If you’re planning to film indoors, consider whether there are fluorescent lights. It could make a big difference to the result. CC-licensed photo by Tom Page 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. Still a bit windswept. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency • BBC News

Leo Sands, Catrin Nye, Divya Talwar and Benjamin Lister:

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Gemma Brett, a 27-year-old designer from west London, had only been working at Madbird for two weeks when she spotted something strange. Curious about what her commute would be like when the pandemic was over, she searched for the company’s office address. The result looked nothing like the videos on Madbird’s website of a sleek workspace buzzing with creative-types. Instead, Google Street View showed an upmarket block of flats in London’s Kensington.

Gemma contacted an estate agent with a listing at the same address who confirmed her suspicion – the building was purely residential. We later corroborated this by speaking to someone who’d worked in the building for years. They had never seen Ali Ayad. The block of flats was not the global headquarters of a design firm called Madbird.

Gemma shared her discovery with another Madbird employee she had got to know and trust – Antonia Stuart, who was leading the company’s expansion into Dubai.

Using online reverse image searches they dug deeper. They found that almost all the work Madbird claimed as its own had been stolen from elsewhere on the internet – and that some of the colleagues they’d been messaging online didn’t exist.

They thought about their options. One was to leave quietly without causing a stir. They had no idea who was behind this con, or the scale of it. They were scared. On the other hand, they worried if the truth wasn’t exposed innocent staff could end up in trouble if they completed deals for Madbird based on lies. Deals were just days away.

In the end, they decided to send an all-staff email from an alias – Jane Smith.

«

Terrific piece of work. It’s also a TV show on BBC3. And raises the question: how do you know your job is real?
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I was wrong, we need crypto • Hey.com

David Heinemeier Hansson:

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First the Ottawa police department got GoFundMe to confiscate donations with the intention of redirecting them to other causes [this is not true – Overspill Ed], then after an outcry, they backed down to merely blocking the money for 7-10 days before refunding. That seemed like a draconian escalation completely at odds with the tens of millions of dollars raised for social justice causes during the protest summer of 2020. But at the time, I thought it was something another fund-raising platform – one less likely to collaborate with the Canadian authorities – could route around. And GiveSendGo indeed started doing just that.

Turns out the concern over the donations was quickly rendered insignificant, as just a few days later, the Canadian prime minister imposed martial law on the protestors. Through powers intended for catastrophic events, he took to freeze the bank accounts of both Canadian protestors and donors, to compulsorily demand that tow-truck operators clear the streets, and forced insurance companies to drop policies for the protestors.

That “worked”. Together with police storming the protests with pepper spray and stun grenades, the area in front of parliament was cleared. But even that wasn’t enough. Even with the protests cleared out, the police vowed to press their new financial powers against anyone involved for months to come.

«

So wrong, in so many ways. Canada is nearly the most vaccinated country in the world. The protesters are a foreign-funded unpopular minority who have been indulged while they disrupt daily life. That’s not political protest; it verges on insurrection.

More to the point. Hansson hasn’t considered that even if the protesters were being paid in bitcoin (etc), they’d still need to convert it to dollars. Guess what? That goes through money laundering checks, ie banks. (The Canadian government has flagged 253 bitcoin addresses as part of its investigations of foreign funding.) And you can’t buy fuel, or other things, with cryptocurrency. Maybe a blessing.
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COVID-19 genetic risk variant we inherited from Neanderthals • Medical Express

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In the autumn of 2020, Hugo Zeberg at Karolinska Institutet and MPI-EVA [Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology] and Svante Pääbo at MPI-EVA showed that we inherited the major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 from Neanderthals.

In the spring of 2021, the same researcher duo studied this variant in ancient human DNA and observed that its frequency has increased significantly since the last ice age. In fact, it has become unexpectedly common for a genetic variant inherited from Neanderthals. Hence, it may have had a favourable impact on its carriers in the past.

“This major genetic risk factor for COVID-19 is so common that I started wondering whether it might actually be good for something, such as providing protection against another infectious disease,” says Hugo Zeberg, who is the sole author of the new study in PNAS.

«

See if you can guess what the other infectious disease – which predates Covid by quite some time – is before you click through.
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Apple Stores employees make effort to unionise • The Washington Post

Reed Albergotti:

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Before officially filing, Apple Store organizers have been informally gauging interest among the staff, hoping that more than half of the employees will vote to unionize, people familiar with the matter say, the threshold needed to gain official legal standing with the NLRB.

In at least one case, store employees hoped to gain at least 80% support before officially filing to form a union. That’s because the organizers expect that Apple will try to convince employees to vote against the union.

To avoid detection by managers at the stores, employees have been meeting in secret and communicating with encrypted messaging, sometimes using Android phones, the competitor to Apple’s iOS operating system, to avoid any possible snooping by Apple.

Apple Store employees at one store said managers have already begun pulling employees aside and giving speeches about how unions will hurt employees, lower their wages and force Apple to take away benefits and opportunities, such as the “career experience” that Herbst described. Managers try to eavesdrop on employees, they said, while pretending to do something else.

«

It’s probably better for workers to be in a union than not, but I’m interested in the “sometimes using Android phones” bit. If these people work in the Apple Stores they can’t possibly think that Apple is spying on their phones, unless they have phones provided by Apple which has MDM (mobile device management) software on it. If so, OK, there’s a tenuous possibility. But a personal iPhone running WhatsApp or Signal is going to be secure: your messages won’t leak. Are they using Android phones because those are their personal phones? Or, just possibly, the Android phones are PAYG – in effect “burners” so the phone number isn’t listed as a named contact on others’ phones, to show who’s organising if the phone somehow gets compromised? (Quite paranoid thinking now.)

I like the thing about managers eavesdropping. Everyone eavesdrops. It’s just sometimes you’re more paranoid about it.
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The people of the metaverse • ROUGH TYPE

Nick Carr:

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It’s revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didn’t talk about “authenticity” as we do today. They didn’t have to. They understood, implicitly, that there was something solid behind whatever show they might put on for public consumption. The show was not everything. The anxiety of the deep fake had not yet taken hold of the subconscious. The reason we talk so much about authenticity now is because authenticity is no longer available to us. At best, we simulate authenticity: we imbue our deep fakeness with the qualities that people associate with the authentic. We assemble a self that fits the pattern of authenticity, and the ever-present audience applauds the pattern as “authentic.” The likes roll in, the views accumulate. Our production is validated. If we’re lucky, we rise to the level of influencer. What is an influencer but the perfection of the deep-fake self?

I know, I know. You disagree. You reject my argument. You rebel against my “reductionist” speculations. You think I’m nuts. I can almost hear you screaming, “I am not a deep fake! I am a human being!” But that’s what you would think, and that’s what you would scream. After all, you have created for yourself a deep fake that believes, above all else, that it is real.

The metaverse may not yet have arrived, but we are prepared for it. We are, already, the people of the metaverse.

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The internet is Tokyo • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick, in a joint post with Josh Kramer’s “New Public” newsletter, noting how a leakd Facebook document suggests there’s more use of Facebook Groups in rural areas than urban ones:

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We can only speculate, but why might rural folks use Facebook Groups more? If they’re like my wife’s Boomer aunt, they just want a place to talk about their interests (in her case, two elderly pugs named Thelma and Louise). Perhaps, because rural America is more conservative, this finding actually means that conservative users are more active in Groups. Or, maybe users in cities just have more options, and are using apps like Nextdoor instead.

But here’s my favorite theory, as expressed by a Facebook staffer with their name blacked out: “My hypothesis is that people in cities have compelling offline alternatives to whatever value FB Groups provide. But that seems a bit simplistic.” Actually, anonymous staffer, it suggests something really complicated — that population density is a factor affecting behavior on social platforms. This is fascinating to think about, and central to our mission at New_ Public.

Offline, density can manifest in rich, varied experiences that make cities worth living in. Our Co-director, Eli Pariser, previously of MoveOn and Upworthy, explained in WIRED why he loves living in crazy dense New York City, near Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn:

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The park serves as an early-morning romper room, midday meeting point, festival ground, and farm stand. There are house-music dance parties, soccer games during which you can hear cursing in at least five languages, and, of course, the world-famous Great Pupkin Halloween Dog Costume Contest. In short, the park allows very different people to gather, see each other, and coexist in the same space. When it’s all working, Fort Greene Park can feel like an ode to pluralistic democracy itself.

«

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Pariser, of course, is famous as the author of The Filter Bubble. The idea that population density (or lack of it) leads to different behaviour on social networks is probably overlooked, but it’s been emerging from academic research for some years.
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The myth of tech exceptionalism • Noema

Yäel Eisenstat and Nils Gilman:

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All business leaders dislike being regulated (who likes rules?), but many tech leaders believe “tech” is fundamentally different from “mature” industries, like those that create chemicals or cars, whose goods and harms are eventually well understood and therefore regulatable. Tech’s identity, on the other hand, was defined around the constant creation of the radically new or the disruption of the outdated, for which the proper regulatory framework could not be anticipated in advance. Would-be tech regulators were derided as dull bureaucrats, would-be killers of the golden goose, applying rules based on systems that tech itself, if left alone, would soon supersede anyway.

In any other industry, the sorts of harms produced by Big Tech would long ago have spurred the standard response: government regulation. But the tech titans and their stalwarts have shielded themselves by resorting to two basic arguments — really, rhetorical strategies — to fend off the regulators. First, many in the tech world insist that whatever harms technology creates, it is more than outweighed by the good in the present. In a September podcast interview, for example, Instagram head Adam Mosseri argued: “We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar.” Of course, Mosseri was roundly mocked for this line — he seemed unaware that, in fact, the auto industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the U.S. and Europe.

«

Terrific essay (not short), via John Naughton. Eisenstat in particular knows very much whereof she speaks: a former CIA officer, she went to work for Facebook in the belief that they were hiring her to find and root out election disinformation. On Day 2 (after Day 1, orientation) she discovered that that wasn’t their intent at all. She left soon after, and is strong Facebook critic.
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Electric car prices could be about to plummet – here’s why • Sky News

Victoria Seabrook:

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Battery electric vehicle (EV) prices have already fallen dramatically and are expected to reach parity with petrol or diesel cars between 2025 and 2027 – and be cheaper very soon after.

The average motorist should save £700 a year in fuel costs by switching, according to New Automotive, a research group aiming to accelerate the shift to electric.

The price drop is partly due to advancements in the batteries, set to tumble further still, as well as carmakers producing more mass market cars.

“International agreements on climate change mean car companies understand that there is a global transition to clean transport under way,” said Ben Nelmes from New Automotive.

“They are racing to increase the number of electric models they are selling to secure a share of tomorrow’s car market,” he said.

Now that the auto industry is designing EVs from scratch – rather than adapting existing design structures known as “platforms” – they are improving both performance and cost.

Government plans to set targets for manufacturers to sell more EVs should help prices fall further.

For now, the car industry is calling for increased incentives for buyers until EV prices match those of combustion engine cars.

«

Fun fact: around two-thirds “of people” in the UK have driveways and so could charge at home. I don’t know if that’s meant to equate to households or not, but it’s a lot more than one would expect. And the reason why prices could soon plummet is that a wave of secondhand EVs will hit the market, having been owned by fleets for a couple of years.
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How to avoid flickering video with fluorescent lights • Untamed Science

Rob Nelson:

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Essentially the problem has everything to do with understanding how fluorescent lights work. They’re not “on” all the time. Instead they flicker on and off at a certain frequency. They do this so fast that our eyes can’t sense it…

We’ll discuss how to get around this frequency. However, as we go through, understand that the frequency of AC currents differs depending where you are. In much of North and South America it’s 60 Hz and in Europe, Africa and Asia, it’s 50Hz…

If you set your camera up to capture a still frame at a certain frequency, it may mess you up. Here’s why. If you’re always capturing an image at the top of the curve [of illumination] (for example), you’re fine. However, if you start capturing video frames when the fluorescent light is putting out different intensities of light, you’ll run into trouble.

To get around this problem you have to match your frame rate with the frequency of the lights you are in. You need to shoot at frame rates that are divisible by the number of light pulses. So, in a 60 Hz AC area, you’ll need to shoot at 30, 60 or 120 fps.

However, If your camera is set up for European PAL shooting, you may not be able to get these frame rates. You can get around it by simply shooting at different shutter speeds.

«

Mains frequency turns out to be useful for crime solving and a pain for filming. What else? (Thanks Matt L for the link.)
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The CDC isn’t publishing large portions of the Covid data it collects • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli:

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For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public.

When the CDC published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected.

The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.

Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

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Pretty bad. By contrasts the UK effort has been laudable – a triumph for open data. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There turns out to be a surprising use for tracking the mains frequency in your home. Just hope you never have to call on it. CC-licensed photo by Richard Ash on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Not featured in Wordle. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

New EU antitrust frontier emerges for Microsoft and Google: spam ads • POLITICO

Samuel Stolton:

»

A new claim that Microsoft and Google are gaming the online advertising market to the detriment of smaller rivals threatens to set up a new antitrust clash in Europe, according to previously unseen data.

The two U.S. giants appear to be flooding smaller search engine partners with spam ads and keeping some of the most valuable ads for themselves, according to data reviewed by POLITICO, in a move that draws parallels with the infamous €2.4bn Google Shopping case.

While EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager’s 2015 offensive against Google’s abuses in the search market got the backing of the EU General Court in November, there are some who say that blind spots in the case have allowed for certain violations to continue — illustrated by Swedish price-comparison site PriceRunner’s decision earlier this month to sue Google for €2.1 billion in damages.

And now, according to the same data, both Google and its closest rival in the search engine space, Microsoft, are siphoning off so-called spam ads to smaller search engines that use their search results, as well as limiting the quantity of higher-value ads that appear on these partner search engines.

Spam ads are regarded as those that have little relevance to the original search, direct users to less reputable online sources and generate little value for the search engine. In the long term, such ads may turn users away from using alternative search engines like Qwant, Ecosia and DuckDuckGo, and drive them back to the likes of Bing and Google, thereby negatively affecting the smaller players’ bottom lines.

The data, compiled by researchers working in the adtech space who wish to remain anonymous for fear of damaging commercial relations between Microsoft or Google and smaller search engines, indicates that the two internet giants fob off low-value and irrelevant ads to their downstream syndication partners — smaller search engines that rely on both gatekeepers’ huge web page indexes.

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NFTs, cryptocurrencies and web3 are multilevel marketing schemes for a new generation • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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In a recent ad for cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Tom Brady asks seemingly everyone in his contact list, “You in?” As in, are you going to join him in buying some crypto, and not, presumably, in being a football star married to a supermodel. The pitch is straightforward celebrity-endorsement fare, designed to capitalize on the FOMO that is the standard psychological tactic of those who are already invested in cryptocurrencies and related technologies, and who would like the rest of us to come aboard. Mr. Brady has an equity stake in FTX.

A “You in?”-style pitch is also typical of successful multilevel marketing companies. Both make a virtue of the fact that our getting “in” will obviously enrich those urging us to do so, by driving up the value of their own holdings or network. And then, hey, the same could be true for us!

It’s a siren song as old as the promise of attaining financial freedom by selling herbal supplements, cosmetics or leggings from the comfort of your home, enhanced and refined by the ways in which modern communications systems can rapidly elevate ideas and movements from the fringe to the center of national and global conversation.

But how does owning or trading crypto, which is after all just data—infinitely reproducible, supposedly nearly free thanks to the internet—make one rich? Or for that matter, owning or trading other digital assets like NFTs (or “nonfungible tokens”) that have become all the rage among celebrity art collectors? The straightforward premise: by using the blockchain—a type of public database that anyone can access and everyone can (supposedly) trust—it is possible to create a chunk of data, known as a token, that is unique in the world, and cannot be reproduced. In other words, it is possible to make a digital object, be it a piece of art or a crypto coin, scarce.

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He’s absolutely right. Usually MLM schemes thrive in times of hardship, but the NFT MLM has grown up in a time of plenty because there was so much money sloshing about for the past few years that grifters were looking for some way to siphon it in their direction. Hmm, what if you made something that isn’t rare, “rare”? Don’t enquire too much about the quote marks, just pay me.
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Futures spun and stolen in the metaverse • Noema

Tim Maughan:

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Like every young kid with an IG account he’d tried minting a few of the images as NFTs. None had sold. Well, not until yesterday, when I got some bots to buy a few. But like every artist that got in after the initial goldrush, Fragileman had realized there was no real money in tokenizing your work when you were starting out. The days of buying any tokenized art you saw just for the novelty or some mystical potentials were long gone; now only established artists, artists with connections and influence and a recognizable brand, made serious money selling their work. 

No, as a new artist there was little point wasting money and carbon on having your work minted when you could tokenize something far more valuable: yourself. Pay an exchange to mint you into an NFT, split it into thousands of shards, and then put those up for sale. Suddenly you were there, legitimately part of the real art world: a line on a chart. 

The artist as tradable financial product, your artistic value ranked by the automated exchanges, subreddit day traders, stonks hustlers, hedge fund analysts and high-frequency trading algorithms. They — the critics, the holdouts, the no-coiner ludds — they keep telling us we’d finally destroyed art, reduced it all to nothing but stocks and shares, meaningless toy money for the world’s rich to play with. Of course, the truth was that’s what art had always been, for centuries if not longer. We just made it more ubiquitous, more efficient, more technologically mediated. We made it faster.

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Maughan wrote the fascinating SF book Infinite Detail, about a world where the internet (and hence any supply chain that relies on it, ie all of them) has broken down irrevocably. Now he’s looking around at the scenery he sees more recently.
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The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos • Input Mag

Annie Rauwerda:

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One reason I love the Wikipedia article for “high five” is that it’s one of those entries about an utterly basic aspect of everyday life that reads like it was written by a group of aliens observing human beings: “Its meaning varies with the context of use but can include as a greeting, congratulations, or celebration.”

But the high-five Wikipedia page is among my very favourites not because of its writing, but because of its iconic photos — specifically the ones in the section on the “too slow” variation. [High fives offers “up high, down low, too slow!]

I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word “victim,” and the fact that “finger-guns” gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo.

The sequence was uploaded on August 14, 2008 by Bgubitz, a user who describes themself as an accountant who likes “sunsets and long walks on the beach.” Today, photos from the “too slow” series are featured on Wikipedia pages in eight languages and get more than 200,000 annual views.

A quick search of “high five wikipedia photo” shows that the images are an object of fascination for many others besides me. People around the world have noted that the pair looks a lot like Rachel and Chandler from Friends. But not everyone is a fan. In 2020, one particularly passionate Wikipedia user named Kugihot suggested the photos be removed because they were “simply a waste of precious Wikipedia public bytes.”

Writing on the article’s talk page, the forum where editors discuss the article at hand, the critic went on: “My main concern that is especially out of place to me is the final image which depicts the use of finger guns, which is arguably completely and utterly irrelevant in the context of different variations of high fives.”

To me, the fact that the photos inspired such extreme pedantry speaks to their power.

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And so she decided to try to find the two people in the article. Were they an article then before they became part of an article? Might they be now? Being an icon can be a lot of pressure down the years.
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Electrical network frequency analysis • Wikipedia

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Electrical network frequency (ENF) analysis is an audio forensics technique for validating audio recordings by comparing frequency changes in background mains hum in the recording with long-term high-precision historical records of mains frequency changes from a database. In effect the mains hum signal is treated as if it were a time-dependent digital watermark that can help identify when the recording was created, detect edits in the recording, or disprove tampering of a recording. Historical records of mains frequency changes are kept on record, e.g., by police in the German federal state of Bavaria since 2010 and the United Kingdom Metropolitan Police since 2005.

The technology has been hailed as “the most significant development in audio forensics since Watergate.” However, according to a paper by Huijbregtse and Geradts, the ENF technique, although powerful, has significant limitations caused by ambiguity based on fixed frequency offsets during recording, and self-similarity within the mains frequency database, particularly for recordings shorter than 10 minutes.

More recently, researchers demonstrated that indoor lights such as fluorescent lights and incandescent bulbs vary their light intensity in accordance with the voltage supplied, which in turn depends on the voltage supply frequency. As a result, the light intensity can carry the frequency fluctuation information to the visual sensor recordings in a similar way as the electromagnetic waves from the power transmission lines carry the ENF information to audio sensing mechanisms.

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Since I was wondering last week what use monitoring your mains frequency would be.. at least it’s useful to some people. (Still not sure that personally monitoring your own has that much benefit.) (Thanks @Reynolds.)
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Coronavirus: as BA.2 subvariant of Omicron rises, lab studies point to signs of severity • CNN

Brenda Goodman:

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The BA.2 virus – a subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus variant – isn’t just spreading faster than its distant cousin, it may also cause more severe disease and appears capable of thwarting some of the key weapons we have against Covid-19, new research suggests.

New lab experiments from Japan show that BA.2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older variants of Covid-19, including Delta.

And like Omicron, it appears to largely escape the immunity created by vaccines. A booster shot restores protection, making illness after infection about 74% less likely. BA.2 is also resistant to some treatments, including sotrovimab, the monoclonal antibody that’s currently being used against Omicron.

The findings were posted Wednesday as a preprint study on the bioRxiv server, before peer review…

“It might be, from a human’s perspective, a worse virus than BA.1 and might be able to transmit better and cause worse disease,” says Dr. Daniel Rhoads, section head of microbiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Rhoads reviewed the study but was not involved in the research.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is keeping close watch on BA.2, said its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

“There is no evidence that the BA.2 lineage is more severe than the BA.1 lineage. CDC continues to monitor variants that are circulating both domestically and internationally,” she said Friday.

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There’s no evidence in humans. The Japanese paper infected hamsters and looked “surrogate markers for bronchoconstriction or airway obstruction”. Very unconfirmed.
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Why I will never buy another Samsung device • Medium

Juhani Lehtimäki:

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I needed to replace my aging Pixel 4 and after watching Marques’ video I decided to face my old dislike and go for a Samsung device. The [foldable] form factor definitely made the phone interesting, although costly.

The phone arrived and to my surprise Samsung software had become bearable, even likable over the years since I last tried it. I swapped out my Pixel and the Flip became my daily driver. I started to really like the phone. Foldables will definitely have a place in the future line-up of smartphones. All was looking good and in 3 months in I was happy with my purchase. But then…

One day, I took the phone out of my pocket and the screen had a black part in the middle and the top half no longer responded to touch. When I got home the black part has expanded and kept growing. The screen clearly had failed from the fold. But hey, no worries, I had not dropped the phone, it was in case and I’ve only used the phone the way I’ve always used my other phones.

So I’ll just send it to Samsung for repairs and all is good. Folding is still new tech so shit happens, I didn’t really mind.. until I received a response from Samsung repair:

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We regret that your Samsung SM-F711BZGEEUB could not be repaired under warranty.
Based on the information you have provided, we have contacted our service partner to obtain more detailed information regarding the repair.
During the technical inspection of your device, the technician was able to determine that in addition to the display, the frame is also broken and that this damage is due to a mechanical impact, such as a fall, bending or excessive pressure.

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It’s pretty dramatically bad for a phone that cost €1,099. Samsung will fix the screen for €304. But his real argument is that for such an early product, making early adopters bear the downside won’t encourage adoption.
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Google should kill Stadia • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the Stadia announcement by touting the worldwide scale of Google’s cloud, saying:

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Our custom server hardware and data centers can bring more computing power to more people on planet Earth than anyone else. Today, we are in 19 regions and in over 200 countries and territories connected by hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables.

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Google is a massive cloud computing company that has servers all over the world. So Stadia is available all over the world, right?

Not exactly. Stadia certainly isn’t available in “over 200 countries.” It’s available in just 22 countries, or about 10% of the scale Pichai heavily implied Google could work at.

Until recently, Stadia’s home inside Google has been the hardware division, with project leader Phil Harrison reporting to Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh. Google is actually pretty bad at competing on an international scale, and every Google Hardware product is capped at about 20 countries. It is strange that Stadia, a cloud service, ended up in the hardware division, but that’s where Google decided to put it. The company really wants people to use its game controller and Chromecast media players, so Stadia is limited to the small list of countries Google is willing to sell hardware in. (If you compare the Google Hardware country list to the Stadia country list, they are essentially the same.)

To be fair, international business is hard. Can any of Google’s competitors match Stadia’s 22-country distribution list?

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is available in 82 countries. Xbox Cloud Gaming—which is still labeled a “beta”—is available in 26 countries. Google is in third place. PlayStation Now—the most neglected service on our list (though it is reportedly due for a big update)—works in 19 countries. Google has Amazon Luna soundly beat, at least. That service is still in an invite-only “early access” and is available in one country, the United States.

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Amadeo is frequently brutal about Google products and services, which must hurt the Google PR folk as he’s Ars Technica’s Google correspondent. There’s a lot more to this article, but he develops his case solidly.
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Being a Facebook Metaverse ‘Community Guide’ seems like a nightmare job • Vice

Emanuel Maiberg:

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Imagine you had to moderate a Facebook comment thread, only each commenter was able to come up to you, wave their hands in your face, and scream whatever they want.

That’s what some moderators of Facebook virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds are dealing with, and it looks just as nightmarish as it sounds. 

“Trying to not smash my headset, like in frustration,” one Horizon Worlds Community Guide with the screen name Peanutbutter can be heard saying in a TikTok uploaded by @vrpranksters after interacting with a bunch of kids fighting and screaming over a virtual boomerang. 

“Shhhh, can you guys stop?” Peanutbutter asks the screaming kids as he floats away to a quiet corner and attempts to help an older man navigate Horizon Worlds’ menus. “Please, I’m trying to actually help an adult here.” 

Peanutbutter sighs loudly and approaches the group of kids. “You guys know you’re not supposed to hit each other in here and yet you’re doing it?” he asks.

Most people don’t know this because they don’t have virtual reality headsets, but Facebook isn’t just talking about the “metaverse” and selling Oculus devices. It is actively letting people create virtual reality spaces and hosting its own with a flagship VR platform it calls Horizon Worlds.

Facebook says that Horizon Worlds allows users to find and create “communities” in VR, which understandably requires what the company calls “Community Guides,” people who appear in these spaces in order to help users who are new to VR and also do some basic moderation. 

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You can see the video at this tweet. It does indeed look like a nightmarish task.
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EU accuses China of ‘power grab’ over smartphone technology licensing • Financial Times

Andy Bounds:

»

The EU is taking China to the World Trade Organization for alleged patent infringements that are costing companies billions of euros, as part of what officials in Brussels claim is a “power grab” by Beijing to set smartphone technology licensing rates.

Businesses, including Sweden’s Ericsson, Finland’s Nokia and Sharp of Japan, have lost money after China’s supreme court banned them from protecting their patents by securing licensing deals in foreign courts, the European Commission said.

Chinese courts set licence fees at around half the market rate previously agreed between western technology providers and manufacturers such as Oppo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Huawei, it added.

“It is part of a global power grab by the Chinese government by legal means,” said a European Commission official. “It is a means to push Europe out.”

Smartphone makers have agreed global standards for telecommunications networks. In return, technology manufacturers must license their patents to others. If they cannot agree on a price, they go to court to set it. Chinese courts generally set prices at half the level of those in the west, meaning their companies pay less for the technology from overseas providers.

In August 2020, China’s Supreme People’s Court decided that Chinese courts can impose “anti-suit injunctions”, which forbid a company taking a case to a court outside the country. Those that do are liable for a €130,000 daily fine and the judgments of courts elsewhere are ignored.

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Patents are a sort of intellectual property supply chain for smartphones in particular, and the disputes get very vicious and nationalistic.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Has Covid become like smoking – a personally avoidable cause of illness and death? CC-licensed photo by Susan Jane Golding on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. In search of the missing link? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

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

Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing:

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

It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Timmer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin Mazer:

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

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

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

Evan Shapiro:

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

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

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

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

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The unreasonable math of Type 1 diabetes • Maori Geek

Graham Jenson:

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Nicole Westman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Daws:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto • Platformer

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

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

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

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

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

Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Culliford:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamish Hector:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Fanelli, Ben Foldy and Dustin Volz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“dkb”:

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

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

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

Jessica Bursztynsky:

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

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

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

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

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

Jenny List:

»

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

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

«

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

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

Jason Snell:

»

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

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

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

«

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

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

Emily Kling:

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

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

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

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

«

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

In Siberia, global heating is turning permafrost into occasional slush – with dramatic results for buildings and the future climate. CC-licensed photo by Adam Jones on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Windswept. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation • Slow Boring

Matthew Yglesias:

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesim Dikmen:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

Barry Collins:

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

James Murray:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colin Lecher:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Vincent:

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

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

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

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

Adrienne So:

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

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

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

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

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The new chief executive of Peloton says it isn’t going to be sold; it also seems to be developing new exercise machines. At least one of those ideas is bad. CC-licensed photo by Dana L. Brown on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. So clickable, so very clickable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

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

Emily Baker-White:

»

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

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

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

«

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

»

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

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

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

«

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

Patrick McGee and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Teuteuf, a developer:

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Guess the WORLDLE in 6 guesses.

Each guess must be a valid country, territory, …

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

«

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

Meaghan Tobin, Wency Chen and Abubakar Idris:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Gurman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Cory Doctorow:

»

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

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

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

«

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

Maxwell Strachan:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Lauren Pelley:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Beer:

»

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

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

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

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

«

As Beer points out, there were 17 dot-com-boom advertisers. I think two of them are still going, and to some extent that’s because they weren’t directly doing dot-com things.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An attempt by Samsung to demo its new phone in the metaverse didn’t go to plan. At all. CC-licensed photo by Moogani GossipGirl on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Still not feeling invaded. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem • The Atlantic

Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin and Trevor Davis:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Kashmir Hill:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Sam Shead:

»

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Jem Bartholomew:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Isobel Asher Hamilton:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

»

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

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

«

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

Ed Conway:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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This is just s small part of a really long but very educational read. Very counterintuitive that you need more carbon for all the batteries.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Though useful for tracking lost dogs, Apple’s AirTags have also been used for malicious purposes – so the company is going to make it easier to find any you don’t own that are travelling with you. CC-licensed photo by Tony Alter on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Where are you exactly? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking • Apple

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Ron Amadeo:

»

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

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

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

Reed Albergotti:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew Yglesias:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Joshua Benton:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel Rose:

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Oliver:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Robin George Andrews:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Alizeh Kohari:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Many Facebook Groups supporting trucking protests in Canada are organised by a single, hacked account. Why hasn’t Facebook acted? CC-licensed photo by michael_swanmichael_swan on Flickr.

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

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

Anya van Wagtendonk, Benjamin Powers and Steve Reilly:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kyle Orland:

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

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

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

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

«

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

Jordan Pearson:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurt Schlosser:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Daniel Castro:

»

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

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

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Telegram became the anti-Facebook • WIRED

Darren Loucaides:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Joanna Stern:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Michael Simon:

»

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

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

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

«

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

Scott Cohn:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The EPC system which rates a house’s energy needs doesn’t accurately reflect the energy efficiency of air source heat pumps. That’s bad. CC-licensed photo by Krzysztof Lis on Flickr.

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

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Gilbert:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issie Lapowsky:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Markus Reinisch is vice president, public policy for Europe:

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

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

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

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

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

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The Futurist

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

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

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

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

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

Anita Ramaswamy:

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Simon:

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

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

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

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

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

Ricardo Torres:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jan Rosenow:

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

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

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

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

Amrita Khalid:

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

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

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

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