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

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

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

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

New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI • BBC News

James Gallagher:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gergely Orosz:

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

»

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

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

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

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

George Avalos:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Goodin:

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Mulligan:

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

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

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

Anna Nicolaou:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Booth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asa Fitch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Roth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Berger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Barwick:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Lindsay:

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Broderick:

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

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

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

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

Temitayo Lawal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bradly Shankar, a month ago:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Richtel, Catherine Pearson and Michael Levenson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hope nobody’s surprised by this.

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

Hannah Murphy and Patrick McGee:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Stockdale:

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UploadVR will attend the Apple WWDC23 keynote on June 5.

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

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

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

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

“Anonymous”:

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Hello everyone.

This is my final message to everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Peters:

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

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

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

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

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

Lia Haberman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Curtis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Siele:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Boucher:

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

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

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

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

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

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Let’s have a look..

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

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

Adrian Weckler:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abené Clayton:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Schechner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meena Venkataramanan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Vincent:

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

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

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

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

Sergiu Gatlan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleanor Olcott and Demetri Sevastopulo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don Kaye:

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

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

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

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

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

Natasha Lomas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nico Grant and Kashmir Hill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gwyn Topham:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

MacKenzie Sigalos:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Ryan Joe:

»

Writing and distributing press releases is time consuming and expensive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Byron Kaye:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Tim Harford:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Sascha Pare:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

David Pierce:

»

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

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

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

«

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

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

Michael Birnbaum:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Kellen Browning:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Benjamin Mullin:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Multiple authors:

»

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

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

«

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

Oliver Milman:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

What if you took all the separate streaming services, combined them into a single bundle and charged one price for them? Crazy idea, right? CC-licensed photo by Tatsuo Yamashita on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Well, why not? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Supreme Court rules Andy Warhol’s Prince art is copyright infringement • PetaPixel

Jaron Schneider:

»

The United States Supreme Court has released its opinion on The Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith case, finding in favor of Lynn Goldsmith and stating that Warhol’s use of her photo was not fair use.

For those unfamiliar, the Warhol v. Goldsmith case has been ongoing for several years and involves photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s photo of Prince and Andy Warhol’s use of that photo which his Foundation argues was fair use.

The details of the case to this point can be read in prior coverage, but in summary, Goldsmith had been victorious in the most recent court’s decision leading up to this point. The Andy Warhol Foundation had appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, who has affirmed the lower court’s decision and sealed Goldsmith’s win.

In an 87-page, seven-to-two opinion written by Justice Sotomayor, the Supreme Court has ruled that Warhol’s use of Goldsmith’s Prince photo was not transformative enough to warrant fair use and was instead a violation of her copyright. Justices Roberts and Kagan dissented.

“Although new expression, meaning, or message may be relevant to whether a copying use has a sufficiently distinct purpose or character, it is not, without more, dispositive of the first factor,” the court holds.

«

Photographers are delighted. This is the case that The Atlantic said “could wreck American art” back in October when it reached the Supreme Court. We’ll see how that plays out.
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Twitter, Google win big at Supreme Court • POLITICO

Josh Gerstein and Rebecca Kern:

»

The Supreme Court has passed up a closely watched opportunity to clarify the scope of the federal liability shield known as Section 230 that protects internet companies from most legal claims over content posted by users.

In a pair of rulings Thursday morning, the justices rejected lawsuits seeking to hold tech giants like Google and Twitter liable for terrorism-promoting content on their platforms. And the court nixed the suits without issuing any sweeping pronouncements on the immunity provision that has come under increasing fire from Republicans and Democrats.

The cases mark the first time the high court dealt with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 law that broadly protects tech companies from being sued over hosting most third-party content on their websites and decisions to remove violative material.

The two decisions mark a major win for the tech industry, which has argued that narrowing Section 230 could be disastrous for the internet if platforms could be sued over content-moderation decisions. But the resolution leaves the door open to future showdowns —- potentially in Congress — over the breadth of the legal protection the internet firms enjoy.

…In the first case, Twitter v. Taamneh, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected a lawsuit seeking to hold Twitter, Google and Facebook responsible for an ISIS nightclub attack in Turkey in 2017 due to recruiting videos posted on their sites.

Then, the justices used the ruling in that case to wriggle out of a clear-cut decision in Gonzalez v. Google, a lawsuit from the family of a California college student who was killed in a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. The family alleged that Google’s YouTube algorithms promoted ISIS recruitment videos and thereby contributed to the attack.

The high court disposed of the Google case in a three-page, unsigned opinion that said the Section 230 issues were not ripe for decision.

«

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Replication of room-temperature superconductor claims fails to show superconductivity • Phys.org

Bob Yirka:

»

A team of physicists at Nanjing University, attempting to replicate the superconductivity results from an experiment conducted by a team at the University of Rochester, produced the desired material but also found that it was not superconductive. In their study, reported in the journal Nature, the group replicated the work by the prior team and tested the resulting material.

In 2020, a team of engineers and physicists at the University of Rochester in New York, led by mechanical engineer Ranga Dias, published a paper in the journal Nature claiming to have created a compound that, when exposed to extreme pressure, became a superconductor at room temperature. Soon thereafter, Nature retracted the paper due to the use of undocumented data by the research team.

More recently, the same team published another paper in Nature claiming to have created a different material that became superconductive at room temperature—at much lower pressure than the material described in their first paper. In this new effort, the team in China duplicated the work, hoping to find the same results.

«

🎼 Nuclear fusion and quantum computers, 🎶 room temp-er-ature superconductors, bitcoin as currency, 🎵 a universe of strings, these are a few quite impossible things.
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What if San Francisco never pulls out of its ‘doom loop’? • Financial Times

Tabby Kinder and George Hammond:

»

Tech companies were among the most enthusiastic in embracing remote work during the pandemic, banking a tax saving and allowing employees to avoid San Francisco’s high rents. The reduction in demand has only been compounded by tech lay-offs. “The irony for the city is that the economy that grew up as a response to the measures we adopted in 2009 to pull us out of the recession focused on a single industry,” says Wade Rose, the president of Advance SF, which lobbies on behalf of the city’s business community. “Then the pandemic hits, and it turns out that the economic sector we had built up was the most amenable to switching where their employees worked from.”

Salesforce Tower isn’t the only beacon of hope turned mausoleum. Opposite the Financial Times’s office on California Street, a mostly empty office block that was valued at $300m in 2019 just changed hands for as little as $60m. The sale could trigger the repricing of workplaces across the city. Thirty% of commercial real estate is now empty, a larger portion than New York, Miami and Detroit. Areas surrounding “zombie offices” are a growing hollow at the heart of the city. Around the corner, the spectre of a branch of Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed in March, is another reminder of a fragile financial infrastructure.

What happens downtown has an outsized significance. San Francisco anchors a wider Bay Area economy which thrived during boom times, and 80% of the city’s $250bn annual GDP is produced by office-based industries mostly centred in the financial district. Mayor Breed has put forward a plan to clean up and reinvigorate downtown, but urban renewal projects of the scale required tend to take decades, rather than years. Until then, San Francisco may simply feel emptier than before. At Embarcadero station, which delivers workers to the financial district for example, passenger numbers are down 70% since 2019. 

…In just one week of reporting this story, one of us was the victim of three separate crimes: their handbag was stolen; they were harassed by a man on a Bart train who cornered them in their seat; and a man tried to break into their home. This is not normal.

«

Guessing it wasn’t Hammond who was the victim. San Francisco has a problem, and not a lot of time to fix it once remote working becomes embedded.

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David Zaslav open to leveraging Max in bundle with other streamers: ‘it would be great for consumers’ • The Wrap

Lucas Manfredi:

»

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav warned on Thursday that consolidation in the streaming is coming – but rather than through mergers and acquisitions, he sees it coming in the form of aggregation.

“One of the challenges in the business right now is the difficulty for a consumer in aggregating the content that they love, entertainment, nonfiction, content, sports content. Everyone’s googling where is it? How do I get it?” Zaslav said during MoffettNathanson’s inaugural Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. “It’s not rational and it’s not really sustainable because it’s not a good consumer experience, not sustainable because there are a lot of people in this business that are just losing too much money.”

While he acknowledged that consolidation through M&A is “one answer,” he noted that it is “not easy” from a regulatory perspective.

“It takes time. This industry is changing so quickly. Saying I’m gonna take two years and then I’m gonna emerge with a new set of assets for two-and-a-half years, who knows what the world looks like,” he said. “So I think there’s a lot of risk from a regulatory or even a time [perspective], but there should be a consolidation. And I think it’s more likely to have to happen in the repackaging and marketing of products together.

«

Hmm, you could collect all those streaming services together in a single bundle, offer some sort of discount compared to the sum of the individual services, and think of a snappy name for them – perhaps something that indicates how they come into the house, such as “cable”?
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OpenAI ChatGPT on the App Store

»

Introducing ChatGPT for iOS: OpenAI’s latest advancements at your fingertips.

This official app is free (no ads!), syncs your history across devices, and brings you the newest model improvements from OpenAI.

With ChatGPT in your pocket, you’ll find:

· Instant answers
· Tailored advice
· Creative inspiration
· Professional input
· Personalized learning

Join millions of users and try out the app that’s been captivating the world. Download ChatGPT today.

«

It’s official. Now everyone’s potentially going to have a chatbot. Includes speech-to-text so you can dictate a question.
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Spacetop hands-on: we tried the world’s first augmented reality laptop • The Verge

Monica Chin:

»

The Spacetop doesn’t have a screen. In total, it is a screen-less keyboard deck with a pair of AR glasses (which are customized NReal glasses) hardwired to it. Put those on, and you will see your desktop projected into the air before you. You operate it — move windows, play videos, type messages, etc. — with the keys and touchpad, as you would a physical screen. Sightful claims that the Spacetop is actually a “100-inch laptop.” It’s getting that from the fact that if you were to treat the image the user sees as a projection on a surface in front of them, that projection would have a 100in diagonal. I suppose that’s one way to look at it (though, by that logic, a projector can also be called a 120in TV or whatever).

This, in the opinion of Sightful CEO Tamir Berliner, is the obvious future of computing. There will come a time when all electronic tasks, from web design to AAA gaming, are done while squinting through AR glasses. “We are looking forward to the day when we forget about the laptops we have today,” Berliner told me, mirroring predictions that Mark Zuckerberg has been making for years.

My question, naturally, was: why? Why do my activities in the air, when I can do them just fine on a screen?

“If you go to Best Buy tomorrow and you see a 13-inch laptop, and a 15in laptop, and a 100in laptop that’s the size of a 13in, which would you buy?” Berliner asked me. Probably the 13in, I admitted; I liked portability but didn’t love the idea of sitting around in AR glasses all day. “You’re wearing glasses already,” Berliner said, pointing at my face. Fair enough, but my glasses were hand-selected and custom-molded to my head shape, and I couldn’t say the same for Sightful’s hefty goggles.

…I don’t feel that the 100in screen accolade is quite accurate — the Spacetop gives you no peripheral vision. Everything outside of your immediate view is dark. Sure, the Spacetop can technically display many, many more windows than you might be able to cram onto a 13in, but you can still only see a few at a time (also the case on a 13in).

And performance, overall, was a bit choppy.

«

Uh-oh. I still hold onto a little bit of hope that Apple won’t release a headset at WWDC, and we can all let this horrible dream die now, rather than having to stuff landfill with more useless goggles. The 3D cinema craze was bad enough.

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Post Office bosses blocked inquiry into faulty Horizon IT system in 2010 • The Times

Tom Witherow:

»

The Post Office boss in charge of criminal prosecutions blocked a full investigation into the company’s faulty Horizon IT system because “such an investigation will be disclosable“ in trials, an inquiry was told.

Emails shown to the public inquiry into the Horizon accounting scandal showed that Post Office executives were planning an internal investigation of its IT system in early 2010, and intended to bring in external auditors from Ernst & Young to verify it.

But when Robert Wilson, the head of criminal law, heard about the plans he opposed them, leading bosses instead to order a one-sided report that would only “confirm our belief in the robustness” of the IT system.

In an email to colleagues, Wilson expressed anger that he was not notified about the investigation, telling colleagues he was “staggered” he was not included in the meeting, “given the nature of the discussions that took place”.

Months later Seema Misra was sent to jail when she was eight weeks pregnant, leading a senior Post Office lawyer to celebrate the fact they had “destroyed the attack on the Horizon system”. Criminal prosecutions continued for another five years, and by 2015 as many as 700 had been wrongly convicted.

Yesterday, in closing statements for the third phase of the public inquiry, counsel for postmasters said the evidence heard in recent weeks showed senior Post Office staff knew there were bugs, but refused to investigate them. The Post Office denies its staff were aware of systemic faults and claims Fujitsu hid errors in its Horizon system.

«

So there’s a certain amount of fingerpointing going on, but it’s evident from this email alone that the intent was not to get to the bottom of what was going on, but to assume that the computer was infallible. This continues to be one of the biggest scandals of “just following the computer’s orders” ever in which scores of innocent people were accused and imprisoned.

Imagine if it were ChatGPT that had declared the sub-postmasters guilty. Who would question that? How would you investigate it?
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Global chipmakers to expand in Japan as tech decoupling accelerates • Financial Times

Leo Lewis and Kana Inagaki:

»

Seven of the world’s largest semiconductor makers have set out plans to increase manufacturing and deepen tech partnerships in Japan as western allies step up efforts to reshape the global chip supply chain amid rising tensions with China.

At an unprecedented meeting in Tokyo with Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, the heads of chipmakers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Intel and Micron of the US described plans that could transform Japan’s prospects of re-emerging as a semiconductor powerhouse.

Micron said it expected to invest up to ¥500bn ($3.7bn), including Japanese state subsidies, to build a plant to produce cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet lithography technology in Hiroshima.

Samsung is also discussing setting up a ¥30bn research and development centre in Yokohama with pilot lines for semiconductor devices. Japanese government officials said the move followed a thaw in relations between Tokyo and Seoul. Samsung was not available for comment.

“Japan’s role has risen as like-minded nations work to strengthen their supply chains,” said Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan’s minister of economy, trade and industry, following the meeting with chip chief executives. “We reconfirmed the strong potential for Japan’s semiconductor industry.”

The announcement comes as Japan prepares to host a G7 summit where economic security will be a focus of talks. Semiconductors in particular have emerged as an area of intense focus for the US and allies.

«

One gets the feeling that an invasion of Taiwan is being taken as a certainty, and the only question is when. Of course Japan won’t mind becoming a world powerhouse in chipmaking again.
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The rubbishscapes of Essex: why our buried trash is back to haunt us • The Guardian

Tim Burrows:

»

Cliff [Hatton, Burrows’s father-in-law] said one of the gravel pits, known as Hamble Lane, had, like an increasing number of places in south Essex, become an established rubbish tip by the time they started fishing there. But, while fishing at night, he noticed something odd. “There was more activity at the site during the hours of darkness than there was during the hours of light, even though everybody should by law have been gone,” Cliff said. Lorries would come through the gates “nose-to-tail” with sometimes up to 14 in a convoy, all through the night until sunrise. It was only later he realised the extent of the industrial chemicals that were being dumped there under cover of darkness.

One day in 1967, an elderly neighbour had asked Cliff to bring back some sticks from the Hamble Lane dump that he could use in his rose garden. Cliff remembered his errand when he was on the way back from fishing, after the sun had gone down. He climbed on top of a pile of wood to search for sticks, and then jumped off. “I just leapt into the darkness thinking I was going to land on solid ground,” said Cliff. Instead, he found himself up to his waist in slime. After a few moments, his skin began to burn. He had jumped into a caustic slurry, dumped there by a pharmaceutical company based in Dagenham. “That led to me spending a week or so in hospital and many, many weeks after that invalided indoors with great burns to my legs and on my face,” said Cliff.

Cliff’s parents, knowing their place, never sought compensation. Once recovered enough to return to the pits, Cliff found two half-empty drums of granulated cyanide floating in one of them. Another time, he and his brother came across a mountain of glass vials, and suspected that barbiturates had been dumped a few yards from a school fence. “We took some samples to the local police station, and showed them these dangerous drugs and mentioned they were within yards of the school playing field, and the only question we were asked was: ‘What were you doing over there?’ They were more worried about the fact that we were trespassing.”

Thurrock council took no action over the scandalous pollution that burned him and destroyed the habitat he so cherished, leaving Cliff with “a lifelong grudge against authority”.

«

This is only the curtain-raiser for the modern day problem that Burrows digs into (ahem). Like the future, our dystopian past is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed, but concentrated in rubbish tips that are now escaping their previous bounds.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Poker isn’t a matter of luck. Which is how one writer had a mother who supported her family by playing for money when her husband died suddenly. CC-licensed photo by slgckgcslgckgc 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. Think of some media. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google to use new AI models for ads and to help YouTube creators • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

»

Google’s effort to rapidly add new artificial intelligence technology into its core products is making its way into the advertising world, CNBC has learned.

The company has given the green light to plans for using generative AI, fueled by large language models (LLMs), to automate advertising and ad-supported consumer services, according to internal documents.

Last week, Google unveiled PaLM 2, its latest and most powerful LLM, trained on reams of text data that can come up with human-like responses to questions and commands. Certain groups within Google are now planning to use PaLM 2-powered tools to allow advertisers to generate their own media assets and to suggest videos for YouTube creators to make, documents show. .

Google has also been testing PaLM 2 for YouTube youth content for things like titles, and descriptions. For creators, the company has been using the technology to experiment with the idea of providing five video ideas based on topics that appear relevant.

With the AI chatbot craze speedily racing across the tech industry and capturing the fascination of Wall Street, Google and its peers, including Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, are rushing to embed their most sophisticated models in as many products as possible. The urgency has been particularly acute at Google since the public launch late last year of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT raised concern that the future of internet search was suddenly up for grabs.

«

Well obviously Google would automate itself. A roundabout way of reducing headcount, perhaps? On the other side of the wall, advertising execs will of course be using ChatGPT and its siblings to churn out a zillion forms of the same message in text, picture and video form. Think of the 2016 Trump campaign which tried scores of slightly different Facebook ads and zeroed in on the ones that worked: like that, but more so.
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OpenAI shut down DC company’s pitch to apply ChatGPT to politics • Semafor

Louise Matsakis:

»

Washington, D.C., company, FiscalNote, touted in a press release that it would use ChatGPT to help boost productivity in “the multi-billion dollar lobbying and advocacy industry” and “enhance political participation.”

Afterward, those lines disappeared from FiscalNote’s press release and were replaced by an editor’s note explaining ChatGPT could be used solely for “grassroots advocacy campaigns.”

A FiscalNote spokesperson told Semafor it never intended to violate OpenAI’s rules, and that it deleted that text from its press release to “ensure clarity.”

This is the first known instance of OpenAI policing how the use of its technology is advertised. The company last updated its policies in March, which now ban people from using its models for, among other things, building products for political campaigning or lobbying, payday lending, unproven dietary supplements, dating apps, and “high risk government decision-making,” such as “migration and asylum.”

OpenAI told Semafor that it uses a number of different methods to monitor and police when those policies are being violated. In the case of politics specifically, the company revealed it’s working on building a machine learning classifier that will flag when ChatGPT is asked to generate large volumes of text that appear related to electoral campaigns or lobbying.

«

A good catch, but you know there’s going to be more, done from the grassroots.

I deleted a big “KNOW MORE” from the text above which was encouraging you to read further, which you’d think the text would either achieve or not depending on how interesting it is, not whether you get told to “know more”. Speaking of which…
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Incuriosity, Inc. • How Things Work

Hamilton Nolan:

»

The production of journalism in America depends to a remarkable degree on fooling rich people into thinking it’s a good idea to fund some publication, and then feverishly publishing as much stuff as possible before the rich person figures out that journalism is not a good investment.

An unfortunate consequence of this, though, is the profusion of publications designed from the ground up to appeal to the demographic of “business people who incorrectly imagine themselves to be ideas people.”

…The defining publication of the appeal-to-the-funder-type era is Axios, which did not invent the form I’m talking about, but which has certainly refined it to its highest/ lowest form. To make fun of the Axios house style is hardly original, but it is worth understanding it as the embodiment of a broken economic system in the journalism industry that relies purely on seducing people who don’t read:

Bold. This makes things look important whether they are or not.

• Bullet points are the baby food of language. Busy executives must have their brain food mashed up and put on tiny bite-sized spoons.
• Here’s another bite. Open up!

On the other hand: The false equivalency of “both-sidesism” has long been one of the plagues of journalism, causing good and bad ideas to be presented as equally meaningful, as a quick and dirty way to achieve the veneer of impartiality. Instead of eradicating this harmful tendency, imagine if you boiled it down into a thick, black concentrate, and then used that goo to write bold bullet points. Business people fucking love that shit. “Much to consider,” they nod.

Number. Statistics lend the appearance of validity to arguments regardless of their provenance.

• The American Enterprise Institute found that 63% of business guys aren’t maximizing their productivity.
• Much to consider.

Go deeper. Axios’s financial success in a hard media environment has attracted notice. Now there is also Semafor, which raised a ton of money to make what is in essence “Global cosmopolitan Axios.”

«

What’s hilarious about the Axios stuff is that you can delete the headings and •s and it reads just like a normal news story.
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The Vietnamese military has a troll army and Facebook is its weapon • Rest of World

Danielle Keeton-Olen:

»

On Christmas Day 2017, Vietnam’s defense ministry announced a military group devoted to policing the country’s internet, called Force 47. In the five years since, pro-government trolls have been a persistent presence on the side of the regime, operating more or less freely across major platforms like Facebook and YouTube. As speech laws tighten in countries like India, Turkey, and Thailand — and platforms lose interest in pushing back — the trolls consistently and successfully harass activists and journalists posting on Vietnamese Facebook, providing a troubling model for how censorship can flourish within social media, even reaching beyond national borders.

In Vietnam, the fight has taken place largely outside the usual channels of law enforcement requests and court orders. In the first half of 2022, Facebook reported just under 1,000 takedowns based on local laws in Vietnam — above average, but still far fewer than neighbors like Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. Over the same period, Facebook reported only one government request for user data within the country. By conventional measures, the Vietnamese government is not doing that much to restrict its citizens on Facebook.

But according to local opposition groups, activists and reporters, these numbers conceal a far more aggressive campaign of mass reporting of any groups that question or critique the government. Michel Tran Duc, the advocacy director for the pro-democracy group Viet Tan, told Rest of World he has to dispute a community standards violation on Facebook at least once a month. Michel is then forced to appeal the decision through Facebook — a slow and difficult process.

«

This is a story that’s familiar if you’ve read Social Warming: there’s coordinated effort and the distant moderators aren’t able to act soon enough or understand the problem. So bad state actors get away with it.
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Introducing The Messenger Scale • The Messenger

»

Introducing The Messenger Scale, a new system designed to cut through the noise and help you understand what really matters in the news.

It’ll be like the “Richter scale” for measuring earthquakes, but in this case we will be assigning a simple 1-10 number based on input from our panel of more than 80 “news seismologists” from the worlds of politics, policy, law, history, academia and media. Our panel spans the entire political spectrum in order to provide readers with a balanced response to major news events.

…How does it work? When a news event happens, we’re hitting up our group with a simple question: On a scale of 1-10, how much do you think this event matters?

We purposefully kept the question vague and urged everyone to interpret it based on areas of expertise, understanding of the news cycle and where this particular event fits into the wider arc of history. 

The higher the number on The Messenger Scale, the more our panel thinks the event matters. The lower the number, the less they think the event matters.

We are averaging the responses to generate a number score down to the tenth decimal. We are keeping individual number ratings anonymous to encourage complete honesty, though who’s participating in The Messenger Scale will be public.

«

Since you’re wondering, 10 is big and/or bad. The January 6 insurrection was a 9.8, apparently. (Is a 10 a presidential assassination? How about aliens landing or a meteor strike – an 11, logically?)

The Messenger is a new website that has been described as “what if an entire website was a chumbox” (the junk links you see in a box below the story on a downmarket site). I liked the comment by Rusty Foster at Today In Tabs: “every new publication is looking for a moat, but only The Messenger had the guts to start by drowning in theirs.”
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Fighting misinformation: using our trusted voice to good effect • Science Media Centre

Fiona Fox is the PR manager of the Centre:

»

Scientists at bodies that are wholly owned by, or arm’s-length from, a government department are not free to speak to journalists. There may be some managed media interventions occasionally with nominated spokespeople, but if any of any of you are scientists working for the NIBSC, the MHRA, UKHSA, the FSA, APHA, RCE, and many more like these, you will certainly not be encouraged to answer the phone to journalists, or engage regularly in ongoing controversies. And unfortunately, you will not be allowed to join the SMC’s database of experts providing us with comments on breaking news or new research.

And unlike my previous description of the changing culture, things are not getting steadily better in these arenas. Indeed, more and more science is being drawn into this heavily controlled and risk-averse culture. University or research institutes who are commissioned to do pieces of science for government often now have contracts which give political press officers leadership of the communications. University academics who have academic freedom are often subject to constraints if they agree to sit on a scientific advisory group to government. Both the former Chair and current CEO of UKRI have testified to excessive controlling tendencies from government departments, and we now rarely see the executive chairs of the Research Councils speaking openly in the news; a development that deeply saddened the late Professor Sir Colin Blakemore, who had often used his voice as head of the MRC to great effect.

When I raise this issue with scientists close to government, they invariably agree with me that we are missing out on some great scientists, but caution that the culture is entrenched and would simply be too hard to change. I’m sure that is true. But I think before we concede defeat, we should first ask ourselves collectively if it’s worth trying. As I have described, we have already collectively changed the culture of academic science to great effect. If we think misinformation is a serious barrier to progress in societal discussions, then surely we need to look hard at how we liberate more scientists to join the fight against it.

«

Those initials in full: National Institute for Biological Standards and Control, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, UK Health Services Agency, Food Standards Agency, Animal and Plant Health Agency, Radiation and Chemical and Environmental Hazards directorate. Colin Blakemore was an excellent spokesman for science.
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How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change • Salon.com

Kathleen Dean Moore:

»

Thirty-eight rail cars filled with vinyl chloride derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio. Vinyl chloride, a flammable petroleum product, is a potent carcinogen. When it is burned, it creates dioxin, another nasty carcinogen that now permeates the town. A familiar pattern followed: lamentations over the derailing; a cascade of reporters; a debate in Congress. Finally, politicians, commentators and outraged citizens all posed these questions: how will we punish the railroads? And how can we make railroads safer?

Those are the wrong questions. What I want to know is why would any sensible people allow the US petrochemical industry annually to produce 7.2 million metric tons of a poison that causes liver, lung, and brain cancer, and to distribute it as polyvinyl chloride in water pipes, gutters, rubber duckies, and My Little Pony dolls?

Another surprising example: In an effort to reduce the town’s use of fossil fuels, the city of Eugene, Oregon prohibited natural gas infrastructure in new residential construction. These types of prohibitions prompted a similar brand of handwringing — the question being posed in op-eds and comments sections running along the lines of, “How can anyone ask us to sacrifice our gas stoves, just to cut carbon emissions?”

That’s the wrong question. What I want to know is what sacrifices we are already making to support a fossil-fuel industry that earned $4 trillion in global profits last year, an industry whose control over us extends even to how we cook bacon-and-eggs. As ecologist Carl Safina said: “We are sacrificing our money, sacrificing what is big and permanent, to prolong what is small, temporary, and harmful. We’re sacrificing animals, peace, and children to retain wastefulness – while enriching those who disdain us.”

«

Questions worth asking. A worthwhile read too for the derivation of the phrase “red herring”.
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Google, Facebook would pay “journalism fee” under California Bill • Bloomberg Law

Titus Wu:

»

California lawmakers are trying to advance legislation that would require digital platforms like Google and Facebook to pay a share of advertising revenue to media outlets after similar federal efforts have stalled.

The state legislation (A.B. 866) mirrors a federal measure in its attempt to help financially rescue local journalism companies and organizations. Newspapers rely heavily on social media and search engines to drive digital traffic as traditional print advertising revenues have disappeared. Meanwhile, titans like Google and Meta Platforms Inc. have controlled up to more than half of the online advertising market in recent years.

“These dominant digital ad companies are enriching their own platforms with local news content without adequately compensating the originators,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D) when announcing her bill in March. “It’s time they start paying market value for the journalism they are aggregating at no cost from local media.”

Big Tech, however, is characterizing the payments as a “link tax” that would disrupt the free and open nature of the internet.

The legislation faces strong opposition from a coalition of tech firms and even some journalism organisations, which contend the bill would actually harm local media and raises First Amendment issues. Backers of the measure also are wrestling with the logistics of imposing a proposed fee for original content as the bill awaits an Assembly floor vote.

Media groups in support of the bill say such payments would be an important financial lifeline for them to help them cover local issues from city council meetings to breaking news. Over 100 California newspapers have shuttered in the last decade as big tech companies have become the gatekeepers of how readers access news, said Emily Charrier, chairperson for the California News Publishers Association. She also serves as editor and publisher of the Sonoma Index-Tribune and publisher of the Petaluma Argus-Courier.

«

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Tipping at self-checkout has customers crying ‘emotional blackmail’ • WSJ

Rachel Wolfe:

»

Zero interaction with employees during a transaction no longer guarantees freedom from the moral quandary of how much to tip.

Prompts to leave 20% at self-checkout machines at airports, stadiums, cookie shops and cafes across the country are rankling consumers already inundated by the proliferation of tip screens. Business owners say the automated cues can significantly increase gratuities and boost staff pay. But the unmanned prompts are leading more customers to question what, exactly, the tips are for.   

“They’re cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout. So what’s the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?” says Ishita Jamar, a senior at American University in Washington, D.C., who has noticed more self-serve tip cues at restaurants she frequents.

Tipping researchers and labor advocates say so-called tip creep is a way for employers to put the onus for employee pay onto consumers, rather than raising wages themselves. Companies say tips are an optional thanks for a job well done.

Businesses “are taking advantage of an opportunity,” says William Michael Lynn, who studies consumer behavior and tip culture as a professor at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration. “Who wouldn’t want to get extra money at very little cost if you could?” 

«

Certainly not American companies, which avoid paying proper wages by expecting customers to make up the difference between what staff are paid, and should be paid.
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My mother the poker shark • Esquire

Ian Frisch:

»

My mother had first started playing poker for the fun and for the intellectual challenge. Returning to competition twenty years later, she rediscovered old pleasures. She was playing not only to make money but also as an emotional escape. At the table, she wasn’t a single mother without a steady job mourning her husband’s death. It was the only place she felt comfortable playing the villain, cutthroat and cruel, lying to strangers’ faces and getting paid for it. “I love having a nemesis at the table,” she once told me. “It gives me purpose.” To this day, at every table, she picks a player and slowly, steadily, hand by hand, tries to destroy them.

To some people, poker is just a card game, a way to pass the time. For me and my mother, it’s a window into our identity, our way of understanding a world that at times can seem unforgiving. I began joining my mother in basement games around town in 2003, when I was sixteen. Ever since, poker has formed a bond between us, a mutual love, a prism through which I can see her not just as my mother but as a three-dimensional person who carries deep heartache and immense responsibility. Though it took me years to realize it, I now understand exactly how high the stakes were each time she sat down at a card table: It was the only way she knew how to keep living.

«

A lovely little vignette of a mother and son united by grinding other people down. Fairly.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Norway, electric vehicles are selling like hot cakes – and Tesla models the most of all. CC-licensed photo by Norsk Elbilforening 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns of AI’s potential harm, wants regulations • The Washington Post

Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima and Will Oremus:

»

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman delivered a sobering account of ways artificial intelligence could “cause significant harm to the world” during his first congressional testimony, expressing a willingness to work with nervous lawmakers to address the risks presented by his company’s ChatGPT and other AI tools.

Altman advocated for a number of regulations — including a new government agency charged with creating standards for the field — to address mounting concerns that generative AI could distort reality and create unprecedented safety hazards. The CEO tallied “risky” behaviors presented by technology like ChatGPT, including spreading “one-on-one interactive disinformation” and emotional manipulation. At one point he acknowledged AI could be used to target drone strikes.

“If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” Altman said.

Yet in nearly three hours of discussion of potentially catastrophic harms, Altman affirmed that his company will continue to release the technology, despite likely dangers. He argued that rather than being reckless, OpenAI’s “iterative deployment” of AI models gives institutions time to understand potential threats — a strategic move that puts “relatively weak” and “deeply imperfect” technology in the world to understand the associated safety risks.

…Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the subcommittee, said Altman’s testimony was a “far cry” from past outings by other top Silicon Valley CEOs, whom lawmakers have criticized for historically declining to endorse specific legislative proposals.

“Sam Altman is night and day compared to other CEOs,” Blumenthal, who began the hearing with an audio clip mimicking his voice that he said was generated by artificial intelligence trained on his floor speeches, told reporters. “Not just in the words and the rhetoric but in actual actions and his willingness to participate and commit to specific action.”

«

Altman has done a clever PR job here, frightening the horses sufficiently that competitors will have to struggle through regulation that OpenAI can probably handle easily, because it’s ahead of them. Get the lawmakers happy with you, and you’re halfway there.
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Apple previews new accessibility features, including AI-generated voice clone • Six Colors

Shelly Brisbin:

»

Apple organizes its accessibility features and settings by functional categories: Vision, Hearing, Physical and Motor. Now there’s Speech, too. New features under the Speech heading support those who are partially or fully nonverbal. Personal Voice is an intriguing feature that might seem familiar to anyone who has experienced AI-based text-to-speech that’s been trained on an actual human voice.

Those diagnosed with ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka motor neurone disease] are at great risk for losing their ability to speak, but often have advance warning. Using Personal Voice, an individual will be able to use an Apple Silicon-equipped Mac, iPhone or iPad to create a voice that resembles their own. If the ability to speak is lost, text the user generates on the device can then be converted to voice, for use in a variety of ways. It will work with augmented communication apps that are often used to make it easier for people with limited speech to be understood. And no, you can’t create a new Siri voice this way. All Personal Voice training is done on-device.

Live Speech can use an existing Siri voice to give people with speech disabilities a quick way to use voice to express common phrases or sentences. Type and save a statement, like a food order or a greeting, then tap the text to have it spoken aloud. It works inside Phone and FaceTime, or in-person, and users can save common phrases.

«

Apple using AI, but in a way that isn’t saying “hey, look at our AI, which works on-device!”

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Introducing Ask Skift, the AI chatbot for your travel questions • Skift

Rafat Ali:

»

Today, we are very excited to announce Ask Skift, the AI chatbot answers engine specializing in the travel industry, here to be of service on your daily work queries. 

Go ahead, ask away any question, such as “How is Airbnb planning to leverage AI?” Or “Who is the new CEO of IHG?”. Or “Who are the owners of Ace Hotel?” Or, “Write me a short essay on the state of overtourism post-covid.”

We have “trained” Ask Skift on all the sum totality of Skift archives over the last 11 years, including daily stories, research reports, all of our clients’ trends reports, our specialized products – Airline Weekly, Daily Lodging Report, and Skift Meetings – and all the U.S. public travel companies’ financial SEC annual and quarterly reports. As soon as a new story or report is published, it goes straight into Ask Skift.

And this is just the start: we will continue to train it on other specialized travel industry content and data in coming weeks in order to improve the answers and expand the universe of queries it can tackle.

For now we have built this on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 deep learning artificial intelligence algorithm (a logic-learning machine, or LLMin short). We would really like to use GPT-4, which gives exponentially better answers (we know, we have been testing internally on both versions) but for now it is cost-prohibitive. We expect prices to come down later this year and will upgrade to it.

«

Ali, who started and runs Skift, is a very smart person in the media space: I believe he has the rare distinction of never having been in charge of a media site that has closed. And this – training a chatbot on the specialist content of your site – is a really clever wrinkle in the media landscape. What if you tuned a chatbot on The Guardian’s deep, deep content, or the NY Times’s, or any sufficiently longstanding media site?
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Telly, the ‘free’ smart TV with ads, has privacy policy red flags • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

»

We’ve pasted below the portion of Telly’s privacy policy verbatim, typos included, as it was published at the time — and have highlighted the questionable passage in bold for emphasis:

»

“As noted in the Terms of Use, we do not knowingly collect or solicit Personal Data about children under 13 years of age; if you are a child under the age of 13, please do not attempt to register for or otherwise use the Services or send us any Personal Data. Use of the Services may capture the physical presence of a child under the age of 13, but no Personal Data about the child is collected. If we learn we have collected Personal Data from a child under 13 years of age, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. (I don’t know that this is accurate. Do wehave to say we will delete the information or is there another way aroundthis)? If you believe that a child under 13 years of age may have provided Personal Data to us, please contact us at…”

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A short time after contacting Telly for comment, the company removed the section from its privacy policy.

In an email, Telly chief strategy officer Dallas Lawrence said an old draft of the privacy policy was uploaded by mistake.

“The questions raised in the document between our developer team and our privacy legal counsel appear a bit out of context. The issue raised was a two-part technical question related to timing and whether or not it was even possible for us to be in possession of this kind of data,” Lawrence said.

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Hmm, perhaps. You’ll recall that Telly was going to have a big screen, and “inescapable” ads that would scroll (we presume) along a smaller screen below that. To which reader/commenter starbird2005 observed “I wonder why someone wouldn’t just put some black paper over the second monitor. Then the ads play but you’ll never see them. Sort of reminds me of that CueCat scanner, which turned out to be a very handy barcode scanner when you hacked it.” Paper! The best hack.
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Skylight: forecast Golden Hour and Sunset

Here’s a clever twist on a photography app, from the makers of the iOS app Halide:

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Skylight uses atmospheric information to give you a forecast for evening light.

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So if you’re trying to catch that perfect sunset for your holiday pic, this will tell you what sort of sunset you’re going to get, plus the “Golden Hour” – the period when the light is loveliest before sunset.

You’ll go and look at them after you’ve taken them, right? Print them? Frame them?
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A photographer embraces the alien logic of AI • The New Yorker

Chris Wiley spoke to the (art) photographer Charlie Engman, who started playing around with Midjourney:

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“And then, one time, I randomly did make something that I was, like, This is maybe cooler than anything I’ve ever made. How did that happen?”

The image in question was of a pair of ginger-haired boys perched on a couch with what looks like a miniature horse. One boy is affectionately nuzzling the other’s face. There is a distant resemblance to Dorothea Tanning’s surrealistic scenes of people and their animals, perhaps, but on closer inspection Engman’s images reveal layers of A.I. oddities. One boy’s legs appear to be merging into the sofa, and his hands have too many fingers (an easy A.I. tell). The lower halves of the second boy and their equine companion both seem in the process of being swallowed up, like loose change, by a black hole between the couch cushions.

Engman continued to make variations on the “couch with a horse” theme, each one stranger than the next. Like the Midjourney program itself, which responds to prompts with batches of four images at a time, Engman as an A.I. artist is dizzyingly prolific. “The amazing thing about A.I. is that I can make, like, three hundred pictures a day,” he told me, “And every single one of them can be an entirely different set of characters, and new location, and new material. I’m not constrained by physical reality at all.”

Physical reality, of course, is something that A.I. is completely unfamiliar with, a fact that Engman exploits to his benefit. “There was a while where I really loved how it iterated bodies in space,” Engman told me, “I was, like, How does it understand how people sit in chairs? How does it understand how people hug each other?” One series of images he made shows contorted, malformed human figures sitting in and often merging with various chairs, like a freaky update of a series of hilarious photographs by the artist Bruno Munari titled “Seeking Comfort in an Uncomfortable Chair.” Another features groups of businesswomen amorously engaged with a motley collection of semi-humanoid inflatables. My favorite series shows groups of middle-aged suburbanites standing in parking lots kissing. Each configuration looks like a hybrid of an erotic-contact improv troupe and a swarm of feeding lampreys.

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Notable how uninterested he is in the copyright issue that has so many others freaking out. “We are all trained on, like, everything”, he says.
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In Norway, the electric vehicle future has already arrived • The New York Times

Jack Ewing:

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About 110 miles south of Oslo, along a highway lined with pine and birch trees, a shiny fueling station offers a glimpse of a future where electric vehicles rule.

Chargers far outnumber gasoline pumps at the service area operated by Circle K, a retail chain that got its start in Texas. During summer weekends, when Oslo residents flee to country cottages, the line to recharge sometimes backs up down the off-ramp.

Marit Bergsland, who works at the store, has had to learn how to help frustrated customers connect to chargers in addition to her regular duties flipping burgers and ringing up purchases of salty licorice, a popular treat. “Sometimes we have to give them a coffee to calm down,” she said.

Last year, 80% of new-car sales in Norway were electric, putting the country at the vanguard of the shift to battery-powered mobility. It has also turned Norway into an observatory for figuring out what the electric vehicle revolution might mean for the environment, workers and life in general. The country will end the sales of internal combustion engine cars in 2025.

Norway’s experience suggests that electric vehicles bring benefits without the dire consequences predicted by some critics. There are problems, of course, including unreliable chargers and long waits during periods of high demand. Auto dealers and retailers have had to adapt. The switch has reordered the auto industry, making Tesla the best-selling brand and marginalising established carmakers like Renault and Fiat.

But the air in Oslo, Norway’s capital, is measurably cleaner. The city is also quieter as noisier gasoline and diesel vehicles are scrapped. Oslo’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen 30% since 2009, yet there has not been mass unemployment among gas station workers and the electrical grid has not collapsed.

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The big losers? Car dealers. Of note from this story: Norwegian kindergarten children take their daytime nap outside, “weather permitting”. And Norway is a big fossil fuel exporter – an irony the Green Party there acknowledges.
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What would happen if the Succession fire played out in real life • Slate

Richard L. Hasen on the plotline in the latest episode of Succession, where a fire in a ballot counting station in Democratic-leaning Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is thought to tip the state Republican, thus handing (perhaps?) the election to a weird Trump-like figure:

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Wisconsin’s election statutes do not appear to speak to what would happen with the massive destruction of ballots on Election Day. Many states interpret vague election statutes to favor enfranchisement of the voter, but Wisconsin gives less protection for absentee ballots, as the key state Supreme Court justice in the 2020 case of Trump v. Biden explained. If the justices on the state Supreme Court divided along party lines, as is often (but not always) the case, thanks to the recent election of Janet Protasiewicz, the court likely would side with the left-leaning candidate and offer some kind of remedy. Doing so would prevent voter disenfranchisement. If the same scenario were to take place in a potential tipping-point state that had a more conservative-leaning state Supreme Court, such as North Carolina, however, it could go another way.

To carry on the hypothetical based on the premise of a divided state court with a pro-democracy lean, like in Wisconsin: Perhaps the state court would require a partial revote in Milwaukee, as was suggested by Shiv in the Succession episode and by Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, who consulted on the Succession episode. Woodall-Vogg explained that election officials would have records to know whose absentee ballots were destroyed in the fire.

But a revote may violate federal law, which requires that there be a uniform day on Election Day. (My former dean Erwin Chemerinsky unsuccessfully tried to get a revote in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000 after many voters were misled to vote for Pat Buchanan rather than Al Gore by the infamous butterfly ballot.)

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I’m glad he mentioned Bush-Gore, because that was an obvious example where vote counting was undermined and the courts were relied on to rule. America isn’t very good at this democracy game, if we’re honest about it.

(Don’t worry about this being a spoiler for the episode, because it’s much more about the interpersonal relationships.)
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Vice Media: from Murdoch money to bankruptcy in a decade • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

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Joseph Teasdale, head of tech on Enders Analysis’ media team, told Press Gazette the problem was “Vice never figured out a model at all”.

“Vice had a pitch – we know how to engage young people – but they never found a way to turn that pitch into a business,” Teasdale said. “They tried digital advertising, sponsored content, creative agency work, TV production, but continually missed revenue targets and never hit sustained profitability.”

Jim Bilton, managing director at Wessenden Marketing, drew attention to the role the tech platforms had in Vice’s financial downfall. “Despite some interesting and quite clever diversifications, the core business model is ad-driven, volume-driven and ultimately dependent on the big tech platforms to deliver audiences that Vice will never own themselves – the reverse of what the smarter legacy media companies are doing,” Bilton said. “The bottom line is that the better legacy media organisations are actually much more agile, smarter and multi-dimensional than the ‘one trick pony’ Vice. Trusted brands, audience-appropriate content, quality independent journalism, tight management and common-sense should/must win in the long-term!”

Teasdale added that Vice, in common with Buzzfeed, had believed that their online content businesses would scale in a manner similar to the software and platform successes of the last decade.

“You invest up front, and if you grow users enough, your revenues will eventually vastly outstrip your costs. But journalism is a lot more of a widgets business than people thought: if you want people to keep coming to your site, you need to keep making content, and so you need to keep spending money. A news business like Buzzfeed or Vice could never enjoy the kind of margins a platform business like Facebook can.”

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Pinball is making a comeback in the US as an older generation shows the younger ones the joy of flippers. CC-licensed photo by el-toroel-toro on Flickr.

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

I’m an ER doctor, here’s how I’m using ChatGP to help treat patients • Fast Company

Josh Tamayo-Sarver was trying to explain his treatment protocol to a patient’s family:

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“I know that you are concerned about your mom,” I tried explaining to them. “But she cannot breathe right now because she has pulmonary oedema, which is fluid in her lungs. If I hydrate her with IV [intravenous] fluids, it will make her pulmonary oedema worse and she might die. Once we have the fluid out of her lungs and breathing better, then we can worry about her being dehydrated.”

“But whenever she is sick, she just needs an IV because of dehydration,” the patient’s son insisted, adamant. “Why don’t you just give her some IV fluid? She will be better in no time.”

I tried to rephrase my explanation in multiple different ways, but judging by their blank expressions, none were resonating. This is actually a common situation in the ER. People do not wake up planning on an emergency that brings them to me in the dead of night, and are often in a decompensated emotional state.

To make matters worse, several other patients were in more immediate need of my attention. 

Desperate for a solution, I went down the hall to my computer, and fired up ChatGPT 4. Typing in:

“Explain why you would not give IV fluids to someone with severe pulmonary edema and respiratory distress even though you might be concerned that the patient is dehydrated. Explain it in simple and compassionate terms so that a confused person who cares about their mother can understand.”

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What ChatGPT produced looks almost exactly like what he told the family previously. But it seemed to persuade them. He describes its effectiveness as “like working with an incredibly brilliant, hard-working—and occasionally hungover—intern. That’s become my mental model for considering the usefulness of ChatGPT.”
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Santa Barbara County man who deliberately crashed airplane for YouTube video admits to obstructing federal investigation • United States Department of Justice

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A YouTuber pilot has agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge for obstructing a federal investigation by deliberately destroying the wreckage of an airplane that he intentionally crashed in Santa Barbara County to gain online views, the Justice Department announced today.

Trevor Daniel Jacob, 29, of Lompoc, agreed to plead guilty to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, a crime that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.

A plea agreement and a one-count information charging Jacob were filed Wednesday in United States District Court in Los Angeles. He is expected to make his initial court appearance in the coming weeks.

According to his plea agreement, Jacob is an experienced pilot and skydiver who had secured a sponsorship from a company that sold various products, including a wallet. Pursuant to the sponsorship deal, Jacob agreed to promote the company’s wallet in a YouTube video that he would post.

On November 24, 2021, Jacob took off in his airplane from Lompoc City Airport on a solo flight purportedly destined for Mammoth Lakes. Jacob did not intend to reach his destination, but instead planned to eject from his aircraft during the flight and video himself parachuting to the ground and his airplane as it descended and crashed, he admitted in the plea agreement

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Sentencing to come. The things people will do for advertising. Speaking of which..
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Telly giving away 500,000 free ad-supported 55-inch 4K TVs • Variety

Todd Spangler:

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Ilya Pozin made a bunch of money when Viacom bought Pluto TV, the free video-streaming company he co-founded, for $340m four years ago. Since exiting Pluto about a year after that deal closed, Pozin has been working on another startup venture — one he thinks will be a much bigger deal.

On Monday, Pozin’s brainchild, Telly, comes out of stealth after two years in development. Telly wants to ship out thousands (and eventually millions) of free 4K HDTVs, which would cost more than $1,000 at retail, according Pozin.

The 55in main screen is a regular TV panel, with three HDMI inputs and an over-the-air tuner, plus an integrated soundbar. The Telly TVs don’t actually run any streaming apps that let you access services like Netflix, Prime Video or Disney+; instead, they’re bundled with a free Chromecast with Google TV adapter.

What’s new and different: The unit has a 9in-high second screen, affixed to the bottom of the set, which is real estate Telly will use for displaying news, sports scores, weather or stocks, or even letting users play video games. And, critically, Telly’s second screen features a dedicated space on the right-hand side that will display advertising — ads you can’t skip past and ads that stay on the screen the whole time you’re watching TV… and even when you’re not.

…When you sign up through the company’s app, Telly will ask for specific demographic, TV-viewing and lifestyle info, which the company will use to target addressable ads to individual households. The TVs also have a built-in sensor that can detect the number of people who are watching at any particular time. Pozin emphasized that all of Telly’s features comply with privacy regulations.

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Here’s the puzzle. Obviously, it will insist that the second screen is online, or else the TV can be repossessed. But what form will those ads take? Video with sound is the most valuable, but you can’t have those at the same time as content with sound on the main screen. Someone watching a movie will find a parade of bright ads underneath pretty unbearable. I’d suggest. “Free hardware for ads” hardly ever works.
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Pinball is booming in America, thanks to nostalgia and canny marketing • The Economist

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Twenty years ago, pinball seemed to be circling the drain. In the 1980s and 1990s video games stole market share from the mechanical sort, and home games-consoles stole market share from arcades. By 2000 WMS, the Chicago-based maker of the Bally and Williams brands of pinball machines, then the biggest manufacturer, closed its loss-making pinball division to focus on selling slot machines. Yet today, pinball is thriving again, both at places like Logan Arcade [in Chicago] and in people’s homes.

Sales of new machines have risen by 15-20% every year since 2008, says Zach Sharpe, of Stern Pinball, which after wms closed became the last remaining major maker. “We have not looked back,” he says. Next year the firm is moving to a new factory, twice the size of its current one, in the north-west suburbs of Chicago. Sales of used machines are more buoyant still—some favourites, such as Stern’s Game of Thrones-themed game, can fetch prices well into five figures. Josh Sharpe, Zach’s brother and president of the International Flipper Pinball Association, says that last year the ifpa approved 8,300 “official” tournaments, a four-fold increase on 2014.

What is driving the boom? Much of it is nostalgia. A generation raised on pinball in arcades in the 1980s and 1990s are now at an age where they have disposable income, and kids with whom they want to play the games they played as children. Marty Friedman, who runs an arcade in Manchester, a tourist town in southern Vermont, says that he and his wife opened their business after he realised it would allow him to indulge his hobby. “I compiled a list of the games I felt were essential to a collection you would deem museum-worthy,” he said, and went about acquiring them. But canny marketing is also drawing in fresh blood. Newer Stern machines are now connected to the internet, so players can log in and have their scores uploaded to an online profile. Both Sharpes suggest that the mechanical nature of the games appeals to people bored with purely screen-based play.

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I’ve always preferred pinball over any screen-based game, because it is about manipulating real objects, and there’s real skill involved. Good players are amazing to watch.
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Life inside the South African gangs risking everything for copper • Financial Times

Monica Mark:

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Copper was the new gold, as far as their gang was concerned, and anywhere it could be found was fair plunder. Theoretically, the sale and export of scrap copper is carefully controlled by South African officials. But the properties that make it the world’s third most-used metal also make copper a smuggler’s dream. Malleable and recyclable, it is easily melted down, after which its origin becomes virtually untraceable. It was February 2021 and prices had hit a 10-year high, reaching $9,000 a tonne on international markets. Any number of unscrupulous dealers would buy the coveted metal, then resell it in South Africa or, more likely, help smuggle it to booming markets in China and India.

That made a ragtag group of izinyoka the first link in a lucrative supply chain ultimately controlled by international syndicates. They were connected and feared enough that they’d never yet had to shoot anyone with their 9mm semi-automatic pistols. A warning volley fired into the air when they arrived on a job was enough to clear the premises. This heist was so routine that their group had deemed only three of their dozens of members were necessary.

Sausages was in charge. The portly commander had informants in every location worth robbing, and he’d already paid off the security guards. He had then summoned Mafia, whose nyaope addiction meant he took on jobs with a zeal bordering on ruthlessness. “That guy was smoking every day. That’s why, every day, he had to steal cables, to buy more,” recalled the third gang member, a skinny, softly spoken man known as TwoSix.

It was Mafia who once scaled a 27-metre-high electric pylon to cut live wires. But, in their time working together, they had all hacked down telephone poles, dug up underground cables and broken into industrial plants. Train stations were a favourite target. By the end of that year, izinyoka had ripped out more than 1,000 kilometres of overhead cable from Transnet, the state-owned freight rail operator, prompting it to contemplate switching from hybrid electric locomotives to diesel-only models that don’t require cabling.

In January, the consequences of industrial-scale theft in South Africa included: three security guards killed during heists; three hospitals scaling back operations because stolen copper plumbing hampers their ability to pipe oxygen to intensive care units; trains cancelled due to stolen signalling cable or track sleepers; parts of the city going without electricity for days after thieves toppled pylons.

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Amazing piece of reporting. Well worth it if you have the subscription, or can find non-paywalled access.
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Cat and dog torture videos litter Twitter, adding to concerns about moderation • NBC News

Ben Collins:

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Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.

One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content.

Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video. “There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying. Clemens said she then went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.”

Clemens said that she clicked on the suggested search term and a gruesome video of what appeared to be a kitten being killed inside of a blender appeared instantly. For users who have not manually turned off autoplay, the video will begin rolling instantly. NBC News was able to replicate the same process to surface the video on Wednesday.

Clemens said she is grateful her child asked her about the video instead of simply going on Twitter and typing in the word “cat” by himself. “I’m glad that my child has talked to me, but there must be lots of parents whose kids just look it up,” she said.

The spread of the video as well as its presence in Twitter’s suggested searches is part of a worrying trend of animal cruelty videos that have littered the social media platform following Elon Musk’s takeover, which included mass layoffs and deep cuts to the company’s content moderation and safety teams.

Last weekend, gory videos from two violent events in Texas spread on Twitter, with some users saying that the images had been pushed into the platform’s algorithmic “For You” feed.

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Which is why, among other reasons, you should never, ever, click on the “For You” tab. On the topic of moderation, meanwhile…
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Moderator Mayhem: a mobile game to see how well *you* can handle content moderation • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

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So much of the discussion lately around content moderation and trust & safety doesn’t come from a place of any kind of actual experience with moderating content and understanding the competing pressures, both internal and external, towards allowing free speech, protecting user safety, and complying with various laws and other factors.

A friend of mine in the trust & safety world once suggested that these conversations would be a lot more useful if everyone had to spend a few days moderating an actual community, and could learn how content moderation is not about “suppressing viewpoints,” but almost always about understanding really complex scenarios in which you have to make decisions in a very limited period of time, with limited information, and where there may not be any “right” answer.

Enter: Moderator Mayhem. It’s a browser-based mobile game, and you will learn that you have to make your moderation decisions by swiping left (take down) or right (keep up), and try to align content with the policies of the company (a fictional review site called TrustHive). Of course, users of your site may not like your decisions. They might appeal the decisions, and you might realize you missed some important context (or not!). Your manager might disagree with your decisions, and might not think you’re suited for the job. Your CEO might have his own views on how your moderation is going. So might the media.

And, of course, you don’t have much time to make your decisions, as the stack of flagged content you’re expected to review will keep growing and growing. Often, it would be helpful for you to investigate the more detailed context, and you can do that within the game, but it takes precious time. Sometimes you’ll learn something useful… but sometimes you won’t.

Also, there’s often no “correct” answer, so the game won’t tell you if you got something “right” or “wrong” because often there is no right or wrong. Your manager might tell you they disagree with your decision, or might not. But at the end of each session you’ll get a general update on how your manager thinks you’re doing in accurately applying company policy, and you’ll get a sense of your job security. Mess up too often and you may be looking for a new job. Apply the policy well enough, and maybe you can get promoted.

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Being promoted out of the moderation division seems like the point. “Enjoy” seems like the wrong salutation for this.
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Scoop: Forbes takeover bid gives cover for foreign funding • Axios

Sara Fischer:

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Forbes agreed to sell itself in a deal that makes it look like the iconic magazine brand is staying in American hands. But two sources familiar with the deal tell Axios the takeover may actually be substantially paid for by foreign investors.

The deal structure has the effect of obfuscating how much money foreign groups may put in, which could help alleviate any regulatory concerns.

Forbes was ready to sell to the group of mostly foreign investors in March. But management feared regulatory pushback and pivoted, Axios previously reported. Forbes also faced public criticism over the involvement of Indian investment firm Sun Group, which has had ties to Russia.

Forbes on Friday quietly confirmed that Austin Russell, the 28-year-old American CEO of electric vehicle tech company Luminar Technologies, will acquire an 82% stake in the iconic media brand at an $800m valuation.

But Forbes and Russell didn’t disclose how he would finance the roughly $656m needed to foot his stake.

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“Youngest self-made billionaire” (a title previously held by Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, I think) Russell isn’t really committing a lot of his own money in this. It looks very peculiar.
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EU approves Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Alex Hern:

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The EU has approved Microsoft’s $69bn (£55bn) acquisition of the Call of Duty creator Activision Blizzard, in a move that drew immediate pushback from its UK counterpart, which has already blocked the gaming mega-deal.

The EU accepted Microsoft’s concessions on cloud gaming, the same problem that led the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to block the transaction last month.

The proposed deal aims to bring together Microsoft, the maker of the Xbox console, with the video game developer whose hit titles also include World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Candy Crush Saga and Overwatch.

The approval by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, will revive Microsoft’s hopes for the deal as it prepares to appeal against the CMA’s decision. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US has also come out against the takeover and is suing to block it.

The commission’s preliminary investigation had found that the deal could harm competition in cloud gaming, which allows users to stream video games stored on remote servers on to their devices, and in the supply of rival PC operating systems. It was concerned that if gamers could stream Call of Duty only via a Windows-exclusive streaming service then they may be less likely to switch to other operating systems such as Mac OS or Linux.

However, the commission said on Monday it had accepted Microsoft’s proposed remedies. The compromise involves Microsoft offering free licences over a 10-year period allowing European consumers who purchase Activision PC and console games to stream them on other cloud gaming services.

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Nils Pratley, a Guardian finance columnist, is unimpressed by Microsoft’s posturing. The CMA’s objection feels like a reasonable one: Microsoft’s promises now might be meaningless in the context of the future shape of the market.
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The eyes have it • Event Photography London

Paul Clarke, again, with the followup he wrote in February 2020 to his previous post about Parliamentary photos when the new crop, from December 2019, arrived:

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As any photographer will know; as any creative will know – no, as any human with any empathy will know – it’s pretty horrible to see your work criticised. And I stress again that although it’s a perennial temptation to blame the person who presses the shutter for the results, with a project like this there are a lot of hands and eyes involved. The moment of capture is one thing; the design, set-up, handling of the portrait’s subject, editing and the sign-off for public release involve many more people.

And in this official portrait of the 158th Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle is wearing his office pass on a lanyard round his neck. A bright, green, stripy lanyard at that.

There are few cast-iron rules of corporate photography, but it’s nearly universally accepted that taking off ‘clutter’ is a good idea. And asking subjects to remove their security passes is just what you do. Immediately.

Perhaps he didn’t want to? Perhaps he refused point blank and threatened to make a scene. Unlikely – but even when something like this happens (and it’s happened to me) there are ways in. “Can we ensure consistency across all Members please sir?” and “It’s not generally good security practice to include pictures of passes in public photos” (though they did at least blur out the detail in the edit) are good lines to take.

Or even, “Very glad to see you keeping up standards sir by adopting full morning dress in contrast to the oh-so-cheeky ways of that scamp who preceded you, but I suspect that not in Erskine May nor in any other manual of Parliamentary procedure will you find reference to a necklace that looks to be modelled on that famous chewable sweet, the Pacer, lamented lost child of 1970s confectionery that it is. Would you mind slipping it off for ten seconds while we do the picture? Sir.”

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Once seen…
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Kuo: Apple ‘well prepared’ for headset announcement next month • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

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In a brief report posted to Medium on Monday, Kuo wrote that the headset’s announcement next month “bodes well” for the supply chain share price, with the analyst touching on five of the device’s components that – apart from assembly – represent its “most expensive material costs” in his view.

Those include the 4K micro-OLED displays, dual M2-based processors, the headset casing, 12 optical cameras for tracking hand movements, and the external power supply. These components are being supplied by Sony, TSMC, Everwin Precision, Cowell, and Goretek, respectively.

Pricing on the headset is expected to begin somewhere around $3,000. Perhaps with that in mind, Apple won’t aim it at general consumers to start with, but will instead position it as a device for developers, content creators, and professionals. Apple expects to sell just one headset per day per retail store, and it has told suppliers that it expects sales of seven to 10 million units during the first year of availability.

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One headset per day per retail store? Apple has more than 500 stores worldwide. One per store per day is ~15,000 per month, or 180,000 per year. That’s a long way even from a million. So the expectation is for most people to buy it without trying it? Even at $1,500 you’d need some dramatic use cases.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How did Salvador Dali become the most faked artist? By producing too much “art”, it seems. CC-licensed photo by cea. 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. I’m melting! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google Bard hits over 180 countries and territories—none are in the EU • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

On Wednesday, Google detailed the evolution of its Bard conversational AI assistant, including PaLM 2 and expanded availability. The list of 180 supported countries and territories excludes Canada and all of the European Union’s (EU) 27 member states. As the world grapples with how to juggle the explosive growth of generative AI chatbots alongside user privacy, there’s suspicion that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is at the center of the omission.

Google’s I/O event this week included flashy announcements around AI developments and expanding Bard access with added Japanese and Korean language support. However, some people quickly noticed that EU countries and The Great White North were not part of the news. This could change, as Google’s support page says the company will “gradually expand to more countries and territories in a way that is consistent with local regulations and our AI principles.”

In the meantime, Google hasn’t explained why it’s not yet bringing Bard to the EU, Canada, or any other excluded geography. However, the EU features more stringent data protection and user privacy policies than Google’s homeland. And the EU’s AI regulatory landscape is on the brink of transformation.

…Italy has rather active privacy regulators and was one of the first countries to restrict access to an AI like [rival OpenAI’s] ChatGPT. When announcing its temporary ban in April, the Italian government said ChatGPT had to comply with measures around “transparency, the right of data subjects—including users and non-users—and the legal basis of the processing for algorithmic training relying on users’ data.”

OpenAI eventually complied with measures like sharing an online form that lets users opt out and delete data from ChatGPT’s training algorithms. OpenAI also checks Italian users’ birth dates upon signup to ensure they’re either 18 or older or have parental permission. Further, OpenAI said it would try to educate users about ChatGPT through a publicity campaign with details like how users can decline to share data.

By not releasing Bard in the EU, Google can avoid jumping through similar hoops OpenAI faced to retain availability in Italy.

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AI is speeding up astronomical discoveries • Gizmodo

Chris Impey:

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Astronomers working on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, use radio telescopes to look for signals from distant civilizations. Early on, radio astronomers scanned charts by eye to look for anomalies that couldn’t be explained. More recently, researchers harnessed 150,000 personal computers and 1.8 million citizen scientists to look for artificial radio signals. Now, researchers are using AI to sift through reams of data much more quickly and thoroughly than people can. This has allowed SETI efforts to cover more ground while also greatly reducing the number of false positive signals.

Another example is the search for exoplanets. Astronomers discovered most of the 5,300 known exoplanets by measuring a dip in the amount of light coming from a star when a planet passes in front of it. AI tools can now pick out the signs of an exoplanet with 96% accuracy.

AI has proved itself to be excellent at identifying known objects – like galaxies or exoplanets – that astronomers tell it to look for. But it is also quite powerful at finding objects or phenomena that are theorized but have not yet been discovered in the real world.

Teams have used this approach to detect new exoplanets, learn about the ancestral stars that led to the formation and growth of the Milky Way, and predict the signatures of new types of gravitational waves.

To do this, astronomers first use AI to convert theoretical models into observational signatures – including realistic levels of noise. They then use machine learning to sharpen the ability of AI to detect the predicted phenomena.

Finally, radio astronomers have also been using AI algorithms to sift through signals that don’t correspond to known phenomena. Recently a team from South Africa found a unique object that may be a remnant of the explosive merging of two supermassive black holes. If this proves to be true, the data will allow a new test of general relativity – Albert Einstein’s description of space-time.

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Why Salvador Dalí is the most faked artist in the world

Mark Dent:

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By the 1950s and 1960s, it was clear the demand for Dalí’s work exceeded the supply.

So Dalí, Gala, and others in Dalí’s inner circle devised a solution: prints. Lithographs and etchings took less time to finish than paintings and could be reproduced as limited series.

There were two categories of Dalí prints:
• Fully original: Dalí created the images himself on a printing plate and signed a limited series of prints. Originals sold for up to $3.5k
• Legitimate prints: Some limited-edition lithographs were made by licensed publishers copying a watercolor of Dalí. These were not technically original, although they were marketed as such and approved and signed by Dalí. They could sell for nearly as much as the fully original prints.

Dalí ensured a steady flow of prints by signing his name on thousands of blank sheets of paper before he knew what would be printed on them. (The signature was worth ~$40 on its own.) Members of his inner circle, some of whom exploited Dalí for profit, once told the Wall Street Journal Dalí would sign blank sheets “every two seconds for an hour without stopping.”

The prints, the signatures, and the commercial contracts kept the dollars rolling in. Beyond, the magazine of the St. Regis Hotel, noted Dalí was as much “high finance” as he was “high art.”

But in the 1970s, the artist’s health declined, and he became a recluse for the next decade. Dalí stopped creating prints. He stopped signing his name. And yet, in a stroke of real-life surrealism, the world, and especially the US, was about to see more art attributed to Dalí than ever before.

At the Center Art Galleries in Honolulu, John Proctor’s job was to shadow visitors in the showroom. When they looked at Lincoln in Dalívision, he began his sales pitch, handing them a fact sheet revealing reported increases in value for Dalí’s art and setting them up with a “closer” to convince the visitors to spend as much as $11.5k for the print — enough, at the time, for a down payment on the median US home.

“It was easy to sell art to the tourists,” Proctor told The Honolulu Advertiser in 1980. “Once you tell them they’re going to make money, they get hot for the stuff.”

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Guess what happened next. The problem of provenance will never go away.
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Twitter’s encrypted DMs are deeply inferior to Signal and WhatsApp • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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the company appears to have stopped short of calling the feature “end-to-end” encrypted, the term that would mean only users on the two ends of conversations can read messages, rather than hackers, government agencies that can eavesdrop on those messages, or even Twitter itself.

“As Elon Musk said, when it comes to Direct Messages, the standard should be, if someone puts a gun to our heads, we still can’t access your messages,” the help desk page reads. “We’re not quite there yet, but we’re working on it.”

In fact, the description of Twitter’s encrypted messaging feature that follows that initial caveat seems almost like a laundry list of the most serious flaws in every existing end-to-end encrypted messaging app, now all combined into one product—along with a few extra flaws that are all its own.

The encryption feature is opt-in, for instance, not turned on by default, a decision for which Facebook Messenger has received criticism. It explicitly doesn’t prevent “man-in-the-middle” attacks that would allow Twitter to invisibly spoof users’ identities and intercept messages, long considered the most serious flaw in Apple’s iMessage encryption. It doesn’t have the “perfect forward secrecy” feature that makes spying on users harder even after a device is temporarily compromised. It doesn’t allow for group messaging or even sending photos or videos. And perhaps most seriously, it currently restricts this subpar encrypted messaging system to only the verified users messaging each other—most of whom must pay $8 a month—vastly limiting the network that might use it.

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It’s the latter point which is so strange. Why offer encryption – something which is table stakes (or assumed) in so many other networks – but only for people who pay for it?
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Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over • The Verge

David Pierce:

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Adopting Google’s strange new version of the web resulted in an irresistible flood of traffic for publishers at first: using AMP increased search traffic to one major national magazine’s site by 20%, according to the executive who oversaw the implementation.

But AMP came with huge tradeoffs, most notably around how all those webpages were monetized. AMP made it harder to use ad tech that didn’t come from Google, fraying the relationship between Google and the media so badly that AMP became a key component in an antitrust lawsuit filed just five years after its launch in 2020 by 17 state attorneys general, accusing Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly on the advertising industry. The states argue that Google designed AMP in part to thwart publishers from using alternative ad tools — tools that would have generated more money for publishers and less for Google. Another lawsuit, filed in January 2023 by the US Justice Department, went even further, alleging that Google envisioned AMP as “an effort to push parts of the open web into a Google-controlled walled garden, one where Google could dictate more directly how digital advertising space could be sold.”

Here in 2023, AMP seems to have faded away. Most publishers have started dropping support, and even Google doesn’t seem to care much anymore. The rise of ChatGPT and other AI services pose a much more direct threat to its search business than Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News ever did. But the media industry is still dependent on Google’s firehose of traffic, and as the company searches for its next move, the story of how it ruthlessly used AMP in an attempt to control the very structure and business of the web makes clear exactly how far it will go to preserve its business — and how powerless the web may be to stop it.

AMP succeeded spectacularly. Then it failed. And to anyone looking for a reason not to trust the biggest company on the internet, AMP’s story contains all the evidence you’ll ever need.

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Great piece of reporting.
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Apple M3 chip, Mac specifications and features: CPU, GPU and RAM increase details • Bloomberg

Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter:

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Apple finally brings Final Cut Pro and Logic to the iPad. After a couple years of development, Apple is bringing two of its core pro apps to the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. The user interface of Final Cut Pro is designed to be touch-first (it works with a trackpad on a Magic Keyboard or similar device) and appears perfect for in-field edits or for high-end content creators. But, of course, it’s not going to replace the full functionality of Final Cut Pro on a Mac. In fact, it’s probably closer to iMovie back in the day, when it was actually functional. 

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Yup, fine, sure, except that you can’t round-trip on Final Cut Pro – ie you can’t upload a project from your Mac to the iPad, edit it a bit, and then transfer it back to the Mac. You can only send it from the iPad to the Mac, probably (the ATP folk speculate) due to RAM restrictions. So it’s absolutely not perfect for high-end content creators.

Moving on..

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Now, here’s the angle that I am really interested in: how Apple may be adapting Final Cut Pro and Logic to its upcoming mixed-reality headset. I’m told that the headset will have a content-creation focus and that its user interface, which relies on hand and eye control, could be precise enough to handle apps like Final Cut. On top of that, the device is supposed to work with any iPadOS app out of the box. That makes it seem likely that the new apps will run on the headset.

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Good grief. Seriously? You think people are going to try to edit video or sound in a headset? This is like the Wall Street analyst who was convinced for years that Apple was going to produce a TV, and was eternally disappointed. More and more I hope Apple doesn’t release a headset, just to see how the amount of copium required.
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The mother of all photoshoots • Event Photography London

Paul Clarke, who back in 2019 looked at the new set of House of Commons photos of MPs and, as a professional photographer, had a few thoughts:

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Did you ever look at a black and white version of your face and think – “oh, that’s so much nicer!”? There are a few reasons why this can happen, but one of them is that black and white is a quick way to create a distance from reality. Given the, er, complex relationship most of us have with our own image, having a bit of room to see ourselves abstracted can often help us accept, or even enjoy, the result. With this portrait set, I think there’s been a deliberate choice to ‘cool down’ the images – shifting the colour palette down to the blue end of the spectrum. It’s what makes these pictures look a little ‘blue’ or ‘cold’ overall. It really helps to give them a distinctive look, but it also helps to make them just a little bit unreal – at least in tone.

They are, however, ruthlessly real in other aspects. They are, as far as I can judge, unretouched. We’re in really interesting territory here in terms of what we mean by the ‘truth’ of a portrait. Whether Cromwell actually used the words “warts and all” to his portrait artist Sir Peter Lely, is unknown. But we all recognise the sentiment. The role of the portrait painter was to convey an artistic impression – very possibly a flattering one – of the subject. But the role of the photographer? Well, within the world of PR photography, not all that different. But in the world of journalism? Very. A little adjustment of colour, brightness and contrast, maybe, but no retouching as such.

So are these photos to be seen as PR work, or journalism? In a sense they fall between the two stools. They are not a “news story” (although they did become one) nor are they an exercise in image management. The project team have come down firmly on the side of the journalists – unairbrushed reality. If the subject has a bit of a sweat on, it’s in. A pimple or a wart? Same. A few flakes of dandruff or a stray hair on their collar? You get the picture. It’s really easy to see the sort of problems a project like this might run into if it were seen to have manipulated the photos to flatter. But it shows the weight of the decisions that were involved.

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Paul pointed me to this post of his after the discussion last week about “what is a photo?” In this post he does a little “work” on the photos. His rates are very reasonable, I understand.
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BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the casualties of the traffic wars • The New Yorker

Nathan Heller reviews Traffic, the new book by Ben Smith (ex-Buzzfeed News); Heller worked at a webzine at that time, and this coda to his review sums up the problem faced by media today aptly:

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At the online magazine where I worked, the measure of success in traffic-seeking kept changing. The goal was at first to maximize the number of unique page views by publishing more material.

Then instructions came down that what mattered was not volume but authority (other reliable sites linking to us), and we were instructed to reach out to eminent bloggers to promote our wares. After some months of this, it was decided that, in fact, the most valuable measure of traffic was engagement (how long readers spent reading our articles); our brief was to do work that was longer, better, and nearer the headlines of the day. When that approach, too, generated insufficient revenue, volume was summoned as the solution once again.

The media business has since made at least one more complete turn on this traffic roundabout in the hope of stabilizing its future. (The line is usually that the last model “isn’t how the Web works.”) And the will to traffic is now everywhere: on your phone, in your ears, on your screen.

In dreamy moods, I sometimes fantasize about journalism dropping out of the game—not chasing traffic, not following this year’s wisdom, not offering audiences everything they could possibly want in hastiest form. Imagine producing as little as you could as best you could: it would be there Monday, when the week began, and there Friday, the tree standing after the storm. And imagine the audience’s pleasure at finding it, tall and expansive and waiting for a sunny day. In an age of traffic, such deliberateness could be radical. It could be, I think, the next big thing.

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Can Linda Yaccorino keep Elon Musk on a tight enough leash to succeed? • Fortune

Kylie Robison:

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Sources describe Yaccarino as a “tough,” traditional Italian, “Long Island lady” who can both inspire and terrify the people who work for her. She has an identical twin, who’s a nurse.

Her fearless attitude in the male-dominated ad business is undoubtedly one of her biggest strengths, and could be an important part of her professional relationship with Musk. She’s capable of playing the long game, said a source, describing her rise at NBC: “She came in knowing that she was going to run the whole thing, but she started with cable and she took over broadcast.” Two sources also told Fortune she’s a sharp negotiator, which will help her when it comes to crafting a smart employment contract with Musk.

“She stood up to a lot of misogyny. She stood up to a lot of men,“ the source recalled during her time working with Yaccarino. “There’s nothing demure about her.”

Her values are well documented, too. She’s a devoted Catholic and staunch Republican. When former president Donald Trump was elected to office, Yaccarino attended his inauguration, one source told Fortune. Then, in 2018, Trump appointed Yaccarino to serve a two-year term on the President’s Council on Sport, Fitness and Nutrition, alongside big names like New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and Incredible Hulk star Lou Ferrigno, Adweek reported. One source said she joined “just to get near Trump.” 

Some have speculated that Musk chose Yaccarino because their political values aligned. Yet, according to Lou Paskalis, CEO of the marketing consultancy firm AJL Advisory, and a client of Yaccarino’s for 35 years, Yaccarino always kept her political views “fairly private.” That sensibility could provide the needed counterweight to Musk’s tendencies, Paskalis reckoned: ”She’ll probably be able to temper [Musk’s] enthusiasm for extreme commentary, but introduce more balance.”

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She kept her politics “fairly private” but attended Trump’s inauguration? And what’s the relevance of her twin being a nurse? (None, it’s just a fact dump.) What’s clear is that she’s been brought in to bring back the advertisers. She won’t be a CEO. Musk will decide what the network looks like; she’ll be in charge of filling in the white spaces where the ads should be.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified