What if Facebook is really more like a zillion channels, almost all of which have nothing on? CC-licensed photo by Kevin Dooley 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 algorithmically chosen. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Algorithmic tracking is ‘damaging mental health’ of UK workers • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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An “accountability for algorithms act’” would ensure that companies evaluate the effect of performance-driven regimes such as queue monitoring in supermarkets or deliveries-per-hour guidelines for delivery drivers, said the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on the future of work.

“Pervasive monitoring and target-setting technologies, in particular, are associated with pronounced negative impacts on mental and physical wellbeing as workers experience the extreme pressure of constant, real-time micro-management and automated assessment,” said the APPG members in their report, the New Frontier: Artificial Intelligence at Work.

The report recommends bringing in a new algorithms act, which it says would establish “a clear direction to ensure AI puts people first”. It warns that “use of algorithmic surveillance, management and monitoring technologies that undertake new advisory functions, as well as traditional ones, has significantly increased during the pandemic”.

Under the act workers would be given the right to be involved in the design and use of algorithm-driven systems, where computers make and execute decisions about fundamental aspects of someone’s work – including in some cases allocation of shifts and pay, or whether they get a job in the first place.

The report also recommended that corporations and public sector employers fill out algorithmic impact assessments, aimed at ironing out any problems caused by the systems, and expanding the new umbrella body for digital regulation, the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum, to introduce certification and guidance for use of AI and algorithms at work.

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Helen Lewis also did an excellent radio programme (free to listen) about this in February 2019. The topic of people essentially being ruled by an algorithm is quite weird.
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As the UK nears elimination of cervical cancer, the US isn’t close • STAT

Angus Chen:

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[Peter] Sasieni and his colleagues [at King’s College London] compared women in the UK who were offered the vaccine in school as teens and preteens against slightly older women who were not offered the shot, all under the age of 30.

The team found that women who were offered the vaccine at ages 12 to 13 had an 87% lower risk of cervical cancer than those who were not offered the vaccine at the same age. Their risk of an abnormal Pap smear, a screening test that detects signs of potential cervical cancer, was lower by 97%. That means, Sasieni said, cervical cancer “becomes a very rare cancer, instead of what was one of the most common cancers in young women.”

Based on their findings, Sasieni extrapolated that the vaccination will drive cervical cancer cases down to 50 per year among women under 30 in the U.K. from more than 400 per year before HPV vaccination.

In the US, the HPV vaccine has not had such success. Instead, it’s had to slog through a quagmire of social and economic objections since the day it was approved. Some pointed out that the shot was just plain expensive, making it hard for states to justify school vaccine mandates, but the greatest opposition to the vaccine has come because it became entwined with the subject of teen sex. Some advocacy groups opposed mandating HPV vaccines since HPV can be transmitted sexually, arguing instead that public health efforts be focused on keeping kids from having sex.

“I think the biggest mistake was the way this vaccine was introduced into this country,” Kempe said. “There was a lot of discussion about sexual activity. The focus was on sexual activity and getting it into early adolescents before sexual activity. That was a big mistake. Parents got concerned that this meant their child was sexually active or it would trigger sexual activity.”

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Good old America – it would be free for children, but pricey ($360) for older women. And of course it got tied up in sex.
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How SARS-CoV-2 in white-tailed deer could alter the course of the pandemic • NPR

Michaeleen Doucleff:

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veterinarians at Pennsylvania State University have found active SARS-CoV-2 infections in at least 30% of deer tested across Iowa during 2020. Their study, published online last week, suggests that white-tailed deer could become what’s known as a reservoir for SARS-CoV-2. That is, the animals could carry the virus indefinitely and spread it back to humans periodically.

If that’s the case, it would essentially dash any hopes of eliminating or eradicating the virus in the U.S. — and therefore in the world — says veterinary virologist Suresh Kuchipudi at Penn State, who co-led the study.

“If the virus has opportunities to find an alternate host besides humans, which we would call a reservoir, that will create a safe haven where the virus can continue to circulate even if the entire human population becomes immune,” he says. “And so it becomes more and more complicated to manage or even eradicate the virus.”

In the study, Kuchipudi and his colleagues looked for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the lymph nodes of nearly 300 white-tailed deer, including more than 100 wild deer. “So these deer were either roadkill or free-living deer that hunters had killed [to eat],” says veterinary microbiologist Vivek Kapur at Penn State, who also co-led the study.

What they found left Kapur and Kuchipudi dumbfounded. “It was actually quite stunning to us,” Kapur says. “We were very surprised to see such a high number of positive samples.”

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See also: mink. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Facebook’s vast wasteland: infinite channels and nothing on • Galaxy Brain

Charlie Warzel, newly installed at The Atlantic which is hosting his newsletter:

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Some of the top links [on Facebook] make sense to me (a recipes website, vaccines.gov, one link with 35.8 million views that Facebook won’t show, because “This link was removed by Facebook for violating Community Standards”). But most of the links just lead to spammy, clickbait-y content.

Many of the pages seem to simply repost screen-grabbed photos of recycled memes (a tactic that’s very popular among local-radio-station Facebook pages). The most popular pages include celebrity-gossip sites (People), various cooking blogs, mom-focused content, the Australian branch of the popular viral dude-content site LADbible, and, of course, the Falun Gong–backed newspaper The Epoch Times, which doubled down on publishing right-wing misinformation during the Trump era. The most popular individual posts are almost all text cards with prompt questions like “Who can honestly say they never had a DUI? I’ll wait.” (94.3 million views) and “Name something that a lot of people like, but you can’t stand?” (82.4 million views).

Clicking through these pages can feel like flipping through the channels during a programming dead zone. Some posts are truly vapid, recycled, or low budget, like the 2 a.m. channel scroll. Other posts approximate the feel of listless daytime channel surfing: lots of time killers and “on in the background” content sandwiched between melodrama.

Importantly, lots of this content is not offensive in any way. There’s some worrying misinformation and propaganda in Facebook’s list; there are also some legitimately helpful resource pages, too. But the bulk seems to be this quickly published, clickbait-y grist for the viral Facebook mills. It’s not quite spam, because people engage with it, but it is created and published much like spam by content merchants who throw as much shit at the wall as possible to see what sticks.

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The question we’ve stopped asking about teenagers and social media • The New Yorker

Cal Newport:

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For a particularly dispiriting case study of how long it sometimes takes to establish definitive causation between behaviors and negative outcomes, consider the effort involved in connecting smoking to lung cancer. The first major study showing a statistical correlation between cigarettes and cancer, authored by Herbert Lombard and Carl Doering of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Harvard School of Public Health, was published in 1928.

I recently came across an article in the archives of The Atlantic from 1956—nearly thirty years later—in which the author was still trying to convince skeptics who were unhappy with the types of confounding factors that are unavoidable in scientific studies. “If it has not been proved that tobacco is guilty of causing cancer of the lung,” the article pleads, “it has certainly been shown to have been on the scene of the crime.”

So where does this leave us? If the science is not yet ready to give us a definitive answer about the impact of social media on teen-agers, then Amy Orben is right when she notes that, in her role as a scientist, she can’t tell you what to do with your kids. But this isn’t an issue that we need to fully defer to science. Unlike with the hard-to-detect development of lung-cancer cells, when it comes to the well-being of teen-agers, we can, as parents or educators, often clearly observe what seems to make a difference.

Even more directly, we can ask the teen-agers themselves. As Adam Alter noted, it doesn’t take much time chatting about social media with these groups before alarms begin to ring. In other words, you don’t need a specification-curve analysis to uncover the potential negative impacts of Instagram—just ask any teen-age girl.

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It’s not just Facebook; all the social networks manipulate us. Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find out more.

Did Google’s victory in £3bn landmark Supreme Court case backfire? • Daily Mail (via MSN)

Mark Duell:

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Google’s argument over third party cookies which it used to win its Supreme Court case contradicts another ongoing case on its ‘Privacy Sandbox’, it was alleged today.

An alliance of tech businesses, advertisers and publishers known as ‘Movement for an Open Web’ has claimed that Google said in the first case that third party cookies were no threat to privacy – but, in the second case, it says they are.

It comes after the UK’s highest court yesterday blocked a £3bn lawsuit against the US tech firm over claims it secretly tracked millions of iPhone users’ web activity. 

If the case had been successful, more than four million Britons would have received damages of up to £750 each for alleged breaches of the Data Protection Act. But the Supreme Court ruled former Which? director Richard Lloyd had failed to prove that ‘material damage or distress’ had been caused to individuals as a result. 

Now, Movement for an Open Web. also known as MOW, has claimed yesterday’s outcome at the Supreme Court was ‘not quite the triumph Google might claim’. It said the court held that a mere collection of data is not an invasion of privacy – so the mass claim could not proceed, in a finding that might look to benefit Google.

However, in reaching its decision, the UK’s highest court found Mr Lloyd had failed to prove an infringement of privacy law arising from the mere collection of data. And a MOW spokesman said today: ‘Put simply – it wasn’t clear that the setting of third-party cookies by Google involved any invasion of privacy contrary to law.’

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This is the text of the Supreme Court decision, which – if I read it right – boils down to two problems: the Data Protection Act doesn’t offer damages for the correct use of data (and the argument with Google was over how it got the data, not what it did afterwards); and it wasn’t feasible to estimate the damages suffered by users because they varied so widely, meaning a class-action lawsuit (or UK equivalent) couldn’t succeed.
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The republic of the metaverse • The Pull Request

Antonio García Martínez:

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If you’re wondering why someone like Zuckerberg with such immense resources (including an estate on paradisiacal Kauaʻi) wants to blot out reality with a VR headset, then you need to understand the techie mindset. As one notable VC un-ironically told me in private: anything worth doing, can be done better via a screen. His (very successful) investment portfolio and lifestyle both reflect that view; while he himself still convenes in-person dinners, those ‘IRL’ events are now a luxury add-on (and reflection of) digital life rather than vice versa. He and others like him invest vast sums in people they’ve never physically met. The resulting companies have workforces who spend all day looking at each other via endless Zoom calls, but who never or rarely meet (I know, I’ve worked in them). The techies prefer intermediating reality and people via pixels and algorithms, and they’ve created the conditions such that the world meets them on their terms.

Not that we were very hard to convince.

While I find myself a bit skeptical of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse plan—virtual reality has been the perpetual technology of the future for longer than I can remember, and Facebook has gone a long time without a homespun product hit—the little ‘m’ metaverse is already here and firmly in place.

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He also wrote an interesting thread on the topic, which in some ways is better.
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Researchers wait 12 months to report vulnerability with 9.8 out of 10 severity rating • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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About 10,000 enterprise servers running Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect VPN are vulnerable to a just-patched buffer overflow bug with a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10.

Security firm Randori said on Wednesday that it discovered the vulnerability 12 months ago and for most of the time since has been privately using it in its red team products, which help customers test their network defenses against real-world threats. The norm among security professionals is for researchers to privately report high-severity vulnerabilities to vendors as soon as possible rather than hoarding them in secret.

CVE-2021-3064, as the vulnerability is tracked, is a buffer overflow flaw that occurs when parsing user-supplied input in a fixed-length location on the stack. A proof-of-concept exploit Randori researchers developed demonstrates the considerable damage that can result.

“Our team was able to gain a shell on the affected target, access sensitive configuration data, extract credentials, and more,” researchers from Randori wrote on Wednesday. “Once an attacker has control over the firewall, they will have visibility into the internal network and can proceed to move laterally.”

Over the past few years, hackers have actively exploited vulnerabilities in a raft of enterprise firewalls and VPNs from the likes of Citrix, Microsoft, and Fortinet, government agencies warned earlier this year. Similar enterprise products, including those from Pulse Secure and Sonic Wall, have also come under attack. Now, Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect may be poised to join the list.

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The Twitter response to Randori was that it had done a Very Bad Thing not alerting everyone to this, and using the zero-day in its red team (permitted attack on clients) exercises. The CEO’s point was: zero-days exist, and so you need to be able to protect your organisation against them. So how well did these organisations they were red-teaming against cope? Put like that, it’s a bit more justifiable – realistic even.
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Thanks for the bitcoin! How does it work? • The New Yorker

Ben McGrath:

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Anthony Di Iorio, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, is a Toronto native, and, as it happens, is in the midst of a transition toward philanthropic endeavors that extend to combatting misinformation and other problems engendered by faulty business models. “We need media that is trustworthy,” he said. “Ninety-nine% of the stuff I’m reading? Grain of salt.” He dispatched some associates to help set the Phoenix up with a so-called cold wallet and later joined Bidini and his top editors for a Google Hangouts session to “whiteboard” strategies for growth, using a model that he calls his “perfect formula.”

They made at first for an awkward party, the cryptocurrency guru and the ink-stained journalists. Di Iorio sat in a futuristic white swivel chair with a couple of talismans hanging from chains around his neck, one of them given to him by the organizers of Burning Man and the other by a Costa Rican shaman. (“It stands for protection,” he said.) Between bites of salad, he spoke of scalability, disruption, utilization, stakeholders, and the importance of “empowering people to be in control of their digital lives.” Bidini, who likes to joke about his unfamiliarity with smartphone features, sat on a couch with his wife, Janet Morassutti (the managing editor and a co-founder of the paper), and their snoozing rescue dog, Sandy. He interrupted Di Iorio at one point to ask, “Can you just define what a stakeholder is?” He reverted to a music analogy to articulate his concerns about selling out. “I always use R.E.M. as an example. How do they go from ‘Murmur’ to ‘Losing My Religion,’ and they continue to be R.E.M.? They navigated it so beautifully.”

The Phoenix staff may have been short on data, but they were long on hunches—about, for instance, the efficacy of hot-pink lawn signs (“I Read the West End Phoenix”) in disseminating the word, compared with ads they were placing on the boards of local ice rinks, say, and with social media, where engagement was measurable but potentially in conflict with their ethos.

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A lovely little story of worlds colliding.
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Google caught hackers using a Mac zero-day against Hong Kong users • Vice

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

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Google researchers caught hackers targeting users in Hong Kong exploiting what were at the time unknown vulnerabilities in Apple’s Mac operating system. According to the researchers, the attacks have the hallmarks of government-backed hackers. 

On Thursday, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the company’s elite team of hacker hunters, published a report detailing the hacking campaign. The researchers didn’t go as far as pointing the finger at a specific hacking group or country, but they said it was “a well resourced group, likely state backed.” 

“We do not have enough technical evidence to provide attribution and we do not speculate about attribution,” the head of TAG Shane Huntley told Motherboard in an email. “However, the nature of the activity and targeting is consistent with a government backed actor.”

Erye Hernandez, the Google researcher who found the hacking campaign and authored the report, wrote that TAG discovered the campaign in late August of this year. The hackers had set up a watering hole attack, meaning they hid malware within the legitimate websites of “a media outlet and a prominent pro-democracy labor and political group” in Hong Kong. Users who visited those websites would get hacked with an unknown vulnerability—in other words, a zero-day—and another exploit that took advantage of a previously patched vulnerability for MacOS that was used to install a backdoor on their computers, according to Hernandez. 

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There was also an iOS exploit, but they couldn’t recover it. Not hard to guess which government would be behind this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might think that Assassin’s Creed is just another video game, but Ubisoft took a lot of trouble to create historically accurate locations. Why? CC-licensed photo by cea + on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not part of a COP26 communique. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook allows stolen content to flourish, its researchers warned • WSJ

Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz:

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Facebook has allowed plagiarized and recycled content to flourish on its platform despite having policies against it, the tech giant’s researchers warned in internal memos.

About 40% of the traffic to Facebook pages at one point in 2018 went to pages that stole or repurposed most of their content, according to a research report that year by Facebook senior data scientist Jeff Allen, one of a dozen internal communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Pages are used by businesses and organizations to disseminate content on Facebook, while individual users put content on what Facebook calls “profiles.”

The researchers also wrote Facebook has been slow to crack down on copyright infringement for fear of opening itself to legal liability.

“What’s the easiest (lowest effort) way to make a big Facebook Page?” Mr. Allen wrote in an internal slide presentation the following year. “Step 1: Find an existing, engaged community on [Facebook]. Step 2: Scrape/Aggregate content popular in that community. Step 3: Repost most popular content on your Page.”

Mr. Allen, who left Facebook in late 2019, wrote that Facebook pages seeking big followings simply had to ask one question of the content they were considering recirculating: “Has it gone viral in the past?”

Posting unoriginal content continues to be a formula for success on Facebook, according to data the company has released this year on the platform’s most popular posts.

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There was a thread to this effect on Twitter a few months ago, though I don’t think it was from Allen. This is a big problem, though. Facebook used to worry (maybe still does; maybe always does) that people weren’t interacting enough with the site – not posting enough updates, not Liking enough stuff, not commenting enough. Viewed through that lens, why would it be worried if people recycle content? That’s going to be Fine, Great, Keep Doing That.
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Instagram tests ‘Take a Break’ reminders on an opt-in basis • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today the company has begun testing a new feature this week called “Take a Break,” which will allow users to remind themselves to take a break from using the app after either 10, 20 or 30 minutes, depending on their preferences. As an opt-in feature, however, the reminders may have a limited impact, as users would have to be motivated to set up the new control for themselves.

The company had previously said it was looking into “Take a Break” reminders. Mosseri, for instance, mentioned the coming addition when commenting on Instagram’s plans to pause its plans to build a version of its service for younger users, Instagram for Kids. He referenced Instagram’s plans to build in “nudges” and “reminders,” like “Take a Break,” as an example of how Instagram was addressing issues related to its product’s impact on users’ mental health.

Meta’s (previously, Facebook’s) Global Head of Security Antigone Davis also referenced Instagram’s  “Take a Break” reminders when the company was grilled in a Senate hearing over teen mental health back in September. He said the idea with the feature was to encourage users to stop looking at the app after they had been browsing for too long, and cited it as one of the many ways the company was working to improve the experiences of young people using its platform.

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Another interesting move from a social network. (Instagram previously instituted a “You’re all caught up” element when you’d seen all the new posts. But, leopards qua spots, it then instituted a “suggested follows” feature into which you were automatically opted.
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YouTube is making dislike counts private for everyone • The Verge

Mitchell Clark:

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YouTube has announced that it’ll be hiding public dislike counts on videos across its site, starting today. The company says the change is to keep smaller creators from being targeted by dislike attacks or harassment, and to promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” The dislike button will still be there, but it’ll be for private feedback, rather than public shaming.

This move isn’t out of the blue. In March, YouTube announced that it was experimenting with hiding the public dislike numbers, and individual creators have long had the ability to hide ratings on their videos. But the fact that the dislike counts will be disappearing for everyone (gradually, according to YouTube) is a big deal — viewers are used to being able to see the like-to-dislike ratio as soon as they click on a video and may use that number to decide whether to continue watching. Now, that will no longer be an option, but it could close off a vector for harassment.

YouTube says that when it tested hiding dislike numbers, people were less likely to use the button to attack the creator — commenting “I just came here to dislike” was seemingly less satisfying when you don’t actually get to see the number go up.

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Fascinating move, taking the heat out of social networks (which YouTube is, effectively, in a way that Reddit isn’t: YouTube recommends both content and users to follow).
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Where would we be without social networks? Possibly somewhere better. To understand what they’re doing to us, read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

It’s time for some game theory • Lapham’s Quarterly

Caroline Wazer:

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Does Assassin’s Creed actually have an impact on how young people understand history? One illuminating attempt to answer this question appeared in the journal Theory and Research in Social Education in 2019. Lisa Gilbert, a lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis, conducted qualitative interviews in which she asked fourteen teenage boys who had played at least one Assassin’s Creed game to explain how, if at all, the series had influenced their understanding of history.

Most of the boys Gilbert interviewed reported having a low or moderate preexisting interest in history. Many said that they didn’t think the game had measurably influenced their social studies grades or even taught them historical information, which they largely equated with the rote memorisation of dates and names. They also seemed to understand quite well that AC is a work of fiction, not fact. Gilbert describes one hesitating when asked to categorise ACIII characters as “historical” or “fictional”—the game’s George Washington, he made sure she knew he understood, was both at once.

What the boys did nearly unanimously report to Gilbert is that Assassin’s Creed had made them feel more emotionally connected to the past. “It’s not like you’re learning about history” from playing the games, one explained. “You’re experiencing it.” As another put it, “Assassin’s Creed reminds us that history is more than just words on a page. History is human experience.” An interviewee named Henry told Gilbert about the powerful emotional reaction he experienced after playing through ACIII’s portrayal of the Boston Massacre and realising, for the first time, how frightened participants in the actual event would have been: “That was a terror not like anything I had ever read. But I felt that.”

…According to Maxime Durand, the lead historian on the games, Ubisoft considered adding the Discovery Tour mode [which removes the game characters, leaving just the location] for almost a decade before they finally did so. With Origins’ re-creation of first-century-bc Egypt “we had this fantastic setting,” Durand told the Guardian of the decision to release the mode in 2018, but “we also have the legitimacy to do it now, after all these games showing that we treat history with respect.”

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A very deep dive that suggests games can subliminally make a difference here too.
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Visualised: cars created by tech giants

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Using genuine patents filed by Apple Inc., we’ve created a vision of the anticipated Apple Car and how it might look on launch. Click below to explore the car inside and out, with details on the real-life patents that went into the concept.

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I yelped with laughter at this. It’s the ugliest thing you could imagine; worth looking at just for the feeling of “this is how you wouldn’t do it”. There’s also an “interior” view. If this were in any way true, nobody at Tesla would lose a moment’s sleep. However, Apple has recently hired a Tesla engineer, so there might be something to think about.
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EU wins €2.4bn Google Shopping case • Financial Times

Javier Espinova:

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Google has lost its appeal against a €2.42bn EU competition fine over its Shopping service, in a ruling that is likely to re-energise antitrust investigators looking at how Big Tech promotes its own businesses.

The General Court of Luxembourg ruled on Wednesday that Google favours “its own comparison shopping service over competing services” in its search results, rather than delivering the “better result”.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief, accused Google in 2017, after a seven-year investigation, of abusing its market power to give an “illegal advantage” to another arm of its business. Some price comparison websites have gone bust since Google engaged in this behaviour.

Shivaun Raff, co-founder of Foundem, a now defunct shopping comparison website that was an original plaintiff in the EU’s investigation, said: “While we welcome today’s judgment, it does not undo the considerable consumer and anti-competitive harm caused by more than a decade of Google’s insidious search manipulation practices.”

Google said the judgment on Wednesday related to a “very specific set of facts” and that it made changes in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision.

The ruling is likely to be appealed. But it marks the first time that a European court has ruled against Google on an antitrust case.

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As Raff points out, this case is ancient. She and her partner at Foundem filed their complaint in 2010 – and that was over behaviour by Google in 2009, favouring its own shopping search results and downgrading other shopping sites. The “solution” isn’t a solution; it makes them pay for positions they used to get for free in organic links.

That doesn’t however mean that the pattern of behaviour is gone. As we’ve seen in the stories about the real reason for AMP, and the “header bidding” cheating, Google – well, some parts of Google, because it’s not one monolithic mass – doesn’t think there should be any room for rivals, and will use its position to solidify that.
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iPhone apps can tell many things about you through the accelerometer • Mysk

Tommy Mysk:

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Accelerometer measurements are collected all the time while you are holding your phone. iOS makes the measurements accessible to the app that is active in the foreground. The app may choose to ignore the measurements or read them. There’re no boundaries for what an app can do with the measurements, but here are some spooky scenarios:

Motion and Activities
Accelerometer data reflects how you hold your phone and how you move. An app can tell if you are using it while lying, sitting, walking, or cycling. The app can also count your steps. Although access to the pedometer on the iPhone is protected by a system permission, there are many sophisticated algorithms that process accelerometer data to achieve exactly that.

It is worth mentioning that the iPhone is also equipped with a barometer, a sensor that measures air pressure and altitude. The barometer is also part of the Core Motion Framework and no permission is required to access it. As a result, any app can figure out your altitude and measure air pressure in your environment. Thus, any app can tell if you are riding on a bus, train, or plane while using it.

Heart Rate
The accelerometer can detect the slight movements of your hand and body while holding the phone. Researchers can use this data to estimate your heart rate. Thus, an app can potentially know your heart rate while you are using it.

Breathing Rate
Similarly to heart rate, researchers can use accelerometer data to estimate your breathing rate, and even diagnose certain diseases.

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And lots more. Plus apps don’t need permission to access the accelerometer/barometer combo.
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‘Politics-as-sports’: why it matters • Breaking the News

James Fallows is editor of The Atlantic, but also wrote a book called “Breaking the News” 25 years ago. Now he’s pointing to the way that US papers’ love of the horse-race of politics, not the distance covered, undermines understanding:

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A major Democratic-backed bill passed with bipartisan support, and the nation’s leading newspaper framed it as a scramble backward for “Democrats.”

The roughly 40 paragraphs of the story that followed, from the front page to a long inside jump, were strictly about the politics, deal-making, factional maneuvers, and polling implications of the bill. The story’s only glancing mention of its contents was as follows:

“Passage of the infrastructure legislation would be a much-needed and long-delayed victory for Mr. Biden—and a welcome break for Democrats, who could spend next week’s Veterans Day break traveling to their districts to show off the roads, bridges, tunnels, transit lines and airports due for a huge infusion of federal support.”

That is: roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and so forth were significant mainly as near-term talking points. This would be the appropriate framing if you were a pollster or a Congressional staffer. Less so for anyone else.

A few hours later, the Times’s revised online version of the story had added some mentions of the bill’s contents. Which means, interestingly: under the previous night’s intense deadline pressure to make the print edition, the aspect the paper chose to stress was the how of party politics. When it had time later on, it got around to the what.

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The problem is less bad in the UK, partly because the political process is a lot less impotent. The US has so many checks and balances it can’t do anything effective.

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Updating The Verge’s “on background” policy • The Verge

Nilay Patel is editor in chief of The Verge:

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big tech companies in particular have hired a dizzying array of communications staff who routinely push the boundaries of acceptable sourcing in an effort to deflect accountability, pass the burden of truth to the media, and generally control the narratives around the companies they work for while being annoying as hell to deal with.

The main way this happens is that big companies take advantage of a particular agreement in the media called “background.” Being “on background” means that they tell things to reporters, but those reporters agree to not specifically attribute that information to a person by name. Oftentimes, companies will make things significantly worse and also insist that background information be paraphrased, further obscuring both specific details and the source of those details.

There are many reasons a reporter might agree to learning information on background, but importantly, being on background is supposed to be an agreement.

But the trend with big tech companies now is to increasingly treat background as a default or even a condition of reporting. That means reporters are now routinely asked to report things without being able to attribute them appropriately, and readers aren’t being presented with clear sources of information.

This all certainly feeds into the overall distrust of the media, which has dire consequences in our current information landscape, but in practice, it is also hilariously stupid.

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I’ve experienced this a lot, and it swept in from American tech companies. I didn’t come across it until some time in the mid-2000s, I think. A spokesperson will say they’re telling you something “on background”, which means journalists have to write things as though they magically know (bland, corporate) inside information. It’s a terrible system, and it’s good that The Verge is acting. Others will surely follow.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: 1) I’ll link to the US-China announcement from COP26 in tomorrow’s edition, when there has been time for some analysis of what it actually contains.
2) Retracted articles still stay online; they just get a big watermark all over them. So you can still read the now-zapped “Air dust pollution and online music teaching effect based on heterogeneous wireless network”. (Thanks Michael Stoner.)

The phone charger maker Anker has seen sales jump since Apple and Samsung stopped including chargers in the box with new phones. What are people doing with the old ones? CC-licensed photo by Nenad Stojkovic 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. Not guest edited. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Hostage-style bitcoin scam videos are spreading across Instagram • Vice

Joseph Cox:

»

Hackers are forcing Instagram users to film hostage-style videos instructing their followers to participate in fraudulent get-rich-quick Bitcoin schemes as part of a new kind of scam that’s spreading across the Facebook-owned app.

The news follows Motherboard reporting last week on how a scammer forced one victim to film a video with the promise of getting their money back after sending the fraudster Bitcoin. After filming the video, however, the scammer broke into the victim’s Instagram account and sent the video to their friends and posted it from their profile to try and scam others. After we published the story, more Instagram users got in touch with Motherboard saying they’ve been hacked and forced to shoot similar videos, indicating the issue appears to be more widespread on the social network with victims describing personal, professional, reputational, and financial damage. Multiple victims also complained about the troublesome Instagram account recovery process and the lack of direct communication from the company.

“Hey you guys, I just got back from a long day of work, but Ashly just helped me invest $1,000 and got me back $8,500,” Emma Zoller, who was forced to make one of the clips, says to the camera during her video. “What an amazing way to end the day, and I feel so blessed and appreciative for this process. It’s guaranteed. I suggest doing it.”

But Ashly is a fraudster. The scam started when Zoller saw her best friend post about making money from Bitcoin in an Instagram Story, according to a chronology of the events written and shared by Zoller’s mother with Motherboard. Zoller clicked a link the friend’s account sent her, and a hacker took over her account. The link appears to spoof a legitimate Instagram page.

Initially, the hacker demanded that Zoller send them a nude video to regain access to the account.

“I am bawling my eyes out. I can’t take a nude video,” Zoller wrote to the Ashly account. “I am going to kill myself, please you stole everything from me. Please give me my Instagram back please.”

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Turn on two-factor authentication, and get your family and friends to as well. Wonder if Instagram will actually figure this out and stop the videos spreading.
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Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published • Nature

Holly Else:

»

Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.

Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract 300 more that have been published as part of 6 special issues in one of its journals, and Springer Nature is retracting 62 articles published in a special issue of one journal. The retractions come after the publishers each issued expressions of concern earlier this year, covering hundreds of articles.

Science-integrity experts expect that more investigations will come in the months ahead as other titles realize that they have been duped.

“It is very worrying,” says Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, who has worked to uncover nonsense science papers in special issues. He adds that it is shocking to see such papers in journals from ‘flagship’ publishers and that “it is not only predatory journals that publish bullshit”.

A Springer Nature spokesperson said that an investigation had revealed “deliberate attempts to subvert the trust-based editorial process and manipulate the publication record”. They added that they did not yet know who was responsible (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher).

«

They seem to relate to “Environment and low carbon transportation” in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, for Springer (I’m now gagging to read “Air dust pollution and online music teaching effect based on heterogeneous wireless network” but it’s retracted).

Puzzle is what the people who do this are up to. Seems to be so they can raise the profile of low-impact researchers.
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Why charging phones is such a complex business, with Anker CEO • The Verge

Nilay Patel puts questions to Steven Yang, the charger company’s CEO:

»

Q: Apple and Samsung do not have chargers in the box anymore. We should talk about the international regulatory pressure to reduce e-waste, but I am curious from the nuts and bolts level: if companies are not including chargers in the box, does that result in more charger sales for Anker?

Yes — a lot more, because this is a new category. Previously, a lot of users didn’t buy a charger by itself. Per our survey, about 50% of those users still just go back to using their old chargers, because they have saved some over the years. But more and more people are starting to shop for individual chargers. Of course, a large fraction of them will go to the device brand — for example, they will go buy an Apple or Samsung charger. Still, that gives us a chance as a third-party charger brand to reach those users. It is a chance to inform them about the superiority of our charger: the small size, the high power durability, and the interoperability to charge all their devices from all the brands.

Q: This brings us back to the e-waste question: the idea was that, since consumers probably have a charger already from a previous phone, manufacturers can take the charger out of the box, reducing e-waste. But you are saying consumers are responding to these mandates by buying a lot more chargers. Do you think that the box mandates have resulted in a meaningful effect on e-waste?

First of all, when chargers aren’t in the box, that’s already a lot of savings. Let’s say that for a hundred people, we saved a hundred chargers already. Per our survey, around 50% of people will reuse their old chargers so they won’t buy any more, but there is still a fraction of users whose old chargers are slow-charging chargers.

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Who are these people who don’t reuse their old chargers? I don’t understand them. At all.
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A quarter of new Volvos are now plug-in hybrids or battery EVs • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

»

Volvo sold a total of 581,464 cars [worldwide] between January and October of this year, despite supply chain problems that have affected production. Of those cars, 148,068 [25.4%] were either plug-in hybrid or battery electric, with the vast majority (129,803) being plug-in hybrid versions of the 60 series and 90 series vehicles.

With only two battery-electric Volvos on sale (the XC40 Recharge and C40 Recharge), it’s not surprising that BEVs made up a smaller percentage at just 3.1%, or 18,261 cars in total.

Here in the US, the automaker sold 104,066 vehicles, of which 12,906 were plug-in hybrids and another 5,225 were fully electric.

«

So about 17% were hybrid or electric in the US. Tesla’s total world sales for the same three quarters was 627,481. It’s bigger than all of Volvo, and selling only battery electrics. Volvo’s market cap: $59.52bn. Tesla’s market cap: $1 trillion.

The market cap is the market’s estimate of the total future profits of a company before it goes phut. For Volvo, the market seems to think (based on its $5bn profit for this year) that it has another ten years to go.
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Google gives the Nest Hub another year to convince you sleep tracking’s worth paying for • Android Police

Will Sattelberg:

»

More than six months after release, Google has returned to give the Nest Hub a boost for sleep tracking — along with some more details on when the feature might cost money to use.

Sleep staging is the most significant improvement here, utilizing new algorithms to help chart your progression during the night. The Nest Hub uses its Soli sensors to more accurately detect both the quality and duration of each of your stages of sleep: light, deep, REM, and awake. In the morning, you’ll receive a complete chart showing exactly when you were fully asleep, along with exact time periods for all four stages.

According to Google’s AI blog, improved training is the biggest difference between this new iteration and the original feature. Sleep tracking now predicts the user’s sleep stages rather than looking for a basic sleep-wake status. Using public data from multiple sleep studies, the company utilized more than 10,000 sessions with polysomnography data to build its new algorithm.

…When the second-gen Hub initially hit store shelves in the spring, Google made it clear that sleep tracking wouldn’t be free forever. Part of our hesitance in recommending the sleep tracking at all was the promise of a switch to a subscription model, and we’re finally learning what that might entail with this upgrade. Although Nest Hub users will be able to keep using sleep tracking for free through 2022, the feature will require a paid Fitbit Premium subscription sometime in 2023.

That plan is pretty expensive — $9.99 per month or $80 annually — especially when you consider that not every Nest Hub owner has a Fitbit.

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PSA: sleep tracking isn’t even worth zero. You can’t act on it, and can’t even be sure it’s tracking you correctly.
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Running down to zero battery breaks Google Pixel 6 fingerprint sensor • Android Authority

C. Scott Brown:

»

Now that lucky buyers have had time to play with their new Pixel 6 smartphones, we’re starting to see some issues. Unfortunately, most of the issues seem to stem around the fingerprint sensor, which we noted was fairly weak in our Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro reviews.

Disappointingly, it appears there’s more bad news for the Google Pixel 6 fingerprint sensor now. According to multiple users on Reddit, a dead battery can permanently disable your phone’s fingerprint sensor.

In the thread, you can see many different people all telling the same story: their Pixel 6 died from an empty battery and, upon rebooting, the fingerprint sensor became non-operational. So far, it appears the only way to fix the problem once it occurs is a factory reset, which is not exactly convenient.

However, at least one person claims they faced the issue without losing battery power. This suggests a dead battery could be a trigger for some other issue instead of the root cause.

Thankfully, there’s already an official Google issue tracker for this problem. That tracking page has even more people discussing the issue.

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Most phone “issues” are overblown and irrelevant, but this one seems like an absolutely terrible oversight.
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Samsung develops industry’s first LPDDR5X DRAM • Samsung Global Newsroom

»

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has developed the industry’s first 14-nanometer (nm) based 16-gigabit (Gb) Low Power Double Data Rate 5X (LPDDR5X) DRAM, designed to drive further growth throughout the high-speed data service applications including 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.

«

“What should the press release say to make it seem new and buzzy?”
“Metaverse, definitely.”
“Anything else?”
“5G, I guess. Oh, yes, and AI.”

Notice what it doesn’t seem to be any good for? (Hint: starts with “block”, ends with “chain”.) Thus shall you know what manufacturers consider important for their field.
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Facebook whistleblower fears the metaverse • Associated Press

Raf Casert and Kelvin Chan:

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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen warned Tuesday that the “metaverse,” the all-encompassing virtual reality world at the heart of the social media giant’s growth strategy, will be addictive and rob people of yet more personal information while giving the embattled company another monopoly online.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Haugen said her former employer rushed to trumpet the metaverse recently because of the intense pressure it is facing after she revealed deep-seated problems at the company, in disclosures that have energized legislative and regulatory efforts around the world to crack down on Big Tech.

“If you don’t like the conversation, you try to change the conversation,” the former product-manager-turned-whistleblower said. The documents she has turned over to authorities and her testimony to lawmakers have drawn global attention for providing insight into what Facebook may have known about the damage its social media platforms can cause. She is in the midst of a series of appearances before European lawmakers and regulators who are drawing up rules for social media companies.

Meta, the new name for the parent company of Facebook, denied it was trying to divert attention away from the troubles it faces by pushing the metaverse. “This is not true. We have been working on this for a long time internally,” the company said in a statement.

«

Wouldn’t doubt that the metaverse thing has been in the works for a long time, as I pointed out yesterday (Zuckerberg bought Oculus, an essential element for the metaverse, in 2014).

It would be quite the thing if Haugen turned out to be right about this, wouldn’t it.
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Social networks are everywhere. Read Social Warming, my latest book, which looks at the way they influence our lives and thinking.

Chinese military builds dummy American aircraft carrier, warships – CNN

AnneClaire Stapleton, Hannah Ritchie and Mitch McCluskey:

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China’s military has constructed mockups in the shape of a US Navy aircraft carrier and US warships, possibly for target practice, according to Maxar satellite images reviewed by the independent United States Naval Institute (USNI).

Satellite images from China’s northwest Xinjiang region appear to show a full-scale outline of a “Ford-class” aircraft carrier currently being constructed for the US Navy, and the shapes of at least two Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers at a new target range complex in the Taklamakan Desert, according to the USNI, a private, non-profit, professional military association.

The complex has repeatedly been used for ballistic missile testing, according to USNI and Maxar Technologies, a space technology company.

“This new range shows that China continues to focus on anti-carrier capabilities, with an emphasis on US Navy warships,” USNI reported.

Militaries around the world regularly build mock-ups of real-world targets such as iconic landmarks, warships, and aircraft carriers.

China’s anti-ship ballistic missile programs are overseen by the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF). CNN has reached out to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of National Defense for comment.

In a news briefing Monday, Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby said the US Defense Department was aware of media reports about the mockups but was instead focused on its own preparedness to support a free and open Indo-Pacific region.

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Just prepping for the sea off Taiwan in a few years’ time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: it was wrong to say that Jane Brambauer is a professor of law at the University of Arizona. Her name is Jane Bambauer. (Thanks Wendy G.)

The latest mouse patent from Microsoft shows a “bendy” design – inspired perhaps by a famous artist? CC-licensed photo by Joel Kramer 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. Don’t drop them. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The global TV streaming boom is creating a severe translator shortage • Rest of World

Andrew Deck:

»

Last month, bilingual Korean-American influencer Youngmi Mayer took to TikTok and Twitter, bemoaning what she considered to be botched English subtitles on Netflix’s hit series Squid Game. She argued that important nuances had been lost in translation. Others chimed in: the French and Hindi subtitles were junk too, and the English dubbing was a joke. Although many translation professionals say that the criticism was unfair, the pile-on was picked up by major news outlets.

The controversy drew a bright spotlight onto a rarely discussed industry at the heart of major international streaming platforms: language service providers, or LSPs. These are companies that provide outsourced subtitling, captioning, and dubbing through a global network of contract subtitle translators, voice-over actors, translation editors, and sound mixers. It also underscored a looming concern for streaming services: a shortage of quality translators who can handle an increasingly global audience.

“Squid Game is another sign that there is a demand for locally produced media entertainment content above and beyond local audiences — for Korean content outside of Korea, for Mexican content outside of Mexico,” Paolo Sigismondi, a professor at the University of Southern California who researches the global entertainment industry, told Rest of World. Most of the over 111 million viewers who have now seen the gory Korean-language Netflix series watched with subtitles in one of 31 languages or via 13 dubbed versions. LSPs are critical to the distribution of that local content on a global scale. But because of a labor shortage and no viable automated solution, the translation industry is being pushed to its limits.

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Fascinating: yet another supply chain that’s disrupted. (And a great story showing how Rest Of World, founded in 2019, is hitting some really good stories that are out of view of the west.)
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Google’s new Business Profile: when search becomes a political tool • Near Media

Mike Blumenthal:

»

Google recently rebranded Google My Business as “Business Profile.” They have been heavily promoting the new name and features via email to get small businesses to interact with the new search and maps interface. Clicking though I discovered Google had an additional and more nefarious use for this campaign.

I was shocked that the first call to action wasn’t an invitation to edit my listing or even an incentive to buy Google Ads. It was a call to support Google’s fight against possible antitrust regulations.

With all of the buzz around the rebranding, Google apparently couldn’t resist the opportunity, however brazen, deceptive and totally misguided, to enlist the small business community in its antitrust fights.

When clicked, the call to action takes you to a page titled: Understand the impact new legislation could have on your business. On that page Google details, in a very Meta/Facebook-like fashion, all the pain small businesses will face if the government successfully manages to put in place a regulatory framework to limit Google’s unprecedented power and reach.

First up was a call to join an email list to help with advocacy on behalf of Google. After signing up the page notes, “Together, we can help shape the policy conversation and have an impact on regulations that affect you — and your business.” I assume that is the royal we.

«

Shocked, shocked, I tell you, that Google would use space on its site to push things it wants. Though as Blumenthal says:

»

Clearly this “feature” is not for the betterment of the user, as Google frequently claims. It’s about bamboozling small businesses to support Google in their fight to remain a monopoly.

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Five affiliates to Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware gang unplugged • Europol

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On 4 November, Romanian authorities arrested two individuals suspected of cyber-attacks deploying the Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware. They are allegedly responsible for 5 000 infections, which in total pocketed half a million euros in ransom payments. Since February 2021, law enforcement authorities have arrested three other affiliates of Sodinokibi/REvil and two suspects connected to GandCrab.

These are some of the results of operation GoldDust, which involved 17 countries*, Europol, Eurojust and INTERPOL. All these arrests follow the joint international law enforcement efforts of identification, wiretapping and seizure of some of the infrastructure used by Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware family, which is seen as the successor of GandCrab.

Since 2019, several large international corporations have faced severe cyber-attacks, which deployed the Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware. France, Germany, Romania, Europol and Eurojust reinforced the actions against this ransomware by setting up a Joint Investigation Team in May 2021. Bitdefender, in collaboration with law enforcement, made a tool available on the No More Ransom website that would help victims of Sodinokibi/REvil restore their files and recover from attacks made before July 2021.

In the beginning of October, a Sodinokibi/REvil affiliate was arrested at the Polish border after an international arrest warrant was issued by the US. The Ukrainian national is suspected of perpetrating the Kaseya attack, which affected up to 1,500 downstream businesses and for which Sodinokibi/REvil asked a ransom of about €70m. Additionally, in February, April and October 2021 authorities in South Korea arrested three affiliates involved in the GandCrab and Sodinokibi/REvil ransomware families, which had more than 1,500 victims.

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Bit by bit, putting a squeeze on the people around the centre. REvil seems to have vanished after their servers were hacked.
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Helion secures $2.2bn to commercialize fusion energy • TechCrunch

Haje Jan Kamps:

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Helion Energy, a clean energy company committed to creating a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, today announced the close of its $500m Series E, with an additional $1.7bn of commitments tied to specific milestones.

The round was led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator. Existing investors, including co-founder of Facebook Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital and notable sustainable tech investor Capricorn Investment Group also participated in the round. The funding includes commitments of an additional $1.7bn dollars tied to Helion reaching key performance milestones. Round-leader Altman has been involved in the company as an investor and chairman since 2015.

…Helion, as a company, has been focusing less on fusion as a science experiment and more on a more important question: Can their technology generate electricity at a commercial and industrial scale?

“Some projects in the fusion space talk about heat, or energy, or other things. Helion is focused on electricity generation. Can we get it out fast, at a low cost? Can we get it to industrial-scale power?” asks David Kirtley, Helion’s co-founder and CEO. “We are building systems that are about the size of a shipping container and that can deliver industrial-scale power — say on the order of 50 megawatts of electricity.”

In June of this year, Helion published results confirming it had become the first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius, an important milestone on the path to commercial electricity from fusion. Soon after, the company announced it had broken ground on building its factory to start the process of preparing for manufacturing of its seventh-generation fusion generator, which the company calls “Polaris.”

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“Milestone” – bingo. “Commercial” – bingo. Big temperature (but what does it mean?) – bingo. Classic fusion story.
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China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors • Smallcaps

Robin Bromby:

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It is the news that the uranium players have been waiting for: a potential new, huge surge in demand that will reward mining companies ready to go into production.

China has reported overnight to be planning 150 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years — more than have been built around the world since 1980 — a signal that uranium production needs to be stepped up, fast and soon.

In a lucky coincidence, Paladin Energy (ASX: PDN) announced Wednesday that it is making progress on restarting its Langer Heinrich uranium mine in Namibia. 

And earlier this week, advanced uranium explorer Boss Energy (ASX: BOE) said it will begin a new drilling program at its flagship Honeymoon uranium project in South Australia with the aim of building mining inventory to extend production life and achieve higher rates.

Boss has so far built its uranium resource to 71.67 million pounds.

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Council of Turkey has approved construction of a fourth reactor at the Akkuyu nuclear power plant in Mersin Province, southeast Turkey. The unit will be built by Akkuyu Nuclear, a subsidiary of Russian nuclear engineer Rosatom, and will be the final phase of the $20 billion project. 

There are already signs of short-term uranium shortage. Kazatomprom, the state-owned uranium miner in Kazakhstan, has reduced its expected production figures for 2021, due to COVID-related and supply chain delays in exploration and development.

Last week Canada’s Cameco cut its forecast for production for the year, also citing supply chain issues.

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I’ll bet most of these get built before a single working fusion reactor comes into view. Don’t get me wrong – I’d love fusion to happen. But it seems to be one of those things that’s constantly beyond our grasp.

Also, this is the counterpoint about China building coal stations. These are all intended to replace them. China is far more aware of climate change than most countries.
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Forget bendy screens—Microsoft patents “foldable mouse” • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Foldable screens have allowed for some wacky phone and PC designs over the past few years. As bendy tech continues to trend, Microsoft wants to bring the fold to the wireless mouse. According to an international patent spotted by German tech site WindowsUnited, Microsoft is exploring the idea of a “foldable mouse.”

The patent is listed on PatentScope, a service from the World Intellection Property Organization that provides a searchable database of international patent applications. Microsoft’s patent was published on Thursday and filed in March. It describes a mouse that looks similar to today’s Microsoft Arc wireless mouse but with the ability to become flatter and easy to carry.

Here’s how Microsoft describes the peripheral:

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A foldable computer mouse is provided that includes a deformable body configurable to be formed into a first expanded configuration usable for receiving inputs for controlling a computing device and a second folded configuration in which a first portion of the deformable body is folded over a second portion of the deformable body.

«

Microsoft’s illustrations provide a good idea of what the company has in mind.

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And there was you thinking Salvador Dali had been dead all this time.
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Facial recognition as a less-bad option • Lawfare

Jane Brambauer is a professor of law at the University of Arizona:

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My argument goes as follows: (1) to the extent criminal justice reformers have political capital to spend, it should be spent dramatically reducing criminal liability and sentences for all crimes while increasing the probability that criminal conduct will be detected; and (2) facial recognition is a valuable tool for increasing the probability of detection because it reduces the discretion that police officers have as compared to other forms of surveillance.

Holding everything else constant, it is more efficient and more fair for police to run a photograph through facial recognition software to identify candidate suspects than to try to identify the suspect using witnesses or to solve the case without using the image.

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Fairly short at nine pages. Certainly there’s an argument that facial recognition, where shown to work, doesn’t discriminate. And misidentification is the serious problem in policing.
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How Facebook is stoking a civil war in Ethiopia • Vice

Nick Robins-Early:

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Every time Lucy Kassa publishes an article, she knows what will come next. As an Ethiopian freelance journalist covering her country’s intensifying civil war, Kassa has reported on killings, starvation, sexual violence, and other atrocities in the conflict. After each report, Facebook and other platforms erupt with threats against her. 

“It’s an everyday reality. Whenever I publish a story, there is a smear campaign on Facebook,” Kassa said. “The content is hate speech. It’s defamation, and its aim is to bully me and stop me from investigating, to harass and threaten me.”

After Kassa reported in May on a 13-year-old girl who suffered horrific burns from a possible incendiary weapons attack, a pro-government Facebook account with over 200,000 followers posted a photo of Kassa and openly called for her arrest—a serious incitement in a country where dozens of journalists have been detained during the conflict. In the weeks after, Kassa faced a wave of harassment across social media platforms that included death threats and threats of sexual violence. The Facebook post is still up months later, with over 6,000 likes and more than 1,000 comments. 

As Facebook struggles to address hate speech, radicalization, and misinformation in the United States, recently leaked internal company documents have made it clear that the problem is far worse and less addressed in countries across the global south. Even in Ethiopia—which Facebook has designated its highest risk level and repeatedly made assurances it is dedicating resources to monitoring—researchers and journalists say that hate is still spreading unabated and the platform is stoking ethnic and political conflict.

“People criticize them for how little they do in the U.S.,” said Timnit Gebru, Google’s former chief AI ethicist. “Imagine elsewhere: What we’re talking about is them doing absolutely nothing, as far as I’m concerned.” 

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I wrote about Ethiopia, well ahead of the civil war that has broken out, in my book: I picked it because it’s one of the least connected, lowest social media penetration countries in the world. I wasn’t looking for a country with trouble. It was meant to be a contrast with Myanmar, which had gone from nothing to widespread connectivity. But you still get the same social warming, even at low penetration.
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Since I’ve mentioned it, you can get my book Social Warming which will tell you about Ethiopia, Myanmar, South Africa and many more.

Currency crisis as New World MMORPG suffers deflation • Player Auctions

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Consider the ways a player can earn currency in a MMO (excluding player-to-player transactions, since that money is already in circulation): loot drops, quests, event rewards, dungeon or raid completions, and etc. Every mechanic in a game that rewards currency is spawning it out of thin air. In contrast to the real-world where the supply of money is usually, except rare exceptions, tightly controlled by central banks and regulatory authorities.

As players spend more time on a game, amassing wealth, prices inevitably soar. The only player-friendly solution is to develop currency sinks – think mounts or housing – to remove money from circulation. Supply-side interventions, i.e restrictions on currency rewards, are understandably not popular with players and so are used rarely.

New World is suffering the opposite, and significantly more rare issue, of deflation. The ways of obtaining coins in-game – monster drops, salvage, and quests – don’t offer enough raw currency to counterbalance the number of coins being used.

As a result, prices have been dropping for goods, particularly crafting materials such as ore, not necessarily because there isn’t enough coin to afford them but because the value of the currency is so much higher than the value of goods, given their relative scarcity. A punishing overhead “tax” burden exists in the game, where the cost for crafting, home-ownership, or repairs exceeds the players’ ability to accumulate coin. In addition, companies are taxed for territory ownership, essentially disincentivizing PvP since the marginal costs far exceed any potential benefits.

Currency is so valuable now that on certain servers, direct trades have become part and parcel of a makeshift barter economy, with neither party willing to be parted from their coin. Trades such as 1000 linen for 600 ore and 20 eggs, or star metal tools for 40 steel bars, are commonplace, as one would expect to see in a hunter-gatherer society. It’s surprisingly thematic, but nonetheless a frustrating experience for players.

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That story ran in late October. On Friday, Amazon (which owns New World) posted a note saying everything in the economy is tickety-boo. Well, apart from people scamming it. The economy turns out to be really hard to control in MMORPGs.
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Metabrand • Benedict Evans

He’s considering the renaming:

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though Facebook wrestles with toxicity (or even if you think it doesn’t care), it worries that teenagers prefer Snap or TikTok, and that Apple’s Tim Cook has his boot on their throat. These questions give Facebook’s investment in VR (over $10bn this year, it disclosed in the accounts) and now ‘the metaverse’ existential urgency. If there is something after smart phones, Facebook wants to be the landlord, not a tenant. It wants to set the agenda and invent new experiences (and – let’s be honest – it hasn’t invented much itself for quite a long time). Of course, today this is as speculative as smartphones were in 2001 – VR seems stuck as a subset of games, and ‘metaverse’ is more mood-board than product. When I wrote about the term a few weeks ago, I described it as the new ‘information superhighway’ – a bunch of really interesting ideas on a whiteboard, that probably won’t actually happen quite like that. There is probably some displacement here too – testing VR goggles is more fun than being shouted at in Congress.

But Facebook is protean – it shifts and turns and surfs user behaviour. It crushed MySpace and jumped from the web to mobile and then to Instagram. I think it would be wrong, or at least limited, to see this as a PR move – Facebook wants to move in a new direction. Perhaps ‘Facebook’ should be left behind as a ‘bad bank’ while Meta now builds quite new experiences again, this time perhaps even planning for those problems.

Indeed, it seems to me that the real rebrand this week wasn’t Facebook to Meta but VR to Metaverse. VR is an old and pretty stale term – a dad brand – and Facebook wants to make VR into much more than just a headset and some games.

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What people seem to me to be overlooking is how far out Zuckerberg is looking, and was looking. This is what we always underestimate with the really disruptive thinkers. Bill Gates could see a PC on every desktop when most people struggled with the idea of one in each company. Page and Brin could see phones as computers when most people could barely grasp text messaging. Facebook bought Oculus for $2bn in March 2014. Some revolutions are slow.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Chips! Or, rather, semiconductor packages! They’re in short supply (unlike Warhol copies), and the reason why is complicated. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer on Flickr.

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

What’s harder to find than microchips? The equipment that makes them • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

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The pandemic helped trigger current chip shortages, prompting both shutdowns of factories that are critical to the manufacturing and packaging of these chips and a surge in demand for work-from-home gear and other products that use them. But that is just part of the story.

A longer-term trend, of expanding and insatiable demand for microchips in every electronic device you can name, has for years been taking slack out of the supply chains for the equipment at the heart of the supply chain for microchips.

Mr. Howe, who started his company [buying and selling secondhand chipmaking equipment] in 1998, says that typically the semiconductor industry has gone through cycles of boom and bust that by turns fill and then empty his warehouses, which are located in Italy, Malaysia and Texas. But starting in 2016, demand for both new and used equipment for making chips has only grown, he says.

That swelling demand is due in part to the growth of the “Internet of Things” over the past five or so years, says Hassane El-Khoury, chief executive of Onsemi, a Phoenix, Ariz.-based semiconductor manufacturer that specializes in power and sensing technologies for automotive and industrial applications.

It’s not just that so much of what we buy these days has a chip in it—it’s also that some of those things have many more chips than ever before. For Onsemi, the dollar value of microchips in an electric vehicle with a driver assist system is 30 times as much as the cost of the chips in a fuel-powered vehicle without such a system, says Mr. El-Khoury. Chip demand also flows from the rise in popularity of mobile devices and the need for many more servers—aka cloud-computing infrastructure—to support it.

In the second quarter of 2021, the latest for which data are available, the semiconductor industry sold more chips than at any point in history, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

Chip manufacturers are responding to all this demand by pledging to make more chips than ever, but ramping up manufacturing of the kinds of chips that so many companies need right now is difficult or impossible, for a number of reasons.

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So it’s not so much that the pandemic caused a slowdown which is bouncing back and forth through the supply chain, but that the demand is all going up (especially now the car makers are pushing the accelerator again).
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Museum of Forgeries

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“Possibly Real Copy Of ‘Fairies’ by Andy Warhol” is a series of 1000 identical artworks. They are all definitely by MSCHF, and also all possibly by Andy Warhol. Any record of which piece within the set is the original has been destroyed.

Ubiquity is the darkness in which novelty and the avant-garde die their truest deaths. More than slashed canvas or burned pages, democratization of access or ownership destroys any work premised on exclusivity.

The capital-A Art World is far more concerned with authenticity than aesthetics, as proven time and again by conceptual works sold primarily as paperwork and documentation. Artwork provenance tracks the life and times of a particular piece–a record of ownership, appearances, and sales. An entire sub-industry of forensic and investigative conservation exists for this purpose.

By forging Fairies en masse, we obliterate the trail of provenance for the artwork. Though physically undamaged, we destroy any future confidence in the veracity of the work. By burying a needle in a needlestack, we render the original as much a forgery as any of our replications.

All else being equal, an original is worth more than a copy; a unique work is worth more than an editioned work. It’s common practice for a gallery to increase the price of prints in their inventory as more are sold–local scarcity sets the price, even though the total extant quantity is unchanged.

Walter Benjamin might say that copies diminish the artistic value of the original because they exist outside the work’s original, unique context, thereby diluting the singularity of the original’s existence in culture that initially imbued it with aura.

Paradoxically, for artists, successfully merching down an object = consistent, increased revenue. Posters, prints, or easily replicable derivative works turn an artwork into a product line, and when you hit the big time, product lines tend to be net more profitable than a handful of masterworks. Copies reduce value but increase revenue.

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Essentially, the opposite of NFTs: take one Warhol artwork (purchased for $20,000) and create 999 copies, very carefully duplicated to resemble the original as closely as possible. Then sell all one thousand for $250 each.

Profit: a lot. Statement about art and scarcity: intriguing.
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Global CO2 emissions have been flat for a decade, new data reveals • Carbon Brief

Zeke Hausfather:

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The GCP has always reported on emissions from both fossil CO2 and from land-use change (LUC). Fossil CO2 emissions represent upwards of 90% of current global emissions and understandably tend to get most of the attention. However, the GCP researchers have long pointed out that the largest uncertainties in understanding of CO2 emissions comes from LUC, despite its relatively small contribution to the total.

The figure below shows global CO2 emissions from both fossil and LUC. The dashed light blue line shows the prior GCP estimate of global CO2 emissions, while the solid dark blue shows the new estimate. The shaded area represents the combined uncertainty from land use and fossil CO2 emissions in the new GCP estimate.

Annual total global CO2 emissions – from fossil and land-use change – between 2000 and 2021 for both the 2020 and 2021 versions of the Global Carbon Project’s Global Carbon Budget. Shaded area shows the estimated one-sigma uncertainty for the 2021 budget. Data from the Global Carbon Project; chart by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.

Previously, the GCP data showed global CO2 emissions increasing by an average of 1.4 GtCO2 per year between 2011 and 2019 – prior to Covid-related emissions declines. The new revised dataset shows that global CO2 emissions were essentially flat – increasing by only 0.1GtCO2 per year from 2011 and 2019. When 2020 and 2021 are included, the new GCP data actually shows slightly declining global emissions over the past decade, though this should be treated with caution due to the temporary nature of Covid-related declines.

The new GCP dataset also puts historical (1750-2020) cumulative emissions around 19 GtCO2 lower than in the prior 2020 version, roughly equal to half a year of current global emissions. 

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Good news? Well, sort of. But now consider that during those past ten years the global temperature has been climbing relentlessly. This is why it’s not enough to hit “net zero”; you need “net negative”.
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Boris Johnson’s fickle climate leadership • The New Yorker

Sam Knight:

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Nine months after the agreement came into force, there are still considerable problems in Northern Ireland and a dispute with France over fishing rights.

But those deficiencies—like many other political differences—can be fixed another day, or another year, or by other politicians. Our planetary catastrophe is not salvageable, or bluffable, in the same way. At the end of the second day in Glasgow, when the international leaders had mostly departed, Johnson sat for an interview with Christiane Amanpour, on CNN. He looked slumped and tired. “Are we starting to inch forward?” he asked. “Yes, I think that arguably we are.”

Johnson noted India’s plan to decarbonize much of its electricity supply by 2030; a $10bn contribution, from Japan, to help developing countries adapt to climate change and transition away from fossil fuels; and a new global agreement on deforestation. All of which are valid. All of which are not enough. Then Johnson started to talk about the Dogger Bank, a submerged plain in the North Sea, which makes an excellent base for offshore wind farms. Amanpour looked nonplussed. “We’re running out of time,” she said. “I don’t know what Dogger Bank is.” Johnson plowed on. He ran down the clock with a disquisition about Doggerland, and the people who lived there in Mesolithic times, and a series of undersea landslides that probably wiped them out. He cannot resist distraction, because it covers what is not there.

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Knight also says of Johnson’s speech to COP26, invoking James Bond and bombs, that

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He is, more than anything, a facile student in a perpetual essay crisis: staying up late, scribbling unwieldy, fancy-sounding analogies to get through another assignment. Something something Sophocles. It’s mostly wordplay and bullshit.

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Let’s talk about AMP • SEO for Google News

Barry Adams:

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With the current kerfuffle around AMP as part of the broader lawsuit against Google, this is as good a time as any to talk about the divisive web framework.

I have thoroughly documented my own opinions on AMP in 2018, so I won’t reiterate the arguments I made there. I want to discuss something else that’s been grating me for several months now.

There’s this particular graph that, whenever I think about it – and what it actually means – it makes me angry. The more I think about that graph, the angrier I get.

This is the graph in question:

It shows the percentage of articles in Google’s mobile Top Stories carousel in the US that are not AMP articles. The sudden spike in non-AMP articles coincides with Google officially removing the AMP requirement for mobile Top Stories in the middle of July 2021.

Before then, non-AMP articles accounted for single-digit percentage of results shown in Top Stories on mobile devices. Afterwards, when any article – regardless of the technology it is built on – can rank in Top Stories, the percentage of non-AMP shot up to 25% for Google US (where it still sits today).

Let’s take a moment to digest what that actually means.

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Of course the post is all worth reading (as is the 2018 link, showing quite how hard Google pushed AMP), but the TL;DR is that AMP was built solely to benefit Google. Not publishers. And, arguably, not readers. Also relevant: Google was asked at a developer conference last week why anyone should trust it on FLoC (its privacy system), after AMP.
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The ad “blocker” that actually injects ads • Imperva

Youhann Sillam and Ron Masas:

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Deceptive ad injection is a growing concern on the internet today, affecting many people browsing the web. And while the concept isn’t new (Google stated it was the most common complaint amongst Chrome users back in 2015), just like with other online threats, bad actors are constantly refining their techniques.

Imperva’s research team is constantly monitoring and researching client-side attacks to better understand the attacker’s TTPs (Tactics, techniques and procedures).

In this post, we’ll break down a new ad injection campaign that Imperva Research Labs recently uncovered. The campaign was targeting users of some of the largest websites in the world through an extension available on both Chrome and Opera browsers called AllBlock.

Ad injection is the process of inserting unauthorized advertisements into a publisher’s web page with the intention of enticing the user to click on them. Ad injection can originate from various sources like malicious browser extensions, malware and even through stored cross-site scripting (XSS).

Ad injectors are often made by scammers who want to cash in on application downloads. They can generate revenue for their creators by serving ads and stealing advertising impressions from other websites. Other uses of ad injection, mostly common in retail e-commerce, include:

1. Brands can advertise on competitors’ sites, potentially stealing customers away.
2. Price comparison ads can be used to distract customers’ attention from making a purchase.
3. Affiliate codes or links can be injected as well, allowing scammers to cash in on purchases without ever helping a single customer.

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Now gone (the post was in October, and they found it in August) but you can bet that others will try the same thing.
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What does tech take from us? Meet the writer who has counted 100 big losses • The Guardian

John Harris:

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[Pamela Paul’s book] 100 Things We’ve Lost To The Internet draws on themes that have run through a lot of her work. It applies an appealing humour and light touch, and tells a vivid story: how, in little more than 20 years, we have shed ingrained social and behavioural habits, as well as some of the most basic ways we once thought of ourselves and our relationships with others. If they are minded to read it, anyone under 40 will presumably understand the book as the evocation of a strange, slow, endlessly inconvenient reality that now feels almost exotic. For anyone older, it will deliver a sense of loss – and of being old enough to remember times that seem almost hilariously distant.

One of Paul’s talents is the ability to see big change in lots of small ones. She writes about the end of talking to strangers on aeroplanes; the increasingly lost human habit of staring out of windows; and why no one bothers to remember phone numbers any more.

In one particularly ingenious entry, she explains the demise of the full stop (or, in American English, the “period”). If you have ever wondered why putting such once-crucial punctation in emails, phone messages or tweets now feels so awkward, here is the answer: “The period can feel so emphatic as to sound sarcastic, the internet’s version of ‘puh-leeze’ and ‘no, thank you’ and ‘srsly’ rolled into one tiny dot.” It can easily come across as passive-aggressive. Exclamation marks, moreover, “now convey warmth and sincerity”; failing to use them runs the risk of making the person you are messaging feel uncertain and anxious.

Such small transformations, Paul explains, arrive without warning and magnify a sense of everything being in flux. For fear of becoming social outcasts, most people feel they have little option but to try frantically to keep up.

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Admit it, you’ve felt this compulsion. (Via Andrew Curry’s Just Two Things.)
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Windows on ARM on Apple Silicon: an open conversation • getwired.com

Wes Miller:

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[The company] Parallels’ current approach to getting Windows on ARM installed on Apple silicon systems to date relies on users enrolling in/being in the Windows Insider Program, and installing and running preview releases of Windows, not released, fully-licensed copies of Windows 10 or 11. I’ve wound up in numerous pointless debates on Twitter where people insist they’ve properly licensed their Apple silicon Macs for Windows—it’s pretty clear that that’s not possible, and that people who insist on going this route will be on their own in the future.

Recent updates already appear to be hard-blocking updates of Windows 11 on M1 Macs. It’s likely that Windows 11 builds will eventually fail to work correctly on Apple silicon, particularly now that Microsoft has specifically called out that they will not be supporting Windows on the platform. Contrary to some of the tweets I’ve seen, if Windows on ARM breaks, this isn’t malice.

Let’s take a step back for a second. Why is Windows on ARM not thriving today?

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Wes used to work at Microsoft, and now works at an independent company that advises on Microsoft licensing (which is a topic to make strong men weep). If you want to understand this topic, this is the piece to read.
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The booming underground market for bots that steal your 2FA codes • Vice

Joseph Cox:

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The call came from PayPal’s fraud prevention system. Someone had tried to use my PayPal account to spend $58.82, according to the automated voice on the line. PayPal needed to verify my identity to block the transfer.

“In order to secure your account, please enter the code we have sent your mobile device now,” the voice said. PayPal sometimes texts users a code in order to protect their account. After entering a string of six digits, the voice said, “Thank you, your account has been secured and this request has been blocked.”

“Don’t worry if any payment has been charged to your account: we will refund it within 24 to 48 hours. Your reference ID is 1549926. You may now hang up,” the voice said.

But this call was actually from a hacker.

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Have you figured it out? If they’ve got the email address you use for an account, they can often find a password from a data breach. If that works but you have 2FA turned on, or the system blocks them because the login location is suspicious, it sends a code to you. Bingo!

Relatively cheap, and very clever.
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Calculations suggest it’ll be impossible to control a super-intelligent AI • Science Alert

David Nield:

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Rules such as ’cause no harm to humans’ can’t be set if we don’t understand the kind of scenarios that an AI is going to come up with, suggest the authors of the 2021 paper. Once a computer system is working on a level above the scope of our programmers, we can no longer set limits.

“A super-intelligence poses a fundamentally different problem than those typically studied under the banner of ‘robot ethics’,” wrote the researchers.

“This is because a superintelligence is multi-faceted, and therefore potentially capable of mobilizing a diversity of resources in order to achieve objectives that are potentially incomprehensible to humans, let alone controllable.”

Part of the team’s reasoning comes from the halting problem put forward by Alan Turing in 1936. The problem centers on knowing whether or not a computer program will reach a conclusion and answer (so it halts), or simply loop forever trying to find one.

As Turing proved through some smart math, while we can know that for some specific programs, it’s logically impossible to find a way that will allow us to know that for every potential program that could ever be written. That brings us back to AI, which in a super-intelligent state could feasibly hold every possible computer program in its memory at once.

Any program written to stop AI harming humans and destroying the world, for example, may reach a conclusion (and halt) or not – it’s mathematically impossible for us to be absolutely sure either way, which means it’s not containable.

“In effect, this makes the containment algorithm unusable,” said computer scientist Iyad Rahwan, from the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany back in January.

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Here’s my question: would a superintelligent AI help divert an asteroid that was heading towards us?
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Nothing about the blue site! Or any social network! Even so, you should read Social Warming, my book about the effects that social media is (are?) having on society, democracy and journalism.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The software chief from Apple, Craig Federighi, came to Lisbon to perform his new offering ‘Don’t Make Me Sideload On The iPhone, Ma’. CC-licensed photo by Web Summit 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. Just seven to go. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Surprise! Facebook’s climate denial problem got worse this year – The Verge

Justine Calma:

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As world leaders scramble to forge global agreements in Glasgow this month in a last-ditch effort to avert the worst of the climate crisis, there’s a threat to meaningful climate action lurking on social media. Climate denial on Facebook has gotten even worse this year, according to a new study led by climate advocacy group Stop Funding Heat and the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a watchdog group made up of academics, journalists, and activists. It’s evidence that Facebook’s efforts to stomp out lies about climate change are failing, the study’s authors say.

Reactions, comments, and shares per post from Facebook pages and groups dedicated to spreading climate misinformation jumped a whopping 77% since January, the report found. Each day, it found, climate misinformation on the platform gets between 818,000 and 1.36 million views. Less than 4% of the posts it analyzed had been fact-checked.

“Facebook is the Big Tobacco of our generation, greenwashing to avoid responsibility and sewing [sic] confusion and doubt about climate change in the global conversation,” Real Facebook Oversight Board wrote in a statement.

The authors analyzed a dataset of 195 pages and groups and 48,700 posts written in English between January and August. That included 41 accounts focused entirely on climate misinformation, like a page called ‘Friends of Science’ that today posted a photo of a cake with icing that says “COP26 Much Ado About Nothing”— a reference to COP26 the high-profile United Nations climate summit taking place in Glasgow. Other pages and groups also have a history of posting false information about climate change. Fox News, Breitbart, and Sean Hannity were the three most prolific spreaders of climate misinformation identified in the report.

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Notice how traditional old media provides the seed, but Facebook provides the tractor with the seed spreader.
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Facebook and misinformation? Plenty more about its responses on Covid and other topics in Social Warming, my latest book, which examines why social media drives everyone (even non-users!) a little bit mad.

A new Alphabet company using DeepMind AI to find new drug candidates • Isomorphic Labs

Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind:

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The pandemic has brought to the fore the vital work that brilliant scientists and clinicians do every day to understand and combat disease. We believe that the foundational use of cutting edge computational and AI methods can help scientists take their work to the next level, and massively accelerate the drug discovery process. AI methods will increasingly be used not just for analysing data, but to also build powerful predictive and generative models of complex biological phenomena. AlphaFold2 is an important first proof point of this, but there is so much more to come. 

At its most fundamental level, I think biology can be thought of as an information processing system, albeit an extraordinarily complex and dynamic one. Taking this perspective implies there may be a common underlying structure between biology and information science – an isomorphic mapping between the two – hence the name of the company. Biology is likely far too complex and messy to ever be encapsulated as a simple set of neat mathematical equations. But just as mathematics turned out to be the right description language for physics, biology may turn out to be the perfect type of regime for the application of AI.‍

This is just the beginning of what we hope will become a radical new approach to drug discovery, and I’m incredibly excited to get this ambitious new commercial venture off the ground and to partner with pharmaceutical and biomedical companies. I will serve as CEO for Isomorphic’s initial phase, while remaining as DeepMind CEO, partially to help facilitate collaboration between the two companies where relevant, and to set out the strategy, vision and culture of the new company.

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China climate goals hinge on $440bn nuclear power plan to rival US • Bloomberg

Dan Murtaugh and Krystal Chia:

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China has over the course of the year revealed the extensive scope of its plans for nuclear, an ambition with new resonance given the global energy crisis and the calls for action coming out of the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow. The world’s biggest emitter, China’s planning at least 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35. The effort could cost as much as $440bn; as early as the middle of this decade, the country will surpass the US as the world’s largest generator of nuclear power.

The government’s never been shy about its interest in nuclear, along with renewable sources of energy, as part of President Xi Jinping’s goal to make China’s economy carbon-neutral by mid-century. But earlier this year, the government singled out atomic power as the only energy form with specific interim targets in its official five-year plan. Shortly after, the chairman of the state-backed China General Nuclear Power Corp. articulated the longer-term goal: 200 gigawatts by 2035, enough to power more than a dozen cities the size of Beijing.

It would be the kind of wholesale energy transformation that Western democracies — with budget constraints, political will and public opinion to consider — can only dream of. It could also support China’s goal to export its technology to the developing world and beyond, buoyed by an energy crunch that’s highlighted the fragility of other kinds of power sources. Slower winds and low rainfall have led to lower-than-expected supply from Europe’s dams and wind farms, worsening the crisis, and expensive coal and natural gas have led to power curbs at factories in China and India. Yet nuclear power plants have remained stalwart.

“Nuclear is the one energy source that came out of this looking like a champion,” said David Fishman, an energy consultant with The Lantau Group. “It generated the whole time, it was clean, the price didn’t change. If the case for nuclear power wasn’t already strong, it’s a lot stronger now.”

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Unfortunately, the contrast between what can get done by authoritarian governments and what can get done by sclerotically democratic governments (how’s that big infrastructure bill going?) is only going to get more stark as global warming kicks in.
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Half world’s fossil fuel assets could become worthless by 2036 in net zero transition • The Guardian

Jonathan Watts, Ashley Kirk, Niamh McIntyre, Pablo Gutiérrez and Niko Kommenda:

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About half of the world’s fossil fuel assets will be worthless by 2036 under a net zero transition, according to research.

Countries that are slow to decarbonise will suffer but early movers will profit; the study finds that renewables and freed-up investment will more than make up for the losses to the global economy.

It highlights the risk of producing far more oil and gas than required for future demand, which is estimated to leave $11tn-$14tn (£8.1tn-£10.3tn) in so-called stranded assets – infrastructure, property and investments where the value has fallen so steeply they must be written off.

The lead author, Jean-Francois Mercure of the University of Exeter, said the shift to clean energy would benefit the world economy overall, but it would need to be handled carefully to prevent regional pockets of misery and possible global instability.

“In a worst-case scenario, people will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the demand they expected does not materialise and they realise that what they own is worthless. Then we could see a financial crisis on the scale of 2008,” he said, warning oil capitals such as Houston could suffer the same fate as Detroit after the decline of the US car industry unless the transition is carefully managed.

The challenge is evident at the ongoing Cop26 climate conference, where some of the nations most at risk of being left with stranded assets – such as the oil and gas exporters Russia and Brazil – are likely to try to slow down the transition as they have done at previous climate meetings, while those most likely to gain – such as the fuel-importing EU – are pushing for faster action.

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Tear down those paywalls, International Energy Agency • Our World in Data

Max Roser:

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Transitioning to a low-carbon energy system is one of humanity’s most pressing challenges. Since 87% of annual carbon dioxide emissions come from the energy and industrial sectors, this transition is essential to address climate change.1 At the same time the provision of clean energy is also a priority for global health and human development: 10% do not have access to electricity; 41% do not have access to clean fuels for cooking, and estimates of the health burden of anthropogenic outdoor air pollution range from 4 to over 10 million premature deaths per year.

To understand the problems the world faces and see how we can make progress we need accessible, high-quality data. It needs to be global in scope – leaving no country absent from the conversation – and it needs to cover the range of metrics needed to understand the energy system: this includes primary energy, final energy, useful energy, the breakdown of the electricity mix, end-sector breakdowns of energy consumption, and the CO2 emissions that each sector produces.

This data exists. It is produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA). But the IEA only makes a fraction of their data publicly available, and keeps the rest behind very costly paywalls. This is despite the fact that the IEA is largely funded through public money from its member countries. The reason that the IEA puts much of its data behind paywalls is that the funders made it a requirement that it raises a small share of its budget through licensed data sales. As a consequence of this requirement the data is copyrighted under a strict data license; to access more than the very basic metrics, researchers and everyone else who wants to inform themselves about the global energy system needs to purchase a user license that often costs thousands of dollars.

In 2018, the annual budget of the IEA was €27.8m. According to the IEA’s budget figures, revenues from its data and publication sales finance “more than one-fifth of its annual budget”. That equates to €5.6m per year. To put this figure in perspective, it is equal to 0.03% of the total public energy R+D budget for IEA countries in 2018, which was €20.7bn. Or on a per capita basis split equally across IEA member countries: 0.44 cents per person per year.

We believe that the relatively small revenues that the paywalls generate do not justify the very large downsides that these restrictions cause.

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Open data. It’s the same old rallying cry. And given how wrong the IEA has been in its forecasts about non-fossil forms of energy, the paywalls are protecting bad data.
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The urban oil fields of Los Angeles • The Atlantic

Alan Taylor:

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In the 1890s, the small town of Los Angeles (population 50,000) began a transformation driven by the discovery and drilling of some of the most productive oil fields in history. By 1930, California was producing nearly one quarter of the world’s oil output, and its population had grown to 1.2 million. In the decades that followed, many wells closed, but even more opened, surrounded by urban and suburban growth. Machinery was camouflaged, loud noises were abated, methane pockets were vented, as residents learned to live side-by-side with oil production facilities. To this day, oil fields in the Los Angeles Basin remain very productive, and modern techniques have centralized operations into smaller areas or moved offshore. Gathered here are images of some of the sites and machinery still in use among the homes, golf courses, and shopping malls of Los Angeles.

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This article is from 2014, so some of these might be gone. Still fascinating; the most shocking, to modern eyes, is the oil derricks on Venice Beach in 1952, within living memory. (Thanks Ravi for the link.)
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New dictionary words, October 2021 • Merriam-Webster

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Just as the language never stops evolving, the dictionary never stops expanding. New terms and new uses for existing terms are the constant in a living language, and our latest list brings together both new and likely familiar words that have shown extensive and established use.

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Words like “FTW” and “digital nomad” and “bit rot”? They seem pretty non-2021 to me. Google Trends shows “bit rot” popping up in 2004, and that’s probably not it.
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Microsoft Surface Duo 2 review: a bad case for two screens • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

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The Microsoft Surface Duo 2 is great for reading Dune. At least, that’s what I spent the majority of my time doing while I used it.

I also browsed TikTok more than a person my age probably should. The addictive app spanned the Duo 2’s dual screens in a way that almost—almost—made the weirdness of those dual screens worth it. One night at dinner, I scanned a menu QR code with half of the Duo 2 while using the second display to look up a bottle of wine. (Our server, intrigued, paused to ask what this thing was. I told him it was a new Microsoft foldable phone. Then I mentioned that it cost $1,500, and he lost interest.)

The Duo 2 is no doubt a conversation starter. It’s a glimpse into the folding-phone future. But doing all the usual phone stuff on the Duo 2—browsing the web, taking photos, texting, Slacking, Zooming—was awkward on this two-screens-with-a-hinge phone. The only time using the Duo felt truly natural to use was when I was kicking back and reading, holding it like a small book, which it so much resembles. So yes, it makes a really nice, really expensive, Kindle replacement. It’s just not great for much else.

…Some apps span both screens, sure, but for the most part you’re being urged to live in two states at once. Your calendar on one side, your Slack on the other. Your email inbox over here, your email compose window over there. Twitter sitting opposite the news article you should probably read before you tweet it. Google Docs, where you’ve jotted down your test notes about this befuddling phone, and Microsoft Teams, which you’ll use to ask Microsoft execs seven different versions of “Why?” Work and play. Work and life.

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The dual screen idea seems like it ought to work. Maybe there’s just too much of it.

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Don’t read the comments? For news sites, it might be worth the effort • Poynter

Elizabeth Djinis:

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Is the death of online newspaper comments greatly exaggerated? It largely depends on their function. If the goal is for online comments to serve as the primary form of discourse around an article, rather than social media or even external discussion, it’s probably unrealistic. But if the aim is mission-based, that of a newspaper providing a service to their readers, a way for readers to engage with content that at least gives them the appearance of being heard, then online newspaper comments may still have a long future yet.

That’s a compelling argument to Talia Stroud, a University of Texas at Austin professor and director of the Moody College of Communication’s Center for Media Engagement. She’s seen various newspapers get rid of their comments, but it doesn’t leave her with a lasting impression of a general trend.

“Over the years, I’ve heard a number of the ‘comment sections are all going to go away’ arguments, and it has never come to pass,” she said. “I feel like one or two papers or a high-profile organization do it, but there are so many publications out there who are doubling down.”

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Stroud is so wonderfully wrong. Maybe if she was given responsibility for looking after a newspaper’s comments section for a few months, and figuring out what to do about the terrible toxicity and irrelevance that the journalists in the article point to, she’d realise precisely how wrong. Practitioners v theorists. (I wrote about why newspaper comments degenerate back in 2014, and it remains true.)
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Craig Federighi vehemently speaks out against iPhone sideloading in Web Summit keynote • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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Federighi repeatedly referred back to a house analogy during the event. He likened buying an iPhone to buying a “great home with a really great security system,” but then a new law gets passed that forces you to weaken the security of your home.

“The safe house that you chose now has a fatal flaw in its security system, and burglars are really good at exploiting it,” Federighi said.

The Apple executive also warned that the legislation comes as there have “never been more cybercriminals” determined to access the private information on your iPhone. “Sideloading is a cybercriminal’s best friend,” Federighi said. “And requiring that on iPhone would be a gold rush for the malware industry.”

»

“As an engineer who wants iPhone to stay as secure as possible for our users, there is one part I worry about and that’s the provision that would require iPhone to allow sideloading. In the name of giving users more choice, that one provision would take away consumers’ choice of a more secure platform. All of this comes at a time where people are keeping more personal and sensitive information than ever on their iPhones. And I can tell you there have never been cybercriminals more determined to get your hands on it.” 

«

Federighi went on to say that this legislation would open a “Pandora’s box of unreviewed, malware-ridden software and deny everyone the option of iPhone’s secure approach.”

He also spoke out against the counterargument of simply letting people “choose” to sideload, warning that people could be coerced or tricked.

»

“Clearly, I’m no fan of sideloading, but I want to address an argument I hear a lot: ‘Let people choose whether or not to sideload. Let them judge the risks, and they can decide themselves.’ And it’s easy to see the attraction of this argument, but history shows us that it doesn’t play out the way we’d hope because even if you have no intention of sideloading, people are routinely coerced or tricked into doing it. And that’s true across the board, even on platforms like Android that sideloading somewhat difficult to do.”

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There’s a video of the whole speech in the post. This part certainly sounds Canute-ish.
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Sonos Voice Assistant leaks ahead of launch • Protocol

Janko Roettgers:

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Sonos may be getting close to the launch of its own voice assistant: code traces found in the company’s mobile app suggest that the company has been preparing the launch of “Sonos Voice Control,” an assistant focused on playback and device control.

A Sonos spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The code snippets were posted this week by a Reddit user, who was also able to unearth the assistant’s icon: a speech bubble not too dissimilar from the one used by Amazon’s Alexa assistant.

Those images also suggest that the assistant can be activated in addition to Alexa, making it possible for Sonos owners to invoke either assistant by using specific wake words. The same doesn’t seem to be true for Google Assistant, with the images suggesting that the two assistants won’t be able to be activated on the same device.

Google has long insisted that technical issues prevent it from running Google Assistant in addition to another voice assistant. Sonos executives have rejected that claim, and alleged that Google’s voice assistant policies are anti-competitive. The issue took center stage at a recent antitrust hearing, during which a Google representative signaled that the company may be willing to change its tune over time.

In addition to the interoperability issues, the leak also shines a light on some of the features Sonos Voice Control will be supporting: Users will be able to launch and control music playback and volume, change which speakers music is playing on and check the battery level of portable Sonos devices.

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Been a while coming.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The appearance of Facebook (Meta’s) Chris Cox via weblink at the Web Summit in Lisbon wasn’t very persuasive about the state of the metaverse. CC-licensed photo by Web Summit 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 an entity on a list. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Israeli spyware company NSO Group placed on US blacklist • The Guardian

Stephanie Kirchgaessner:

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The commerce department said it included NSO – as well as three other companies – on the so-called “entity list” because it had “reasonable cause to believe, based on specific and articulated facts, that the entity has been involved, or is involved, or poses a significant risk of being or becoming involved in activities that are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States”.

In effect, it means that NSO will be barred from buying parts and components from US companies without a special licence. It also puts a cloud over the sale of the company’s software globally, including in the US.

The commerce department said that “investigative information” had shown NSO and another Israeli surveillance company called Candiru had developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used this tool to “maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers”.

NSO has said that its spyware is used by foreign government clients to target serious criminals. It has denied that any of its clients ever targeted Macron or any French government officials.

But in the weeks that followed the publication of the Pegasus project, Israeli officials met with counterparts in the US and France to discuss allegations of abuse of the technology.

Israel has long claimed it maintains robust oversight over any weapon sales to foreign governments. But following the publication of the Pegasus Project this summer and its diplomatic fallout, Israeli officials – both in public and private – have appeared to distance the government from private weapons companies.

Yair Lapid, the country’s foreign minister, said in September that the government had only limited control on how defence exports are used. He added: “We are going to look at this again.”

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Not sure what “parts and components” NSO needs – it’s not like Huawei (still underwater from being on the blacklist). But as it says, being on the entity list might be a problem. Or companies and people who want to hack dissidents and political opponents and troublesome journalists will just carry on as before.
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The internet is leaking • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick is at Web Summit in Lisbon (that’s Portugal, for American readers):

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About an hour before this newsletter hit your inbox today, Facebo— sorry, I mean, Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, presented on a panel called “Welcome To The Metaverse”. After [Facebook/Meta chief flack Nick] Clegg’s tribute to the days of trying to watch a video mid-Kazaa download earlier in the week, I wondered if Cox would show in person and, if he did stream in, would the lag be as bad as it was with Clegg.

Cox’s buffering was so bad and lag time was so awkward that interviewer Nicholas Carlson, the global editor-in-chief of Insider, actually had to address it, quipping that even if his picture froze, as long as the audio still worked, he’d try to keep going. It’s also important to point out this seemed to be a Facebook problem. Other remote presentations at the Web Summit have been fine. I mean, any Twitch streamer or South Korean Starcraft player could have told them about the issues with trying to stream 4k video internationally. But while Cox was freezing up while trying to talk about integrity or whatever, something else happened.

The upper rows of the auditorium during Cox’s panel were full of students. After Cox’s second completely canned response — he was trying to explain that standup comedy is a perfect fit for Facebook’s Horizons (lol sorry but can you imagine anything more grim than performing standup for a Facebook executive in VR?) — the students clearly ran out of patience. They all took out their phone lights and started flashing them at Cox on the screen while talking loudly enough that I saw reporters in the press section struggle to hear what was going on on stage.

Cox would have been able to notice this and, maybe at the very least, stopped painfully describing how fun his weird Club Penguin conference call app is, but he didn’t know it was happening. Because he was remote, he couldn’t actually see the crowd.

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Broderick has been absolutely killing it with his metaverse posts. This one, which is unusual in that’s a single written-through piece, is utterly stellar. I recommend you subscribe – there’s a free or paid tier.
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The Metaverse: what it is, where to find it, who will build it, and Fortnite • MatthewBall.vc

Matthew Ball, writing back in January 2020:

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Just as it was hard to envision in 1982 what the Internet of 2020 would be — and harder still to communicate it to those who had never even “logged” onto it at that time — we don’t really know how to describe the Metaverse. However, we can identify core attributes.

The Metaverse, we think, will…

• Be persistent – which is to say, it never “resets” or “pauses” or “ends”, it just continues indefinitely
• Be synchronous and live – even though pre-scheduled and self-contained events will happen, just as they do in “real life”, the Metaverse will be a living experience that exists consistently for everyone and in real-time
• Be without any cap to concurrent users, while also providing each user with an individual sense of “presence” – everyone can be a part of the Metaverse and participate in a specific event/place/activity together, at the same time and with individual agency
• Be a fully functioning economy – individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of “work” that produces “value” that is recognized by others
• Be an experience that spans both the digital and physical worlds, private and public networks/experiences, and open and closed platforms
• Offer unprecedented interoperability of data, digital items/assets, content, and so on across each of these experiences – your Counter-Strike gun skin, for example, could also be used to decorate a gun in Fortnite, or be gifted to a friend on/through Facebook. Similarly, a car designed for Rocket League (or even for Porsche’s website) could be brought over to work in Roblox. Today, the digital world basically acts as though it were a mall where every store used its own currency, required proprietary ID cards, had proprietary units of measurement for things like shoes or calories, and different dress codes, etc.
• Be populated by “content” and “experiences” created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors, some of whom are independent individuals, while others might be informally organized groups or commercially-focused enterprises

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Still some distance off, when compared with Ryan Broderick’s observations above.
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The Apple Polishing Cloth is everything wrong with society • Gizmodo

Victoria Song:

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Don’t get me wrong. The Apple polishing cloth thing is stupid. The $19 glorified microfiber square is now back-ordered into oblivion. But after saying my piece about the cloth, I figured it’d slither away into the black hole where so many forgotten blogs have died before it. The news cycle is always churning, and we as a species need to constantly be entertained, outraged, or focused on making/sending memes. A stupid $19 cloth inspires all three, but the internet also has the attention span of a gadfly. It’s only a matter of time before Apple surfaces the “next” polishing cloth.

I asked my editor Caitlin McGarry, who came into possession of an Apple Polishing Cloth when she reviewed the nano-textured 27-inch iMac last year, how she would describe the product: “It feels like luxury, that’s all I can say,” she said. It’s better than a microfiber cloth, but not something she’d actually spend her own money on. This is probably the natural conclusion we should’ve all reached.

But alas, here we are. iFixit has done a teardown of the cloth. (Surprise, it’s actually two clothes glued together.) The New York Times has published a semi-ridiculous, overly serious investigation into the cloth. There is a Twitter parody account. Some asshat is selling it on eBay for $48, and another asshat out there will probably buy it. Apple is likely watching all this with befuddled bemusement, patting us chuds on the head for giving it free marketing for something that doesn’t deserve this much attention, counting its billions. As of this writing, the cloth is back-ordered through early January. You jackals. This was not how the polishing cloth jokes were supposed to turn out, and really, it was over the second Elon Musk tweeted about it [on Oct 22].

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Jellyfish attack nuclear power plants, again and again • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Susan D’Agostino:

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The clash between gelatinous jellyfish and hulking nuclear power plants has a long history. These spineless, brainless, bloodless creatures shut down the Torness nuclear power plant in 2011 at a cost of approximately $1.5m per day, according to one estimate. Swarms of these invertebrates have also been responsible for nuclear power plant shutdowns in Israel, Japan, the United States, the Philippines, South Korea, and Sweden.

Humans have unwittingly nurtured the adversarial relationship between jellyfish and nuclear power plants. That is, human-induced climate change has raised ocean water temperatures, setting conditions for larger-than-usual jellyfish populations. Further, the relatively warm water near nuclear power plant discharge outlets may attract jellyfish swarms, according to one study. Also, pollution has lowered oxygen levels in sea water, which jellyfish tolerate more than other marine animals, leading to their proliferation.

Some look at jellyfish and see elegant ballerinas of the sea, while others view them as pests. Either way, they are nothing if not resilient. Jellyfish are 95% water, drift in topical waters and the Arctic Ocean, and thrive in the ocean’s bottom as well as on its surface. Nuclear power plant operators might take note: Older-than-dinosaur jellyfish are likely here to stay.

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If I was listening correctly to last week’s In Our Time (about corals), jellyfish are somehow tied up with the life cycle of one of the animals that is essential to coral reefs, which are bleaching (losing the motile animal). So it’s all goes well for the jellyfish, but not so much for the coral. Or, of course, the nuclear power stations. (Via Andrew Curry’s Just Two Things.)
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Apple trims iPad production to feed chips to iPhone 13 • Communications Today

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Apple has cut back sharply on iPad production to allocate more components to the iPhone 13, multiple sources told Nikkei Asia, a sign the global chip supply crunch is hitting the company even harder than it previously indicated.

Production of the iPad was down 50% from Apple’s original plans for the past two months, sources briefed on the matter said, adding that parts intended for older iPhones were also being moved to the iPhone 13.

The iPad and iPhone models have a number of components in common, including both core and peripheral chips. This allows Apple to shift supplies between different devices in certain cases.

The company is prioritizing iPhone 13 output in part because it forecasts stronger demand for the smartphone than for the iPad as Western markets begin to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, sources said. Europe and the Americas account for 66% of Apple’s revenue.

The peak of new iPhone sales also comes within months of release, so ensuring smooth production for the iPhone 13, which was released on Sept. 24, is a top priority for Apple right now.

Demand for the iPad, however, has also been robust thanks to the rise of remote working and learning amid the pandemic. Global shipments of iPads climbed 6.7% on the year to 53.2 million devices last year, securing a 32.5% global market share, far ahead of the No. 2 Samsung’s 19.1% share, according to IDC data. Total iPad shipments were 40.3 million for the first nine months of this year, up 17.83 % from the same time a year ago.

…This is not the first time Apple has prioritized iPhones over iPads. In 2020, it reallocated some iPad parts to the iPhone 12, its first full-range of 5G handsets, to shield its most iconic product from supply chain constraints during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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(The story is reprinted from the Nikkei.) There’s so reliably always an iPhone supply story within a month or two of whichever is the latest one to be released. The regularity would shame clockwork. First time I’ve seen “production steady, but something else missing out” that I recall, though.
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Instagram brings back Twitter Card preview support for posts • TechCrunch

Aisha Malik:

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Instagram is bringing back support for Twitter Card previews starting today. Now when users share an Instagram link on Twitter, a preview of the post will be shown in the tweet. Prior to this change, when users posted an Instagram link on Twitter, the tweet would only display the URL of the Instagram link.

The social media platform made the controversial decision to remove Twitter Card support back in 2012. At the time, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom said the reason was that Instagram wanted to take control of its content and that the company wanted images to be viewed on Instagram, as opposed to Twitter.

The change was met with backlash, as it made cross-posting more difficult for users. In some cases, users found workarounds through third-party platforms in order to feature Instagram posts in tweets.

Twitter has also acknowledged the change in a tweet, noting that “if you want to share your latest Instagram post on the Twitter timeline too, you’re in luck. Now when you share a link to an IG post in a Tweet, it’ll show up as a card with a preview of the photo.”

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The subtle thing about this rapprochement is that it shows how the two networks don’t view each other as competitors any more. The time when this interchange was blocked, all the social networks were at war with each other, fighting for users. (See my post from the time about Twitter blocking Tumblr from using its social graph.) Now, they’ve reached a steady state. It might even benefit them both: Twitter users get to see Instagram posts, but might also visit them.

So, iPad app next, Instagram? Only been 11 years.
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Since we’re mentioning the early days of social networks, they’re a topic that’s covered in Social Warming, my latest book – along with the more dramatic effects that followed once they grew large.

This is what 3°C of global warming looks like • The Economist

:

»

rise of 3°C in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels by 2100 would be disastrous. Its effects would be felt differently around the world, but nowhere would be immune. Prolonged heatwaves, droughts and extreme weather events could all become increasingly common and severe. Worryingly, slow progress from governments in cutting emissions make this an uncomfortably plausible scenario. This film shows what that world would look like.

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It’s 16 minutes (though I have to admit it felt longer – there’s a certain ponderous style to lots of climate effect films).

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Fossil fuel subsidies: If we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we should not pay people to burn fossil-fuels • Our World in Data

Max Roser:

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Billions of the poorest people in the world do not have access to modern sources of energy. Four out of ten people in the world – that’s 3 billion – do not have access to clean, modern energy for cooking. They have to cook and heat with wood, crop waste, charcoal, coal or dried dung. Millions die every year from indoor air pollution as a result, as I wrote in this essay on energy poverty.

Fossil fuel subsidies are expensive and environmentally disastrous. But because energy access is so crucial the solution is not as simple as just repealing these subsidies. If they cannot access fossil fuel energy, they need substitutes. To end the subsidies that sustain the consumption of fossil fuels we need to make energy from clean sources affordable.

Whether industry and private individuals choose energy from fossil fuels or from clean alternatives is largely decided by their price. To transition away from fossil fuels to clean sources, the clean alternatives need to be cheaper. The fact that fossil fuels are subsidised makes this transition much harder. Clean alternatives don’t just have to be cheaper than fossil fuels, they need to be cheaper than fossil fuels with subsidies.

As so often with progress, the world rarely solves a problem through a single event. Repealing subsidies is a process. The good news is that there are several countries that are making progress and that others can learn from. Indonesia – home to 270 million people and a country with a major oil industry – is one of them. Researchers Beaton, Lontoh, and Wai-Poi (2017) show how the country overcame the political obstacles to gasoline and diesel subsidy reforms and focus on the reforms after the 2014 price hike. …The data in the charts [in the post] shows that Italy, Ukraine, and Thailand are also examples of countries that have recently reduced subsidies.

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One of those things where it just continues because even though it’s bad the idea of not doing it is even worse.
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How ExxonMobil captured COP26 • Byline Times

Nafeez Ahmed:

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The Government, which is hosting the COP26 UN climate summit in Glasgow, is being formally advised by Texas fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil – one of the world’s biggest funders of climate science denial – according to Government documents examined exclusively by Byline Times.

The documents, unnoticed until now, reveal that Government officials have met with ExxonMobil representatives a total of at least nine times since 2020 to discuss UK climate strategy, net zero, decarbonisation and even Brexit – shaping both Britain’s own net zero plan, and how it has framed discussions at COP26.

Top Government ministers and officials have met repeatedly not just with ExxonMobil representatives but also with other oil industry officials over the past five years to explore key issues around Britain’s net zero climate strategy, associated energy policies, and in particular the role of carbon capture, utilisation and storage, the documents reveal.

The meetings, particularly those involving ExxonMobil, increased in the run-up to COP26.

The meetings reveal how one of the world’s biggest funders of climate science denial, as well as other major carbon polluters, are now formally advising this year’s host of COP26 on how to achieve net zero. Perhaps most importantly, they have done so not by breaking the law, but by simply exploiting the extraordinary largesse provided to them by Boris Johnson’s Government.

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The accusation (made in a rather woolly piece of writing; Byline Times could do with tougher editing) is that the UK government has been allowing fossil fuel companies to dictate climate moderation policy – including reliance on technologies that don’t exist at the scale we need, and which might never do.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The iconic London black cab is making a comeback as Uber prices rise, forced up by a driver shortage. CC-licensed photo by JOHN LLOYD 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. The blue site’s back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

You could always try a book: Social Warming, my latest book, which looks at how social networks affect us. (Here’s a recent video review, just a couple of minutes.)

Facebook’s ban on facial recognition isn’t what it seems • Gizmodo

Shoshana Wodinsky:

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Facebook first began using facial recognition tech back in 2010 as a way to make tagging photos a bit easier for the folks uploading photos for the platform. Facebook’s software would suggest friends that were potentially in your photos, and even tag them for you, cutting down on the time that people would spend manually tagging everyone they knew in their pics. Facebook automatically opted its users into this system until 2019, when it finally announced it would let us decide whether to turn it on—and let the company continue scanning every uploaded photo for a sign of your face—or off.

And now, the platform’s doing away with the feature entirely. As part of the change, the company notes that those that are still opted into Facebook’s Facial Recognition setting will “no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos.”

On top of that, the facial template being used to recognize each of these users will be deleted from Facebook’s systems. “The platform will still encourage people to tag posts manually,” in order to help users find friends that might be in a photo or video, the blog post notes.

As for why Facebook’s making this move after slightly more than a decade of collecting countless faces, it looks like the company’s finally realized what watchdog groups and tech critics have been saying for years: facial recognition, by and large, does way more harm than good. (At minimum it’s realized the tech does reputational harm.) And for the most part, the real-world harms are disproportionally felt by people of color that are often misidentified by these systems.

“Every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance,” wrote Jerome Pesenti, one of the heads for artificial intelligence at Meta, in the Tuesday blog post. “In the case of facial recognition, its long-term role in society needs to be debated in the open, and among those who will be most impacted by it.”

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Not clear though whether Instagram or Spark AR (Facebook’s augmented reality platform) will give up facial recognition.
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GitHub is China’s ‘last land of free speech’ – but for how long? • Rest of World

Meaghan Tobin:

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In 2020, nearly 10% of GitHub’s 56 million contributors came from China. GitHub has been a triumph there for parent company Microsoft, which bought the platform for $7.5 billion in 2018. With the departure of foreign social networks like Facebook and the rollback of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn’s services there, GitHub is now the last major foreign-owned platform accessible in China that hosts user-generated content — an unpredictable set of information that would normally be at risk of censorship, screening, and even summary blockage. Some users have referred to it as “the last land of free speech.” 

Though GitHub continues to provide an unparalleled bridge to the global open source community, China’s developers have begun to wear their reliance on the platform more uneasily. Adding to the mounting pressure is a tech policy environment that is increasingly challenging, even for China’s own top tech companies – including, from November 1, the new Personal Information Protection Law. Intended to protect citizens’ data and store it inside the country, the law applies to any company that transmits Chinese user data.

As an open source platform, GitHub is more in alignment with Chinese tech policy goals in general than LinkedIn was, said Kendra Schaefer, head of tech policy at Trivium China, a Beijing-based consultancy. But, she said, “Open source policy goals do not supersede online content and algorithm regulations. The rules that make it more difficult for platforms with social elements to do business will still apply, and Microsoft may still decide they don’t want to deal with them.”

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Yahoo just pulled (the last of its remaining sites) out. Hard to see how Github is going to be able to carry on under the new PIP law.
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Nintendo to make 20% fewer Switch consoles due to chip crunch • Nikkei Asia

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Nintendo will only be able to produce about 24 million units of its popular Switch game console in the fiscal year through March, 20% below an original plan, Nikkei has learned.

Its production has been held up by shortages of semiconductors and other electronic parts amid strong demand for Switch, including for its latest version released on Oct. 8.

Nintendo’s trouble is a reminder of the far-reaching impact of the global supply crunch that has affected a wide range of industries from autos to electronics to machinery.

The Kyoto-based company originally planned on producing a record 30 million Switch units on the back of rising demand for computer games triggered by the COVID pandemic, which has forced people to spend more time at home.

However, production bottlenecks quickly emerged around springtime for key components including microcomputers. The company concluded it would have to revise down production targets as it was not able to secure enough supplies. Nintendo’s suppliers have already been notified about the production cuts.

A Nintendo spokesperson acknowledged that the production is being affected by component shortages. “We are assessing their impact on our production,” the spokesperson said.

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All this unfulfilled demand. Wonder where that goes: do people just hold on to their money, waiting for a time when they can get that Switch they briefly wanted? Or do they buy something else that’s available? (Of course it won’t all be one of the other, but the balance of what happens is the question.)
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Black cabs roar back into favour as app firms put up their prices •The Guardian

James Tapper:

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While drivers with a cab talk of people running towards cabs when they stop to let out a passenger, arguing about whose taxi it is, or queues of 100 people outside Victoria train station or Liverpool city centre, there are plenty of licensed drivers without a vehicle.

“People are coming to us every single day looking for a cab,” said Lee DaCosta, a founder of Cabvision which runs payment systems for taxis and also rents a fleet for drivers who don’t own a vehicle. “We’re having drivers turning up literally walking the streets from garage to garage going ‘got any cabs?’”

Transport for London (TfL) figures show there were 13,858 licensed taxis in London on 24 October, compared with historic levels of about 21,000.

…some of the decline pre-dated the pandemic, and DaCosta says TfL’s policy of forcing older, diesel taxis off the road has not been accompanied by enough support for electric cabs.

…“Getting older polluting vehicles off the road is obviously a good thing,” he said. “But the average age of a person in the industry is 54, and so you’re looking at about £50,000 of finance. For someone in their 50s, that’s not worth it.”

About 1,200 drivers a year are leaving the trade, DaCosta said, but only about 300 a year are joining. There are only about 900 people doing the Knowledge – the requirement, since 1865, for drivers to learn each street in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, which takes more than three years of training and practice before a licence is granted.

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Remarkable that the Knowledge is still a prerequisite. I’d like to see a competition between an Uber driver using a satnav, and a taxi driver with the Knowledge. (Besides the taxi getting the preferential use of a lane.)
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The metaverse is already here. It’s Minecraft • Medium

Clive Thompson:

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“[Zuckerg’s vision of the metaverse] looks like junk,” wrote Ethan Zuckerman, who built a metaverse 27 years ago. “His superhero secret lair looks out over a paradise island that’s almost entirely static. There’s the nominal motion of waves, but none of the foliage moves. It’s tropical wallpaper pasted to virtual windows.”) Despite Facebook’s attempts to make things look jolly, and despite the bazillions of dollars they probably spent on this demo, it was almost experimentally lifeless.

Big tech firms are desperate to launch a metaverse. They keep on promising it’ll be here — some day soon! It’ll transform daily life, letting you hang out with friends — any day now! You’ll see art, go to live events, be creative, play games, run businesses — like, soon, we mean it!

Of course, these tech giants all want to be the earliest entrant, praying they’ll lock in first-mover advantage and build Hotel-Californian network effects. They want to create the metaverse, a walled-garden from which they can harvest all the profits.

This is why they’re doomed to build such dreary, mall-like wares.

The truth is, a thriving metaverse already exists. It’s incredibly high-functioning, with millions of people immersed in it for hours a day. In this metaverse, people have built uncountable custom worlds, and generated god knows how many profitable businesses and six-figure careers. Yet this terrain looks absolutely nothing the like one Zuckerberg showed off.

It’s Minecraft, of course.

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Minecraft definitely fits the bill, and has all the quirky elements that Ryan Broderick suggested last week would be part of a successful metaverse.
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John Carmack, one of the key players in building Facebook’s metaverse, is pretty bearish about the idea • Fortune

David Meyer:

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Carmack is a legend in the gaming and virtual reality (VR) worlds, being cofounder of id Software, the firm that published the seminal Doom game. Eight years ago he became chief technology officer (CTO) at Oculus VR, the VR-headset outfit that Facebook—which was rebranded as Meta on Thursday to reflect its new focus—acquired soon after he joined. A couple years ago he stepped back into a consulting-CTO role. He’s highly respected to say the least, and he doesn’t think much of Zuckerberg’s plan.

“I want it to exist, but I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse,” Carmack, who has been talking up the metaverse concept since the 1990s, said. The problem, he explained, is that the concept is a “honeypot trap for architecture astronauts…a class of programmers or designers that want to only look at things from the very highest levels.” Such people don’t want to talk about “any of the nuts and bolts or details,” he complained.

“But here we are, Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning, resources are flowing, and the effort’s definitely going to be made,” the tech guru said. “So the big challenge now is to try to take all of this energy and make sure it goes to something positive, and we’re able to build something that has real near-term user value, because my worry is that we could spend years, and thousands of people, possibly, and wind up with things that didn’t contribute all that much to the ways that people are actually using the devices and hardware today.”

…Carmack also warned against “the metaverse” being under the control of one company. “The problem is that if you make a bad decision at the central level, nobody can fix it,” he said. “You can cut off entire swaths of possibility—things that might be super important. I just don’t believe one company ends up making all the right decisions for this.”

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Well, since he mentioned it…

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Microsoft takes on Facebook by launching metaverse on Teams • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

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Microsoft has taken its first step towards bringing the metaverse to office life, in the latest sign that some of the biggest tech companies see the blending of the digital and physical worlds as one of the most important new trends in computing.

The US software giant said that in the first half of next year, users of its Teams collaboration software would be able to appear as avatars — or animated cartoons — in video meetings. Remote workers will also be able to use their avatars to visit virtual work spaces, which would eventually include replicas of their employers’ offices.

Microsoft’s first moves to blend the virtual and physical worlds are modest compared to the expansive vision that Facebook laid out last week when it changed its corporate name to Meta to reflect its new focus on the metaverse.

However, Microsoft’s plan is based on underlying technology, known as Mesh, that it unveiled earlier this year to handle far more complex virtual interactions on different types of hardware, from PCs to virtual reality headsets. Also, Microsoft executives said they saw the adoption of personal avatars as the first step in a progression that would see workers become increasingly comfortable with new forms of virtual interaction that might seem alien to them now.

“With 250m people around the world using Teams, the introduction of avatars will be the first real metaverse element to seem real,” said Jared Spataro, the head of Teams.

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Not sure if anyone’s keeping count, but we’re definitely up to three, maybe four metaverses now.
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Tesla recalls 11,706 vehicles over Full Self-Driving beta software bug • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

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According to the safety recall report, the problem affects Models S, X, and 3 vehicles built between 2017 and 2021 and Model Y vehicles built between 2020 and 2021 that are running firmware release 2021.36.5.2. The updated firmware was rolled out to drivers in its beta testing program on October 23 and, once installed, caused a pair of chips to stop talking to each other when the vehicle wakes up from “sentry mode” or “summon standby mode.”

That error prevents the neural networks that operate on one of the chips from running consistently, causing it to throw false-positive collision warnings and—more seriously—false-positive AEB [automatic emergency braking] activations.

Tesla acted quickly after unleashing the faulty software. After receiving multiple reports of problems, the company halted the rollout and disabled the two affected safety features on the affected cars by the next day. On October 25, a new firmware version was released, correcting the problem and restoring collision warning and AEB to the affected cars.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of this story is that Tesla initiated the recall process through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for a software issue. Almost all the affected cars have already been patched, and Tesla doesn’t often feel the need for such formality.

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On seeing the headline, you’d think that Tesla has had to drag a load of cars back to its repair bays. Not at all: it just hit a button at headquarters and beamed out a software update/downgrade. In all, a total of 11,706 vehicles were affected. And then unaffected. A new way for cars to get broken, and fixed.
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Elon Musk says Tesla hasn’t signed deal with Hertz despite earlier announcement • WSJ

Omar Abdel-Baqui:

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Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said the electric-vehicle maker hasn’t signed a deal with Hertz Global Holdings yet, which appeared to contradict a Hertz announcement late last month that the company was ordering 100,000 Teslas.

“I’d like to emphasize that no contract has been signed yet,” Mr. Musk said in a tweet late Monday. “Tesla has far more demand than production, therefore we will only sell cars to Hertz for the same margin as to consumers. Hertz deal has zero effect on our economics,” he said.

Representatives for Hertz and Tesla weren’t immediately available for comment.

In late October, Hertz said it ordered 100,000 Teslas to be delivered to the rental-car company by the end of next year, a bulk purchase that promised to expose more mainstream drivers to Tesla’s technology.

Hertz said last month it was “announcing a significant investment to offer the largest EV rental fleet in North America and one of the largest in the world. This includes an initial order of 100,000 Teslas by the end of 2022 and new EV charging infrastructure across the company’s global operations.”

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Well this is embarrassing, though probably more for Hertz than for Tesla, which is apparently never going to be short of people who want its cars. (Hertz doubled down, insisting it’ll start offering the cars by the end of next year.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: the mystery [from Monday] of why the guy wanted the Apple computer (we assume Mac, not iPad) that came in the smallest box isn’t resolved. We’re going to try asking him. Stay tuned.

Asteroid Bennu is essentially a junk pile of rocks – which means that trying to divert it from an Earth-crossing orbit might be particularly difficult. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Gill 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. Warming to it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Stop telling kids they’ll die from climate change • WIRED UK

Hannah Ritchie:

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One of the most recent and alarming examples of this doomsday mindset came from a group of young activists before the German elections. The group, who call themselves the Last Generation, went on hunger strike for almost a month. Several ended up in hospital. One told his parents and friends that they might never see him again. Another told a journalist that the hunger was “nothing compared to what we can expect when the climate crisis unleashes a famine here in Europe in 20 years.”

I couldn’t work out where this claim was coming from. Not from scientists. No credible ones have made this claim. Climate change will affect agriculture. In some regions—particularly across some of the world’s poorest countries—this is a major cause for concern. It’s why I spend so much of my time working on it. But famine across temperate Europe? Within 20 years?

There are a couple of ways I think this doomsday scenario has become commonplace. First, you don’t need to look far to find people with large platforms promoting these messages. Take Roger Hallam, the founder of Extinction Rebellion. In one of his most recent videos—titled “Advice to Young People as They Face Annihilation”—he claims we must get emissions to zero within months, otherwise humanity will be wiped out. He claims that this annihilation is now locked in.

The worst thing about this message is that, rather than inspiring action, it resigns us to the falsehood that we are already too late. There is now nothing we can do. It’s easy to dismiss Hallam as an extreme outlier, but he is also the founder of one of the world’s largest environmental movements. A movement whose name is hinged on this premise that we’re heading for a total wipeout. This is out of line with the science, and scientists should call this out more prominently.

Second is a miscommunication of targets and thresholds. The 1.5º Celsius target was written into the Paris Agreement in acknowledgement that 2ºC of warming would risk the livelihoods of some communities—particularly low-lying island states. It was a call for greater ambition. But the likelihood that we would meet this 1.5ºC target was as slim then as it is now. Feasible in the models, but in reality it’s gone. The problem is that many now view 1.5ºC as a tipping point threshold. Once we hit it, the game is up. It’s therefore not surprising—given that we will most likely pass 1.5ºC in the next few decades—that many people believe we’re too late.

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Boris Johnson’s teeth-grindingly terrible speech – suggesting that COP26 is the world’s James-Bond-disarming-the-bomb moment, where it must be done or that’s it, sayonara – was a classic of the “misrepresenting reality” fare that we’ve had for decades. There was plenty of time. Until there absolutely wasn’t. But that moment passed at least a decade ago.
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Managing climate change • Financial Times

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COP26 is a moment of truth to see if world leaders can ‘keep 1.5 alive’. In this report: Biden’s fight to save the US green agenda; why net zero is difficult; investor pressure; action on the ground; the power of small changes. Plus: water and oceans

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No paywall on all the articles.
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Apple wants iPhones to detect car crashes, auto-dial 911 • WSJ

Rolfe Winkler:

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Beginning next year, iPhone users who are in a car accident could have their phone dial 911 automatically.

Apple plans next year to roll out a product feature called “crash detection” for iPhones and Apple Watches, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the feature.

Crash detection uses data from sensors built into Apple devices including the accelerometer to detect car accidents as they occur, for instance by measuring a sudden spike in gravity, or “g,” forces on impact.

The feature would mark the latest move by Apple and its competitors to use motion-sensor technology to build safety functions into their devices. Apple introduced a fall-detection feature in its smartwatch several years ago that senses when wearers have taken a hard fall and dials 911 if they don’t respond to a notification asking if they are OK. The company this year added a feature to the newest version of its iPhone operating system that assesses the walking steadiness of users.

…Apple has been testing the crash-detection feature in the past year by collecting data shared anonymously from iPhone and Apple Watch users, the documents show. Apple products have already detected more than 10 million suspected vehicle impacts, of which more than 50,000 included a call to 911.

Apple has been using the 911 call data to improve the accuracy of its crash-detection algorithm, since an emergency call associated with a suspected impact gives Apple more confidence that it is indeed a car crash, according to the documents.

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Not the first (Google Pixel has it, some apps offer it) but building it in means yet more passive utility.
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Trolls will be jailed for ‘psychological harm’ • The Times

Matt Dathan:

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A new offence of “threatening communications” will target messages and social media posts that contain threats of serious harm. It would be an offence where somebody intends a victim to fear the threat will be carried out.

A “knowingly false communication” offence will be created that will criminalise those who send or post a message they know to be false with the intention to cause “emotional, psychological, or physical harm to the likely audience”. Government sources gave the example of antivaxers spreading false information that they know to be untrue.

The new offences will include sol-called “pile-ons” where a number of individuals join others in sending harassing messages to a victim on social media.

The Times was told that the plans had been sent to cabinet for approval. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, is intending to add them to the bill when it is introduced to parliament next month, government sources said.

The move is likely to be met with resistance from freedom of speech campaigners and civil libertarians.

David Davis, a former cabinet minister, said assessing based on the impact it has on the receiver was too subjective and urged the government to rethink the proposals, especially given it has hailed the legislation as “world-leading”. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said the new harm-based offences were too broad.

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This just sounds wild and unhinged. Of course Dorries, who has instituted various pile-ons, would be doing this now. No shame, no vision, no sense.
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Asteroid Bennu’s surface lacks dust due to rock porosity • SYFY WIRE

Phil Plait:

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scientists predict that solid stony asteroids will tend to have more regolith than crumbly ones like Bennu (and Ryugu, another small asteroid recently visited by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2), which are high in carbon and therefore called carbonaceous asteroids.

…Besides the cool science of all this there’s also a streak of self-interest here. If an asteroid is on an impact trajectory with Earth, the best thing we can do is push it out of the way by, for example, slamming a spaceprobe into it. That small change in velocity can move the asteroid onto a path that misses Earth.

But if the asteroid is porous that method doesn’t work as well. A lot of the momentum of the spacecraft is used up in compacting the rocks instead of moving the asteroid as a whole, and the efficiency of the hit is lowered. Instead, we might have detonate a nuke very close to the surface, using the huge flash of heat to vaporize rocks there; the suddenly expanding gas will push on the asteroid like a rocket and move it onto a new path. But we need to know if an asteroid is porous or solid before we launch such a mission to save the world. This new study may help inform such an endeavor.

OSIRIS-REx stands for “Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer”. The “regolith explorer” part has turned out to be pretty important to the “security” part. Bennu itself is a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid, one that’s bigger than 140 meters wide and gets within 7.5 million kilometers of Earth; in fact it gets close enough to Earth that there’s a 1-in-2,700 chance of an impact in September of 2182.

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Just spitballing here, but couldn’t we drive the rocket with the nuke directly at the asteroid to explode on the surface? Two birds one stone (so to speak) and doesn’t require two missions, which would be really hard to organise when everyone was running around like headless chickens. (Also, it’s very Armageddon, isn’t it?)
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Nigeria’s eNaira digital currency had an embarrassing first week • Quartz

Alexander Onukwue:

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The eNaira is supposed to live within a mobile wallet (pdf), have the same value and be interchangeable with the physical naira for everyday transactions. Nigerians believe the eNaira, which is governed by a centralized blockchain, is part of the central bank’s drive to discourage cryptocurrencies’ popularity among Nigeria’s youth, just like China’s effort with the digital yuan.

And so this week, Nigeria’s central bank made two types of eNaira wallets available on Google and Apple stores: one for individuals, and another for merchants. But some users say parts of the wallet for individuals have not worked properly.

Fisayo Fosudo, a Nigerian YouTuber who reviews gadgets and apps, said he and three friends initially got error messages that the eNaira app could not match their emails to their bank verification numbers. He would later register successfully but found broken links that did not lead to helpful support pages on the central bank’s website. “Was really looking forward to reviewing the eNaira app but it’s been hard to get it to work seamlessly. We wait,” Fosudo said.

After many users left poor reviews for the Android version of the eNaira app for individuals, it was taken down. It had been downloaded 100,000 times before that. The Apple Store version remained available at press time.

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Still waiting for more news on how things are going in El Salvador with its bitcoin experiment. Mostly it seems like the government is buying them when prices drop – essentially putting its foreign reserves into crypto. Of course it had to block a feature that allowed arbitrage in transactions.
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Ex-Googler Gill Whitehead appointed to lead UK’s Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum • VideoWeek

Tim Cross:

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The UK’s Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) has today announced Gill Whitehead has been appointed as its new chief executive. The DRCF was formally announced last summer as a way of coordinating the regulatory work of Ofcom, the Competitions and Markets Authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, and the Financial Conduct Authority.

Whitehead’s appointment marks a major milestone for the forum, and she will be tasked with creating a plan of action for the DRCF’s work in streamlining regulation and providing practical assistance for the government’s work.

Gill Whitehead herself is an interesting choice given her previous work in the industry. She most recently worked for Google’s UK Management Group, where she led specialist teams in analytics, measurement, data science, and user experience. She’s also worked for UK broadcasters Channel 4 and the BBC – giving her experience both within one of the tech giants, and within the broadcasters who likely want to see those tech giants more tightly regulated.

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“Interesting” is a, well, interesting choice of word there. Is Whitehead the perfect person to know what sort of things go on inside Google, and thus make the DCRF a force to be reckoned with? Or will she be compromised by her past? You know any decision she makes or weighs in on will be a Rorschach test for those analysing it.
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Memory lanes: Google’s map of our lives • The Guardian

Sirin Kale:

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I am leaning against a wall outside my secondary school in my home town of Canterbury, waiting for my mother to pick me up. She is late, as usual. I rest my head on the stone wall, which is obsidian smooth with the occasional sharp edge. I can feel a flinty knuckle of rock pressing into the base of my skull. I shift uncomfortably in my non-regulation high heels and watch the other parents come and go. I am irritated and worried I won’t have enough time to finish my GCSE coursework that evening. And then she arrives, and I slam the car door shut with more force than is needed.

Only I am no longer a sullen teenager and I am not in Canterbury. I am on my sofa in south London, walking the streets of my former home town on Google Street View. I drag and drop Pegman, the Street View icon, outside my old school. He flails for a moment before freefalling feet-first, and then I am a teenager, walking the passageways of my youth. I can feel the cold stones under my hand as I trace my palm along the wall. I spent so many afternoons waiting for my mother in this spot that it feels as if there is an imprint of me forever leaning there, a ghostlike presence for today’s students to bustle past.

I am not the only person to connect with Google Street View on an emotional level. In June, the poet Sherri Turner went viral after posting a Twitter thread about her experience revisiting her mother’s old house on Street View. “There is a light on in her bedroom,” Turner wrote. “It is her house, she is still alive, I am still visiting every few months on the train to Bodmin Parkway.”

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This is a strangely lovely piece, about how people have discovered slices of their lives in Google’s indifferent capture – including the theft of a caravan, happening on camera.

I recall the first day it went live: at The Guardian (and everywhere else, I think) everybody’s first reaction was to look up their home address and see if it was there. Of course it was. Their next reaction was to go and look up either their workplace or their favourite childhood home. You could probably know all you need to know about someone by their first 10 GSV lookups.
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EU investigating leak of private key used to forge Covid passes • Bleeping Computer

Ax Sharma:

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The private key used to sign EU Digital Covid certificates has been reportedly leaked and is being circulated on messaging apps and online data breach marketplaces.

The key has also been misused to generate forged certificates, such as those for Adolf Hitler, Mickey Mouse, Sponge Bob—all of which are being recognized as valid by the official government apps.

The Digital Covid certificate, or the “Green Pass” helps European Union residents travel across borders seamlessly by proving that they have either been vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result, or successfully recovered from COVID-19.

This week, users reported seeing the private key for EU Digital Covid certificates circulating on messaging apps, like Telegram.

The private key is used to sign “Green Pass,” European Union’s equivalent of a vaccine passport, and/or proof of negative COVID-19 status that can help travelers cross borders seamlessly.

“On various groups (Telegram mainly) are circulating several forged Green Pass with valid signature… There is the possibility that a database of private keys is compromised and this may [end] up in a break of the chain of trust in the Green Pass architecture,” stated GitHub user Emanuele Laface.

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The hackers have generated a certificate for “Hitler, Adolf” which is valid in Italy, and which gives his birth date – wrongly – as January 1 1900. Since we’re talking about medical matters, you might enjoy this Roald Dahl story, which is “based on true events” – only the dialogue is invented.
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Covid death toll overtakes that of HIV/AIDS in the US • Boing Boing

Rob Beschizza:

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The data are imprecise, but October likely saw the death toll from Covid-19 surpass that of HIV/AIDS in the United States. According to Johns Hopkins University, 746,000 people in America have died in the U.S. with Covid-19. The Kaiser Foundation reports that “More than 700,000 people in the U.S. have died from HIV-related illness,” but does not specifically cite the source for that total.

Though Covid took only two years to kill as many people in America as AIDS has in 40, both are ongoing pandemics.

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Amazing to contemplate the difference between the two diseases. One has a vaccine, one doesn’t; one is a retrovirus (that really *does* change your DNA, at least of infected cells), the other very much isn’t. Though of course HIV is much more of a slow burning fuse compared to the, relative, firecracker of Covid.
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No Facebook links today! But even so, you should buy my book Social Warming, to find out more about how social networks are affecting us.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This will sound like a brain teaser, and it is. Why would someone walk into an Apple Store and demand the Mac that comes in the smallest box – no other spec matters? CC-licensed photo by Jamie McCall 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. Does a metaverse imply the existence of a metamiddle eight? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Learning to live with Mark Zuckerberg • The New York Times

Ben Smith talks to Jessica Lessin (whose outlet was one of just four, none including “big legacy” outlets, to get a Mark Zuckerberg why-the-metaverse interview:

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Ms. Lessin dates the hostility between journalists and Silicon Valley to the rise in the mid-2010s of Uber, whose leaders treated the worst features of tech culture — arrogance and misogyny, among them — as features, not bugs, and faced a new kind of adversarial coverage for it.

But Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016 was also central to the shift. Mainstream publications woke up to the centrality of Facebook in a new and sometimes violent and anti-democratic strain of global right-wing populism, a connection that Mr. Zuckerberg at first glibly dismissed. (Reporters also resented being forced to police Facebook’s informational byways like underappreciated mall cops, when Facebook should have been doing that itself.)

In their frenzy to provide a simple explanation for Mr. Trump’s victory, journalists sometimes botched the details and oversimplified the story. This was particularly true in the overhyped case of the political consultant Cambridge Analytica, which embodied fears of a new kind of algorithmic propaganda but which, a British government report later found, never actually did most of the sinister things it bragged about. Accurate reporting and erroneous articles alike bred a deep sense of embattlement in Palo Alto.

Ms. Lessin said she sees a few patterns, and a lot of symmetry. One is that journalists and tech figures are bad at reading one another’s motives.

“Tech companies say journalists are doing this hard-hitting reporting for profit motives” and because they’re angry about losing advertising, she said. “That’s obviously absurd.”

“But journalists who are accusing Facebook of making bad content moderation decisions because they’re only concerned about profits are also missing the point. Most of the time the challenges are around free speech.”

“They’re actually making the same mistake in reverse directions about each other,” she said. “I’m kind of baffled by it.”

Ms. Lessin’s second observation is that many tech chief executives see themselves in a battle with news outlets for the hearts and minds of their own employees. When they blast media coverage, they are also speaking to the people whose salaries they pay.

“The woke revolution in Silicon Valley is fueling this, too,” she said. “Tech executives are completely associating their employees’ activism with media outlets.”

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Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube lose nearly $10bn after iPhone privacy changes • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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Apple’s decision to change the privacy settings of iPhones caused an estimated $9.85bn of revenues to evaporate in the second half of this year at Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as their advertising businesses were shaken by the new rules.

Apple introduced its App Tracking Transparency policy in April, which forced apps to ask for permission before they tracked the behaviour of users to serve them personalised ads.

Most users have opted out, leaving advertisers in the dark about how to target them. Advertisers have responded by cutting back their spending at Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and diverted their budgets elsewhere: in particular to Android phone users and to Apple’s own growing ad business.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, has said the iPhone changes meant “the accuracy of our ads targeting decreased, which increased the cost of driving outcomes for our advertisers. And . . . measuring those outcomes became more difficult.”

Lotame, an advertising technology company whose clients include The Weather Company and McClatchy, estimated that the four tech platforms lost 12% of revenue in the third and fourth quarters, or $9.85bn. Snap fared the worst as a percentage of its business because of its focus on smartphones, while Facebook lost the most in absolute terms because of its size.

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Is it “iPhone privacy changes” or is it “customer privacy changes”? Apple doesn’t force anyone to opt out; it just asks them if they want to let an app track them. Seems that a very large proportion don’t want that, where they didn’t have the chance before.

Which raises the interesting question of how much money, and how big, those companies would be if such a block had been in place to begin with; and also whether it will be, or is, or would have been, something that would lead to Android customers changing to iOS.
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Google revelations help explain local-news crisis • The Seattle Times

Brier Dudley is editor of the Seattle Times Free Press:

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New details of the ad-market distortions were revealed Friday when, under a judge’s order, the shroud was lifted from much of a multistate antitrust case against Google. Key details about how extensively the search giant dominates the marketplace for buying, selling and pricing online display advertising, and manipulates things to benefit itself, had been redacted since the case was announced in December.

Among the revelations: Google gets up to a 42% cut of ad sales handled through its system. The extraordinary take shows how much the company dominates the marketplace, the state case led by Texas argues.

Google’s ad exchange handles more than 60% of display ad inventory sold in the US. The company’s own ad buying tools also win more than 80% of auctions hosted on its dominant exchange, unredacted passages state.

In one example cited, a $6 bid for an advertising spot came through Google’s advertising exchange and an $8 bid from a different exchange. But because Google designed the system to prioritize itself, the $6 bid won, shorting the publisher $2.

“Internally, Google employees grappled with the fact that Google was falsely telling publishers that Google’s header bidding alternative enabled competition and improved yield, since in reality, Google created a program that advantaged itself at the expense of publishers,” the case states.

The case also revealed what it called “an illegal agreement” between Google and Facebook made in 2018, when Google’s dominance was threatened by a new bidding system for online ads that Facebook supported. In return for backing off, Facebook received preferential treatment in Google’s system.

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Worth pointing out how Google is putting its finger on the scale all the time here. But, again, the realisation comes much too late, when ripping these things out will be much more difficult.
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No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices • Terence Eden’s Blog

The aforesaid Eden with a post that annoys me, for reasons I’ll explain:

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Every few years, a dodgy stat does the rounds claiming you can save £££ if you switch off all your gadgets at the wall. The standby mode of your TV is bleeding you dry!!!

[The BBC quoted the Energy Saving Trust in a story about fuel bills, saying that you’d save £30 per year by switching off devices that were on standby.]

This is known as “Vampire Energy” and, amusingly, is a bit of a zombie statistic. Being the party-pooper that I am, I emailed the Energy Saving Trust to ask how they calculated the stat. They replied quickly with:

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The calculation for £35 savings from turning off stand-by devices per year per household comes from average 201KWh for stand-by power times GB average standard electricity price 16.471 £p/KWh, then rounded to nearest £5.

201KWh comes from “Further Analysis of the Household Electricity Survey Early Findings: Demand side management”. Please note that the term “stand-by” used in this situation also include device on idle mode. Please refer to the report in more detail about the assumptions used in the analysis. Here is the link for this report.

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Eden then takes those claims apart. It’s nothing like £30 per year these days, and even in the old days it was probably questionable. My annoyance? Because I emailed the EST’s press office, and it took them 10 working days and four emails to come up with a response that wasn’t even as good as Eden got just trying to “Contact” page.
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Nilay Patel on Facebook’s reckoning with reality—and the Metaverse-size problems yet to come • Vanity Fair

Delia Cai speaks to Patel, who has been running The Verge for a decade now:

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DC: One more Facebook question. What’s the deal with the rebrand?

NP: They want it to be about the metaverse, right? They’re really focused on Oculus and A.R. But A.R. is a really hard problem. If you step back to the beginning, you’ve gotta build the display that goes on your face that doesn’t make you look ridiculous. You have to find a way to power it; you have to put a battery on your body somewhere; you’ve gotta find a computer that’s fast enough to look at the world around you and put stuff on top that’s also small enough to run off the battery. Very challenging. But that’s just the tech problem.

Once you build it, who is going to augment reality? Who is in charge of that project? If I’m standing at the United States Capitol and you’re standing there, and we’re both looking at the Capitol, what are we seeing—what is the label on that building? Is it the “home of democracy,” or is it “where Donald Trump got screwed”? We’ll actually live in different realities.

Facebook is trying to pivot away from its Facebook problems, which is a content-moderation-at-scale problem. It might well be unsolvable. Meanwhile, they are still racing toward the hardest content moderation at scale that will ever exist: that you and I will live in different realities because we’re wearing headsets on our faces that present to us different realities in the same moment, in the same physical space.

DC: God, that’s spooky.

NP: I think about it all the time.

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But then he suggests something even worse. (An idea that multiple companies seem to be running towards, and which one is already building for certain.) His comments on data-driven journalism are on point too.
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Kids and their computers: several hours a day of screen time is OK, study suggests • The Conversation

Katie Paulich is a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder:

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Even when kids spend five hours a day on screen – whether computers, television or text – it doesn’t appear to be harmful. That’s what my colleagues and I at the University of Colorado Boulder discovered after analyzing data taken from nearly 12,000 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study – the largest long-term study of its kind ever in the U.S.

The participants included children between the ages of 9 to 10, from diverse backgrounds, income levels and ethnicities. We investigated how screen time was linked to some of the most critical aspects of their lives: sleep, mental health, behavior and friendships.

Our results, recently published in the journal PLOS One, found no association between screens and a child’s depression or anxiety. Greater amounts of screen time were associated with stronger peer relationships for both boys and girls – both have more male and female friends. Social screen use may drive that association; video gaming, for instance, is a social activity that seems to foster more friendships. So does social media and texting.

…Our study also found negative correlations: More screen time predicted higher levels of attention problems, worse sleep, poorer academic performance and an increase in aggression and misbehavior.

Taken at face value, these contrasting positive and negative correlations are confusing. Is screen time good or bad?

Perhaps neither one: when looking at the strength of the correlations, we see only very modest associations. That is, any association between screen time and the various outcomes, whether good or bad, is so small it’s unlikely to be important at a clinical level.

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Willingness to look stupid • Dan Luu

Luu on the benefits of asking (what seem to be) stupid questions:

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when I look at people who have a very deep understanding of topics, many of them frequently ask naive sounding questions and continue to apply one of the techniques that got them a deep understanding in the first place.

…In general, I’ve found willingness to look stupid to be very effective. Here are some more examples:

• Going into an Apple store and asking for (and buying) the computer that comes in the smallest box, which I had a good reason to want at the time.

The person who helped me, despite being very polite, also clearly thought I was a bozo and kept explaining things like “the size of the box and the size of the computer aren’t the same”. Of course I knew that, but I didn’t want to say something like “I design CPUs. I understand the difference between the size of the box the computer comes and in the size of the computer and I know it’s very unusual to care about the size of the box, but I really want the one that comes in the smallest box”. Just saying the last bit without establishing any kind of authority didn’t convince the person.

I eventually asked them to humor me and just bring out the boxes for the various laptop models so I could see the boxes, which they did, despite clearly thinking that my decision making process made no sense (I also tried explaining why I wanted the smallest box but that didn’t work).

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There are more, but this one is the most intriguing, because he doesn’t answer it. See if you can think of the potential answers. (Via Ian Leslie’s excellent Substack.)
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Science confirms it: websites are all starting look the same

Sam Goree:

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We found that across all three metrics—color, layout, and AI-generated attributes—the average differences between websites peaked between 2008 and 2010 and then decreased between 2010 and 2016. Layout differences decreased the most, declining over 30% in that time frame.

The graph shows website similarity of companies in the Russell 1000. Lower values mean that the sites studied were more similar, on average. [Image: courtesy of the author]

These findings confirm the suspicions of web design bloggers that websites are becoming more similar. After showing this trend, we wanted to study our data to see what kinds of specific changes were causing it.

You might think that these sites are simply copying each other’s code, but code similarity has actually significantly decreased over time. However, the use of software libraries has increased a lot.

The graph on the left shows a decline in code similarity among Russell 1000 websites, while the graph on the right indicates an increase in library overlap. [Image: courtesy of the author]

Libraries feature collections of generic code for common tasks, such as resizing a page for mobile devices or making a hamburger menu slide in and out. We looked at which sites had lots of libraries in common and how similar they looked. Sites built with certain libraries—Bootstrap, FontAwesome, and JQuery UI—tended to look much more similar to each other.

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A new world of cronut lines • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

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During Facebook Connect, Zuckerberg showed of a slew of VR and AR products, including the Project Cambria headset, the Oculus Quest 2 (soon to be Meta Quest), and a social virtual lobby-like platform for Oculus users called Horizon Home. And Bloomberg got ahold of leaked photos of a Facebook Smart Watch, which is believed to have front and back facing cameras and connect to the internet via a cellular connection that wouldn’t require a smartphone.

What we can tell, from all of this, is that for Zuckerberg, the metaverse is an ill-defined hodgepodge of virtual productivity tools and lame wearables. It’s in line with this broader feeling in Silicon Valley right now that if you jam together a conference call and a FitBit, somewhere in the middle there, you’ll end up with the metaverse.

Look, here’s the thing. The metaverse will probably happen at this point, but it won’t look like anything in Zuckerberg’s stupid Connect video. It will be weird and janky and people will use it to have sex with cartoon characters and hide video game achievements in parks and interact with their favorite influencers, who may or may not be real…

…Big platforms will inevitably create products that will facilitate this, but they won’t be Facebook. They’ll be stranger and more specific. They’ll emphasize small localized networks and faster and more visual communication: A Discord-like messaging app that has a Snap Map functionality and seamless live video filters. Digital assets, whether they’re NFTs or just memes you save on your phone, will be displayed in jewelry or small picture frames. You’ll turn a corner on the street and see a group of people standing together, staring at their phones or watches, and you’ll have no idea that they’re seeing together. Maybe one of them airdrops you the piece of content they’re all looking at. Maybe this has already happened to you.

But just think about the internet right now and think about how far beyond Facebook is already. It is laughable to think Zuckerberg is capable of creating a brand new VR-based internet. He couldn’t even beat TikTok!

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Meta acquires VR fitness subscription service Supernatural • CNET

Scott Stein:

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Supernatural was one of the first subscription-based services on the Oculus Quest (soon to be called the Meta Quest). The app, which uses video avatars of instructors in combination with motion-tracked workout routines (boxing was just added), sometimes feels like a ramped-up fitness version of the VR game Beat Saber.

“Our partnership with Meta means we will have more resources to expand and bring you even more music, more creative ways to work out, more features and more social experiences for VR,” Within CEO Chris Milk said in a statement Friday. 

It looks like a move that could let Meta evolve more fitness and health aspirations on future headsets or products. “Together we will also explore ways we can enhance future hardware to support VR fitness apps, encouraging other developers to bring new fitness experiences to VR. We believe fitness will be a massive success in VR where multiple third-party fitness apps can succeed,” Meta VP of Play Jason Rubin said in a statement.

Ssupport for connected smartwatches for live heart rate readings during workouts may be the app’s most intriguing feature as it applies to Meta. Meta has its own movement-tracking fitness app on the Oculus Quest called Oculus Move, but no deeper support for connected smartwatches yet. Mark Zuckerberg spoke to CNET earlier this year, expressing an interest in both fitness and fitness sensors. Meta is expected to be making its own smartwatch, and is working on wrist-based neural input accessories for future smart glasses.

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Well, it’s nice to have dreams.
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Zuckerberg announces fantasy world where Facebook is not a horrible company • Vice

Jason Koebler:

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Moments before announcing Facebook is changing its name to “Meta” and detailing the company’s “metaverse” plans during a Facebook Connect presentation on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg said “some people will say this isn’t a time to focus on the future,” referring to the massive, ongoing scandal plaguing his company relating to the myriad ways Facebook has made the world worse. “I believe technology can make our lives better. The future will be built by those willing to stand up and say this is the future we want.”

The future Zuckerberg went on to pitch was a delusional fever dream cribbed most obviously from dystopian science fiction and misleading or outright fabricated virtual reality product pitches from the last decade. In the “metaverse—an “embodied” internet where we are, basically, inside the computer via a headset or other reality-modifying technology of some sort—rather than hang out with people in real life you could meet up with them as Casper-the-friendly-ghost-style holograms to do historically fun and stimulating activities such as attend concerts or play basketball. 

These presentations had the familiar vibe of an overly-ambitious video game reveal. In the concert example, one friend is present in reality while the other is not; the friend joins the concert inexplicably as a blue Force ghost and the pair grab “tickets” to a “metaverse afterparty” in which NFTs are for sale. This theme continued throughout as people wandered seamlessly into virtual fantasy worlds over and over, and the presentation lacked any sense of what this so-called metaverse would look like in practice. It was flagrantly abstract, even metaphorical, showing more the dream of the metaverse than anything resembling reality.

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Lovely use of “flagrantly”. People have been lining up to dump on Facebook for this, but I think Koebler did it best.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified