Has Covid become like smoking – a personally avoidable cause of illness and death? CC-licensed photo by Susan Jane Golding 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. In search of the missing link? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How a Saudi woman’s iPhone revealed hacking around the world • Reuters via Yahoo

Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing:

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A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world’s most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world.

It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone.

An unusual error in NSO’s spyware allowed Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and privacy researchers to discover a trove of evidence suggesting the Israeli spyware maker had helped hack her iPhone, according to six people involved in the incident. A mysterious fake image file within her phone, mistakenly left behind by the spyware, tipped off security researchers.

The discovery on al-Hathloul’s phone last year ignited a storm of legal and government action that has put NSO on the defensive. How the hack was initially uncovered is reported here for the first time.

Al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent activists, is known for helping lead a campaign to end the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia. She was released from jail in February 2021 on charges of harming national security.

Soon after her release from jail, the activist received an email from Google warning her that state-backed hackers had tried to penetrate her Gmail account. Fearful that her iPhone had been hacked as well, al-Hathloul contacted the Canadian privacy rights group Citizen Lab and asked them to probe her device for evidence, three people close to al-Hathloul told Reuters.

After six months of digging through her iPhone records, Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak made what he described as an unprecedented discovery: a malfunction in the surveillance software implanted on her phone had left a copy of the malicious image file, rather than deleting itself, after stealing the messages of its target.

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Again, the NSO Group’s work is – viewed without context – amazing. But the uses made of it are depressing.
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Latest success from Google’s AI group: controlling a fusion reactor • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

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Since setting the AI loose on actual hardware during the training process could be a disaster, the team started out with a tokamak simulator specific for the Swiss Plasma Center hardware. This was largely accurate, and they programmed limits into the AI that kept it from directing the plasma into a configuration where the simulator produced inaccurate results. DeepMind then trained a deep-reinforcement-learning program to reach a variety of plasma configurations by letting it control the simulator.

During training, an intervening layer of software provided a reward function that indicated how close the plasma’s properties were to the desired state. Another algorithm, termed a “critic,” learned the expected rewards for various changes to the tokamak’s control magnets. These were used by the actual control neural network to learn which actions it should take.

The critic was elaborate and computationally expensive, but it was only used during the training portion. When training was done, the control algorithm had learned which actions to take to reach a variety of states, and the critic could be discarded.

In order to allow real-time performance, the trained controller was bundled as an executable. The standard control software would be used to activate the tokamak and bring a plasma up to high energies. Once the plasma was stable, it handed off control to the AI.

The resulting software performed pretty much as you would want it to when set loose on actual hardware. The software could control experimental runs that targeted different conditions over time—in one test case, it ramped up the energy, held the plasma steady, then altered the plasma’s geometry, then relocated the plasma within the tokamak before ramping the energy back down. In another, it held two separate plasma structures in the same tokamak simultaneously.

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Here’s the Nature paper on the work. Though isn’t the real target to let the AI find entirely new ways to do things, so it surpasses what humans can program directly (as with Go)? You want to trammel it so it doesn’t loose the plasma on the surroundings, but who knows what the right way to control a tokomak really is?
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COVID is more like smoking than the flu • The Atlantic

Benjamin Mazer:

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The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States. Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me that if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one. Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting. Because too few people are vaccinated, COVID surges still overwhelm hospitals—interfering with routine medical services and leading to thousands of lives lost from other conditions. If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again. (We do have other methods of protection—antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies—but these remain in short supply and often fail to make their way to the highest-risk patients.) Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

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The US, by contrast, hasn’t, which is quite the example of how political polarisation and wilful refusal to understand things can hold a country back.
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Mean screens • VideoWeek

Evan Shapiro:

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The data shows pretty clearly that the era of “Connected TV Devices” is coming to an end, and the era of “Connected TVs ONLY” has started. Last year the largest growth for streaming content, by far, was on smart TVs, with direct connections to web-based apps. All but one of the connected TV devices lost streaming market share in 2021. Streaming devices, as a whole, lost two percentage points of the streaming share market last year, whereas CTVs as a group increased by 37%.

Yes, Roku includes dongles in their universe of 55 million CTV homes and commands a huge share of the streaming TV market, with 31.8% worldwide, 41% in the US, and 12% growth in 2021. But a good percentage of Roku’s streaming use comes from their Roku-powered TCL CTVs, which do not use the Roku dongle, but rather their operating system inside the TVs. Considering the overall loss of share among the device cohort, we can extrapolate that their increase was weighted heavily towards the CTVs.

Meanwhile, Samsung and LG CTVs saw substantial increases, and Android/Google TV garnered the largest increase at 42%. Consumers are buying new TVs, and each comes out of the box with the most-used apps pre-installed and ready to use. The downside of the inexpensive dongles sold in the last five years is that they are easily forsaken when a new, shiny TV arrives. Considering those 250 million sets sold every year, and the billion to come out by the end of 2025, this shift from dongles and devices to smart TVs and operating system platforms is quite likely not an anomaly, but a trend that will accelerate every month of each year.

Beyond this major development, though, there are some significant signs of major battle fronts in the screen wars. Roku’s partner TCL launched six new Google TVs in August 2021. Additionally, Sony launched a slew of Google TV powered sets last year. Chromecast saw zero% growth in 2021 and has been losing market share steadily for years. It seems quite clear that Alphabet has moved on from their dongle and is now focusing nearly exclusively on their CTV OS. I have spoken to regional CTV makers around the world, who emphatically confirm this strategy, reporting significant deals with Google, and huge increases in TV sales share for Google-powered sets.

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The unreasonable math of Type 1 diabetes • Maori Geek

Graham Jenson:

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In January 2022, our 18 month old son, Sam, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). This was stressful, sad, and scary as we spent 5 days in hospital with him while he recovered from Diabetic Keto Acidosis (DKA). Within an hour of him being diagnosed a wonderful diabetes nurse gave us a literal backpack filled with books and information we needed to learn to keep him alive. We started to read and try to understand what it takes to manage T1D. Immediately the massive cognitive overhead it takes to just survive with this condition hit us.

I find the best way to learn something is to try explain it to someone else. This post is me trying to explain the maths involved in managing T1D, with a few small rants about how crap it is.

Insulin is a molecule created by the pancreas that lets glucose from blood enter cells to be used as energy. T1D is an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the insulin creating cells until the pancreas stops creating insulin altogether. T1D means you have a faulty pancreas; there is no cure, no diet that fixes it and you don’t grow out of it. It is a lifelong condition that you have to manage 24 hours a day.

Glucose enters the blood when you eat basically anything, but especially carbohydrates. Without insulin glucose will build up in the blood, eventually causing your body to enter a state called Diabetic Keto Acidosis (DKA), then coma, then death. Insulin must be added to lower the amount of glucose in the blood. Too much insulin and your glucose level will go too low and you go Hypoglycaemic (hypo), then coma, then death.

Managing T1D is walking on a knifes edge between DKA and Hypoglycemia by balancing blood glucose levels with insulin.

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He illustrates this by explaining how there are different units for all this, and you have to figure it out in a dynamic system where different foods are absorbed at different rates. Maddening. Unless…
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FDA clears first smartphone app for insulin delivery • The Verge

Nicole Westman:

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The Food and Drug Administration cleared a smartphone app from Tandem Diabetes Care to program insulin delivery for its t:slim X2 insulin pump, the company announced Wednesday. It’s the first phone app for both iOS and Android to able to deliver insulin, the company said in a statement. Previously, delivery had to be handled through the pump itself.

With this update, pump users will be able to program or cancel bolus doses of insulin, which are taken at mealtimes and are crucial in keeping blood glucose levels under control. “Giving a meal bolus is now the most common reason a person interacts with their pump, and the ability to do so using a smartphone app offers a convenient and discrete solution,” John Sheridan, president and CEO of Tandem Diabetes Care, said in a statement.

The change could be a big improvement for people who prefer not to have pumps out in pubic settings or attach them to undergarments like bras.

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Impressive. Now all that needs to happen is for insulin prices in the US to be reduced.
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New FBI unit will focus on cryptocurrency exploitation • Decipher

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the FBI is forming a new unit dedicated to investigating abuses of cryptocurrencies, and the Department of Justice is launching a new International Virtual Currency Initiative to work with law enforcement, prosecutors, and cryptocurrency platforms to trace ransom payments and develop regulations and anti-money laundering legislation.

The new initiatives mark a further escalation of the U.S. government’s campaign against ransomware groups, which has accelerated quite a bit in the last year. In October, the Justice Department announced the formation of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), a group that now comprises 12 attorneys. On Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced that Eun Young Choi, a highly experienced cybersecurity prosecutor, has been appointed the director of the NCET, which will work closely with the new Virtual Asset Exploitation unit at the FBI.

Monaco pointed to the department’s seizure last week of more than $3.6bn in Bitcoin that was stolen during the hack of Bitfinex several years ago as the type of work that the new teams can do.

“We’re focusing our collective efforts on the abuse of cryptocurrencies. A unified effort on things like money laundering requires our combined efforts and multiple eyes from law enforcement on these issues,” Monaco said during a keynote at the Munich Security Conference.

“Given what we did last week, we are sending the clear message that cryptocurrencies should not be considered a safe haven.”

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There’s a good thread by Felix Salmon (on one page) about how the $3.6bn seizure was enabled by KYC/AML (know your customer/anti-money laundering) regulations that have been placed around the crypto exchanges which mean you can buy crypto, but selling it for fiat (especially dollars) is a different matter.
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The EU’s AI rules will likely take over a year to be agreed • AI News

Ryan Daws:

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Rules governing the use of artificial intelligence across the EU will likely take over a year to be agreed upon.

Last year, the European Commission drafted AI laws. While the US and China are set to dominate AI development with their vast resources, economic might, and light-touch regulation, European rivals – including the UK and EU members – believe they can lead in ethical standards.

In the draft of the EU regulations, companies that are found guilty of AI misuse face a fine of €30m or 6% of their global turnover (whichever is greater). The risk of such fines has been criticised as driving investments away from Europe.

The EU’s draft AI regulation classifies systems into three risk categories:

• Limited risk – includes systems like chatbots, inventory management, spam filters, and video games
• High risk – includes systems that make vital decisions like evaluating creditworthiness, recruitment, justice administration, and biometric identification in non-public spaces
• Unacceptable risk – includes systems that are manipulative or exploitative, create social scoring, or conduct real-time biometric authentication in public spaces for law enforcement.

Unacceptable risk systems will face a blanket ban from deployment in the EU while limited risk will require minimal oversight.

Organisations deploying high-risk AI systems would be required to have things like:

Human oversight; a risk-management system; record keeping and logging; transparency to users; data governance and management; conformity assessment; government registration.

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One year is pretty rapid by EU standards. There’s a huge gap between the “limited” and “high” risk systems there. One wonders what the edge cases will be.
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My journey down the rabbit hole of every journalist’s favorite app • POLITICO

Phelim Kine on otter.ai, a fabulous transcription app that saves journalists huge amounts of time transcribing interviews:

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“The fact that these AI-powered services exist and can turn a couple hours of audio into a reasonable written transcript often in a matter of minutes is a complete game changer,” Susan McGregor, researcher at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, said of transcription apps. “These run on machine learning, which means that they expose your data to the algorithm that is both transcribing your text and almost certainly using your text and audio to improve the quality of future transcription.”

Otter and its competitors, which include Descript, Rev, Temi and the U.K.-based Trint, are digital warehouses whose advantages of speed and convenience are bracketed by what experts say can be lax privacy and security protections that may endanger sensitive text and audio data, the identities of reporters and the potentially vulnerable sources they contact.

Trint, Otter, Temi and Rev all claim compliance with all or part of the user data protection and storage standards of the European Union’s flagship data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation. But cybersecurity experts say that the sharing of user data with third parties creates privacy and security vulnerabilities.

Otter “shares your personal data with a whole host of people, including mobile advertising tracking providers, so it strikes me that there’s an awful lot of personal data and the potential for leakage of sources for journalists,” said Paul Rosenzweig, former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security, and founder of Red Branch Consulting. “They also quite clearly say that they respond to legal obligation [law enforcement data requests], so any journalist who transcribes an interview with a confidential source and puts it up on Otter has got to live with the possibility that Otter will wind up giving that transcript to the FBI.”

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But, as Otter also explained, it might do that for law enforcement in other countries. Caveat transcriptor.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A number of people who, like Six Million Dollar Man Steve Austin, got bionic eyes have had them fail after the company lost interest. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Very windswept. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto • Platformer

Casey Newton interviews Molly White, creator of web3 Is Going Just Great:

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Newton: You’re a longtime editor and administrator of Wikipedia, which is often presented by crypto people as a web3 dream project: a decentralized public good operated by its community. And yet something tells me you think about decentralization and community very differently than they do. How do your experiences at Wikipedia shape the way you view web3? 

White: I think my experiences with the Wikimedia community have given me a pretty realistic view of how wonderful but also how difficult community-run projects can be. There are some issues that community-driven projects are prone to running up against: deciding issues when the community is split, dealing with abuse and harassment within the community, handling outside players with a strong interest in influencing what the community does. I think this is partly why some of the best critics of web3 have backgrounds in communities like Wikimedia and open source—they are familiar with the challenges that community governance and decentralization can bring. When I watch DAOs spring into existence and encounter a lot of the same difficulties we’ve seen over and over again, I often find myself wondering how many members have ever been involved in community-run projects in the past. I think a lot of people are dipping their toes in for the first time, and learning a lot of things the hard way, with very high stakes.

Web3 also adds an enormous amount of complexity on top of the already-complex types of issues that the Wikimedia community has faced, because there’s money involved. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation handles most of the finances with respect to Wikipedia, and so although the community has input, it’s largely not a day-to-day concern. There also aren’t really intrinsic monetary incentives for people to contribute to Wikipedia, which I think is a very good thing.

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It certainly is notable that strong critics of web3 (David Gerard, White) are longtime Wikipedia contributors. As she says, they know how this all goes wrong.
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Their bionic eyes are now obsolete – and unsupported • IEEE Spectrum

Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris:

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Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”

It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.

Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.

Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”

…After Second Sight discontinued its retinal implant in 2019 and nearly went out of business in 2020, a public offering in June 2021 raised $57.5m at $5 per share. The company promised to focus on its ongoing clinical trial of a brain implant, called Orion, that also provides artificial vision. But its stock price plunged to around $1.50, and in February 2022, just before this article was published, the company announced a proposed merger with an early-stage biopharmaceutical company called Nano Precision Medical (NPM). None of Second Sight’s executives will be on the leadership team of the new company, which will focus on developing NPM’s novel implant for drug delivery.

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Quite the dilemma for people who could benefit from this. (And a terrific piece of reporting by Strickland and Harris.) It’s why you’d want a bigger health organisation as an intermediary between patient and company to guarantee some sort of pipeline. (In the UK, the NHS usually fulfils that role.)
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Meta CEO Zuckerberg promotes Nick Clegg to lead on policy issues • Reuters

Elizabeth Culliford:

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Meta Platforms Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that he had promoted policy chief Nick Clegg into a larger role to lead on all policy matters, signaling less involvement from Zuckerberg in the area.

“We need a senior leader at the level of myself (for our products) and Sheryl (for our business) who can lead and represent us for all of our policy issues globally,” Zuckerberg wrote, referring to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Clegg, who was a British deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, joined Facebook in 2018 to run its global policy organization. He has led on issues like Facebook’s content policy and elections and spearheaded its establishment of the company’s independent content oversight board.

“Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and our work,” Zuckerberg said in the post.

The CEO said the change would allow him to focus more on leading the company as it builds new products while Sandberg focused on the success of its business.

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So two people above him, both more powerful. Essentially the same dynamic as when he was deputy, and the much smarter George Osborne was Chancellor and David Cameron, the better politician, was PM.

Clegg has climbed the not-so-greasy pole at Facebook very quickly by being a magnificent sponge – he’s the one rolled out to be punched in the press, and soon no doubt in Congress – but he’s never going to be in Sandberg’s role. Or Zuck’s, of course.
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Revealed: the 11 slides that finally convinced Boris Johnson about global warming • Carbon Brief

Daisy Dunne, Josh Gabbatiss, Leo Hickman, Robert McSweeney and Ayesha Tandon:

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A scientific briefing that UK prime minister Boris Johnson says changed his mind about global warming has been made public for the first time, following a freedom-of-information (FOI) request by Carbon Brief.

Last year, on the eve of the UK hosting COP26 in Glasgow, Johnson described tackling climate change as the country’s “number one international priority”. He also published a net-zero strategy and told other countries at the UN General Assembly to “grow up” when it comes to global warming.

However, just a few years earlier, Johnson was publicly doubting established climate science. For example, in a Daily Telegraph column published in 2015 he claimed unusual winter heat had “nothing to do with global warming”. And, in 2013, he said he had an “open mind” to the idea that the Earth was heading for a mini ice-age.

Last year, acknowledging his past climate scepticism, Johnson told journalists that he had now changed his mind, largely due to a scientific briefing he received shortly after becoming prime minister in 2019.

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It is definitely a scientific briefing (there’s an explanation of each slide too), and there’s also a useful set of emails from the runup where the scientists are discussing what to include. Quite a good example of “figure out who you’re trying to persuade, of what” though they could also have done “his new squeeze is probably going to be helpful in persuading him.”
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Meta’s Foo Fighters SuperBowl VR concert failed in the most basic ways • TechRadar

Hamish Hector:

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Most online events, particularly those on a grand scale like this Foo Fighters concert [on Sunday night], allow people to enter a virtual waiting room before the officially posted start time – typically opening this up about 30 minutes before showtime. 

This prevents there being a huge impact on the servers with users flooding in all at once, which reduces the likelihood of participants experiencing crashes.

Meta decided to opt for a different strategy. As reported by Bye, no one could join the event until the well-advertised 8pm PT start time rolled around, and the pre-recorded concert began just five minutes later at 8:05pm. 

At 8pm, more than 61,000 eager people would have received an invite to join the Foo Fighter’s After Show (roughly the number of people who registered their interest ahead of time), and, unsurprisingly, the lobby crashed due to the influx of users who tried to join in one big push.

Bye highlighted that there were other ways to jump into the concert through the Horizon Venues app, but this seems to have not been an intuitive solution for users or issues persisted there. At its peak, the max number of VR viewers only reached around 13,000 – less than a quarter of the people who wanted to attend.

Quest users who were able to join found themselves watching a prerecorded video of a concert, with sub-optimal viewing angles and camera operators walking about the stage. This made some feel like the Foo Fighters After Show was not the VR-first experience that had been promised. 

In response to complaints on Twitter the VP of Horizon, Vivek Sharma, cited that problems were caused by “unprecedented” demand. Adding that further opportunities to see the show would be available for those who missed out the first time.

However, we find these excuses to be pretty weak coming from a multi-billion dollar company – especially one that has been heavily advertising this concert and its VR services in the run-up to, and during, the Super Bowl.

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Makes the metaverse even weirder if gigs start on time there.
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A crucial clue in the $4.5bn bitcoin heist: a $500 Walmart gift card • WSJ

James Fanelli, Ben Foldy and Dustin Volz:

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Every transaction of bitcoin is recorded in a public ledger for anyone to see—resulting in huge volumes of data. Analyzing their patterns can reveal groups that seem to share a common source or connection. Court documents show federal agents used software tools to sift through the data in search of connections and patterns, a process called cluster analysis.

One cluster of bitcoin addresses, identified in court filings as 36B6mu, caught investigators’ attention.

On May 3, 2020, a fraction of a bitcoin went from the cluster to an exchange that sells prepaid gift cards. In return, a $500 gift card for Walmart was sent to a Russian-registered email. The transaction, however, was conducted via an IP address linked to a cloud service provider in New York that investigators linked to Mr. Lichtenstein, according to the agents.

Portions of the gift card, filings said, were then redeemed through Walmart’s phone app. Three purchases were conducted online using Ms. Morgan’s name, using one of her emails, and the couple’s apartment address was provided for delivery.

Between February of 2019 and December 2020, bitcoin worth about $7.8 million today flowed through the cluster to and from accounts at various crypto exchanges that investigators said in court documents are tied to Mr. Lichtenstein and Ms. Morgan.

Investigating agents in January 2021 asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui in Washington to issue a warrant to search email accounts connected to the couple. Judge Faruqui approved the warrant in August, noting the public nature of the blockchain ledger meant that those using it had no constitutional right to privacy.

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Great thing when you’re committing your crimes in full sight, and it’s only the names that need to be found.
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Google Search is dying • DKB

“dkb”:

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If you’ve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I don’t need to tell you that Google search results have gone to shit. You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.

Google still gives decent results for many other categories, especially when it comes to factual information. You might think that Google results are pretty good for you, and you have no idea what I’m talking about.

What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search. You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result.

I’m far from the only one who thinks Google is dying…

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Yes, you’ve heard it a few times before. But there’s a Redditor who has a fairly good explanation:

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I think I understand what this article is trying to say. It’s not saying that Google’s search technology is worse or that people don’t use Google to search. It’s saying that people trust less of the results Google shows compared to seeing discussions of it on Reddit.

For instance, if I’m looking to see reviews of the Honda Civic 2022 or whatever, I actually do find myself typing “Honda Civic review reddit” instead of “Honda Civic review”. This is because I want to see what real people and enthusiasts (on r/cars or whatever) are talking about the car, rather than the top results at Google which are basically just paid reviews advertising the car anyway.

Even though I kinda know people in Reddit are just as capable of spouting BS that are completely wrong, I find the discussions more authentic anyway than the corporate speak the “big websites” have on their articles that Google shows me.

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Google plans Android privacy change similar to Apple’s • CNBC

Jessica Bursztynsky:

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Google said it’s developing new privacy-focused replacements for its advertising ID, a unique string of characters that identifies the user’s device. The digital IDs in smartphones often help ad-tech companies track and share information about consumers.

The changes could impact big companies that have relied on tracking users across apps, like Facebook-parent Meta. Apple’s tweaks hit Meta particularly hard, for example. Meta said earlier this month Apple’s privacy changes will decrease the social media company’s sales this year by about $10 billion. That news contributed to wiping $232bn from the company’s market cap in a single day, eventually pushing the company’s below $600bn. Meta was worth more than $1 trillion back in June 2021.

But while Meta fought against Apple’s changes, it seems supportive of the way Google plans to implement its privacy tweaks.

“Encouraging to see this long-term, collaborative approach to privacy-protective personalized advertising from Google,” Graham Mudd, vice president of product marketing, ads and business at Facebook said on Twitter.

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Maybe curb your enthusiasm on this, as it’s not coming for (at least) two years. And Facebook’s reaction – well, don’t forget that Google and Facebook are presently facing a lot of scrutiny over solid-looking claims that they colluded over ad pricing.
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Accurately track your mains frequency • Hackaday

Jenny List:

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Depending upon where in the world you live, AC mains frequency is either 50Hz or 60Hz, and that frequency is maintained accurately enough over time that it can be used as a time reference for a clock. Oddly it’s rarely exactly that figure though, instead it varies slightly with load on the network and the operators will adjust it to keep a constant frequency over a longer period. These small variations in frequency can easily be measured, and [jp3141] has created a circuit that does exactly that.

It’s a surprisingly straightforward device, in which a Teensy takes its power supply from a very conventional if now a little old-school mains transformer, rectifier, and regulator. A sample of the AC from the transformer passes through a low-pass filer and a clamp, and thence to the Teensy where it is fed into one of the on-board comparators from which its period is measured using one of the timers.

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You absolutely are not recommended to try this, unless you’re pretty confident about messing about with mains power. Also, this might be more for the US than UK/Europe.

What I find telling about it though is the implicit desire it fulfils to measure absolutely everything that can be measured, no matter whether it makes the slightest difference to your life, or whether you can do anything about it.
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Fantastical update adds cloud-based scheduling features • Six Colours

Jason Snell:

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Finding a common time when a group of people can meet has been a recurring theme of my life for a couple of decades now. Back in the old days, it was often finding common times for project meetings at work. For more than a decade, it has also included scheduling podcast episodes with a disparate group of panelists. And as an independent type person, I often need to schedule Zoom meetings with a random collection of people in different time zones with different schedules.

My calendar app has never really done this job well, so I’ve used a bunch of web-based tools to facilitate this work, most notably Doodle and (more recently) StrawPoll. As of last week, though, my calendar app does do this—because last week Flexibits announced Fantastical 3.6, an update to its subscription-based calendar app that adds a new web-based scheduler.

Fantastical’s scheduler works both ways. If you’re trying to find a common time, you can create an event with multiple possible times, and then generate a link to send to potential participants. They can respond on the web with the times they’re available, and—this is maybe my favorite part—you can see their responses right within Fantastical.

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I’ve been using Fantastical (it’s a Mac app) for years – I like the fact that it gives you a little calendar accessible from the menu bar, into which you can add appointments etc. I don’t greatly like its determination to parse any use of “at” or similar prepositions into a location, or attempts to deduce dates I haven’t entered, but it’s tolerable for that.

Adding scheduling (it previously added weather) seems like another step closer to the point where, like all apps, it adds messaging.
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Happy Valentine’s Day from Facebook. Here’s a photo of you and your ex • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Emily Kling:

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You really loved that wine bar. Look at how happy you were. And is it just us or is your body snatched in this pic? Do you still own that blouse? Oh, right, it doesn’t fit anymore. Just like your ex, it’s gone now.

What happened anyway? I mean, we’re Facebook; we, of course, know what happened. We’ve read the private messages between your ex-boyfriend and your best friend. Pretty steamy. But also, what happened to you? Bummer that you never fully moved on.

Wonder how your ex is doing? Just hover over his name to enlarge his new profile picture. He is still cute and athletic. Did you know he was training to run the marathon? You were always trying to convince him to get back into running. Well, he’s finally done it. And yes, he’s still with your best friend. Sorry, ex-best friend! Our bad.

Here are some pics of them at that vineyard you love. You were right about that place. So romantic. The perfect spot to get engaged. No argument there from your ex. Check out that diamond. Talk about blinding. Quite the rock. And on such a dainty little finger too.

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Satire so sharp you could cut your wrists on it. (Via John Naughton)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Barry T points out, re yesterday’s article about the man with Covid for 14 months, that immunocompromised people aren’t the only way that variants emerge (and possibly not even the major way). There’s also human-animal-human passage, and others.

In Siberia, global heating is turning permafrost into occasional slush – with dramatic results for buildings and the future climate. CC-licensed photo by Adam Jones 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. Windswept. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation • Slow Boring

Matthew Yglesias:

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When I went on The Joe Rogan Experience in early December of 2020, he surprised me by veering way off-topic to do vaccine-skeptical takes.

Since this is not what my book is about and isn’t something I had professional background covering, I was not prepared to rebut his talking points effectively. That’s especially true because, at the time, the Covid-19 vaccines were loosely Trump-branded, so I wasn’t really expecting this to be a controversial issue and hadn’t looked into it. Which is just to say that Rogan was actually much better informed about the vaccine issue than I was. He (correctly) said the common, non-severe side-effects were considerably worse than I realized. And he also correctly said that the Phase III clinical trials were not long enough to gauge how enduring the protection the vaccines offered was. He, as a vaccine skeptic, had sought out a lot of vaccine skeptic talking points, and many of those talking points were factually true.

I, a normal sane individual who supports vaccination efforts, never bothered to look into anything about it other than when was I going to be able to get my shots.

But this is actually the general pattern in life. A normal person can tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little about the FDA clinical trial process or the moon landing. But do you know who knows a ton about the moon landing? Crazy people who think it’s fake. They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks. If you can remember the number of the Kennedy administration executive order about reducing troop levels in Vietnam, then you’re probably a crank — that EO plays a big role in Kennedy-related conspiracy theories, so it’s conspiracy theorists who know all the details.

More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about “misinformation” is driven by the erroneous belief that more factual information would resolve political disputes.

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Certainly echoes a lot of what I found in researching Social Warming. But the difference now is that there are recommendation engines helpfully pulling together the cranks, who can then crankify themselves even further into CrankWorld.
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The Great Siberian thaw • The New Yorker

Joshua Yaffa visits the land where the ice beneath the ground always used to be frozen – but now isn’t:

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Soviet engineers came to treat vechnaya merzlota [literally “eternal frost”] as exactly that: eternal, stable, unchanging. “They believed they had conquered permafrost,” Dmitry Streletskiy, a professor at George Washington University, said. “You could construct a five- or nine-story building on top of piles and nothing happened. Everyone was happy.” But, Streletskiy went on, “that infrastructure was meant to serve thirty to fifty years, and no one could imagine that the climate would change so dramatically within that span.”

By 2016, a regional official had declared that sixty% of the buildings in Norilsk were compromised as a result of permafrost thaw. On May 29, 2020, a fuel-storage tank belonging to Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia’s largest mining companies, cracked open, spilling twenty-one thousand tons of diesel into nearby waterways and turning the Ambarnaya River a metallic red. Executives at the company said that the damage had been contained. But Georgy Kavanosyan, a hydrogeologist based in Moscow, who has a popular YouTube channel, travelled to Norilsk and took samples farther north, from the Pyasina River, which empties into the Kara Sea. He found pollutant concentrations two and a half times permitted levels, threatening fish stocks and ecosystems for thousands of miles.

The Kremlin could not ignore the scale of the disaster, which Greenpeace compared to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In February, 2021, the state ordered Norilsk Nickel to pay a two-billion- dollar fine, the largest penalty for environmental damage in Russian history. The company had said that the piles supporting the tank failed as the permafrost thawed. An outside scientific review found that those piles had been improperly installed, and that the temperature of the soil was not regularly monitored. In other words, human negligence had compounded the effects of climate change. “What happened in Norilsk was a kind of demonstration of how severe the problem can be,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said. “But it’s far from the only case. Lots of other accidents are happening on a smaller scale, and will continue to.”

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As it melts – irreversibly? – everything is changing.
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Turk sets unenviable COVID record by testing positive for 14 straight months • Reuters

Yesim Dikmen:

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When Muzaffer Kayasan first caught COVID-19, he thought he was destined to die since he was already suffering from leukemia. Fourteen months and 78 straight positive tests later, he is still alive – and still battling to shake off the infection.

Kayasan, 56, has Turkey’s longest recorded continuous COVID-19 infection, doctors say, possibly due to a weakened immune system from the cancer. Despite being in and out of hospital since November 2020, his spirits have been high.

“I guess this is the female version of COVID – she has been obsessed with me,” Kayasan joked last week as he found out that his latest PCR test was, yet again, positive.

Nine months in hospital and five months mostly alone in his flat have separated him from much of the outside world, including his granddaughter, Azra, who stays in the garden while visiting, talking through the glass back door.

“I will play with you when I get well,” he told her through a mask after giving her a plastic toy telephone.

«

This is how variants emerge: the weakened immune system can’t quite kill the infection, but can squash it again and again until a mutation emerges that escapes the immune system and flourishes, and goes on to infect others.
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HMRC seizes NFT for first time in £1.4m fraud case • BBC News

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HMRC said the suspects in its fraud case were alleged to have used “sophisticated methods” to try to hide their identities including false and stolen identities, false addresses, pre-paid unregistered mobile phones, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), false invoices and pretending to engage in legitimate business activities.

Nick Sharp, deputy director economic crime, said the first seizure of an NFT “serves as a warning to anyone who thinks they can use crypto assets to hide money from HMRC”.

“We constantly adapt to new technology to ensure we keep pace with how criminals and evaders look to conceal their assets.”

HMRC said it had secured a court order to detain the seized crypto assets worth about £5,000 and three digital artwork NFTs, which have not been valued, while its investigation continues.

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Google lets you install Chrome OS on PCs and Macs • Forbes

Barry Collins:

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Google has released Chrome OS Flex, a version of its Chromebook operating system that can be installed on PCs and Macs.

Flex is being pitched at businesses who are managing fleets of old Windows machines or Macs. Google describes Chrome OS Flex as “a free and sustainable way to modernize devices you already own”.

Google is clearly trying to draw a comparison between the sluggish performance users often experience with older PCs, compared to the slick performance on offer from the more limited Chrome OS on ageing hardware. The hope being that businesses will decide they can do all they need on actual Chromebooks the next time they get to a hardware refresh.

Google recently snapped up Neverware, a company that was offering a version of the Chrome OS called CloudReady, which could be installed on PCs. That, however, had the disadvantage of no official support from the Google Play Store.

Google is also trying to play up the green credentials of switching to Chrome OS Flex, arguing that it will “refresh your older devices with a modern OS and extend their lifespan to reduce e-waste”. Given that chip shortages are currently limiting the supply of some computer brands, especially in the corporate space, it might also allow companies to get another year or two out of their existing hardware fleet.

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I can see the benefit in installing it on old PCs, but I’d have thought old Macs that were still in use had some software with specific utility. From the outset, I’ve always thought that ChromeOS’s benefits were to corporations, not particularly consumers. Yet the marketing doesn’t seem directed like that, perhaps because of Windows licencing pitfalls.
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Are we at risk of over-estimating the neo-climate sceptics? • BusinessGreen Blog Post

James Murray:

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Perhaps the most pertinent forerunner to this campaign [against the UK government’s 2050 net zero target] is not Brexit, but the various campaigns previously pedalled by [“Brexit hard man” Steve] Baker’s friends at the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the accompanying network of ‘free market’ think tanks and media titles.

Over the past decade this loose grouping has argued against renewables, only to watch them become the lowest cost form of new power capacity and backbone of the energy system. They’ve argued against electric vehicles, only to watch them become the driving force in the auto market. They’ve argued against net zero goals on the grounds no other countries have them, only to watch 90% of the global economy adopt such targets. And they’ve argued for fracking, only to watch it get itself banned. It’s quite the track record.

In fact, their only genuinely successful campaign of the past decade was the one that helped push David Cameron to cut energy efficiency funding schemes and shelve zero carbon home standards. According to recent analysis, that genius move has cost the UK around £2.5bn in higher bills, or £60 per household.

I was reminded of this litany this weekend while reading the letter from a small band of MPs arguing reviving fracking would restore a sense of community in northern England, and Andrew Neil’s bold suggestion that he had discovered “the answer to the energy crisis”. [Shale gas – Overspill Ed.]

When you unpack their manifesto the paucity of it is genuinely staggering. It goes something like this: blame the ‘green blob’ and ‘mad’ politicians; suggest there is a simple solution to a complex energy crisis; quote highly contestable projections for fracking production and jobs; make no mention of the negligible impact UK gas production would have on domestic prices without export bans or nationalisation; big up the potential of new nuclear projects, but make no mention of cost implications; make no mention of energy efficiency; and most of all, in no way engage with what to do about the increased emissions and climate risks that would come with the expansion of gas infrastructure. And that’s it.

The public is not stupid. None of this passes the sniff test, even before you consider the neo-climate denial it is built upon.

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A network of fake test answer sites is trying to incriminate students • The Markup

Colin Lecher:

»

One feature from [online proctoring service] Honorlock especially piqued [computer science student Kurt] Wilson’s interest. The company, according to its materials, provides a way to track cheating students through what Honorlock calls “seed sites” or others call “honeypots”—fake websites that remotely tattle on students who visit them during exams.

Wilson pored over a patent for the software to learn more, finding example sites listed. By looking for common code and the same test questions over the past year, Wilson eventually turned up about a dozen honeypots apparently linked to Honorlock, five of which are still operating.

“It kind of became an obsession at one point,” said Wilson, who hasn’t tracked the honeypots in some months but was at one point checking for them daily.

The sites Wilson found are bare bones. They have names like “gradepack.com” and “quizlookup.com.” They’re largely a catalog of thousands of apparent test questions that are sometimes bizarrely specific. “In which part of the digestive system does chemical digestion begin?” one post asks. A multiple-choice question requests using “VSEPR theory to predict the molecular geometry around the carbon atom in formaldehyde, H2CO.”

Click on the “show answer” button below any of the questions and you won’t get help but will be rewarded with a digital chiming noise and no answer. But visitors to the sites are having detailed information about their mouse movements and even typing transmitted to an Honorlock server.

In the patent, recently flagged, along with an Honorlock honeypot site, by student media at Arizona State University, the company explains that its sites can track visitor information like IP addresses as evidence that a student was looking up answers on a secondary device.

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Some academics think it’s simply entrapment. I still find an educational system that assumes that in the world of work we won’t be able to instantly look things up, and crowdsource information, to be bizarre.
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The New York Times has changed Wordle’s solutions • The Verge

James Vincent:

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Wordle’s acquisition by The New York Times has already stirred up controversy, from broken streaks to accusations the game has become harder. [It hasn’t – Overspill Ed.] But here’s a big change the NYT isn’t shouting about: it’s altered Wordle’s solutions. As of Tuesday, February 15th (game number 241), the New York Times version of Wordle and the original version hosted at powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle have diverged and will now continue forever out of step.

Changes to Wordle’s word list by the NYT were spotted last week by a number of sources, including BoingBoing. Although some thought these changes only applied to the words you could guess, it turns out the Times also altered the list of possible solutions. (The Verge made this mistake as well — we regret the error.) This confusion wasn’t helped by the fact that the Times itself was running round telling publications that everything was the same in Wordle land. As NYT comms director Jordan Cohen told The Guardian: “Nothing has changed about the game play.” Which is really not true!

Sure, the game plays the same, but the Times has not only removed rude words like “pussy” and “whore” from possible guesses, it’s also changed the game’s future solutions. And surely for a game all about guessing words this counts as a change to gameplay.

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Well.. no? I’d take “gameplay” to refer to “how it does things”, not “what the solutions are”. Apparently the solution at Powerlanguage was too exotic so it was unceremoniously dumped. No doubt resynchronisation of the two will be on Vladimir Putin’s list of demands to be fulfilled before his troops retreat.
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My family is trapped in the metaverse • WIRED

Adrienne So:

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It didn’t start out this way. I first got the Meta Quest 2 as a loaner in November, to try coworking with my colleagues and experiment with briefings. For work or relaxation, I found the headset utterly unsatisfying. If I want to meditate, I will take my dog on a walk; if I want to blow off steam, I go for a run. “The killer app is reality!” my husband crowed, as he saw the headset sit dusty and unused on my desk for about a month.

That was until Christmas, when both sides of my family visited and we reinstituted strict social distancing to protect older family members in the middle of the Omicron surge. Trapped in my house with no escape from all of my loved ones, I downloaded Puzzling Places one night. Meditative music plays as you manipulate small pieces of landmarks, clothes, and places in a 3D space around you. The satisfying click and glow as I put each small piece into its place was addictive.

I downloaded a few more games. Then a few more. Getting used to the headset didn’t come easy. The headset is much lighter and easier to use than older iterations, but it’s still heavy and awkward. Getting plopped down into empty space with no legs is still disorienting; I bought myself a big bag of the same ginger gummy chews I used to combat nausea during pregnancy. 

Still, I persisted. In all honesty, I would not have if I were able to do literally anything else. A coworker suggested playing Beat Saber and FitXR. I organized a game of Blaston. My skeptical husband found that he also loved Puzzling Places, and my six-year-old demanded a (short) turn. My 4-year-old still doesn’t want to try it, but it’s only a matter of time. 

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The new chief executive of Peloton says it isn’t going to be sold; it also seems to be developing new exercise machines. At least one of those ideas is bad. CC-licensed photo by Dana L. Brown 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. So clickable, so very clickable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Meta wouldn’t tell us how it enforces its rules in VR, so we ran a test to find out • Buzzfeed News

Emily Baker-White:

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In a matter of hours, we built a private Horizon World festooned with massive misinformation slogans: “Stop the Steal!” “Stop the Plandemic!” “Trump won the 2020 election!” We called the world “The Qniverse,” and we gave it a soundtrack: an endless loop of Infowars founder Alex Jones calling Joe Biden a pedophile and claiming the election was rigged by reptilian overlords. We filled the skies with words and phrases that Meta has explicitly promised to remove from Facebook and Instagram — “vaccines cause autism,” “COVID is a hoax,” and the QAnon slogan “where we go one we go all.” Time and time again, Meta has removed and taken action on pages and groups, even private ones, that use these phrases.

We did not release this toxic material to the larger public. Only a handful of BuzzFeed News reporters were given access to the Qniverse, which was created using an account in the real name of a BuzzFeed News reporter and linked to her Facebook account. We kept the world “unpublished” — i.e., invitation only — to prevent unsuspecting users from happening upon it, and to mimic the way some Meta users seeking to share misinformation might actually do so: in private, invitation-only spaces.

The purpose of our test was to assess whether the content moderation systems that operate on Facebook and Instagram also operate on Horizon. At least in our case, it appears they did not.

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They even reported it to the Meta moderation team, who said it was A-OK. However:

»

Perhaps the moderators left the Qniverse up because the world contained only violative content, and not violating behavior. Beyond the act of creating the misinformation slogans, we did not speak or otherwise interact with the content in the world. Without that context, maybe content moderators took it to be a parody.

We went to Meta’s comms department, a channel not available to ordinary people. We asked about its content moderators’ decisions: how could a world that shares misinformation that Meta has removed from its other platforms, under the same Community Guidelines, not violate Horizon’s policies?

The following afternoon, the experimental world disappeared. The company had reversed its original ruling.

«

Earlier this month I spoke to an ex-Facebook employee, who said she felt that Meta was just leaving behind the mess of Facebook in order to move on to the new shiny. And so the cycle repeats.
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New Peloton chief dismisses suggestions company will be sold • Financial Times

Patrick McGee and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

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[New CEO at Peloton, Barry] McCarthy said his growth strategy would focus on content, explaining that “where the magic lives” at Peloton is on its digital screens, not its connected bikes or treadmills. Expanding the digital community and enhancing content could make Peloton “a very fast-growing business with very high margins”, he said.

His “playbook” will include developing “product line extensions” so customers could own multiple machines, McCarthy said. He added, however, that “an entirely different pricing structure” could replace the $39 monthly subscription fee which has been static since the company sold its first bikes via Kickstarter.

The FT has separately obtained details of two hardware launches under development at Peloton.

One, codenamed Project Caesar, is a connected rower that gives feedback on the user’s form. According to photographs and spec details seen by the FT, the rower features the same tablet as Peloton’s Bike+ product, operates with magnetic resistance and will feature classes taught by instructors in studios and on the water.

In recent months some employees have been testing the rower in their homes. Two people familiar with the matter said it could be announced before or at “Homecoming”, an annual event for Peloton fans to be held on May 13.

Project Cobra would deliver Peloton’s first dedicated strength product. It is designed to rival Tonal, a cable-pulley weight system manufactured by a Peloton competitor. Unlike Tonal, Cobra does not attach to a wall and pairs with a television rather than a touch screen. The product does not appear to be as imminent as the rower.

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The hardware is going to be an anchor that will drag them down until they abandon it. Exercise machinery is a commodity market (as with most hardware), and that isn’t anyway where Peloton’s USP lies – it is, as McCarthy correctly recognises, the screens that connect you to other people taking part. And magnetic resistance for a rower? Sure it will never wear out, but it’s going to be pricey, might need power (electromagnets; permanent magnets would be super-expensive and hard to calibrate?) and there are good-enough alternatives already, using air or water.
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Worldle

Teuteuf, a developer:

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Guess the WORLDLE in 6 guesses.

Each guess must be a valid country, territory, …

After each guess, you will have the distance, the direction and the proximity from your guess and the target country.

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Come on, I think this has a way to go. There could be a Chemicable (what’s the chemical), Equationable (name the physics equation), Medicable (name the medical condition..)
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Here’s what actually happens to all your online shopping returns • Rest of World

Meaghan Tobin, Wency Chen and Abubakar Idris:

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Refunds for the three items were issued as soon as the items were scanned into a New Jersey warehouse, which shares an address with a Chinese furniture company called Loye. (A Shein spokesperson said in an email that the company did not own the New Jersey warehouse or have any relationship with the furniture company but does operate a warehouse in Los Angeles.) 

Over the month of January, the two items with AirTags attached [by the writers] sat for approximately two weeks at the New Jersey warehouse before making their way by vehicle through the U.S. Postal Service to suburbs of California and Florida respectively. Both appeared to be at residential addresses — the last received signal before the AirTag pings disappeared. The spokesperson for Shein did not directly answer written questions around whether returns in the U.S. were resold to new customers in the country.

According to Shobert, returns cost retailers about two-thirds of an item’s original selling price. That means the $20 sweater purchased by Rest of World could cost a company $13 to take back.

“They have basically built their profit model — that if they have to throw away all that’s unsold, it’s calculated into their model,” explained Juliana Prather, chief marketing officer at Edited. 

American consumer spending through the holiday season at Shein alone increased nearly fivefold since 2019. By mid-2021, the Chinese fashion app had almost surpassed Zara and H&M combined to account for the largest share of the American fast-fashion market. “So on one hand, that creates incredible power but [also] incredible focus on getting [products] out there,” Prather said. 

The spokesperson for Shein did not answer a question about whether unsold stock was calculated in the company’s profit model, saying in a written response that they do not disclose “proprietary business data.”

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Take that as a yes, then. It’s hard to think this is sustainable.
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Apple buys startup that makes music with artificial intelligence • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman:

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Apple acquired a startup called AI Music that uses artificial intelligence to generate tailor-made music, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, adding technology that could be used across its slate of audio offerings.

The purchase of AI Music, a London-based business founded in 2016, was completed in recent weeks. The company had about two dozen employees before the deal.

Technology developed by AI Music can create soundtracks using royalty-free music and artificial intelligence, according to a copy of its now-defunct website. The idea is to generate dynamic soundtracks that change based on user interaction. A song in a video game could change to fit the mood, for instance, or music during a workout could adapt to the user’s intensity.

On its LinkedIn page, AI Music said its goal is to “give consumers the power to choose the music they want, seamlessly edited to fit their needs or create dynamic solutions that adapt to fit their audiences.” The startup had earlier deals with advertising companies to create more engaging ads that played different music depending on the audience.

A representative of Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.

While relatively small, the deal is one of the tech giant’s few acquisitions in the past year. Apple’s last reported purchase was also for a music company: Primephonic. That startup ran a classical music streaming service that Apple intends to turn into an app tied to Apple Music this year.

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“AI-built” music is fast becoming A Thing. I searched on the term “AI Music” and got this, which is owned by picture company Shutterstock. Though AI Music doesn’t seem to be listed on the “top 10 music generators” in January 2020.

Would Apple want to include it in Garageband, though, or save it for ProTools?
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Crypto, libertarianism and externalities • Pluralistic

Cory Doctorow:

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I’ve just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I’ve yet to encounter. It comes from David “DSHR” Rosenthal, a distinguished technologist whose past achievements including helping to develop X11 and the core technologies for Nvidia.

Rosenthal’s critique is a transcript of a lecture he gave to Stanford’s EE380 class, adapted from a December 2021 talk for an investor conference. It is a bang-up-to-date synthesis of many of the critical writings on the subject, glued together with Rosenthal’s own deep technical expertise. He calls it “Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Externalities?”

The presence of “externalities” in Rosenthal’s title is key. Rosenthal identifies blockchainism’s core ideology as emerging from “the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks,” and states that “libertarianism’s attraction is based on ignoring externalities.”

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Doctorow provides an excellent precis which is worth reading for itself. A point worth reflecting on is that society has now reached enough of a comfort point that there’s room for libertarianism – which is utterly hopeless in a crisis; self-interest only works until you’re the loser – to attempt to flourish.
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Researchers find the NFT economy is just as unequal as the real one • Vice

Maxwell Strachan:

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One recent study, which a team of researchers published in the leading science journal Nature, for example, found that “the top 10% of traders alone perform 85% of all transactions and trade at least once 97% of all assets.” All things considered, the top 10% of “buyer–seller pairs” are as active as everyone else combined. All in all, the research paints a picture of the NFT market almost completely captured by “whales,” or deep-pocketed players in crypto. 

“You have a very concentrated market,” Andrea Baronchelli, one of the researchers, told Motherboard.  

Baronchelli, an associate math professor at City, University of London and the lead of the token economy group at the Alan Turing Institute, added that the research appears to push back against the arguments typically made that the NFT market is a democratizing and “totally open” economic system where “trade is brought to the masses.”

The team analyzed 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs using 160 separate cryptocurrencies between June 2017 and April 2021. The primary crypto currencies used were Ethereum and WAX, which bills itself as an eco-friendly alternative. 

The study did have some limitations. The researchers got their data from a variety of sources, including APIs for OpenSea and Decentraland, and data from NonFungible Corporation, which tracks historical NFT sales. Because data was not directly scraped from the Ethereum or WAX blockchains, they “likely missed a number of ‘independent’ NFT producers,” according to the study. But overall, their research provides evidence that such platforms, as of now, are largely controlled by dominant whales.

…Though Baronchelli said his research doesn’t “prove” the existence of wash trading [where the same person buys and sells a product to raise its perceived value], the concentrated pattern they observed is “compatible” with such practices, as well as money laundering.

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Had no idea that NFTs were being traded in 2017. I thought they were, at worst, a 2020-era thing.
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Supercomputer helps Canadian researcher uncover thousands of viruses that could cause human diseases • CBC News

Lauren Pelley:

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Tracking pathogens that could spark future pandemics is no easy feat, but thanks to the help of a supercomputer, a Canadian researcher is among a team of scientists who’ve uncovered thousands of viruses that might one day pose a threat to humans.

Dubbed the Serratus Project, the international collaboration recently shared its findings in the journal Nature — which included the discovery of nearly 10 times more RNA-based viruses than were previously known, totalling more than 130,000 new species, all lurking in more than a decade’s worth of publicly available genetic data.

Those types of pathogens are known for causing a wide variety of human diseases, ranging from COVID-19 to Ebola to the common cold. And this knowledge could “improve pathogen surveillance for the anticipation and mitigation of future pandemics,” the team wrote in their paper, which was published at the end of January.

Artem Babaian, a former University of British Columbia (UBC) post-doctoral research fellow, spearheaded the work, which relied on cloud-based supercomputing power provided by Amazon Web Services in collaboration with UBC through the school’s Cloud Innovation Centre. 

“We reanalyzed all public sequencing data — so this is genetic data from pretty much every corner of the planet you can think of,” Babaian told CBC News. “It has soil samples from Vancouver… all the way down to anal swabs from penguins in Antarctica.”

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That’s… a long way down. That they pulled this out of already known data is impressive.
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Super Bowl crypto commercials failed to hijack the game • Fast Company

Jeff Beer:

»

As marketing goes, a year ago most everyday people couldn’t name a crypto brand. Over the past 12 months there has been an explosion in marketing, particular in sports. FTX’s arena deal with the Miami Heat in early 2021 triggered a flood of other crypto brands jumping into the space. Coinbase became the official crypto partner of the NBA and WNBA. Binance sponsored the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament. Crypto.com, of course, replaced Staples as the name on the arena of the Los Angeles Lakers, and then signed on both LeBron James and star-studded soccer club Paris Saint-Germain as partners.

For those who bought into the Crypto Bowl hype, consider it buying in early. Back in 1999, only two dotcom brands had Super Bowl commercials. The next year, there were 17. Today, we don’t even blink when Amazon is a perennially popular Super Bowl advertiser.

One of the challenges for crypto brand marketers is effectively communicating the complexity, potential, and details of an incredibly complicated business. Is it cryptocurrency? Is it blockchain tech? Is it an NFT? Isn’t it all just a scam? Too deep a dive will have people’s eyes glazing over, while too little information will only feed into their confusion and mistrust. So how did this year’s crypto advertisers meet all these challenges?

I didn’t write a white paper outlining how I’d evaluate these ads, nor did I have to put anything on the blockchain. I focused on three questions: Does the ad tell a crypto newbie anything about what it does and why they should care? Does the ad make that person predisposed to like the company? Does the ad inspire them to look into it further?

«

As Beer points out, there were 17 dot-com-boom advertisers. I think two of them are still going, and to some extent that’s because they weren’t directly doing dot-com things.
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An attempt by Samsung to demo its new phone in the metaverse didn’t go to plan. At all. CC-licensed photo by Moogani GossipGirl 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. Still not feeling invaded. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem • The Atlantic

Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin and Trevor Davis:

»

If you want to understand why Facebook too often is a cesspool of hate and disinformation, a good place to start is with users such as John, Michelle, and Calvin.

John, a caps-lock devotee from upstate New York, calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “PIGLOSI,” uses the term negro, and says that the right response to Democrats with whom they disagree is to “SHOOT all of them.” Michelle rails against the “plandemic.” Calvin uses gay as a slur and declares that Black neighborhoods are always “SHITHOLES.” You’ve almost certainly encountered people like these on the internet. What you may not realize, though, is just how powerful they are.

For more than a year, we’ve been analyzing a massive new data set that we designed to study public behavior on the 500 U.S. Facebook pages that get the most engagement from users. Our research, part of which will be submitted for peer review later this year, aims to better understand the people who spread hate and misinformation on Facebook. We hoped to learn how they use the platform and, crucially, how Facebook responds. Based on prior reporting, we expected it would be ugly. What we found was much worse.

The most alarming aspect of our findings is that people like John, Michelle, and Calvin aren’t merely fringe trolls, or a distraction from what really matters on the platform. They are part of an elite, previously unreported class of users that produce more likes, shares, reactions, comments, and posts than 99% of Facebook users in America.

They’re superusers. And because Facebook’s algorithm rewards engagement, these superusers have enormous influence over which posts are seen first in other users’ feeds, and which are never seen at all. Even more shocking is just how nasty most of these hyper-influential users are. The most abusive people on Facebook, it turns out, are given the most power to shape what Facebook is.

«

As you’d expect – you’ve read Social Warming, right? – attention is focused according to a power law, and it’s the incredibly obnoxious people who get and focus the attention. Their research shows that 500 pages “account for about half of public US page engagement on the platform”.
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I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

»

In recent months, people have freaked out after finding AirTags hidden in their bags and on their cars. They were scared about being stalked or followed by someone wanting to steal their vehicles. A Sports Illustrated model, Brooks Nader, said she found one in her coat pocket after visiting a Manhattan bar. All these people received warnings on their iPhones, a feature Apple had built into the AirTag system to help prevent unwanted tracking.

…Alyson Messenger, a lawyer in Los Angeles who works with survivors of domestic violence, said she knew of two women stalked by former partners with AirTags. She thinks other cases are “flying under the radar.”

An abuser could also put spyware on a person’s phone to track them, but that requires time, access and knowing their passcode. With these location-tracking devices, a person “just needs to get close enough to a victim or their property to place them,” Ms. Messenger said. “It’s insidious because the devices are so discreet and unnoticeable. We suspect it is happening and victims don’t know.”

…I asked Mr. Zientz about how LandAirSea [which sells a tracker] dealt with people using its devices for unwanted spying.

“It’s certainly something that comes up,” Mr. Zientz said. “People call in, and they’re like, ‘I found this on my car. What are you going to do about it?’”

The company, which sells about 15,000 devices per month, according to Mr. Zientz, tells these callers they should go to the police, because they will need a subpoena to determine who owns the device they discovered. He estimated that the company received approximately 30 subpoenas per year.

Mr. Zientz said many people arrive at these products after searching online for “spouse tracker,” but that the company was trying to discourage this by marketing the device for “asset protection” and “fleet management.” I asked Mr. Zientz why the company didn’t have any messaging about the legality of its devices on its website or in its packaging.

“It’s in our terms somewhere,” he said.

«

Like facial recognition, this is clearly a genie that’s been out of the bottle for a long time; Apple just made it a lot more visible.

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It’s way too early to count out Instagram Reels • Big Technology

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

When Joy Ridenhour, a junior communications major at NYU, returned home to Virginia for winter break this year, she heard familiar music coming from her parents’ phones. “I was like, huh, it’s interesting they’re watching TikTok,” she said. “But then I realized they weren’t using TikTok, they had discovered Instagram Reels.”

TikTok is giving Facebook an “unprecedented” fight, as Mark Zuckerberg conceded last week, ​​but the battle will be fiercer than many imagine. Despite the narrative that Facebook is cooked, the company is already cutting off TikTok’s growth by feeding its copycat — Reels — to people like Ridenhour’s parents, who might’ve been late TikTok adopters but likely won’t be now.

Reels may still be an inferior product, but it has several advantages that don’t fit neatly into stories about Facebook’s demise. Here are some key factors to consider when assessing the fight between the two social giants, relayed with as much nuance as possible:

TikTok reached 1 billion monthly users last fall — a major feat — but Instagram reportedly hit 2 billion monthly users a few months later. To maintain its fast-paced growth, TikTok must win over people like Ridenhour’s parents, who will likely see no reason to download an app that’s essentially the same as Reels. “They were never interested in TikTok,” Ridenhour said. There are 1 billion people in this camp.

That said, Instagram Reels could be a gateway drug for younger users, who may find TikTok after experimenting with Reels. Ridenhour’s 14-year-old brother, for instance, began using Reels, then downloaded TikTok, and now prefers it over Instagram. 

«

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Half of MPs don’t know chance of flipping two heads in a row • Royal Statistical Society

»

As politicians over the course of the pandemic have dealt with a barrage of statistics, the Society decided to put their statistical skills to the test. A total of 101 MPs were asked the question: if you toss a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads? Just over half, 52%, of MPs gave the correct answer of 25%.

This is an improvement from when the RSS polled MPs with the same question ten years ago, when 40% of MPs gave the correct answer.

In this latest survey conducted by Savanta ComRes on behalf of the RSS in late 2021/early 2022, 32% of MPs gave the incorrect answer of 50%, compared to 45% of MPs in the 2011 survey.

Of those asked in the most recent survey, there was a modest estimated difference between MPs from the two main parties. In the survey, 50% of Conservative MPs gave the correct answer, while 53% of Labour MPs were right.

…The survey also found that politicians who have been in power for longer performed better than those elected more recently. Those who had started in office between 2001 and 2009 performed the best, with 68% giving the correct answer, compared to 38% of MPs elected in 2019.

«

Is it worth pointing out that many of the MPs who were newly elected in 2019 supported Brexit? The 101 sample is just about representative, one hopes, of the 650 members.
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Samsung held an event in the metaverse. It didn’t quite go to plan • CNBC

Sam Shead:

»

The metaverse is more commonly associated with players using headsets or smart glasses which allow them to live, work and play in a virtual world much like the one depicted in the “Ready Player One” novel and movie. Depending on your point of view, the metaverse is either a utopian dream or a dystopian nightmare.

The event specifically took place in Samsung 837X, a virtual building that Samsung has built on Decentraland that’s designed to be a replica of its flagship New York experience center. Samsung 837X is there all the time but there just happened to be an event inside the building’s “Connectivity Theatre” on Wednesday.

But CNBC, and many others, struggled to find the 837X building and when we did many of us were unable to gain access to it. …CNBC immediately noticed a large line of people at the main entrance to the 837X building. People were struggling to get in. Some users were getting their avatars to jump on other people’s heads as they clambered to the front of the queue but it didn’t help. The doors wouldn’t open and the chatbox was again full of pleas for help.

In an emailed statement to CNBC, Samsung said that “visitors and the Decentraland community have given us a highly positive response, seeing it as a fresh spin into an all-digital world.”

Then added: “Unfortunately, a technical issue in one of Decentraland’s realms prevented some people from accessing the event. As soon as we knew of the issue, we informed the community via Twitter and redirected our visitors to a new entry.”

«

The irony being that you could just watch the actual humans on a stream in a normal desktop browser.
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Rising popularity of VR headsets sparks 31% rise in insurance claims • The Guardian

Jem Bartholomew:

»

A man landing an upper-cut on the ceiling fan, a woman slamming into furniture, a guy smashing through a lighting fixture: gamers are learning that virtual reality headsets can often cause havoc at home.

The trend of crashing into furniture while in the metaverse provoked a 31% jump in home contents claims involving VR headsets last year, insurer Aviva said, marking a 68% overall increase since 2016.

“As new games and gadgets become popular, we often see this playing through in the claims made by our customers,” said Kelly Whittington, Aviva’s UK property claims director. “In the past we’ve seen similar trends involving consoles with handsets, fitness games and even the likes of rogue fidget spinners.”

Aviva said the average VR-related claim for accidental damage in 2021 was about £650, often from broken TVs smashed by overenthusiastic gamers.

Claims to Aviva involving virtual reality headsets can get wacky. One customer launched a controller at his TV when a zombie jumped out during the game. Multiple people reported cracking TV screens. One child smashed two designer figurines – perched on the mantelpiece – when his game demanded a “swipe” move.

All three claims were accepted and settled, an Aviva spokesperson told the Guardian.

«

I’ve got one word for you: rubber furniture. OK, two words.
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Neuralink monkeys subjected to extreme suffering, draft complaint says • Business Insider

Isobel Asher Hamilton:

»

Neuralink is developing a device that would be embedded in humans’ brains to monitor and potentially stimulate brain activity. The device consists of a microchip and wires that would be threaded through a patient’s skull into the brain.

The research at the center of the allegations is affiliated with the University of California at Davis, which operates a federal primate-research facility. The PCRM says it obtained more than 700 pages of documents, including veterinary records and necropsy reports, through a public-records request to the university.

The records relate to 23 monkeys owned by Neuralink, which were housed and experimented upon at UC Davis’ facility from 2017 to 2020, the draft complaint says.

In its draft complaint, the PCRM accuses UC Davis and Neuralink of nine violations of the Animal Welfare Act, including breaches of stipulations that researchers minimize pain and distress for animals, that daily observations of the animals take place, and that researchers have an attending veterinarian advise on the use of anesthesia.

Also in its draft complaint, the PCRM gave examples of incidents were it believed monkeys had suffered unduly. One monkey was documented as having missing fingers and toes “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” according to the draft complaint.

Jeremy Beckham, a research advocacy coordinator with the PCRM, told Insider that out of the 23 monkeys, seven survived and were transferred to a Neuralink facility in 2020, when he said Neuralink severed its relationship with UC Davis.

«

“Seven of 23 monkeys survived” sounds bad, though one would need to know a lot more about these experiments to know if that’s a good or bad outcome. Vivisection is never pretty, though it can lead to outcomes we all benefit from.
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Dispatch from the Ottawa Front: Sloly is telling you all he’s in trouble. Who’s listening? • The Line

Matt Gurney on the problem for Ottawa’s police chief, Peter Sloly:

»

Before I came to Ottawa, I spoke with a few people who were sympathetic to the protest: I was advised to stay away from this secondary encampment site, or at least to approach it with caution. I wasn’t feeling particularly heroic on Tuesday, but I figured it wouldn’t make sense to travel all the way from Toronto and then ignore one of the main sites. I drove over, parked my car nearby and walked the rest of the way to the parking lot.

It was clear well before I even arrived that this was something different. There was absolutely no visible police presence. Not a single uniformed officer or marked cruiser. (Note my careful phrasing there: I have no doubt this place is under watch. Just not overtly.) This site, for lack of a better term, has been fortified. There are many trucks parked in the parking lot, but some of them have been arranged to form outer walls. These walls have been augmented with wooden sawhorses and what looked to me to be stacked pallets of some kind. There was an entrance with a tent marked Reception (see photo, below). I wish I could give you a better description of the site, or tell you what was inside, but as soon as I began to approach it on foot, someone very quickly fell into step behind me. A series of others, four or five, met me before I made it to the reception tent. We chatted briefly, and I got the distinct impression that it would be way, way better for me to be somewhere else. I left.

«

There’s clearly a group there which is looking for trouble – serious trouble. And Sloly’s problem is that he needs much more force than his police can muster. In other words, Sloly is asking for the military. Which shows that the problems democracy faces are getting deeper. (See also this piece from The Atlantic, by an Ottawa resident.)
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Britishvolt gigafactory: Britain’s best-kept industrial secret is an unexpected solution to saving the planet • Sky News

Ed Conway:

»

Here, day and night, they bake some of the heaviest parts of the crude oil – quite literally the bottom of the barrel – drill out what is left with extraordinarily high-pressure water drills, run the resulting product through kilns and out come dark, grey-black pockmarked pebbles which look a little bit like miniature asteroids.

This is coke, a dry, light, very carbon-heavy mineral. You’ve probably heard of coke before. The most well-known variety is coking coal, made from the coal you dig from the ground and used to make steel from iron ore. But the coke they make here at this refinery, owned by American company Phillips 66, is very special indeed. It goes by a few names: needle coke, premium coke, graphite coke and they have been making it here for decades. But in the past few years, it has suddenly become very important indeed.

For after the coke is churned out of the kilns here, it is shipped overseas, mostly to China. There it is cooked at high temperatures in a further process which turns it into an incredibly pure form of graphite – sheet upon sheet of carbon atoms. This so-called synthetic graphite is then mixed with the “natural” graphite you get out of the ground and turned into a fine powder which is then coated on to fine copper sheets. Lo and behold, the coke which came out of the Phillips 66 refinery has become an anode.

That’s right: one of the critical materials going into batteries today is a processed form of crude oil, much of it coming from the North Sea. There are a few grams of Humberside coke in many if not most smartphones in the world, sitting alongside the lithium and cobalt, without which those batteries simply wouldn’t function.

Much is made these days about the lithium inside batteries or the cobalt that also goes into the cathodes. Far less is said about the other end of the battery. Yet without the kind of graphite produced from Humberside coke (and this refinery turns out to be one of the world’s most important producers of the stuff – and the only one in Europe) net zero will remain a pipe dream.

«

This is just s small part of a really long but very educational read. Very counterintuitive that you need more carbon for all the batteries.
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Though useful for tracking lost dogs, Apple’s AirTags have also been used for malicious purposes – so the company is going to make it easier to find any you don’t own that are travelling with you. CC-licensed photo by Tony Alter 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. Where are you exactly? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking • Apple

»

• New privacy warnings during AirTag setup: In an upcoming software update, every user setting up their AirTag for the first time will see a message that clearly states that AirTag is meant to track their own belongings, that using AirTag to track people without consent is a crime in many regions around the world, that AirTag is designed to be detected by victims, and that law enforcement can request identifying information about the owner of the AirTag.

• Addressing alert issues for AirPods: We’ve heard from users who have reported receiving an “Unknown Accessory Detected” alert. We’ve confirmed this alert will not display if an AirTag is detected near you — only AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, or a third-party Find My network accessory. In the same software update, we will be updating the alert users receive to indicate that AirPods have been traveling with them instead of an “Unknown Accessory.”

…• Precision Finding: This capability allows recipients of an unwanted tracking alert to locate an unknown AirTag with precision. iPhone 11, iPhone 12, and iPhone 13 users will be able to use Precision Finding to see the distance and direction to an unknown AirTag when it is in range.

• Display alert with sound: When AirTag automatically emits a sound to alert anyone nearby of its presence and is detected moving with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, we will also display an alert on your device that you can then take action on, like playing a sound or using Precision Finding, if available. This will help in cases where the AirTag may be in a location where it is hard to hear, or if the AirTag speaker has been tampered with.

«

Coming at some unspecified future date. Notable for the implication that Apple has helped law enforcement find who was behind some AirTags (“Based on our knowledge and on discussions with law enforcement, incidents of AirTag misuse are rare”). The warning about linking the identifying information might make criminals take an extra step, of setting up a finsta iCloud account.
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So nice they killed it twice: Google+’s business pivot is dead • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Google+ is dead—again! The consumer version of Google+ may have shut down in April 2019, but Google kept the service rolling as an enterprise-focused social network it rebranded “Google Currents.” You need to pay for GSuite to use it, and only members of your organization can see the posts, so it is for private company announcements and discussions.

View more stories In the latest Google Workspace blog post, Google says that Currents is “winding down” starting in 2023. This is no surprise, since Google+ was a completely failed consumer product. Why Google thought pushing the dead service onto business would make Currents successful is unclear. (Hey, Google Stadia, does this sound familiar?) Google never really did anything with Currents after rebranding it as a business product. After rotting for years as a dead consumer product, Currents just rotted for a few more years with new business branding. What is surprising is that Google is pitching Google Chat as a replacement.

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Amadeo’s job, as the guy doing the Google beat, is basically births and deaths. He’s like the classified bit of a newspaper.
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Every employee who leaves Apple becomes an ‘associate’ • The Washington Post

Reed Albergotti:

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Inside Apple, your job classification can mean a lot. The difference between a “level 4” engineer and a “level 5,” for instance, could mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. And those titles help determine how much Apple employees can make when they leave the company for another job. But there’s a hitch.

In widely used databases that companies refer to for verification of job information, Apple changes the job title for every employee, whether they’re a PhD in computer science or a product manager, to “associate,” the company confirms.

Apple’s approach is bizarre if not unique, experts in employment practices say, but until now has gone largely unnoticed by anybody but a handful of job applicants whose résumés conflict with official databases maintained by job verification services run by companies such as Equifax and LexisNexis.

The title “associate” is generally used to connote more junior roles. Entry-level retail workers, for instance, are often called associates. Law firms refer to recent law school hires in the same way, and in universities, associate professors are ranked below those with the title “professor.”

The practice recently came to light when Cher Scarlett, a former Apple software engineer who raised concerns about alleged discrimination and misconduct at the company, filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that when Apple changed her job title to “associate,” it delayed the hiring process at a prospective employer by nearly a week, during which time the company rescinded the offer. Scarlett said the job verification service hired to vet her résumé was unable to resolve the discrepancy with Apple.

Apple spokesman Josh Rosenstock confirmed that, for years, Apple has changed the job titles of its former employees to “associate.” Rosenstock declined to say why Apple does this or precisely when the practice began.

«

You can imagine that Apple doesn’t want its corporate structure to become visible as more and more people leave; recruiters and rivals spend huge amounts of time trying to figure out who fits where in an org chart.

But you’d think a grown-up company could at least confirm to a potential hirer what someone’s job was.
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People need to hear the good news about climate change • Slow Boring

Matthew Yglesias:

»

There is a lot of confusion about the difference between predictions and warnings.

But for example:
• I predict that another big wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections will hit next winter (if not sooner) as new variants emerge from animal reservoirs and the unvaccinated population as accumulated immunity wanes.
• I warn that there’s no guarantee the next variant (or the one after that) won’t combine super-transmissibility with being four or five times as deadly as Omicron (or worse), and unless we get cracking on next-generation vaccines, we could be staring down an epidemiological catastrophe within the next few years.

The prediction is something that I actually think is more likely than not to happen. With the warning, in this case, I am being hand-wavy about the actual probability (because I sincerely have no idea) but I’m trying to scare you a bit with a plausible small-probability catastrophe. The warning is a completely legitimate rhetorical device. In policy circles, we probably don’t spend enough time worrying about small odds of really bad things happening.

But if you are sitting around doomscrolling, paralyzed by the terror of SuperCovid, I want you to remember that this probably won’t happen and also that instead of worrying, you could take ten minutes to email your members of Congress and urge them to support the bipartisan Apollo Program for Biodefense. The odds of your email swaying a member of Congress are low, and the odds that one member of Congress getting fired up about this will cause it to pass are also low. But the odds of SuperCovid emerging are also low. We are simply trying to further reduce the probability, and every email you write counts.

By the same token, with climate change, two ideas are frequently mixed up:
• The IPCC predicts that unless we hold global warming to less than 1.5 degrees centigrade, the world will suffer some irreparable harms.
• The IPCC warns about cataclysmic results under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow unabated into the indefinite future.

These are both bad. But it’s not the case that we either hit the 1.5-degree target or else we fall into the nightmare scenario. There’s a whole range of possible outcomes.

«

OK, but I’m still waiting for the good news. Though as he points out, there are a lot of “doomers” out there (just as there are on Covid, to be honest.)
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An incomplete history of Forbes.com as a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism • Nieman Journalism Lab

Joshua Benton:

»

If you need a refresher: The Gordon Gecko 1980s and NASDAQ-boom 1990s were both very good to Forbes, but things started to drift downward in the 2000s, both in print and in the new world online. When the financial crisis hit, there were cuts and layoffs and, for the first time, a non-Forbes hired to run the place, Mike Perlis. He and chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin came up with a revival strategy that just screams early 2010s digital media: It’s all about scale, baby, scale.

Forbes’ staff of journalists could produce great work, sure. But there were only so many of them, and they cost a lot of money. Why not open the doors to Forbes.com to a swarm of outside “contributors” — barely vetted, unedited, expected to produce at quantity, and only occasionally paid? (Some contributors received a monthly flat fee — a few hundred bucks — if they wrote a minimum number of pieces per month, with money above that possible for exceeding traffic targets. Others received nothing but the glory.)

As of 2019, almost 3,000 people were “contributors” — or as they told people at parties, “I’m a columnist for Forbes.”

Let’s think about incentives for a moment. Only a very small number of these contributors can make a living at it — so it’s a side gig for most. The two things that determine your pay are how many articles you write and how many clicks you can harvest — a model that encourages a lot of low-grade clickbait, hot takes, and deceptive headlines. And many of these contributors are writing about the subject of their main job — that’s where their expertise is, after all — which raises all sorts of conflict-of-interest questions. And their work was published completely unedited — unless a piece went viral, in which case a web producer might “check it more carefully.”

All of that meant that Forbes suddenly became the easiest way for a marketer to get their message onto a brand-name site.

«

A very entertaining spin through a fingers-over-the-eyes descent into crapness of what was once a respected brand. Sort-of related: crypto exchange Binance is investing $200m (in real money I hope) in Forbes. Yes, that’s Binance, which once filed a lawsuit against Forbes (then dropped it).
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Putin kept Macron at a distance for snubbing COVID demands: sources • Reuters

Michel Rose:

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French President Emmanuel Macron refused a Kremlin request that he take a Russian COVID-19 test when he arrived to see President Vladimir Putin this week, and was therefore kept at a distance from the Russian leader, two sources in Macron’s entourage told Reuters.

Observers were struck by images of Macron and Putin sitting at opposite ends of 4-metre-long (13 ft) table to discuss the Ukraine crisis on Monday, with some diplomats and others suggesting Putin might be wanting to send a diplomatic message.

But the two sources, who have knowledge of the French president’s health protocol, told Reuters Macron had been given a choice: either he accepted a PCR test done by the Russian authorities and was allowed to get close to Putin, or he refused and had to abide by more stringent social distancing.

“We knew very well that meant no handshake and that long table. But we could not accept that they get their hands on the president’s DNA,” one of the sources told Reuters, referring to security concerns if the French leader was tested by Russian doctors.

«

What? What?? WHAT?? What exactly do they think Russia is going to do with Macron’s DNA? Clone him? Leave it at the scene of a crime and try to incriminate him? There’s caution, and there’s really wild caution. This sounds like they think Putin is some sort of Bond villain who can target people based on their DNA. (I liked No Time To Die, but it was fiction, people.)
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Energy ‘surge pricing’ to be offered to millions of households • Daily Telegraph

Matt Oliver:

»

Energy “surge pricing” is to be introduced for millions of British households for the first time after three of Britain’s largest suppliers threw their weight behind a revolutionary overhaul of the country’s power market.

Scottish Power, EDF and Octopus Energy said on Wednesday that they support radical new tariffs under which customers will be charged more for using energy during peak periods, and less in quieter ones.

The three businesses – which together have 11 million customers, equal to around a third of British households – gave their backing to a plan in which smart meters will automatically send half-hourly updates to suppliers about household energy use.

This change paves the way for the widespread use of surge pricing, raising the possibility that families could pay higher electricity rates for watching television or putting on the washing machine during peak times such as the morning and evenings, as prices fluctuate throughout the day.

The three companies already provide time-of-use deals to relatively small numbers of customers but experts say the smart meter overhaul will make it easy to offer them to millions more bill payers.

A Scottish Power spokesman said: “Time of use tariffs that are updated on a half-hourly basis will give consumers a real opportunity to save money on their energy bills, particularly for EV drivers charging from home.”

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About half of domestic meters are “smart” meters that can feed directly back to the electricity companies how much energy they’re using, and allocate charging on that basis.

Wonder how the reactionary media (IOW right-wing ones) will react to this. Some people won’t like the idea of staggering when they use heavy consumption systems (heaters, washing machine, dishwasher, tumble dryer); others will get used to using timers.
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Geomagnetic storm destroys 40 new SpaceX satellites in orbit • The New York Times

Robin George Andrews:

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Over the past three years, SpaceX has deployed thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit as part of its business to beam high-speed internet service from space. But the company’s latest deployment of 49 new satellites after a Feb. 3 launch did not go as planned.

As a consequence of a geomagnetic storm triggered by a recent outburst of the sun, up to 40 of 49 newly launched Starlink satellites have been knocked out of commission. They are in the process of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, where they will be incinerated.

The incident highlights the hazards faced by numerous companies planning to put tens of thousands of small satellites in orbit to provide internet service from space. And it’s possible that more solar outbursts will knock some of these newly deployed orbital transmitters out of the sky. The sun has an 11-year-long cycle in which it oscillates between hyperactive and quiescent states. Presently, it is ramping up to its peak, which has been forecast to arrive around 2025.

This recent solar paroxysm was relatively moderate by the sun’s standards. “I have every confidence that we’re going to see an extreme event in the next cycle, because that typically is what happens during a solar maximum,” said Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert at the University of Southampton in England. If a milquetoast outburst can knock out 40 Starlink satellites hanging out at low orbital altitudes, a more potent solar scream has the potential to inflict greater harm on the mega-constellations of SpaceX and other companies.

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Notice “and other companies” in that. SpaceX’s model, where unsuccessful satellites fall back, is actually a good thing: they’ll just burn up, won’t hit the ground, and won’t be space junk. Doesn’t help if there’s a big solar flare, but less (or not more) space junk is always welcome.
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She’s at the center of the Covid lab leak controversy. Now she’s telling her story • MIT Technology Review

Jane Qiu interviewed Shi Zhengli, the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

»

As Shi showed me around her lab, she pointed to the deep freezers where the team kept tens of thousands of bat samples in chemical soups. She told me how virus-containing samples are kept frozen in the field, either on dry ice or in liquid nitrogen, before being transferred to dedicated, double-locked deep freezers in the Wuhan lab. Only designated personnel can access those samples; they need approval from two senior staff members, each of whom is in charge of a separate key to the two locks. All access to the samples is logged.

The core of her research over the past 18 years, she explained, has been to look for bat viruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-1, and to understand how they could evolve new features that allow them to infect humans. She talked me through that process, which begins with testing each bat sample to see if it contains a coronavirus—using the same PCR-based technique as many covid-19 tests. All coronaviruses contain a gene that encodes an enzyme called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, or RdRp, which helps viruses replicate by making more copies of their genomes. If the characteristic RdRp shows up in a bat sample, it’s a telltale sign that a coronavirus is present. 

At first glance I was concerned by the sheer size of Shi’s collection of more than 20,000 bat samples. But she explained that on average only 10% contain coronaviruses, and only 10% of those are closely related to SARS-CoV-1: in all its years, the team has identified approximately 220 such viruses. The findings, say virologists such as Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney, have provided valuable insight into the evolutionary history of coronaviruses and the way they generate genetic variants.

Whenever the team found a bat relative of SARS-CoV-1, Shi says, she asked the same questions: How threatening is it to other animal species, including humans? What would it take for the virus to become one that, like SARS-CoV-1, can cause major epidemics?

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Qiu worked as a molecular biologist for a decade and speaks Chinese and understands China. She wrote an earlier article in 2020 speaking to Shi. Of course the article doesn’t prove anything either way. It won’t convince the sceptics who insist Covid must have come from a “lab leak”. (This peer-reviewed paper says almost surely zoonosis.) Worth the time, though, to read an expert interviewed by someone who’s pretty close to the same.
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An ancient language has defied decryption for 100 years. Can AI crack the code? • Rest of World

Alizeh Kohari:

»

Politics aside, it is remarkable how little we know about the original people of the Indus Valley, who at one point constituted nearly 10% of the world’s inhabitants. It is especially galling given how much more we know about their contemporaries, such as the people of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. Part of the reason for this is the continued elusiveness of the Indus script.

Putting machines to work on the Indus script is trickier than using them to reverse-engineer [the ancient Greek script] Linear B. We don’t have a great deal of information about the Indus script: most crucially, we don’t know what other language it may be related to. As a result, a model like [MIT researcher Jaiming] Luo’s wouldn’t work for the Indus script. That’s not to say technology can’t help, though. In some ways, computer modeling has already played a crucial role: by showing that the Indus script is a language at all. 

For most of the 20th century, the Indus inscriptions were widely accepted as representations of an undeciphered language. Then, in 2004, a group of Harvard researchers — cultural neurobiologist and comparative historian Steve Farmer, computational theorist Richard Sproat, and philologist Michael Witzel — published a paper essentially rubbishing nearly all existing research on the matter. The Indus seals, they claimed, were nothing more than a collection of religious or political symbols — similar to, say, highway signs — and all attempts to decipher them as a language were a waste of time. To underscore their point, Farmer offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could find an Indus inscription containing at least 50 symbols. 

Most Indologists and other Indus script researchers dismissed these arguments. One group of mathematicians, however, turned to computers to investigate the claims. Ronojoy Adhikari, a professor of statistical physics at the University of Cambridge, was one of them. 

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Not a short read, but absorbing. I feel we’re getting better at identifying the spaces where machine learning can do find solutions that we can’t. And: another good story from Rest Of World. (Thanks Peter R for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Many Facebook Groups supporting trucking protests in Canada are organised by a single, hacked account. Why hasn’t Facebook acted? CC-licensed photo by michael_swanmichael_swan 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. Aren’t they sweet? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The hacked account and suspicious donations behind the Canadian trucker protests • Grid News

Anya van Wagtendonk, Benjamin Powers and Steve Reilly:

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The entity behind some of the largest Facebook groups supporting the protests is an unknown person or persons who used the Facebook account of a Missouri woman. She says her account on the platform was hacked and stolen.

The account launched a handful of Facebook groups for the protest, all between Jan. 26 and 28, before the trucker convoy reached Ottawa. With a combined following of more than 340,000 members and more than 7,500 posts, the group names were variations on a theme: “Convoy to Ottawa 2022,” “Convoy for Freedom 2022,” “Freedom Convoy/Ottawa 2022 for Canada,” “Freedom Convoy 2022” and “2022 Official Freedom Convoy to Ottawa.”

Facebook groups are organized by administrators. Grid found that the only administrator account for these groups belonged to the Missouri woman. Reached briefly by phone on Monday, she said her account was hacked and she was not involved with the groups.

“Someone stole my identity on Facebook,” she said. “I don’t know how they [did] it.”

The woman, whom Grid is not naming because she is the victim of apparent identity theft, said her daughter set up a new account for her. A new Facebook account with the woman’s name appeared in October 2021 with the post: “New account. Last one got hacked.”

The groups were disabled Monday afternoon as Grid was reporting this story. Facebook did not immediately respond to questions about the hacked account. “We continue to see scammers latch onto any hot-button issue that draws people’s attention, including the ongoing protests,” Margarita Franklin, a spokeswoman for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said in a statement to media outlets on Monday.

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Great stuff, Facebook. All this stuff explodes and it takes journalists to look at a couple of older posts and figure out that the account was hacked. And does it take any action? Oh nooooo.
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Meta establishes four-foot “personal boundary” to deter VR groping • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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In the real world, the idea of personal space is ingrained from a young age and enforced mainly by unspoken interpersonal contract and subtle social pressure. In the world of virtual reality, on the other hand, Facebook parent Meta is now using software to enforce a 4-foot zone of “personal space” for each avatar in its metaverse-style social spaces.

As detailed in a recent blog post, Meta’s Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues spaces now include a default personal boundary that “prevents avatars from coming within a set distance of each other, creating more personal space for people and making it easier to avoid unwanted interactions.”

The system, in effect, sets up an invisible cylinder with a 2-foot radius that surrounds each avatar; if user movement would cause two cylinders to overlap, “the system will halt their forward movement as they reach the boundary” without any other overt feedback. Two users will be able to jointly reach outside their personal boundary for interactions like a high-five or fist-bump, Meta writes. Having the system on by default will “help to set behavioral norms—and that’s important for a relatively new medium like VR,” Meta writes.

The new announcement comes a few months after a New York Times story calling attention to the problem of “harassment and assaults” in the VR world. But the general issue is much older than that, with writers making public complaints of virtual groping since at least 2016, when affordable consumer-grade virtual reality was still a new and much-hyped concept.

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Meta/Facebook said that this “builds upon existing harassment measures”. O tempora, o mores.
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Analyzing the very bizarre sale of Melania Trump’s $170,000 NFT • Vice

Jordan Pearson:

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The $170,000 purchase of an NFT collection auctioned by Melania Trump was made by the entity that originally put the NFT up for sale, according to blockchain records. 

The former first lady got into NFTs last year, launching her own website and lining up a slate of auctions. On Jan. 11, Trump started auctioning the “Head of State Collection, 2022” on the Solana blockchain, a package deal that paired the “iconic white millinery masterpiece worn by Mrs. Trump” (a wide-brimmed hat she wore during a 2018 visit with French President Emanuel Macron) with a watercolor of her wearing it, as well as an NFT. The opening bid, according to a press release, was “the equivalent of $250,000” denominated in SOL tokens (1,800 SOL at the time) and a “portion” of the proceeds would be used to “provide foster care children with access to computer science and technology education.”

After the auction’s conclusion, the New York Times ran a piece describing the sale as attracting a few bids all around 1,800 SOL, ultimately ending with somebody purchasing the NFT for 1,800 SOL worth $170,000 at the time (now $200,000), a price far below the figure touted by the auction’s press release and which the paper described as “deflated results” due to a wider crash in the price of cryptocurrencies. 

Now, according to Solana blockchain records reviewed by Motherboard and shared with an independent researcher, we know who bought the NFT collection: Melania Trump herself, or at least, whoever set up the auction for her.

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I do love that the blockchain lets these circular scams be revealed. Though there are so many more of them than you’d ever expect.

And how very surprising that a Trump should be mixed up in a highly questionable fraud-adjacent transaction.
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You’re listening to KUOW … like it or not: mysterious glitch has Mazda drivers stuck on public radio • GeekWire

Kurt Schlosser:

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Drivers of certain vehicles in Seattle and other parts of Western Washington are shouting at their car radios this week. Not because of any particular song or news item that’s being broadcast, but because an apparent technical glitch has caused the radios to be stuck on public radio station KUOW.

The impacted drivers appear to all be owners of Mazda vehicles from between 2014 and 2017. In some cases the in-car infotainment systems have stopped working altogether, derailing the ability to listen to the radio at all or use Bluetooth phone connections, GPS, the rear camera and more.

According to Mazda drivers who spoke with GeekWire, and others in a Reddit thread discussing the problem, everyone who has had an issue was listening to KUOW 94.9 in recent weeks when the car systems went haywire.

KUOW sounded unsure of a possible cause; at least one dealership service department blamed 5G; and Mazda told GeekWire in an official statement that it identified the problem and a fix is planned.

“I see the Mazda symbol, like it’s coming on,” said Stephanie Marquis of Olympia, Wash., who was sitting in her car trying to get her dashboard screen to work. “It just keeps rebooting. Now it’s black. It’s like it’s trying to turn on but it won’t turn on.”

…Marquis said she took her car to the dealer in Olympia and was told the problem may be related to KUOW “switching to 5G.” She called Mazda’s corporate offices and was on hold for over an hour before a rep told her he would look into it and call her back. She never heard back.

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And what was it? Mazda: “Between Jan 24 and 31, a radio station in the Seattle area sent image files with no extension, which caused an issue on some 2014-2017 Mazda vehicles with older software,” the Mazda statement said. “Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) has distributed service alerts advising dealers of the issue.”
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IRS was wrong to give in to hysteria and drop use of facial verification to fight fraud and protect consumers • ITIF

Daniel Castro:

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The primary reason detractors give for opposing the IRS’s use of facial recognition is their “serious concerns about privacy,” although the details of those privacy concerns are a bit murky. After all, the IRS maintains extensive records about taxpayers’ most sensitive financial information, so the idea of the agency also having access to a database of selfies does not seem particularly risky. Some objected to the IRS using a private company, ID.me, to operate its facial verification system, arguing that the company might misuse this information. But again, the IRS routinely uses contractors, including to process sensitive taxpayer information, and requires them to adhere to strict privacy controls and subjects them to penalties for violations, so there is no particular reason why facial recognition presents unique privacy risks.

Critics also claim that the IRS should not use facial recognition because “research shows people of color are more likely to be misidentified.” Here too, the evidence does not support the claims, as independent testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown that the best performing facial recognition algorithms have high accuracy rates across most demographics. In addition, the specific company’s algorithm used by ID.me has performed very well in these tests, with little variation based on demographics.

Moreover, the implication of these incorrect claims about facial recognition’s “bias” seems to be that the IRS would underserve communities of color by locking them out of important government services, which shows just how little the critics understand the technology.

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You can sort of guess what sort of companies will be in the ITIF’s supporters list. [ITIF = Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.] It’s somewhat tin-eared, to say the least, to think that having a facial recognition system on all the nation’s taxpayers wouldn’t attract some negative responses.
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Myanmar junta using draft law to conduct searches for VPNs • Radio Free Asia

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane, English version by Joshua Lipes:

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Myanmar junta officials are stopping people to see if their mobile phones use privacy software to access websites like Facebook that regime opponents have used to coordinate protests, including an upcoming “Silent Strike” marking the one-year anniversary of the coup that brought the military in power, sources said.

The junta earlier this month ordered all ministries and internet service providers to comment by Jan. 28 on a proposed cybersecurity law that carries a sentence of up to three years in prison and 500,000 kyats (U.S. $280) for any resident of Yangon found in possession of unauthorized Virtual Private Network (VPN) software.

But residents said officials have already begun stopping passersby and demanding access to their phones, even though the legislation has not been approved.

VPNs, which anonymize a user’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, can be used to bypass location-specific firewalls that would otherwise block access to certain websites. Since seizing power in a coup on Feb. 1, 2021, the junta has restricted the country’s internet.

Residents of Yangon told RFA’s Myanmar Service that authorities recently began targeting VPNs because people are using them to organize the strike scheduled for next week.

“They stopped our motorcycle and asked for our phones to check if we were using VPN software,” a woman who spoke on condition of anonymity said of an encounter with police in Yangon’s Thanlyin township on Wednesday morning.

“Luckily, there was no VPN on my phone. I deleted it some time ago because I didn’t use it much. When they didn’t find it on my phone, we were allowed to leave, but they took away the phones of those who had the software. There were so many people stuck there, but I don’t know what happened [to them].”

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How Telegram became the anti-Facebook • WIRED

Darren Loucaides:

»

In the world of social media, Telegram is a distinct oddity. Often rounding out lists of the world’s 10 largest platforms, it has just around 30 core employees, had no source of ongoing revenue until very recently, and—in an era when tech firms face increasing pressure to quash hate speech and misinformation—exercises virtually no content moderation, except to take down illegal pornography and calls for violence. At Telegram it is an article of faith, and a marketing pitch, that the company’s platform should be available to all, regardless of politics or ideology. “For us, Telegram is an idea,” Pavel Durov, Telegram’s Russian founder, has said. “It is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free.”

Campo shared that faith—but as Telegram’s head of growth, business, and partnerships, he also bore the brunt of its complications. In the mid-2010s, when the media began referring to Telegram as the “app of choice” for jihadists, it was [Elies] Campo who fretted most about ISIS’ use of the platform. He says he often feels like an anxious parent when messaging Durov. “I’m the nag,” Campo says. What troubled him now was how the influx of insurrection-adjacent Americans would play in the media and with the business partners he had to deal with.

So he wrote a long message to Durov. “Good evening Pavel,” he recalls it opening. “Have you been looking at what’s happening in the US? Have you seen Trump is being blocked on other social networks?” He warned that the US far right’s embrace of Telegram could “potentially eclipse” a far more flattering story that was, by sheer coincidence, driving its own stampede of new users onto the platform.

…While Telegram has plenty of channels and groups dedicated to apolitical subjects like Bollywood movies and Miami’s tech scene, it has proven particularly well suited to activism. Its blend of private messaging and public channels makes it a perfect organizing tool: ideal for evangelizing in public and then plotting in secret. “I call it the one-two punch,” says Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University in North Carolina who studies Telegram. “You can do both propaganda and planning on the same app.”

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Today’s long read.
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Let’s face it, LinkedIn might be the best social network right now • WSJ

Joanna Stern:

»

I’m ready to speak my truth: I like LinkedIn. Actually, I love LinkedIn.

At least once a day I open the app, not to look for a job or to wish a colleague from a decade ago a happy work anniversary. But because—unlike in my Facebook, Twitter or Instagram feeds—the conversation is meaningful, the people are civil and there’s no politics. At least not anymore.

LinkedIn recently started testing a no-politics setting, which I enabled. It filters out content about political parties and candidates, election outcomes, ballot initiatives and more. The Microsoft-owned company has made the setting available to some U.S. users over the past few months.

“If they find it effective, if it’s helping them better accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish on LinkedIn, then we’ll roll it out to more,” LinkedIn chief executive Ryan Roslansky told me in an exclusive video interview.

The feature is one of many that the professional social network has been adding while it enjoys the fruits of the quit-pocalypse—I mean the massive upheaval in the labor market that has been best described as The Great Reshuffle. Just look at Microsoft’s last quarter: LinkedIn revenue was up 37% year over year, and new hires made through the service more than doubled.

But here’s the shocker: It isn’t just seasoned professionals flocking to this decidedly uncool corner of the internet.

“We’re seeing a lot of Gen Z join the network right now,” Mr. Roslansky told me, adding that job moves are up nearly 70% for users ages 16 to 22, vs. just 7% for users over 55. “We’re seeing the platform evolve much more to cater to them.”

«

When I wrote Social Warming, I realised that LinkedIn – despite its network – simply wasn’t a contributor to the general problem of anger. Partly that’s because of the way it prevents people connecting (you need some sort of close-ish connection to get in touch) and partly because its focus on “business” means that anger is out of place.

However, you can’t apply that to every social network.
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RealityOS offers the clearest signal that Apple is serious about an AR headset • Macworld

Michael Simon:

»

iOS developer Rens Verhoeven has spotted a reference to realityOS in the App Store upload logs that likely signals Apple’s augmented reality/virtual reality headset is well along in development. Rumors have swirled for years that Apple is working on an Oculus-style mixed-reality device that will strap multiple displays and cameras to our face, but Apple has characteristically been mum about its existence.

RealityOS could be a placeholder name, but it matches up with Apple’s naming convention — tvOS, watchOS, macOS, etc. We still don’t know what the device will be called, but Apple Reality has been floated as a possible name. It could also apply to an expansion of Apple’s current ARKit framework for the iPad and iPhone, but we’d be shocked if Apple’s AR headset wasn’t running realityOS.

Rumors say that the initial release could be a high-priced niche placeholder as Apple works to bring the tech to the masses over the next several years.

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Everyone’s writing AR/VR OSs. Probably the next big landrush. Bear in mind that every time there’s been an OS goldrush, only two have come through from the many that have started: Windows and MacOS on desktop, Windows and Linux on servers, iOS and Android on mobile. So if Apple succeeds in this (and if it’s a significant space), whose OS will be the other one for AR devices?
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Wisconsin Foxconn deal: race to bottom in corporate subsidies is over • CNBC

Scott Cohn:

»

“At the end of the day, economic development and site selection is not about a race to the bottom — about who can do it cheaper than another person — it really is a decision about the best value,” said Christopher Lloyd, a site selection consultant at McGuireWoods in Richmond, Virginia, and chairman of the Site Selectors Guild, an industry trade group.

He said Wisconsin is among many states that have moved away from headline-grabbing incentives in their pitches to companies, selling things like infrastructure and workforce.

“They want to show that we can deliver on many of these fronts to companies. So, give us a shot,” he said.

Back in Wisconsin, they are still dealing with the downsides of the big gamble on Foxconn.

Because the company never met its hiring targets, the state did not have to pay any of the $2.85bn in incentives it had promised in the original deal. But close to $1bn has already been spent on infrastructure and land acquisition, with large portions of those costs falling to the Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County, both of which saw their debt downgraded.

Like the state, the village is also attempting to renegotiate its agreement with Foxconn.

“Everything’s on the table,” Village president Dave DeGroot told WTMJ-TV in April.

Meanwhile, Foxconn has been doing light manufacturing on the site, which includes four buildings and a giant glass sphere that the company originally planned as a data centre, but apparently only contains an auditorium.

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An empty sphere for people to talk to each other, rather than a world-class manufacturing site. Somehow descriptive of the Trump years. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The EPC system which rates a house’s energy needs doesn’t accurately reflect the energy efficiency of air source heat pumps. That’s bad. CC-licensed photo by Krzysztof Lis 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

$66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses • FT via Ars Technica

Richard Waters, Arash Massoudi, and James Fontanella-Khan:

»

The deal, the largest ever in the chip sector, would have given California-based Nvidia control of a company that makes technology at the heart of most of the world’s mobile devices. A handful of Big Tech companies that rely on Arm’s chip designs, including Qualcomm and Microsoft, had objected to the purchase.

SoftBank will receive a break-up fee of up to $1.25bn and is seeking to unload Arm through an initial public offering before the end of the year, said one of the people.

The failure is set to result in a management upheaval at Arm, with chief executive Simon Segars being replaced by Rene Haas, head of the company’s intellectual property unit, the person added.

The collapse of the deal robs SoftBank of a big windfall it would have earned thanks to a boom in Nvidia’s stock price.

The cash-and-stock transaction was worth up to $38.5bn when it was announced in September 2020. But the value soared as Nvidia’s shares took off, reaching a peak of $87bn last November.

In the UK, where politicians have viewed Arm as a strategic national asset, attention is set to shift to whether the company will be listed on the country’s domestic market. A British competition review into the deal was extended late last year to include national security considerations.

However, people close to SoftBank said the group prefers the idea of listing Arm in New York and will seek to resist nationalistic pressure. US markets accord higher valuations to tech stocks, even after a recent sharp reversal, and UK tech executives recently pressed for changes to listing arrangements to make London more attractive.

Nvidia decided to abandon its pursuit of Arm at a board meeting earlier on Monday, said a person familiar with the discussion. Nvidia’s pursuit of Arm marked an opportunistic attempt to score an end-run around chip rivals such as Intel and AMD, and it was prompted by an approach from SoftBank after the Japanese company decided to shed the business.

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Peloton giving 2,800 fired employees a free 1-year subscription • Business Insider

Ben Gilbert:

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Peloton is firing over 2,800 employees — 20% of its corporate workforce — because of an ongoing downturn in the company’s business.

As part of the severance plan for the over 2,800 laid off employees, Pelton is offering a curious benefit: a one-year membership to Peloton.

“The Peloton monthly membership will be complimentary for impacted team members for an additional 12 months,” Peloton said in its press release about the layoffs. That’s in addition to a “meaningful cash severance allotment” that’s determined “based on job level and tenure” with the fitness company, alongside several other benefits.

Peloton also announced CEO John Foley is stepping down as the chief executive, with former Spotify and Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy stepping into the role. The company is also scrapping plans to build a new factory in North America.

In the last few months, Peloton has seen a major downturn after home-fitness products spiked in popularity during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

With gyms reopening as vaccine rates increased, Peloton’s business took a huge hit: The company’s market value has dropped from $50bn last year to $9.8bn as of early February 2022.

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Pretty amazing if it has 14,000 employees (so 2,800 is one-fifth). All making treadmills/stationary bikes? But that’s quite the parting gift. Very much in the spirit of its 2019 Christmas ad. (Also: the instructors didn’t get fired. They get paid up to $500k per year.)
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Meta’s free fall reveals a big issue with Congress’ antitrust bill • Protocol

Issie Lapowsky:

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As Meta’s stock price plummeted in one of the biggest collapses in US history Thursday, tech policy wonks noticed something peculiar: The company’s market value is creeping mighty close to falling below the threshold set by Congress in its antitrust bill specifically targeting Meta.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which is headed to the Senate floor, prohibits large tech platforms from boosting their own products and services on the platforms they own. Just how large is large? The bill says covered platforms have to have a market cap of $550bn or higher “over any 180-day period during the 2-year period” prior to any alleged violations.

A day ago, it was more or less unthinkable that Meta would ever cross into uncovered territory. But that was before the company reported a bruising quarter, during which Facebook’s user base declined for the first time in its history. Meta’s stock price dropped more than 26%, shaving hundreds of billions of dollars off of its market cap in a single day.

The schadenfreude from Big Tech critics was swift — but it was also quickly followed by some keen-eyed observation that Facebook might soon bomb its way out of antitrust enforcement.

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I guess they could keep rewriting the value in the bill, sort of like people running from side to side trying to catch a falling Frisbee.
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Meta is absolutely not threatening to leave Europe • Meta

Markus Reinisch is vice president, public policy for Europe:

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There has been reporting in the press that we are “threatening” to leave Europe because of the uncertainty over EU-US data transfers mechanisms. This is not true. Like all publicly-traded companies, we are legally required  to disclose material risks to our investors. Last week, as we have done in our previous four financial quarters, we disclosed that continuing uncertainty over EU-US data transfers mechanisms poses a threat to our ability to serve European consumers and operate our business in Europe.

We have absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe; of course we don’t. But the simple reality is that Meta, like many other businesses, organisations and services, relies on data transfers between the EU and the US in order to operate our global services. We’re not alone. At least 70 other companies across a wide range of  industries, including ten European businesses, have also raised the risks around data transfers in their earnings filings. 

International data transfers underpin the global economy and support many of the services that are fundamental to our daily lives. For many years, the legal framework supporting the transfer of data across the Atlantic has faced severe disruption. The Safe Harbour Agreement was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2015. Last summer Privacy Shield, which was used by more than 5,000 companies on both sides of the Atlantic, was also invalidated by the European Court of Justice. These decisions have been made based on a conflict between EU and US laws over the protection of data. We want to see the fundamental rights of EU users protected, and we want the internet to continue to operate as it was intended: without friction, in compliance with applicable laws — but not confined by national borders.

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I suspected that this was a bit overblown. Though notice that there isn’t an answer to what they’re going to do about the data transfer problem.
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Heuristics that almost always work • Substack

Scott Alexander (of Slate Star Codex fame) offers a number of scenarios, including “the security guard”, “the doctor”, “the skeptic”, “the interviewer” and more. There’s also this:

»

The Futurist

He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech companies. This will change everything! say the press releases. “No it won’t”, he comments. This is the greatest invention ever to exist! say the press releases. “It’s a scam,” he says.

Whatever upheaval is predicted, he denies it. Soon we’ll all have flying cars! “Our cars will remain earthbound as always”. Soon we’ll all use cryptocurrency! “We’ll continue using dollars and Visa cards, just like before.” We’re collapsing into dictatorship! “No, we’ll be the same boring oligarchic pseudo-democracy we are now” A new utopian age of citizen governance will flourish. “You’re drunk, go back to bed.”

When all the Brier scores are calculated and all the Bayes points added up, he is the best futurist of all. Everyone else occasionally gets bamboozled by some scam or hype train, but he never does. His heuristic is truly superb.

But – say it with me – he could be profitably replaced with a rock. “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING”, says the rock, in letters chiseled into its surface. Why hire a squishy drooling human being, when this beautiful glittering rock is right there?

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I feel a little seen.
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DOJ seizes $3.6bn in bitcoins after busting entrepreneur couple in Bitfinex laundering scheme • TechCrunch

Anita Ramaswamy:

»

The US Justice Department (DOJ) has seized over 94,000 bitcoins that were allegedly stolen in the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex and arrested a married couple suspected to have laundered the money, the department announced today. The couple — Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather Morgan, 31 — faces charges of conspiring to launder money and to defraud the U.S. government. Facing up to 25 years in prison if convicted, they are set to make their initial appearance in federal court in Manhattan later today.

The asset seizure, worth $3.6bn at today’s bitcoin prices, is the largest in the Justice Department’s history, officials said. They did not recover the entire sum of funds lost in the 2016 hack, though — the 119,754 bitcoins allegedly stolen in total are now worth $4.5bn.

While Morgan and Lichtenstein were not formally accused of perpetrating the hack, prosecutors said they discovered the suspects because the bitcoins were sent to a digital wallet Lichtenstein controlled. The couple obtained the coins after a hacker breached Bitfinex’s systems, initiating more than 2,000 illegal transactions, the DOJ said.

Lichtenstein and Morgan are both deeply involved in the tech startup ecosystem, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

«

Guess that involvement might slow down a bit now. There’s a detailed article about how the DOJ would have got the “money” back – by waiting for them to upload their private keys to a cloud service, and then issuing a warrant against it. The duo would never have known.
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Every M1 Mac is due for a 2022 refresh with faster M2 chip, new designs • Macworld

Michael Simon:

»

According to Mark Gurman’s latest Power On newsletter, Apple is preparing to launch no less than four M2 Macs throughout 2022. The first models will likely arrive later in the year, with the redesigned MacBook Air leading the way, followed by a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac, and entry-level Mac mini. A DigiTimes report on Tuesday said the 13-inch MacBook Pro may launch at Apple’s spring event to usher in the new chip.

Like 2021, Apple will be releasing Macs with several different chips in 2022. The M2 will be a successor to the M1, likely with the same 8-core design (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), and the M1 Pro and M1 Max will make their way into more high-end Macs. The first of those, the 27-inch iMac, could arrive at Apple’s spring event, with a Mac mini coming later in the year.

Based on the Macs rumored to launch in 2022, Apple silicon is on an 18-month cadence. The first M1 Macs were released in November 2020, so a June release would be roughly a year in a half. The same would go for a fall launch for a new 24-inch iMac.

There’s also a new Mac Pro due in 2022 as the culmination of the Apple silicon transition.

«

The Mac Pro is the more interesting one of these: is it going to support external GPUs?
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Food coloring firm Oterra to lease offices once used by Foxconn • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Ricardo Torres:

»

The former Foxconn Opus building in Mount Pleasant will house Oterra, a natural food colouring company.  

The Mount Pleasant Village Board and Village Community Development Authority Tuesday each unanimously approved a development agreement with Oterra. The development is expected to bring more than 100 jobs to the village. 

The business park was developed by Brookfield-based MLG/Highway 20 Limited Partnership and the property is now owned by by Milwaukee-based James Campbell Company. The building was the first space to be occupied by the Foxconn Technology Group when it began work on its massive Racine County development site south of the office building.

The Opus building, located along Interstate 94 at 13315 Globe Drive, hosted former President Donald Trump in 2018 when he made remarks and attended a groundbreaking ceremony. Foxconn no longer used the Opus building following the completion of four buildings on its property. 

The building was built in 2016 and Foxconn has been the only tenant in the building. In December, Foxconn received $28.8m in tax credits for investing $266m and creating 579 full-time jobs in the state. It’s unclear what the company plans to produce in Wisconsin. 

Details about the Oterra development were discussed in closed session with the Village Board, community development authority, along with the Racine County Board Executive Committee and Committee of the Whole. There was no discussion in open session regarding the agreement on Tuesday.  

According to the agreement, the building is in tax incremental district 4 and the village will pay roughly $2.04m, through the collection of property taxes, to pay the remaining municipal revenue obligation on the property. 

Once that debt is paid, the village plans to reimburse Oterra for 76% of its taxable capital improvements through the life of TID 4, which is expected to close in August 2035. 

«

So the Foxconn-in-Wisconsin saga grinds to its end: a complete waste of time and money.
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Energy performance certificates hold back heat decarbonisation • FORESIGHT

Jan Rosenow:

»

In 2014, we bought an old Victorian house in Oxford, UK, well aware it needed major renovation work. Our energy performance certificate (EPC), which shows the energy performance of a building, was a poor grade “E” on a scale of A to G, with A being the highest performing category. We have since carried out a major refurbishment programme, installing underfloor insulation, triple and double glazing, underfloor heating, internal solid wall insulation and an air source heat pump. We demolished the old kitchen at the back of the house and replaced it with a modern extension built according to the latest building codes. After all of these improvements, we expected a significant improvement in our EPC rating, yet we are still received an “E” grade.

It is possible the assessor made a mistake, up to 62% of EPCs contain errors of some kind, but the low grade is most likely due to the heat pump we installed. Official UK government policy is to roll out heat pumps across the housing stock. The Climate Change Committee, a government advisory body, believes 2.5 million heat pumps need to be installed by 2030 to meet climate targets. In contradiction to this goal, the EPC system penalises people for investing in heat pumps by regularly issuing poor ratings for their homes. Installers have also complained that EPCs do not recommend heat pumps as an energy performance improvement measure.

There are at least three reasons why the installation of heat pumps does not result in improved EPC ratings and why it is usually not recommended by the EPC.

«

Because: EPCs assume you’ll heat with gas (it’s cheaper, per kWh, than electricity) and they don’t know that heat pumps have efficiencies typically in the 300-400% range (1kWh of electricity generates 4kWh of heat).
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Traders are selling themselves their own NFTs to drive up prices • Engadget

Amrita Khalid:

»

The NFT marketplace is rife with people buying their own NFTs in order to drive up prices, according to a report released this week by blockchain data firm Chainalysis. Known as “wash trading”, the act of buying and selling a security in order to fool the market was once commonplace on Wall Street, and has been illegal for nearly a century. But the vast, unregulated NFT marketplace has shown to be a golden opportunity for scammers.

The report tracked instances of the same traders selling the same NFTs back and forth at least 25 times, a likely incident of wash trading. It identified a group of 110 alleged NFT wash traders who have made roughly $8.9m in profit from this practice. Researchers also discovered significant evidence of money laundering in the NFT marketplace in the last half of 2021. The value sent to NFT marketplaces by addresses associated with scams spiked significantly in the third quarter of 2021, worth more than $1m worth of cryptocurrency, according to the report. Roughly $1.4m of sales in the fourth quarter of 2021 came from such illicit addresses.

“NFT wash trading exists in a murky legal area. While wash trading is prohibited in conventional securities and futures, wash trading involving NFTs has yet to be the subject of an enforcement action,” wrote the authors of the report.

«

Legally murky? Seems like pretty straightforward fraud by misrepresentation. And so easy to do. Makes ransomware look like a mug’s game.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Fuel poverty is made worse by prepayment meters, which charge much higher prices. It’s an experience you don’t forget. CC-licensed photo by Lydia 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. Be gentle with them. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

I lived through fuel poverty as a child. This is how it really feels • The Guardian

Kerry Hudson:

»

Let’s start with a multiple choice question. It is a cold, wet February evening. You come home with your two kids after school. You stand in the hallway and contemplate your options. Do you put on the heating? It is freezing and your kids are reluctant to take off their coats. Perhaps you should make a cheap but nutritious dinner for them. They have been saying all the way home that they are “starving”. You could give them their night-time bath, because it is two days since they had their last one, or save the cost of the heating for some new winter boots – theirs are too tight and letting in water.

You can pick only one option.

When energy bills increase for millions in April, these decisions will become a stark reality for many. According to the thinktank the Resolution Foundation, the number of households living in “fuel stress” will rise by 2.5 million to 5 million. This is a staggering number to comprehend, so please think of your neighbours, your auntie, your best friend, your favourite teacher from school who might be in that position.

As for the measures announced by the government on Thursday to ameliorate the effects of the rise in the energy price cap, the words “too little, too late” and “poorly thought‑out” spring to mind.

Perhaps I should be writing this from a clear-eyed, journalistic point of view, but in fact I am writing this from a place of fury. You see, I grew up in extreme poverty. I know only too well the absolute degradation and hardship of poverty – particularly fuel poverty – when home isn’t a home, but a place that you avoid as long as possible, lingering in shopping centres or libraries, where you can stay warm for a little longer.

…As a child, I came to know what it was to be constantly cold, even as you slept. Even a duvet could feel wet, heavy and hopeless.

«

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Dutch watchdog fines Apple $5.7m again in App Store dispute • Reuters

Toby Sterling:

»

The Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has been levying weekly fines of €5m on Apple since the company missed a Jan. 15 deadline to make changes ordered by the watchdog.

Apple, which could not immediately be reached for comment, has twice published information on its own blog about changes it is making to comply with the Dutch order. However, the ACM said on Monday it was not receiving enough information from the U.S. company to assess whether Apple was actually complying.

“ACM is disappointed in Apple’s behaviour and actions,” it said in a statement. It noted that Dutch courts have upheld its decision, which found that Apple’s behaviour violated competition law.

Apple is under pressure in many countries over the commissions it charges on in-app purchases, with the US Senate approving a bill last Thursday that would bar Apple and Alphabet Inc’s Google from requiring users to use their payment systems. read more

Apple on Jan. 15 first asserted it had complied with the Dutch regulator’s December order , which covers only dating apps like Match Group’s Tinder. But the regulator responded that Apple hadn’t actually yet made the changes – it had just indicated it would

«

If the ACM keeps on not liking Apple’s suggestion, the cost might get quite a bit bigger than any putative revenue that it’s getting from Dutch dating apps.
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The Big Short of music streaming • Dadadrummer

Damon Krukowski:

»

Spotify used the financial model of arbitrage to obtain a cheap if not free product – digital music – and resell it in a new context to realize profit. In other words, Spotify’s profit requires that digital music have no value. Spotify continually talks down the value of music on their platform – they offer it for free; they tell musicians we are lucky to be paid anything for it; they insist that without their service, there is only piracy and zero income. Most tellingly, they invest nothing back into music. Unlike a record label, publisher, or most anyone else in the music industry, Spotify devotes none of its profits to the development of new recordings.

In truth, without Spotify there are many ways to realize value for recorded music today. There is physical media; there are paid downloads; there are even other corporate streaming services that pay twice or three times the royalties that Spotify offers. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell know this well; they clearly have no doubt in the value of their music outside Spotify.

But Spotify can’t acknowledge that, in the spirit of normal negotiation, because it is in their vital interest to keep digital music from developing any value outside of the context they provide and sell – to subscribers, to advertisers, and above all to investors.

Is it any wonder that a company built on the financial device of arbitrage would appeal hugely to the stock market? Spotify’s accountants insist, nearly each and every quarter, that they have once again lost money on the music they stream. And yet this consistently losing business is now capitalized on the NYSE to the tune of $37bn.

«

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Scientists heal paralyzed mice with spinal cord implants • Futurism

Abby Lee Hood:

»

“If this works in humans, and we believe that it will, it can offer all paralyzed people hope that they may walk again,” the research team at the Sagol Center for Regenerative Biotechnology told the Times of Israel, adding that the team has started discussing clinical trials with the US Food and Drug Administration.

The experiment took place at Tel Aviv University where the team, led by Professor Tal Dvir, engineered spinal cord tissue from human cells and implanted them into mice with long-term paralysis. Of the 15 mice they operated on, 12 were able to walk normally.

Dvir told the Times of Israel that the mice received spinal implants from cells of multiple people, but for human patients the plan would be to grow a unique spine for each using their own body’s cells. If approved, the study’s authors wrote in their conclusions that a personalized hydrogel would be created to implant into patients.

Of course, it’s always unclear whether an animal-tested therapy will work in humans.

«

There’s a Twitter account, @justsaysinmice, which points out that there are so many pieces of research which only work in mice that it’s exhausting.
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The unnerving rise of video games that spy on you • WIRED

Ben Egliston:

»

While there are no numbers on how many video game companies are surveilling their players in-game (although, as a recent article suggests, large publishers and developers like Epic, EA, and Activision explicitly state they capture user data in their license agreements), a new industry of firms selling middleware “data analytics” tools, often used by game developers, has sprung up.

These data analytics tools promise to make users more amenable to continued consumption through the use of data analysis at scale. Such analytics, once available only to the largest video game studios—which could hire data scientists to capture, clean, and analyze the data, and software engineers to develop in-house analytics tools—are now commonplace across the entire industry, pitched as “accessible” tools that provide a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace by companies like Unity, GameAnalytics, or Amazon Web Services. (Although, as a recent study shows, the extent to which these tools are truly “accessible” is questionable, requiring technical expertise and time to implement.)

As demand for data-driven insight has grown, so have the range of different services—dozens of tools in the past several years alone, providing game developers with different forms of insight. One tool—essentially Uber for playtesting—allows companies to outsource quality assurance testing, and provides data-driven insight into the results. Another supposedly uses AI to understand player value and maximize retention (and spending, with a focus on high-spenders).

«

The toxic (but commercially utterly compelling) combination of surveillance capitalism and opportunistic machine learning. Succeeded for social networks, so why not video games?
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IRS abandons ID.me facial recognition plans • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

The IRS said Monday it would transition away from using a face-scanning service, offered by the company ID.me, in the coming weeks and would develop an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition.

The agency originally had said that starting this summer all taxpayers would need to submit a “video selfie” to the company to be able to access their tax records and other services on the IRS website. But lawmakers and advocates slammed the idea of mandating the technology’s use nationwide, saying that it would unfairly burden Americans without smartphones or computer cameras and would risk leaking sensitive data to hackers. Facial recognition algorithms have also been shown to work less accurately on darker skin.

“The IRS takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously, and we understand the concerns that have been raised,” IRS commissioner Charles Rettig said in a statement announcing the IRS decision. “Everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured, and we are quickly pursuing short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of nearly two dozen members of Congress who had urged the IRS to halt the plan, said in a statement Monday, “I appreciate that the administration recognizes that privacy and security are not mutually exclusive and no one should be forced to submit to facial recognition to access critical government services.”

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Read the room, IRS, read the room.
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North Korea: missile programme funded through stolen crypto, UN report says • BBC News

»

North Korean cyber-attacks have stolen millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency to fund the country’s missile programmes, a UN report briefed to media says.

Between 2020 and mid-2021 cyber-attackers stole more than $50m (£37m) of digital assets, investigators found. Such attacks are an “important revenue source” for Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme, they said.

The findings were reportedly handed to the UN’s sanctions committee on Friday. The cyber-attacks targeted at least three cryptocurrency exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia.

The report also referenced a study published last month by the security firm Chainalysis that suggested North Korean cyberattacks could have netted as much as $400m worth of digital assets last year.

And in 2019, the UN reported that North Korea had accumulated an estimated $2bn for its weapons of mass destruction programmes by using sophisticated cyber-attacks.

«

Neatly tying together Kim Jong-un’s two big programmes when he took over: the nuclear weapons programme and hacking.
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When the boss lives in a cramped flat over an old shop, what hope has Britain got? • The Sunday Times

Robert Colvile:

»

Should we really be running a major economy from an awkwardly retrofitted set of Georgian townhouses? Does it make sense for No 10 [Downing St, the Prime Minister’s office and residence] to function as a cramped, ungainly, dilapidated hybrid of command centre, event space, provincial museum and family home — in which your influence is dictated largely by your physical proximity to the PM’s office?

Then there’s the way we treat those in charge. Leaving aside your views on the incumbent, does it sound like a recipe for peak performance to have the prime minister living in a flat above the shop, with no dedicated catering, cleaning or childcare (sharing the space, in this case, with two very young children)? To have no on-call GP, so that when he catches a potentially fatal disease, he is essentially locked in his flat, with meals shoved under the door, until he has to be carted off to hospital? That’s before we even get to the whole system of red boxes, in which the people running the country are handed a sheaf of printouts every evening and asked to make billion-pound decisions armed with a marker pen and bottle of wine.

A few weeks ago Tony Blair gave a big speech arguing that Britain was utterly unprepared for the challenges it faced. In particular, our long-term growth rate is “woefully insufficient to pay for the services we expect”. I hosted an event on Thursday with the director-general of the CBI, at which we both made the same point: without a radical pro-business agenda to get GDP up, we will remain in the awful trap of low growth, high spending and high taxes.

But how are we going to thrive in the 21st century with a power structure designed for the 19th? We’ve kept things going via a series of bodges — but no one can argue this is how you would do things if you started with a blank sheet of paper, or even one half-covered in crayons by one of the prime minister’s kids who had wandered into the office.

«

Physical proximity has often been crucial for power systems. Though you could do a lot better than No.10 and No.11 for organisation. The White House has similarly been criticised as inappropriate for the modern challenges it has (which became even worse when Covid hit). A problem with hanging on to the past.
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Queen Elizabeth is hooked on political gossip • POLITICO

Annabelle Dickson:

»

Former dispatch writers said they were instructed to write “the inside track” because the queen reads the newspapers and listens to BBC Radio 4’s flagship morning program, Today, or another daily news show.

Former Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick, who held the post between 2003 and 2005, recalls his instructions from the queen when he asked what he should write about.

“She said something like ‘that which doesn’t make the press would be of interest,’” he recalls. “It’s personal correspondence so it would never be disclosed to anybody. So there was every encouragement just to be frank and transparent with what one was saying because it was just private between she and I.”

Another, the Conservative Andrew MacKay, who held the post in 1996, admitted his initial “rather stilted efforts” prompted a phone call from the queen’s private secretary who suggested the queen wanted the “gossip and the inside track.” He subsequently transformed his letters into a “who’s up, who’s down,” something he was later told had been “appreciated.”

“It’s patently obvious to everybody but the most anti-royalist that she has been a hugely successful monarch over a very long period of time. I think one of the keys is her attention to detail, her desire to be well-informed, and not interfere, because she understood the constitutional position completely,” MacKay added.

Those characteristics have been a “help” to successive prime ministers, who hold weekly private meetings with the queen at Buckingham Palace, Mackay said.

By 2014, dispatches were sent to Buckingham Palace by email rather than being collected by a messenger, Anne Milton, one of the few female vice chamberlains to hold the post said.

“I used look for things that, in my very humble opinion, might amuse her,” Milton said. “If there had been a bit of a row in the house … it’s quite nice to give a bit of color to the events that have gone on.”

«

I do wonder what the briefing notes for the past few weeks have looked like. (The Queen is meant to be apolitical, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be interested in politics.)
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Nerdle – the daily numbers game

Richard Mann:

»

Driving home with Imogen, we were chatting about the Wordle craze and agreed there must be an equivalent for us maths fans. A few minutes later, we’d decided on the rules of the game and the name “nerdle”. As far as we can work out, there are over 100,000 valid words but we have chosen 17,723 valid “words” as there are quite a lot we thought you wouldn’t like. We think it’s just as fun playing with numbers as playing with letters. See if you agree!

«

It’s quite tough. Certainly tougher than Wordle. Which almost certainly means the NY Times is not going to buy it and there won’t be breathless features about it provoking family rows. If you need an alternative, there’s Mathler, which is about as mindbending.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A ransomware attack means that Hula Hoop snacks, and a number of others, are on delay for between two and seven weeks. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Rees 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. Not the invading type. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Beware the FOMO bullies of technology • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

“Web3” does feel more like investors pumping a stock than it does an organic movement. Still, I worry about developing a mindset that goes beyond reflexive skepticism and into a kind of calcified naysaying. My career was born out of a love for new gadgets and services, and the connections and experiences they foster. Then I saw how platforms like Twitter and Facebook could influence how we saw ourselves and one another—and not always for the better.

So far, my experience with Web3 is different. A lot of its projects seem like unnecessarily complex and theoretical financialized tools in search of broader utility; “play-to-earn” blockchain-based games such as Axie Infinity represent, for me, a dystopian vision of leisure, if not a new era of “bullshit jobs.” Non-fungible tokens don’t personally appeal to me and, as some have shown, the technology does not appear to be fully decentralized. Decentralized autonomous organizations—described by some as an internet community or a group chat with a shared bank account—are perhaps the most interesting application of blockchain technology, but I still struggle to see how they aren’t just a new riff on LLCs. Many of them also seem chaotic.

Perhaps worst of all, I find so much of Web3 deeply inaccessible. When I took the time to set up a crypto wallet and participate in the new economy, the experience was devoid of thrill. I didn’t feel that sense of hope and potential that came when I first logged onto the internet, logged into Facebook, downloaded a song on Napster, or held a smartphone in my hand and checked my email away from a computer.

That itself can feel sad, even unsettling, given Web3’s revolutionary framing. I’d like to think that my instincts toward hucksterism and hype cycles are well attuned. Over the years, I’ve watched tech optimists—including some of the very boosters of Web3—get blinded by their ego, greed, or naivete. But there’s a part of me that worries about my own capacity to imagine the future. What if even now, at just 34 years old, I’ve become the guy who [as David Letterman did interviewing Bill Gates about the newfangled ‘internet’ in 1995] says “Does radio ring a bell?”

…Web3 will likely influence the direction of the internet incompletely and unpredictably. But the FOMO-fueled marketing of this technology can still be deeply problematic: It strong-arms people into markets and ideas, attracting grifters, scammers, and the greedy while repelling those who want to build sustainable communities and products.

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Warzel is always worth reading (and has now been folded back into The Atlantic, where his newsletter sort-of lives).
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We found the real names of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s pseudonymous founders • Buzzfeed News

Katie Notopulos:

»

As the value of the asset they produced has skyrocketed, the identities of BAYC’s founders have become the subject of intense interest — not all of it positive. People have pointed out that apes in streetwear-inspired outfits and gold teeth is a racist trope (representatives for Yuga Labs vigorously denied this). Others have expressed concern that Seneca, the young Asian American artist who actually drew the main artwork, has been underacknowledged and undercompensated for her work. Nicole Muniz, the public-facing CEO of Yuga Labs, told BuzzFeed News, “Every single artist of the original five were compensated over a million dollars each.” (Seneca did not respond a request for comment.) This reveals a unique problem with the idea of a billion-dollar company run by an unknown person: How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?

BuzzFeed News can now reveal the identities of BAYC’s two main founders: Greg Solano, a 32-year-old writer and editor, and Wylie Aronow, a 35-year-old originally from Florida.

Neither man immediately responded to a request for comment.

BuzzFeed News searched public business records to reveal the identities of the two core founders, who go by the pseudonyms “Gordon Goner” and “Gargamel.” According to publicly available records, Yuga Labs, the company name behind BAYC, is incorporated in Delaware with an address associated with Greg Solano. Other records linked Solano to Wylie Aronow. Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz confirmed the identities of both men to BuzzFeed News.

Speaking as Gordon Goner and Gargamel, the founders have given interviews to outlets like Rolling Stone and the New Yorker discussing the origin story of the idea of a group of rich apes living in a swamp clubhouse. The broad strokes of their biographies fit Solano and Aronow: They’re both in their 30s, met while growing up in Florida, and both had literary aspirations (one completed an MFA degree in creative writing, the other dropped out for health reasons, according to their interview in CoinDesk).

«

As you could predict, people got totally bent out of shape by Notopoulos committing an act of journalism and discovering publicly available (but slightly obscured) information about people who may be getting millions of dollars and are encouraging others to put real money into their not-useful things. The idea of “accountability” seems to shock some people. Predictably, they’re also people who boost NFTs. Why might that be?
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Apple blasted over paltry 3% fee reduction for external payments in the Netherlands • Macworld

Michael Simon:

»

After announcing in mid-January that it would be complying with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets order to allow alternate payment processing options in dating apps, Apple is now offering more details on how the new system will work.

Developers must first request a StoreKit External Purchase Entitlement or the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement and provide the payment service provider’s name and website. Apple requires the PSP to offer broad payment support, including Apple Pay, and be able to split payments, “with the ability to pay commission directly to Apple at the developer’s request.”

The last bit is particularly important, because Apple will still be taking a 27% fee for every transaction made through an external store or link, just 3% less than using the App Store’s payment system. Apple describes it as “a reduced rate that excludes value related to payment processing and related activities.”

«

Most people will have no idea that Apple’s doing this. But third-party developers for Apple’s platform are furious. Apple is not just doing the least it could, it’s making it actively harder for apps to use a different payment system, and still taking a hefty chunk. It’s a disdain so lofty it’s barely visible from the ground.

(I don’t know why it’s dating apps specifically that Holland picked out for this special treatment. Clues welcome.)
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Inside Google’s plan to salvage its Stadia gaming service • Business Insider

Hugh Langley:

»

When Google announced last year that it was shutting down its internal gaming studios, it was seen as a blow to the company’s big bet on video games. Google, whose Stadia cloud service was barely more than a year old, said it would instead focus on publishing games from existing developers on the platform and explore other ways to bring Stadia’s technology to partners.

Since then, the company has shifted the focus of its Stadia division largely to securing white-label deals with partners that include Peloton, Capcom, and Bungie, according to people familiar with the plans.

Google is trying to salvage the underlying technology, which is capable of broadcasting high-definition games over the cloud with low latency, shopping the technology to partners under a new name: Google Stream. (Stadia was known in development as “Project Stream.”)

The Stadia consumer platform, meanwhile, has been deprioritized within Google, insiders said, with a reduced interest in negotiating blockbuster third-party titles. The focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream, people involved in those conversations said. The changes demonstrate a strategic shift in how Google, which has invested heavily in cloud services, sees its gaming ambitions.

Last year, Google entered conversations with Peloton to be a back-end provider for games running on the fitness company’s bikes, three people familiar with the situation said. Peloton unveiled the first of those games, titled “Lanebreak,” in summer and ran a closed demo late last year that was supported by Google’s technology.

«

Note it’s “salvage” rather than “revive”. Salvage is what you do with a holed or sunken ship. Google seems constantly unable to follow through on promising starts: it beat Apple to wearables, and squandered it by leaving it to OEMs. Its messaging approach has been haphazard, at best. And now this. Apple’s subscription games service seems to chug along, in part because it never promised to revolutionise the world; just to be an add-on.
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How will the Russia-Ukraine crisis end? • Comment Is Freed(man)

Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of War Studies at King’s College London, making a guest post on his son’s Substack:

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While it is not hard to identify differences of opinion among NATO members, [Vladimir] Putin is probably disappointed that the fractures are not deeper. Ukraine has obviously been bothered by the war scare most, not least because it raises a fearful prospect but also because continual mobilisation is draining both socially and economically. This is why Zelensky tried to encourage the US and the UK not to push their more alarmist scenarios too hard.

Even though Putin would have preferred more disarray on NATO’s side he has put some added stress on Ukraine; reminded everybody that Russia is a great power with a significant military clout; got more diplomatic attention than he has enjoyed for a while, with Western leaders paying court, and the possibility might of some modest improvements in Russian security; agreed a verbose communiqué with President Xi of China at the Olympics, which condemns NATO enlargement, along with ‘colour revolutions’; and has been able to use the build-up to cement a developing alliance with Belarus. The Belarusian dictator President Lukashenko once wished to keep his independence from Russia but lost that last year when Russia helped him clamp down on the opposition. He is now hosting exercises with Russian troops close to the Ukrainian border.

If Putin breaks off all diplomacy now then that would be the clearest sign that war was close. If he continues to explore possibilities with [US president Joe] Biden and [French president Emmanuel] Macron and others then in the event of an offensive it would be hard to explain why he is embarking on a war he has said he does not want. It is therefore at least possible that he will carry on developing a mixture of options, seeing if anything changes, taking what he can from the situation, until it is time to start bringing his troops back home. Some crises do just fade away.

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🤞
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Question Time showed that you can’t counter anti-vax myths with cold reason alone • The Guardian

Sonia Sodha:

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research shows that the process of “myth-busting” – setting out a common false statement, then explaining why it is wrong – backfires because it counterintuitively reinforces and helps spread the myths.

This is why the premise of last week’s Question Time [a weekly audience asks/politicians answer panel show] was so flawed. The presenter of the BBC programme, Fiona Bruce, announced in mid-January that the programme wanted to explore why some people had chosen not to be vaccinated against Covid and specifically invited them to apply to be an audience member on the programme.

Understanding why some people have not yet been vaccinated despite the wealth of evidence that the vaccines are safe, effective and save lives is hugely important to improving take-up. But there are numerous research reports on this, to which a current affairs programme such as Question Time has little to add. And if the objective was instead to increase understanding and build empathy among viewers, its tribal format, in which rhetorical flourish is deployed to score quick wins over opponents, could not be less well suited to the task. In response to widely aired concerns, the programme said it would vet potential audience members to allow ordinary unvaccinated members of the public through while filtering out the fanatics.

This is to misunderstand that the expression of reasonable-sounding doubts can be a much more effective transmitter of misinformation than ranting and raving. And sure enough, the programme ended up falling into a number of disinformation traps.

…Question Time also bought into another piece of conventional wisdom that disintegrates on close examination: the idea that on most issues people can be divided into tribes based on their fixed beliefs. The whole endeavour was based on the premise that “the unvaccinated” are a group of people who have been “unrepresented” on our national broadcaster, as if they share a coherent set of attitudes. But people have not yet been vaccinated for all sorts of reasons. Imagine thinking it useful to sort a Question Time audience on the basis of other unhealthy behaviour, such as smoking or excessive drinking.

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Exclusive: iPhone flaw exploited by second Israeli spy firm, sources say • Reuters

Christopher Bing and Raphael Satter:

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A flaw in Apple’s software exploited by Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group to break into iPhones in 2021 was simultaneously abused by a competing company, according to five people familiar with the matter.

QuaDream, the sources said, is a smaller and lower profile Israeli firm that also develops smartphone hacking tools intended for government clients.

The two rival businesses gained the same ability last year to remotely break into iPhones, according to the five sources, meaning that both firms could compromise Apple phones without an owner needing to open a malicious link. That two firms employed the same sophisticated hacking technique – known as a “zero-click” – shows that phones are more vulnerable to powerful digital spying tools than the industry will admit, one expert said.

“People want to believe they’re secure, and phone companies want you to believe they’re secure. What we’ve learned is, they’re not,” said Dave Aitel, a partner at Cordyceps Systems, a cybersecurity firm.

Experts analyzing intrusions engineered by NSO Group and QuaDream since last year believe the two companies used very similar software exploits, known as ForcedEntry, to hijack iPhones.

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What’s odd about this is that ForcedEntry exploits a very particular weakness in Apple’s GIF processing. I don’t know enough about the discovery process for bugs to be sure, but it seems distinctly unlikely that two Israeli hacking companies should have separately found precisely the same mechanism for breaking into iPhones.
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KP Snacks ‘compromised’ by ransomware cyberattack and ‘cannot safely process orders’ • betterRetailing

Jack Courtez:

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KP Snacks has been hit by a cyberattack causing delays and cancelations to deliveries that could last “until the end of March at the earliest”.

A letter from KP Snacks sent to store owners on 2 February said its systems had been “compromised by ransomware” and it “cannot safely process orders or dispatch goods”.

KP Snacks revealed the hack wiped out its IT and communications systems begining on 28 January. “We have teams working through the resolution, but it is unknown when this will be resolved,” the letter read.

Messages sent by Nisa to partnered stores on 1 February, and seen by betterRetailing told local shops to “expect supply issues on base stock and promotions until further notice”.

The hack means supply of top selling brands including McCoy’s, Hula Hoops, Tyrrells, Space Raiders, Skips, Butterkist, Pom-Bears, Nik Naks and KP Nuts is at risk.

The wholesaler added: “Initial discussions have highlighted that no orders will be being placed or delivered for a couple of weeks at least and service could be affected until the end of March at the earliest.”

Nisa said it was introducing ordering caps in order to “manage what stock we do have”.

Files seen by cybersecurity site Bleeping Computer showed KP Snacks listed on hacker group Conti’s confidential ‘data leak page’. The site alleged that examples of KP Snacks related “credit card statements, birth certificates, spreadsheets with employee addresses and phone numbers, confidential agreements, and other sensitive documents” were shown on the data leak page.

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I should point out that the website has an “Age Verification” system to make sure you’re 18 or older before you can read such salacious details. (See how well you get on at persuading it of your age.) Meanwhile, Britain’s diet might be marginally better for the next few weeks.
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Estimate to rip and replace Huawei, ZTE networking gear in US carriers more than tripled since 2020 • PhoneArena

Alan Friedman:

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As recently as last summer, the FCC said that ripping out Huawei and ZTE’s networking gear would cost it $1.9bn, an estimate originally calculated in 2020. But on Friday Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel told Congress that the wireless providers involved in the program requested $5.6 bn to be reimbursed for the cost of “ripping and replacing” the insecure networking equipment.

The FCC issued a press release on Friday which noted that the goal of the “The Supply Chain Reimbursement Program” is to reimburse advanced communications providers for the reasonable expenses these companies laid out for the “removal, replacement, and disposal of covered communications equipment and services.”

While the figure that the rural carriers are seeking is more than triple the amount that the FCC earmarked for this program, the actual amount that will be spent for the rip and replace could still be lower than the inflated new figure. In the press release, Chairwoman Rosenworcel noted that Congress has yet to set aside the $5.6bn that the carriers are asking for.

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Wonder if it’s a shortage of people to do the work, or if Nokia and Alcatel have hiked their prices. That’s a pretty dramatic change. (Huawei and ZTE don’t agree that their equipment is insecure, but the Trump admin said they weren’t to be trusted.)
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Amazon and Nike said to be considering Peloton bid • FT

James Fontanella-Khan, Sara Germano, Dave Lee and Patrick McGee:

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Amazon and Nike have not held any talks with Peloton and the considerations are preliminary, according to people briefed on the matter. They added that the decision to look at Peloton was opportunistic given its market value collapsed from nearly $50bn 12 months ago to less than $8bn this week.

Any deal would be hard to get done without the backing from John Foley, Peloton’s co-founder, and other insiders due to the company’s dual-class shareholder structure, which gives them veto power on all big decisions.

Other buyers are also likely to emerge, said those briefed on the matter, potentially including Apple and large private equity buyers.

Peloton was riding high at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, when thousands of people started using its signature stationary bike amid lockdowns.

On Friday, its share price jumped 30% in after-hours trading after The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon was considering a bid for the company. The Financial Times first reported Nike’s decision to evaluate a deal.

An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on “rumours and speculation”. Nike did not return a request for comment. Peloton declined to comment.

Blackwells Capital, which owns less than 5% of Peloton, has accused Foley of mismanagement, including misleading investors and hiring his wife in an executive role, a decision that the hedge fund claimed cost $40bn in shareholders’ wealth.

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There’s not the faintest chance that Apple would bid for it – why would it want to make stationary bikes and treadmills? It never buys hardware companies, Beats excepted. It could make some sense for Amazon, but Nike feels like a better fit, as the premium version of the brand, where the subscription would work well.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified