nor did it have an SDK (Software Development Kit), with Steve Jobs blithely promoting Web apps, fully knowing the missing SDK was a few months away. And let’s not forget the $499 price, high for the time, and 2G cellular connectivity Verizon and others were happy to lambaste.

Fifteen years later, Apple is an immensely more powerful company…but AR Glasses are orders of magnitude more complicated than the 2007 Jesus Phone. I’ll be really interested in seeing what Apple finally™ introduces and the story company execs tell about their infant Apple Glasses.

Back to our premise: Are Apple Glasses the much-fantasied about Next Big Thing, the new Apple Mother Lode?

I have my doubts.

«

Looking more and more like these will be niche (though perhaps a wished-for niche, because of price). Will they be announced on September 7, though?
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WhatsApp’s JioMart shopping integration is the latest in its super app rollout plan • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

WhatsApp users in India can now do their grocery shopping without ever leaving their messaging app. Meta announced a new integration with JioMart today, through which users can text “Hi” to a certain number and be taken to an in-app shopping experience. The shopping experience looks fairly familiar, akin to what Instacart and other delivery services have been designing for years. But here, there’s no other app. And for WhatsApp, that’s a big deal.

Meta is convinced that business messaging is a big part of how WhatsApp will make money going forward. (Well, that and ads, but the ads thing is causing WhatsApp some trouble.) “Business messaging is an area with real momentum and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post announcing the partnership. The JioMart integration is part back-and-forth chat, part in-app browser, but contains everything from selection to payment to delivery within WhatsApp.

Ultimately, Meta wants WhatsApp to be a WeChat-style super app, the one app users need to run their whole lives. WeChat users can pay their rent in the app, buy concert tickets in the app, pay for food in the app, and much more. Any platform that can consume that much of people’s lives is basically guaranteed to make a fortune in the process, through payment processing fees, premium features, and — you guessed it — ads.

No other platform has come anywhere close to achieving WeChat’s level of dominance, but with more than 2 billion users, WhatsApp has a better chance than most. India is its most popular market, too, with roughly 400 million users in the country. WhatsApp is free, it doesn’t take much data, and it runs on phones at practically all prices.

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First India, then Brazil? Then Europe?
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Will this be the first country bankrupted by crypto? • Rolling Stone

Daniel Alvarenga:

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To date, [El Salvador president Nayib] Bukele claims to have purchased 2,400 bitcoin tokens at more than $100m. Due to market fluctuations, the government’s bitcoin holdings have lost 60% of their value. The issuance of the bitcoin-backed volcano bonds are intended to save the country from defaulting but have reportedly been delayed likely due to a lack of investors. Meanwhile, El Salvador’s national debt is $23bn, $800m of which needs to start being paid to the IMF by 2023.

There are also environmental factors to consider in the construction of Bitcoin City. Bukele has been touting the use of geothermal energy from the country’s volcanoes to harness clean energy for bitcoin mining. However, geothermal energy only supplies about 27% of El Salvador’s energy, and the country still has to import 25% of its electricity to meet demand. It’s still a really expensive source of energy, says Cuéllar: “It requires a lot of capital investment to build out that infrastructure. And so the cheap resource is still fossil fuels.”

Building another geothermal plant could strain the country’s resources because it requires a lot of groundwater in a country that is already experiencing water shortages. “Salvadorans need water because it’s running dangerously low in a country where in a generation or two, most water will be imported,” Cuéllar says. More than 600,000 Salvadorans lack access to clean water, and it’s predicted that El Salvador could run out of water within 80 years. Addressing the population’s dire need for water has taken a back seat to promoting cryptocurrency in the country.

Bitcoin is still an impractical solution for the average person in El Salvador, where using bitcoin is akin to gambling with your next meal. In order to invest in bitcoin, “one must have income above what is necessary to survive, which is not what occurs in the majority of the Salvadoran population,” explains economist Carmen Tatiana Marroquín. Folks with little disposable income cannot afford to lose any of it if the price if bitcoin dips, like when it did by 50% in January, and then 19% again in May.

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A quite amazing set of misaligned incentives. The national debt/loan repayment problem is the most obvious problem that bitcoin absolutely doesn’t solve.
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How a retired MI6 boss, his Brexiteer friends and a celebrity Marxist became targets in Russia’s war on Ukraine • POLITICO

Emilio Casalicchio:

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In the disinformation drive around the war in Ukraine, even eccentric academics lunching with their grandsons can become collateral damage.

At first glance, Gwythian Prins, a professor at the London School of Economics, seems an unlikely target for Russian hackers seeking to discredit the British government. Yet the faceless hackers who broke into and published Prins’ personal emails revealed not only harmless discussions of his day-to-day life — including family lunches in rural England — but also extraordinary claims about an establishment plot to control the British government.

The hackers’ real target, it seems, was Prins’ retired friend and supposed co-conspirator, Richard Dearlove, with whom he frequently exchanged encrypted emails. Dearlove, an ardent Brexiteer, is a former boss of MI6, the top British spy agency made famous by the James Bond movie franchise.

Further attacks on prominent British political figures have followed. Suspected Russian hackers also targeted the Marxist activist Paul Mason, a former economics journalist on British TV news, and now a well-known political commentator who has urged fellow left-wingers to back British efforts to face down Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Both hacks are now subject to intensive investigations by the British security services, POLITICO can reveal.

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Email hacking! We’re six years on from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and the Democratic committee getting hacked by Russians, but this most insecure of messaging systems is still the target of continual attacks.

Just take it to WhatsApp or Signal, people. More secure in so many ways.
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Why YouTube decided to make its own video chip • Protocol

Max Cherney:

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Google’s self-designed YouTube chips [for video transcoding] are part of a growing trend among the tech giants. Amazon has built its Graviton server processors, Microsoft is working on Arm-based server processors, Facebook has a chip design unit — the list goes on.

A common assumption is that big tech companies are getting into chipmaking because it’s an obvious way to save money. Most chip companies operate with a gross margin north of 50%, so by moving the chip design process in-house, tech companies can theoretically save an enormous amount of money.

But that’s not the case, according to Jay Goldberg, principal at D2D Advisory. For one thing, the economics don’t make sense — it’s not worth the massive effort to hire and nurture chip designers to save a few dollars on the margin front. A new advanced chip can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to simply build a prototype, which can then cost tens of millions of dollars to perfect.

“Our focus is not really on saving money,” Silver said. “We like saving money, but what we really want to do is deliver an as-good — if not a better — quality experience for viewers.”

The motive is actually pretty simple: The big tech companies are designing their own chips to create a strategic advantage.

“Typically what that means is you have some software that you want to tie to the chip, and you get a big performance gain,” Goldberg said. One of the earliest and best-known examples is Google’s TPU, which it developed to tackle AI tasks in its data centers.

For certain workloads, “the TPU reduces the number of data centers they have to build by 50%,” Goldberg said. “At $1 billion a pop, that’s a lot of savings.” While saving money on data center construction, it also gave Google Cloud something it could offer that Microsoft Azure and AWS didn’t have at the time.

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The article calls them “self-built” custom chips, but of course they’re self-designed; someone else actually makes them.
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Walmart lists a 30TB portable SSD for $39. It is, naturally, a scam • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

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It feels like high-capacity SSDs are getting cheaper all the time, but in the words of a security researcher known as Ray Redacted on Twitter, there are still some deals that are too good to be true. In the spirit of discovery, he bought a “30TB” external SSD from AliExpress for $31.40, which also happens to be listed on Walmart’s website for $39 (I am linking it for educational and entertainment value, please do not buy it).

On the inside, this “SSD” looks like two small-capacity microSD cards hot glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board’s firmware has been modified so that each of these cards reports its capacity as “15.0TB” to the operating system, for a total of 30TB, even though the actual capacity of the cards is much lower. This is another giveaway; Windows reports drive capacities in gibibytes (1,024 mebibytes) or tebibytes (1,024 gibibytes), while drive manufacturers use gigabytes (1,000 megabytes) and terabytes (1,000 gigabytes). This is why a 1TB drive normally only has a reported capacity of 930-ish GB, rather than a nice round number.

The drive is even more clever when it comes to tricking people into thinking it’s working. It preserves the directory structure of whatever you’re copying, but when it’s “copying” your data, it just keeps writing and rewriting over the tiny microSD cards. Everything will look fine until you go to access a file, only to find that the data isn’t there.

Replies to Ray Redacted’s thread are full of alternate versions of this scam, including multiple iterations of the hot-glued microSD version and at least one that hid a USB thumb drive inside a larger enclosure.

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There’s a non-trivial amount of electronic and software effort in making these; plus the process of producing them, presumably in some spare factory line time. (Which is maybe more available given lockdowns and so on.) The guide price for a terabyte of external SSD: around $/£100.
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Blood abnormalities found in people with Long Covid • Science

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel:

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An ambitious study of people with Long Covid, the mysterious, disabling symptoms that can trail a SARS-CoV-2 infection, has turned up a host of abnormalities in their blood. The clues add to a body of evidence hinting at drivers of the condition and potential treatments worth testing. They also suggest that, as many scientists and patients have suspected, Long Covid shares certain features with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), another condition thought to follow an infection.

The new study, posted as a preprint last week, was modest in size, examining just 99 people with Long Covid. “But it went very deep, it went into granular aspects of the T cells, the antibody response,” says Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who was not involved in the work. “This is exploratory, but it’s the foundation for much bigger studies.”

The Long Covid patients, most of them struggling with intense fatigue, brain fog, and other symptoms, had low levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that helps the body control inflammation, glucose, sleep cycles, and more. Features of their T cells indicated their immune system was battling unidentified invaders, perhaps a reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 or a reactivated pathogen such as Epstein-Barr virus.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified